Even if we were to disregard all the cynical barbs about oil thirst and manifest destiny, America's ongoing struggle to stabilize the Middle East has still yielded some troubling consequences. We have spent a great deal of diplomatic capital over the past few years in assembling all of our various “coalitions of the willing,” and even leaving aside the important role humanitarian aid should play in our policy, if a real threat were to suddenly emerge (e.g. Russia, North Korea, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan), we might be left high and dry. Where exactly does this leave President Obama?
Hopefully learning from the geopolitical mistakes his predecessors made—in Africa.
The year was 1994, a lifetime ago in African politics; civil unrest was rampant, social collapse was imminent—and furthermore, had been for some time—and after having given the nasty idea some deliberation and tested it in the international press, the US and the rest of the United Nations member states withdrew their peace keepers as quietly as they could and watched as the region imploded entirely, with apocalyptic results. The lives of at least half a million Tutsi probably could have been saved, Clinton himself admitted later, if he'd sent even a few thousand of the requested troops. The withdrawal from Rwanda was the darkest hour of his presidency, he said, and like many, many others, I won't disagree, but we shouldn't forget that he simply turned around and twice repeated himself, first with Bosnia and then with Kosovo.
And, of course, we mustn't forget about Somalia, the war-torn coastal nation two countries to the east of Rwanda; its infrastructure has been irreparably destroyed by a civil war that promises never to end, its culture is under the hideous spell of Sharia law, and its international significance these days consists mostly of chatter among pundits about its ongoing problem with piracy. Black Hawk Down came out not ten years ago, and already, we have forgotten everything we might have learned about human solidarity. Actually, that's not true—we never learned anything about it in the first place, and the only reason anyone saw the movie is because it gave us a romanticized impression of ourselves, never minding the collapsing scenery of Mogadishu. A century from now, the cities of Somalia will still be getting riddled with mortars, and we will still be watching that movie, clapping as the credits roll.
This isn't to excuse President Bush; whatever he might have been fighting for in Iraq, it seems inexcusable that he didn't notice Darfur, the region of western Sudan in which the government has essentially decided to orchestrate genocide as a matter of public policy. Not that the rest of the world bothered to do anything, either; never before has so much shouting and hollering about injustice from so many disparate sources led to so little. Yet again, while the UN member states quibble about jurisdiction and responsibility, another country in the heart of darkness rots.
So say whatever you wish about our incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan; it's too easy these days to take shots at Clinton and Bush, but we must ask, what kind of legacy have they left their successor? And more importantly, what will be the Obama Doctrine? What can our new President learn from Africa? It is clearly true that borrowing neo-conservatism from Bush will land him in a quagmire, but if he just squirms, spins around and adopts the stupid isolationism of Pat Buchanan, it won't be merely cowardice, but apparently protocol as well. Please choose wisely, Mr. President.
