Timely. Poignant? Not So Much.

Quick, who said today that the possibility of failure in Afghanistan was a distinct possibility?

No, it wasn't my three year old daughter, it was razor sharp British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Now I know this is shocking. Not that he would say something so plainly obvious and ignorant but that he is still the PM. It seems like he has been running that country into the ground for damn near a generation. I guess bad times just move slower.

Clearly Mr. Brown is trying to drum up support for his Labour Party by beating the drums of war and trying to incite a little nationalistic excitement and pride but what exactly does he expect to achieve? The Conservatives are in a prime spot to make sure Brown and his Labour comrades never see the end of the Afghanistan conflict.

Even if they were still around how exactly will victory be achieved? The United States has completely back-burnered this issue. President Obama's handpicked NATO commander has set forth a plan of action which has been promptly ignored so that the administration can dive headfirst into the financial and social nightmare that Europe is currently trying to escape from. The United Kingdom is even broker than we are, public support is nil and apparently, their military isn't exactly a dynamic entity right now (another casualty of liberal policy). Germany isn't going to send more troops and possibly can't depending on how you interpret the Grundgesetz. France has no military capability to help even if they wanted to (they don't) unless NATO decides to drop a nuke on Kandahar. Italy is busy trying to convict its prime Minister of election crimes and Spain is still trying to hash out if they want to be full socialists or just partial.

Which brings us to the big problems for Afghanistan and by extension Mr. Brown.

NATO is a complete sham.

Any treaty organization whose members can enter or leave any conflict they want without reprisal from the other members is no organization at all. Many of its member nations cannot wage war. Many of the ones that can have absolutely no desire to do so for a variety of economic and political issues both foreign and domestic.

Why is this so bad for Gordon Brown and all the rest of his socialist democrat contemporaries around the globe, including here in the US? Because it shows the inherent weakness of the liberal international world view. Liberals like Brown and Obama constantly blame world conflict on the lack of global cooperation and understanding. They argue that peace can only be achieved through the greater globalization of all people around the world into one true global community through various multinational institutions such as NATO or the United Nations. This is pure theoretical folly. It makes the same mistake communism makes about the individual in believing that people are naturally cooperative and that a state of mutual respect and opportunity will eliminate all the worlds problems. It isn't so for people and it isn't so for nations states. At the end of the day, international law or treatises are only followed so long as they are beneficial to the individual nation state. When they cease to be beneficial, they are ignored and the nation, like the individual, takes whichever path leads to the most prosperity and security for them, the rest of the nations be damned. The competitive nature of man and the nations they create will always rule the day.

This is of course, the proper way it should be. After all, the French people elect leaders to protect their interests, not the entire worlds. If all the worlds leaders believed that then everything would be fine as all people would be represented on the world stage by their elected leaders and an honest competition could follow that would reward nations that excel while encouraging others that do not. Leaders like Brown and Obama are simply not content to mind the affairs of their own nation. They see an irresistible need to meddle in the affairs of other nations as well. They create massive, ineffective institutions to try and wedge all the worlds nations into one massive bureaucracy for the purpose of forced egalitarian equality, as defined by them of course. Unfortunately, the only place where this intended equality can exist is in the realm of mediocrity, which sounds about right for where Brown finds himself.

For the time being at least.