October 05, 2000

As Expected, Yugoslav Election Annulled
Real Straight Talk: There's No Gun Show Loophole
Gore OK with Military as Global Police

As Expected, Yugoslav Election Annulled

Yugoslavia's political crisis came to a head yesterday when the Constitutional Court delivered a ruling that annulled "part" of the electoral procedure for the Sept. 24 vote and said the disputed presidential election should be held again, according to Reuters. Constitutional Court head Milutin Srdic, speaking to Radio Free Europe in Bulgaria, said new elections should be held after the expiry of Milosevic's term and added that a run-off second round vote called for Oct. 8 should not take place.

Thousands of opposition supporters converged on Belgrade from towns across Serbia, brushing aside police roadblocks, to attend a mass rally later in the day to back their demands for President Slobodan Milosevic to accept defeat and step down.

In "Yugoslavia's Moment of Truth," Foreign Policy Analyst Gary Dempsey warns that Milosevic could invalidate or cancel the presidential election and reschedule it for some future date. "When no single candidate receives a majority of the vote in the rescheduled election, he schedules yet another election, a run-off between himself and the other top vote getter," he writes. "By that time, voter turnout and the opposition's morale may be so diminished that Milosevic will need only steal a few votes to stay in power."

Real Straight Talk: There's No Gun Show Loophole

In what gun-control proponents consider a major boost for their cause, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has begun appearing in television commercials promoting ballot initiatives in Colorado and Oregon that would require people who buy firearms at gun shows to undergo criminal background checks, according to The New York Times.

The 30-second spots, which began airing in the Denver area today, show McCain saying into the camera: "I'm John McCain with some straight talk. Convicted felons have been able to buy and sell thousands of guns at gun shows because of a loophole in the law. Many were later used in crimes. That's wrong."

In "The Facts About Gun Shows," Associate Policy Analyst and Colorado resident David B. Kopel demonstrates that there is no "gun show loophole." "Despite what some media commentators have claimed," he writes, "existing gun laws apply just as much to gun shows as they do to any other place where guns are sold." Attempts to shut down gun shows are simply further attacks on the First and Second Amendments.

Gore OK with Military as Global Police

Vice President Al Gore today intensified a foreign policy argument with George W. Bush that began during their debate on Tuesday. He argued that his vision of using the American military to build new democracies after peace is won has its roots in the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Western Europe after World War II, according to The New York Times. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/05/politics/05GORE.html )

Gore suggested that Bush's argument that using the military in that role was endangering its essential function ignored the lessons of a postwar policy that he credited not only with saving a war-ravaged continent but also with building prosperity and, ultimately, reuniting Germany under democracy after the collapse of Communism.

"It's not a new mission," Gore insisted, when asked about Bush's criticism that American military preparedness has suffered because troops are overdeployed around the world, often for nonmilitary tasks. "The generation that won World War II, having seen the catastrophe of the interwar period of the '20s and '30s, wisely decided that nation-building was a preferable alternative to World War III."

In "'Isolationism' as the Denial of Intervention: What Foreign Policy Is and Isn’t," Earl C. Ravenal argues that the tendency of both the Clinton administration and its Republican opponents to frame foreign policy as a compromise between "global policeman" and "isolationism" misses the point entirely. "They erroneously assume that, to one degree or another, the United States can impose its policy preferences around the world, with acceptable costs and risks," Ravenal writes. "Moreover, advocates of so-called selective engagement would end up endorsing almost all of Washington’s current security obligations and recent military interventions, give or take a couple of strategically and budgetarily trivial cases such as Somalia and Haiti."

In "Bosnia Mission Weakens U.S. Military," Foreign Policy Analyst Gary Dempsey finds that the U.S. Army has been used in 29 significant overseas operations in the past decade, compared with 10 during the preceding 40 years. The strain of that pace has had a negative impact on readiness and morale.

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