The irrelevance of the loyal opposition

A Deborah Orin column in today's New York Post argues that the Democrats are becoming increasingly irrelevant to political discourse in the United States. I would tend to agree, but do not believe the situation to be terminal.

That said, I feel that it's pretty easy to lapse into irrelevancy when you don't know what your core beliefs are, or what you even stand for, other than being "against".

The party that had no problem meddling in the affairs of any number of countries during 1993-2000 (Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, Sudan - most of them half-assed bomb-hurling exercises) suddenly returns to their Vietnam-induced pacifist fever-swamps post-9/11 because a cowboy who doesn't take kindly to terrorism decides to get all ninth-century on Jihadistan.
So, which are they? Are they the interventionist, "democracy"-spreaders of the previous decade, or the "peace"-at-all-costs, pacifist, isolationists of today?

Merely 8-years ago, Social Security was a "crisis" that needed to be "fixed" (I can still hear the chants of "SAVE SOCIAL SECURITY FIRST!!!!" ringing in my ears). Today, everything is swell, and no changes whatever are required to this Depression-era behemoth. Again, which is it?

Zell Miller's quirky personality aside, his point that the Democrat Party is no-longer a national party is spot-on. The modern Democrat Party is little more than a cotillion of competing interest groups (radical feminists, homosexuals, ethnic pressure groups, urban liberals, academics, career unionists, dirt-poor recent - or illegal - immigrants), with very little in common with each other aside from their common distrust (hatred, loathing of) Republicans in general and Dubya in particular.

Now they have the personification of that hatred, Dr. Howard "I-hate-Republicans-and-everything-they-stand-for" Dean as their lead-spokesman for the next four years. YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGHH!!!!!

I suppose we'll see how successful being the anti-party is for them over the next few years. It's been going swimmingly to date - for our side, that is.

Kim Calls GWB's Nuke Bluff

Well, the regime of certified nut-job Kim Jong Il has now announced to the world - to the surprise of precisely no one - that they have nuclear weapons - something the Bush Administration has said is "unacceptable". The North Koreans have also announced that they are pulling out of the 6-nation talks the Bush Administration had clearly hoped would deter the Stalinist regime from acquiring nukes - so much for the value of multilateralism.

To sum, Kim has called Bush's bluff - probably figuring that there is little to nothing we can do about it.

So what, if anything, should we do about it?

At least one libertarian-leaning organization has been saying for months that we need to get back to the concept of "deterrence". But will deterrence work with against an isolated, collapsing Marxist regime that seems to have no problem starving it's own citizens to death?

We can talk all the live-long day about thanking the genius-trifecta of Bill Clinton, Jimmy (I never met a Marxist I didn't like) Carter and Madeline Not-so-bright for providing the DPRK with the nukes in the first place (but they promised they wouldn't make weapons, honest!), but that's not the issue here.

The issue is that we have about 48-thousand troops stationed in South Korea right now, seemingly as nothing more than a trip-wire (or speed bump) if Kim decides that his best route to a decent meal is through Seoul.

George Bush has already demonstrated why you shouldn't play Texas Hold 'em with a Texan - because when he thinks you're bluffing, the Texan goes "all-in". I'm not entirely sure that's an option here, however. We are already stretched painfully thin with our ongoing excursions in Southwest Asia, and the ROK - the people most threatened by a nuclear-weaponized neighbor to the north - seem to be rather nonplused by these events. Thus, there seems to be little justification for our moving militarily against Kim - especially when he could certainly reach Japan and possibly the mainland of the US (thanks again to Clinton) in a retaliatory death-agony strike that could result in the immediate deletion of possibly 1-million people.

That said, there is more than a little bit of our national prestige on the line. Having now said repeatedly that we would not allow North Korea to acquire nuclear weapons, can we now allow them to openly flout their acquisition of same with impunity? What sort of message does that send to the more dangerous and equally ambitious Iran?

Paraphrasing that great American poet Tone Loc, we got us a "Big Old Mess" on our hands here.

Was it worth it?

It wasn't too long ago that our President acted in a more-or-less unilateral manner, without any authority from the United Nations and against the stated wishes of regional powers, to forcibly remove a dictator from power who was accused of acts of horrific violence against his people. At the time, many believed that the country posed no threat to the United States and that, while the tyrant in question was certainly a bad guy, we simply cannot go removing every "bad actor" from power.

The President was undeterred. He assembled a modest "Coalition of the Willing" and took action, removing the dictator's regime from power after a sustained military campaign that saw perhaps tens-of-thousands of civilian casualties.

The year was 1999.

The President was named Clinton.

The country we attacked was Serbia.

And the dictator was named Milosevic.

At the time, I don't remember many on the left complaining about the unilateral authority assumed by Bill Clinton to justify his invasion of Serbia and "liberation" (which I put in quotes for reasons that will be quite obvious presently) of Kosovo. We never found the "tens-of-thousands of mass graves", evidence of the ethnic cleansing Clinton used as the sole justification for Milosevic's removal - and yet I don't hear choruses of "CLINTON LIED!!!!!!!!!!" from the leftists, pacifists and peaceniks that seem to have been exported from the deep-blue precincts of Cambridge and Brookline. Maybe I just missed that at the time - but I was a graduate student at an Ivy League campus from 1996-2000, so I think I would have noticed.

Anyway, the Balkans War was supposed to be the model for modern warfare. It was virtually casualty-free (at least on our side - don't tell that to the residents of Belgrade, who endured 77-days of bombing prior to Slobo's surrender), quick (by Vietnam standards, I suppose) and inexpensive (yea, right!). That being the case, and since it's been over 5-years now, perhaps it would be helpful to know what's been going on since then, eh?

So, what's been happening since then, you ask? Well, the U.N. has been running the place, and the latest news should be, dare I say, UNsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention to that UNimpressive organization for the last decade-plus.

Long story short, Kosovo is on the verge of melting-down into ethnic chaos, again. These folks have been just about the only people I can find on the ground other than the official mouthpieces of KFOR - and their latest assessment of the situation is not pretty. You don't have to get past the first couple of sentences to see what I mean:

Time is running out in Kosovo. The status quo will not hold. As evidenced by the deadly rioting in March 2004, Kosovo Albanians are frustrated with their unresolved status, the economic situation, and the problems of dealing with the past. The Albanian majority expects the international community to begin delivering this year on its independence aspirations. Without such moves it may act unilaterally. In such circumstances, given the dismal record of Kosovo Albanians with regard to minorities, Kosovo's Serbs may call upon Serbia's armed forces to protect them, and the region could be plunged into new turmoil.

In case you had forgotten, according to the KFOR official website, KFOR is ...

... a NATO-led mission of 4 Multi-National Brigades, 34 nations and more than 17,000 peacekeepers in their effort to provide a safe and secure environment for all citizens living in Kosovo.

Sounds like they're doing a swell job, don't you think? In case you were wondering, here's a run-down of the current US contingent in KFOR:

38th Infantry Division
2-107th Cavalry
1-148th Infantry
139th Med Group
18th Field Hospital
35th MP Company
37th BCT
237th FSB
364th MPAD
629th MI
206th Engineers
734th EOD
443rd PSB
438th Chemical
313th Postal
1-137th AVN

or, approximately 4,200 troops. This, by the way, does not include the deployment of our troops in nearby Bosnia (which ended recently - December 2004, or 8-YEARS after Clinton promised us they would all be home, to be precise).

So, in light of all of the hemming-and-hawing over our recent adventures in Iraq, do you think our action in Kosovo was worth it?

I don't.

And do you think any of these revelations are going to tarnish the image of The War Hero in the eyes of the pinko-leftists who burn GWB in effigy on a daily basis?

I didn't think so.