Way back in high school, there was a paperback by George Orwell on our required reading list. It was named, "1984."

The 1949 classic pictured a society where all citizens were wards of the state and Big Brother ruled every aspect of their lives. It was government of the person, by the person and for the person. Freedoms of thought and deed were replaced by mandatory "love" for Big Brother. If one strayed from the party line, he was detained by the thought police and reprocessed until a sanitized, politically correct worker-drone could be safely released back into society.

So many themes from this prophetic book could be applied directly to our modern headlines. From governmental liars (gee, I didn’t mean to be redundant) to the micro-managing of our individual lives, every word of the Orwell treatment rings true.

But what I specifically want to touch on, today, was the prediction that our world would be divided into three armed camps, always at war with each other. (Does that sound like today with Russia, China and the U.S.?) The hero of the book, Winston Smith was gainfully employed rewriting history to teach the latest inaccurate version of the past to the next generation.

What we learn from the book is that political alliances are just as quickly rewritten as yesterday's history. Two-on-one conflicts would continually flare up and there was only one certainty in life. No matter who really caused the fight, the other party was totally to blame and your troops were always in the right.

No region in the real world shows the truth of that parable better than the country once known as Yugoslavia. Ever since the death of Marshall Tito, smoldering hatreds have kindled the countryside and ignited ethnic death from Bosnia and Kosovo to Macedonia.

One must ask why an alliance of countries like NATO, representing eons of Christian history, would take up arms to support Albanian Muslims in the quest to drive Orthodox Serbian Christians from the province of Kosovo, a place where they had lived, worked and worshipped for more than a thousand years.

NATO’s campaign of air terror destroyed churches and drove thousands of Serbian civilians from their homes. It empowered a group of drug-running thugs who, by and large, refused to give up their weapons at NATO’s command. The Kosovo Liberation Army has now changed roles from victim to aggressor. They are blowing up busses filled with innocent Serb pilgrims. They are attacking Serbian policemen across the border within Serbia itself. They are now threatening the territorial integrity of a province to their south, Macedonia. NATO troops shot two ethnic Albanians earlier this week as they tried to launch an attack on Macedonia.

Once again, so-called allies have become our enemies but we refuse to admit that we erred by ever becoming embroiled in this centuries old war to the death between two ancient foes.

This is not our fight. It never was. It should not be, now. But we succeeded in earning the rightful wrath of Serbia when our not-so-smart bombs landed right at the doorstep of Yugoslavia’s ex-President Slobodan Milosevic. (Not to mention our blunder in blowing up the Chinese embassy.) Now, we will likely have a new set of enemies among the Albanian Kosovars, as well.

That’s just what we need, a new group of terrorist cells running around our countryside with a fresh score to settle. Frankly, my dear, we’re running out of both time and enemies. And I DO give a…well, you know…

George Bush inherited this mess from his father. US and UN negotiators reached a tentative Bosnia solution involving the use of UN troops during the lame duck days of the George H.W. Bush regime. Bill Clinton expanded the use and commitment of our forces throughout the region. Still, it seems no matter which party holds the White House, our fearless leaders have chosen to invoke "gun barrel" diplomacy, whenever someone comes to power that they don’t like.

That seems fitting, considering the "dum-dums" we’ve had crafting our foreign policy, lately.

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