Albanian Independence or Afghanistan Redux

Today is a peculiar time, and a time that might come back to bite the United States down some long unseen curve of the American derriere. With the backing of the European Union and the United States, Kosovo, up till now a part of Serbia, has unilaterally declared independence.

ABC News reports on their website that:

"Ninety percent of Kosovo's 2 million people are ethnic Albanian most of them secular Muslims and they see no reason to stay joined to the rest of Christian Orthodox Serbia.

And this is all well and grand, accept that Serbia main, and Russia, are not entirely pleased, with Russia explaining that this will only encourage separatist groups around the world.

And it means jack nothing to most Americans that the U.S. government is not so much making an argument for democracy as they imagine, but rather, for people to split themselves up into groups based on religion and ethnicity.

Putin is astutely aware of the broad number of conflicts that can be resolved by secession, though leaders here never imagine how such ideas, once caught, can spread like a fever.

In and of itself secession is not be such a bad thing, but there is a certain amount of American and European hypocrisy and shortsightedness on the matter.

But let's daydream a moment. Let us suppose that one day black Americans have a candidate who is running for president in a land where they were enslaved and denied rights for many years. Now let us also suppose that in the process of the election he is denied the right to be his party representative through the use of non-elected superdelegates.

Now let us further suppose, that the aggrieved party has core constituents of the same ethnicity who do not look favorably on what they consider to be theft and disenfranchisement. They become even more disillusioned with the nation. They form a BLO, a Black Liberation Organization, with political, military and terrorist wings. They petition the government to let them secede from the country in a state they dominate.

Our government's response is a clear and quick "No." Then Mississippi is declared Blackland, and with the support of the U.N. and E.U., secession is declared.

If the government thus does not give in to this version of "democracy," one would see a situation much like in Israel. Imagine living in a U.S where, periodically, bombs are going off on Wall Street, at your local Cinnabon, in the car parked along the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, in the F train coming from Queens. Imagine four gunmen with automatic weapons and grenades standing at the intersection when your light is red, and the hundreds that can be killed quite easily.

It's a far fetched idea, and yet, those are the things we should be thinking about when we so freely apply solutions to other places that we would not dare consider for ourselves.

It's not so much that anything like that could possibly happen here, but rather, our inability to imagine the long term consequences of these actions we support.

Not to mention that the Albanians who seem to love us now for backing them in their pursuit of independence, might be the very same people who are fighting us in the future as radical Islam gains wider ground. Afghanistan redux.

It's a shame when Putin has to do the thinking for us. Granted there might have been no proper way to resolve this situation, but there should have been more discussion and slower progression so as not to build resentments as a nation sees itself cut down to size.