U.S. Foreign Policy Repeats the '90s

[The Northerner]

Is it just me, or does our geopolitical soundtrack play like a 1990s remix?

Americans marked the killing of Osama bin Laden with a nation-wide block party, not unlike their celebration of Desert Storm, the 1991 operation that ejected the Iraqi army from Kuwait. Just as liberating a corrupt Arab emirate exorcised the demons of Vietnam, it seems, so has the killing of a mass murderer with a bad dye job salved the burden of an endless war on radical Islam.

The avenging angel that delivered bin Laden’s fate was a case of life imitating art—or at least a low form of art, as anyone who has seen the 1990 film Navy Seals would agree. (For the uninitiated, the film ends with Charlie Sheen getting rescued at sea after completing a dangerous mission in war-torn Lebanon. Imagine what a better world it would be, had he been left to dog-paddle his way back to the fleshpots of Beirut.)

Speaking of the U.S. Navy, I remember reporting from the deck of the carrier Independence in 1995 as it patrolled the South China Sea at a time when Beijing was acting particularly incontinent, listening to sailors and aviators lament the grueling tempo demanded by President Clinton’s adventures in East Africa and the Balkans. Today, those deployments look like a day trip when compared to the multiple tours American GIs are pulling in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then, as now, a Democratic president was grappling with the legacy of his Republican predecessor’s misbegotten enterprises only to face pressure to enter new ones from neoconservatives to his right and liberal interventionists on his left.

Read more: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/stephen-glain/2011/05/12/us-foreign-policy-repeats-the-90s