We hear a constant litany of failure in Iraq from the left...perhaps they would care to explain this:
Serbia Presidential Election Fails for Third Time in a Year, Deepening Political Crisis
BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro (AP) - Serbians failed for the third time in a year Sunday to elect a president because of low voter turnout, triggering a political crisis in the Balkan republic.
An ultranationalist with close ties to Slobodan Milosevic led the ballot, underlining Serbians' discontent with the pro-Western government that ousted the dictator in 2000 and the republic's drift back to Milosevic's nationalism, which triggered the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
About 36 percent of registered voters cast ballots, preliminary official results showed, less than the 50 percent needed to validate the vote.
Tomislav Nikolic was ahead with 44 percent of vote, the state electoral commission said. Dragoljub Micunovic, a pro-democracy candidate who led pre-election polls, trailed with only 38 percent. Four other candidates shared the rest of the vote.
"This is a defeat for Serbia," Micunovic said, adding he hoped voters would "learn their lessons" in democracy ahead of the upcoming key parliamentary elections in December.
"The Serbian Radical Party has become the single strongest party," he said. "I am sure this heralds Serbia's political future."
There are no more armed conflicts in the region, but the threat of instability remains amid the social and political crises.
In March, Serbia's first post-Milosevic prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, the republic's first democratic leader since World War II, was assassinated, allegedly by crime bosses and Milosevic-era paramilitary commanders.
One violent incident related to the vote was reported in Kosovo, the province that is part of Serbia but has been under U.N. and NATO authority since the 1998-1999 war over the territory between Serbian government troops and ethnic Albanian separatists.
Shortly after midnight, attackers smashed windows at the only polling station in the province's capital, Pristina, said Dragan Stolic, an election supervisor. It was one of a few places where Kosovo's remaining Serbs could vote. The province's ethnic Albanians, who want independence for Kosovo, ignored the elections.
You do remember Kosovo, don't you?
The Balkans Keeping Kosovo : The costs of liberal imperialism.
That war has disappeared from television screens with remarkable speed. In fact, Americans seemed to lose interest in this high- tech war even before it had drawn to a formal close--truly a virtual victory. In Europe, the social-democratic parties got no electoral bounce out of it in the recent European Union elections. Most people in the West saw Kosovo as a good cause (which it was) and were willing to help put things right, but now want to "move on," as a certain Western leader would say. This is Kosovo, after all--not Germany or Japan.
But that is not how wars work. Kosovo and its surroundings have become our problem--and will be so for decades and decades to come. Military interventions are not one-shot deals, particularly if you win. After we had launched the war, winning was important. (Consider the alternative.) There may be no substitute for victory, but victory is no substitute for strategy. Our political goals in the Balkans remain confused and contradictory. The cruise missiles have done their work. It is time for the Clinton administration to follow suit.
Have we achieved our war aims? That depends on what our aims were. If the purpose of our intervention was to avert a humanitarian crisis in Kosovo, in fact we exacerbated it. In the year before the bombing, 2,500 people (mostly KLA partisans and Serb soldiers) died in Kosovo; in the eleven weeks after the bombing began, 10,000 people (most of them Albanian civilians) were killed. At the start of the war, 230,000 Kosovars were estimated to have been displaced; by its end, 1.4 million Albanians had been displaced, 860,000 of them outside Kosovo. Most of the latter have returned, but now over 150,000 Serbs have fled the province. Kosovo has been physically laid to waste; without international aid, mass starvation would soon set in. Yugoslavia itself is estimated by the European Union to have been bombed back 50 years. It will take decades--and over $50 billion--to rebuild the civilian infrastructure of that country when Milosevic exits the stage. For a war waged with humanitarian intentions, these are troubling consequences.
If the purpose of the war was to bring political stability to the Balkans, the results are even more unsettling. Yugoslavia has been turned into a Third World country, which will probably mean that the next wave of refugees into Western Europe will be impoverished Serbs fleeing a desperate land. Kosovo has been liberated from Yugoslavia, but has not been granted independence, which is what 90 percent of Kosovars sorely want. Thus NATO is now the primary obstacle to the fulfillment of Kosovar popular aspirations--an odd role for an alliance that has made the promotion of democracy one of its new goals.
Finally, if the purpose of the war was to affirm the concept of ethnic harmony, that is now also in ruins. The NATO occupation has coincided with a wave of reverse ethnic cleansing so that soon Kosovo will be Serb-free. An emboldened Montenegro is likely to declare independence from Yugoslavia. Macedonia, reeling under the war's impact, is sensing new tensions with its Albanian minority. Albania itself is quietly encouraging the Kosovars to join with it and, after attracting the Albanians in Macedonia, to create a greater Albania. This last outcome is unlikely, but all these trends are hardly conducive to religious harmony and regional stability.
NATO is now a colonial power in the Balkans--inheritor of the Ottoman and Habsburg roles there. It will have to grapple with the problems of being an outsider in an area that has been consumed by virulent nationalism for years. Of course, NATO does not see itself as a colonial power; it sees itself as an enlightened trustee, helping Kosovo along until it can become a "functioning and viable member of the community of nations." These words do not come from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in reference to Kosovo, 1999; they come from U.N. Ambassador Albright, in reference to Somalia, 1993. No doubt one could find similar phrases about Haiti, Bosnia, and Cambodia.