I’ve wanted to talk about Kosovo for a while now. It’s my job to relay the events of the world through my own biased eyes. Since my government started bombing the crap out of some region on the other side of our shrinking planet, I’ve known I should have something to say about it.

It’s a daunting subject to tackle. I’m like every other American sliding through life, and I’ve never bothered to pay much attention to events in Kosovo. Even though a story about Yugoslavia pops up every day in every major paper, the retention valve in my brain shuts off when I see those articles. I enter a state of deep-rooted casualness I apply to countries I confused for gourmet fish six months ago.

Peacekeepers and investigators from the United States and our NATO buddy nations are searching for mass graves and other atrocities from an ethnic cleansing effort. By the numbers, that seems like it would be a terribly moving, shocking story. To me, it just seems like P.R. drivel.

It would be easy to fault myself and the American public for not arming themselves with knowledge of why we’ve committed so much military force to some God-forsaken backward country and its ethnic problems. I don’t think I’ll do that because we shouldn’t have gotten wrapped up in the whole shenanigan from the start.

It all starts out with a very bad man named Milosevic doing bad things to good people in a far away place.

Mass murdering and other unpleasantries go on for awhile until the collective heart of the U.S. Government becomes so heavy with the knowledge of the horrible things that are occurring in Kosovo that there is no other option but to begin ordering airstrikes as our president is being impeached.

We’re not going to ever really enter the country, of course. No, in line with the standard principles of American war in this age, we’ll simply send super-smart bombs to destroy the bad guys and win one for the Gipper.

There were pilots living in Missouri who would fly all night to Kosovo, drop a few bombs and level some children and maybe a few Chinese ambassadors, then fly home and fall asleep in front of the TV. Seriously, we had soldiers fighting for us from the Show-Me State.

That brings me to my main objection to our involvement in Kosovo. Modern military action is at once too bloody and not bloody enough. War has always been the final action of politics through non-political means. Until now, it has carried a big enough price tag that we would rarely venture to enter into a conflict with another country unless there was an issue of national security at stake.

With the advent of the F-117 Nighthawk and the B-2 Spirit, we could whisk into a country under a blanket of stealth darkness and drop smartbombs so accurate we could shoot them down smokestacks.

Like I said, not bloody enough on the one side and too bloody on the other.

Back here in the land of the free, we’ve got pilots receiving purple hearts for basically playing a video game without putting their own lives at risk.

It’s more than just war needing to have consequences for both parties involved, though; it’s the whole can of worms that this quick, relatively simple type of attack opens up that creates problems.

It’s made the leaders of our nation not willing to truly win a war. If a cause is good enough to bomb for, it should be good enough to warrant finishing the job. Enough of this “we’ve accomplished our mission” crap.

Saddam Hussein is still kicking it in Iraq waiting for the UN to get out of his underwear drawer so he can pop a porno in the VCR, and Milosevic is alive as Elvis trying to get Yelstin to bring a bottle of Vodka to peace negotiations because NATO bombed all the bars in Pristina. Make up your mind, almighty imperial superpower: Are these guys Hitlers in training or are they merely mildly evil? If the former, why the pussyfooting around, and if the latter, what were we doing romping around in their countries in the first place?

What it all comes down to is the fact that our beloved nation has taken a serious ego trip since the fall of the Berlin Wall. We’ve got nothing to concentrate our hatred on, and we’re just searching so hard to find an outlet for the oldest and truest of human emotions.

But we’ve got to stop pretending that we’re this gentle benevolent nation that just can’t sit by and watch bad things happen on our planet. We’re not the good guys; we’re wrapped up in our own hypocrisy just as much as the next republic.

You think the terrible acts against humanity that were occurring in Kosovo were the only atrocities of their kind on Earth that the United States knew about when Clinton ordered those airstrikes a couple of months ago? Of course not, but that was probably the conflict that would work the best for our allies and look the best on TV.

If this doesn’t stop, these conflicts are going to lose their impact, and we’ll lose what has become the modern reason for war: To convince ourselves that we’re good people. And there couldn’t possibly be a better way to express it than bombing the living daylights out of whatever that map in the glove compartment of the tank said was a military target.

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David Roepke is a junior in journalism and mass communications from Aurora. He is head news editor of the Daily.