What's with Kosovo?
You know, I'm undecided on this one. Should we be in the business of policing the world? Probably not. But if so, how do we pick the places to go? We didn't intervene last year in Rwanda, and many more people were subsequently killed.
We didn't jump into Angola, either. Kuwait produced naturally occurring hydrocarbon compounds and makes for a simple economic justification. But why Kosovo?
The Balkans have been a hotbed of ethnic enmities for centuries with each side taking turns doing the actual butchering and the other taking revenge. It was the assassination of Ferdinand in Sarajevo was the excuse used to start the Great War, which we renamed WW I after we decided to have wars often enough to require numbering them..
I wonder why we are there at all. Because evil is being done? There are twenty something other _full blown wars_ going on right now according to CNN. Because of the alleged genocide? My Cherokee friends aren't buying into that one. Maybe it's because a good war puts something on the front page and takes our minds off everything else.
War is a bad thing, the closest to a pharmaceutically pure distillate of evil that our species has discovered, but some people really dig it. Using evil to stop evil has never worked, and is not working now. We're not bombing the Serbs who are currently being blamed for the killing -- we're bombing what's left of the dirt called Kosovo and anyone standing on it.
Mr. Milosevic has an agenda, but I honestly don't know what it is. It's been said that you can't hate a man that you know well, and I don't know Mr. Milosevic at all. There is much more to the story than we know, and yet off we go like a gardener who wants the whole forest planted in Zinnias and Tomatoes, trying to cast the world in our own American image. Maybe I'm too cynical. Maybe with the help of Lockheed and General Electric and Pratt/Whitney we can rain death down on these people and make Kosovo a better, if somewhat more damaged place.
Nope. I'm not buying it despite what the polls say.
Scott Nearing said the Great War so poisoned the world that there was no going back. If we accept that it's reasonable to fight, and kill, and die for numbers in a poll maybe Y2K is a good thing. Maybe we won't have polls for a few months.
