MCCAIN ALSO WRONG ABOUT KOSOVO

PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFUL JOHN MCCAIN, in a March, 2008 speech, seemed to go out of his way to offend the Russian government, making it clear that he doesn't regard the regime there as a democracy.

If the media are on the lookout for gaffes by the presidential campaigns, they missed a big one in March, when Cindy McCain met with Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in Kosovo's capital Pristina, while her husband was giving a major foreign policy speech calling for new foundations for a stable and enduring peace. Kosovo's declaration of independence, which McCain accepts and was implicitly recognized by Cindy McCain's visit to Pristina, is a major threat to global peace and security. It could spark a U.S. war with Russia.

It may be asking too much, however, for the media to cover a gaffe like this. The Kosovo policy is a bipartisan blunder. For the liberal media, Iraq, where McCain differs with Hillary and Obama about the length of stay of the U.S. military, seems to be the only foreign policy issue worth talking about. But the U.S. faces other major problems.

We need to recall that the war against the former Yugoslavia was depicted by the liberal media as a worthwhile humanitarian intervention. But it was waged on the basis of Clinton Administration lies of a genocide being waged against Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, a province of Serbia. In fact, the Clinton Administrations NATO war against Yugoslavia probably cost more lives than were lost in the civil war in Kosovo.

Serbian troops were forced to withdraw in exchange for an international guarantee that Serbia would retain sovereignty over Kosovo but the province would get substantial autonomy. The U.S. agreed to that, but that agreement was violated when the Bush Administration, with backing from McCain and Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, recently recognized Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia.

Sending his wife to Kosovo confirms that McCain accepts Clinton's fraudulent version of what happened there and that he agrees with Bush's solution, which can only make the situation worse.

Conservatives should contemplate what is happening here. McCain, who says he wants to wage a vigorous war against Islamic radicals worldwide, is prepared to let Muslim extremists come to power in Kosovo and even have their own sovereign state. This is itself a major gaffe. But McCain compounded it when he gave a speech urging the building of international structures for a durable peace, including strengthening NATO.

This sounds good, except that McCain has to know that recognizing Kosovo's independence has split Western nations and even NATO itself. It is a major foreign policy blunder that the next administration, Democrat or Republican, may never recover from. It represents a direct threat to the international order of nation-states. That is why many nations have not recognized this new state of Kosovo. They realize that Kosovo's independence could spark other groups to wage wars against established regimes around the world.

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