Justin Raimondo has an excellent article in the American Conservative, where he traces John McCain’s devolution from sensible realist (including his stance against the doomed Lebanon intervention and the First Gulf War) to his reinvention in the late Nineties as a full blown neoconservative hawk. His turning point was the Kosovo War, where America bombed Serbia in order to expand Muslim dominance into Serbia’s Kosovo province. Now, these same Albanians harass and ethnically cleanse the remaining Christian population, a situation America enabled in the name of fighting genocide.

If McCain somehow wins the presidency, we can expect more ill-advised wars based on the dubious premise that the United States must identify and then smash every “rogue state” in the world. Iraq had an arguable relationship to U.S. interests, but the real models will be Kosovo, Somalia, and Bosnia. Raimando notes:

The brace of arguments McCain made in his CSIS speech in support of the Kosovo War didn’t hold together at the time—and fares even worse in retrospect. According to McCain, the Serbs threatened “our global credibility and the long-term viability of the Atlantic Alliance”—the former because two successive presidents had warned Milosevic against committing “aggression” against Kosovo, and failure to act would embolden other “rogue states” to defy American edicts. Yet McCain’s reasoning is circular: according to him, our government’s edicts must be obeyed because they are, by definition, non-negotiable—even by Americans. A certain course, once taken, must be pursued to the bitter end, even if it acts against our long-term interests. McCain’s worldview, which admits no possibility of error, is undiluted hubris.