Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Wieseltier wrote, “has been reduced to relief and rescue, to the aftermath of catastrophe.
Where we should have rushed bullets we are now rushing blankets.” Clinton, he said, had
discovered a kind of warfare “in which Americans do not die, a … cowardly war with pre-
cision technology that leaves polls and consciences unperturbed.” He predicted that “this
age of immunity will not last forever. Sooner or later the United States will have to send
its soldiers to … a place where they will suffer injury or death. What will matter is whether
the cause is just, not whether the cause is dangerous.”
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Indeed, an invasion of Iraq began to emerge as a cause in the 1990s, when the U.S. mil-
itary was seen as invincible against the forces of history and geography, if only it would be
unleashed in time, and to its full extent, which meant boots on the ground. It was idealists
who loudly and passionately urged military force in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and
Kosovo, even as realists like Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger, increasingly pilloried
as heartless, urged restraint.
Yet, in fact, the 1990s was less a decade of military power overall than it was specifically
a decade of air power. Air power had been crucial to ousting Iraqi forces from Kuwait in
1991: though geography, in this case, made high-tech war easy, as operations were conduc-
ted over a featureless desert where it rarely rained. Air power was also a factor in ending
the war in Bosnia four years later, and with all its demonstrated limitations, carried the day
against Milosevic in Kosovo four years after that. The ethnic Albanian refugees ultimately
returned to their homes, even as Milosevic was weakened to the extent that he fell from
power the following year in 2000.
We Don't Do Mountains
, went the phrase summarizing
the U.S. Army's initial resistance to sending troops to Bosnia and Kosovo. But it turned
out that as long as we owned the air, the Army
did mountains
rather well. Geography had
reared its head all right in the Balkans, but air power quickly overcame it. Then there were
the Air Force and Navy fighter jets patrolling the Iraqi no-fly zones, keeping Saddam in his
box throughout the decade and beyond. Consequently, segments of the elite, awestruck at
the American military's might, became infused with a sense of moral indignation against
the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations for not using the military in time to
save a quarter of a million people from genocide in the Balkans (not to mention the million
in Rwanda). It was a mind-set that at least for some could lead to adventurism, which it
did. That, in turn, would lead in the next decade to the partial undoing of the Munich ana-
logy, and restore to geography some of the respect that it had lost in the 1990s. The 1990s
saw the map reduced to two dimensions because of air power. But soon after the three-di-
mensional map would be restored: in the mountains of Afghanistan and in the treacherous
alleyways of Iraq.
In 1999, articulating a sentiment increasingly common among liberal intellectuals, Wiesel-
tier wrote:
