War, what is it good for?

Radovan Karadzic's capture, nearly 10 years after NATO involvement in Yugoslavia's Civil War, is an unalloyed good. But it does serve to remind us that Clinton's wars, like Bush's, were ultimately futile. It seems pretty obvious that enough people knew where this guy was that the Serbian government could have turned him over earlier, if they had wanted to. Diplomacy, in particular a desire to join the EU, has done what cluster bombs couldn't. If the government can withstand the domestic backlash for turning over Karadzic, we can hope to see Mladic sharing a cell with him fairly soon.

Before NATO involvement in the Civil War, there was a growing reformist movement in Serbia. While the NATO bombing campaign helped the Kosovars achieve independence, it also dealt a blow to the reformist impulse in Serbian politics (afterwords all the reformists could be tarred as foreign stooges) and probably retarded Serbia's growth towards accepting the West.

Our military involvement is almost never helpful to achieving liberal aims. It's a cliche, but it's true: you can't force Democracy at the barrel of a gun. In Kosovo we managed to unite the Serbians behind the nationalists. Our half-century embargo against Cuba helped Castro keep his grip on power. The 1990s sanctions against Iraq destroyed Saddam's native opposition, and our current occupation of Iraq is serving to fuel the Iraqi Civil War.

I'm voting for Barack Obama because he understands the failure of our war policy in Iraq and is committed to ending it.

But I'm growing very worried about his Afghanistan policies.

See also, the communist hellhole of Vietnam.