Emergency Sex

I finished reading Emergency Sex last night. It is a gripping account of three U.N. workers who were part of the big U.N. actions in the nineties. They are pretty unhappy with Clinton era foreign policy, starting with running Somalia and the resulting timidity of the President in deploying troops. I was personally opposed to most of the Clinton interventions because A) it wasn’t in our national interest and B) because of A we didn’t have the national will to do the job right. Since 9/11 I have concluded that I was wrong A. The world is a small place now. Global transportation and communication make it easy for regional conflicts to have a global effect. At best, the lawless failed countries are a useful hiding place for terrorists. At worse, criminal regimes will be active supporters of these people. Emergency Sex and other things I have read have confirmed that I was correct about point B though. America in the nineties did not have the political will to intervene successfully in foreign humanitarian disasters. The one real exception, Bosnia, was done with a strategy crafted for minimum risks and is still not resolved. In there are really only two ways to lose a war. One is to be annihilated and the other is to give up. America (with the possible exception of the South in the civil war) has never been annihilated. Every war, every conflict, that we have lost has been because we gave up.