History has a way of forcing nations to deal with things left unfinished. Consider this week’s air strikes against al-Qaeda outposts in Somalia and President Bush’s plan to send an extra 21,000 troops into Baghdad.
These are just the latest examples of US foreign policy coming full circle.
Somalia, after all, is where Bush’s father sent 28,000 US troops on a mission of mercy in December 1992. After morphing into a nation-building mission, the US operation culminated on October 1993, in a daylong gun battle in the dusty alleys of Mogadishu. When the guns fell silent, 18 Americans were dead. We didn’t learn until later that bin Laden’s network had provided training to Somali militiamen.
Today, Somalia is still a frontline state in the war on terror. Up until a couple weeks ago, Somalia was officially under the control of a movement aligned with al Qaeda. In fact, it was the chief planner of al-Qaeda’s 1998 embassy bombings that US AC-130 gunships targeted in southern Somalia last week. It’s still unclear if they hit their target.
As to President Bush’s plan to increase troop levels in Iraq, it pays to recall that thoughtful observers warned that the force needed to take down Saddam’s regime was not sufficient to stabilize Iraq. Plus, it pays to recall that thoughtful observers warned that leaving Saddam Hussein in power in 1991 would only defer the inevitable reckoning to some later date. To be sure, there would have been more American casualties had Gen. Schwarzkopf’s juggernaut marched to Baghdad, but would the number of dead have eclipsed 3,000? There also would have been some agitated neighbors. But Turgut Ozal’s Turkey was far more cooperative than the Turkey of today. The Iran of 1991 was far weaker than Ahmadinejad’s Iran. And an Iraqi populace unscathed by the cold calculations that marked the end of Operation Desert Storm was probably more receptive to a US liberation force than today’s Iraq.
The realists point to today’s Iraq to justify those calculations. “The United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land,” as Brent Scowcroft and the elder Bush concluded in A World Transformed. Of course, that’s exactly what happened in the eyes of bin Laden and his followers. Since a wounded Saddam could not be left unattended and an oil-rich Saudi Arabia could not be left unprotected, US troops took up permanent residence in the Saudi kingdom. The presence of foreign troops in the Muslim holy land galvanized al Qaeda, which carried out the attacks of September 11, which triggered America’s global war on terror, which led inevitably back to Iraq, which is where America finds itself today. And now the circle is complete (almost).
There are other foreign policy failures that have yet to come full circle. In 1979, Iranian radicals stormed the US embassy in Tehran and held America hostage for 444 days. All Washington could muster was an abortive rescue mission that ended in humiliation. A few years later, Hezbollah killed 241 Marines trying to keep the peace in Beirut. Foreshadowing the Mogadishu misjudgments, Washington’s response was a rapid retreat.
In short, history has much more unfinished business for America to address.
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