Bush gets a "hero's" welcome in Albania, in what may be the unintentionally (?) funniest AP report ever. The payoff? These words:
"Sooner rather than later you've got to say `Enough's enough — Kosovo is independent,'" Bush said, telling Albanians what they wanted to hear. He said independence was a certainty.
Not to belabor my regular point about keeping at least one blood-soaked American promise, it's worth reiterating that the ice-cold realist question remains whether or not independence for Kosovo is likely to destabilize various awkward world regions where 'breakaway' and 'separatist' statelets (Transnistria, Abkhazia), aspiring statelets (South Ossetia), and has-been states (Taiwan) might take one look at an independent Kosovo and start agitating their way into International Crises. I submit this is not so. Kosovo is, like Iraq, a planetary aberration with a recent history too exceptional and twisted to merit any kind of comparison. Kosovo has roughly nothing in common with any other zone of disgruntled sovereigntists -- with the possible exception of Kurdistan. But no amount of sovereignty for Kosovo will move the United States or anyone else an inch toward support for a Kurdish state complete with flag and UN microphone.
All the great challenges of world politics since the fall of the Soviet Union have been the Lingering Exceptions -- North Korea, the last Stalinist nation; Afghanistan, the one that got conquered by nonstate actors; Somalia, the first modern state that disinvented itself; Israel and Iraq, intransigent regional rulebreakers that couldn't keep out of conflict with their neighbors; Iran, where one of the oldest laws of international diplomacy was chucked out the window in a religious fever; and Serbia, the last European nation to fall to the West. Nothing like Iraq will ever happen again, I bet, and nothing like the impending 'final status' of Serbia will, either. Let's get this over with.
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