Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ates for democracy. But it was the power of the military, and in particular that of the Air
Force, which was the hidden hand that allowed universalist ideas to matter so much more
than terrain and the historical experience of people living on it.
Munich, too, was at work in approaching the dilemma of Saddam Hussein after 9/11.
Though the United States had just suffered an attack on its soil comparable to Pearl Harbor,
the country's experience with ground war had been, for a quarter-century, minimal, or at
least not unpleasant. Moreover, Saddam was not just another dictator, but a tyrant straight
out of Mesopotamian antiquity, comparable in many eyes to Hitler or Stalin, who har-
bored, so it was believed, weapons of mass destruction. In light of 9/11—in light of Mu-
nich—history would never forgive us if we did not take action.
When Munich led to overreach, the upshot was that other analogy, thought earlier to have
been vanquished: Vietnam. Thus began the next intellectual cycle of the Post Cold War.
In this next cycle, which roughly corresponded with the first decade of the twenty-first cen-
tury and the difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terms “realist” and “pragmatist”
became marks of respect, signifying those who were skeptical from the start of America's
adventure in Mesopotamia, while “neoconservative” became a mark of derision. Whereas
in the 1990s, ethnic and sectarian differences in far-off corners of the world were seen as
obstacles that good men should strive to overcome—or risk being branded as “fatalists”
or “determinists”—in the following decade such hatreds were seen as factors that might
have warned us away from military action; or should have. If one had to pick a moment
when it became undeniable that the Vietnam analogy had superseded the one of Munich, it
was February 22, 2006, when the Shiite al-Askariyah Mosque at Samarra was blown up by
Sunni al Qaeda extremists, unleashing a fury of inter-communal atrocities in Iraq, which
the American military was unable to stop. Suddenly, our land forces were seen to be power-
less amid the forces of primordial hatreds and chaos. The myth of the omnipotent new Un-
ited States military, born in Panama and the First Gulf War, battered a bit in Somalia, then
repaired and burnished in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, was for a time shattered, along with
the idealism that went with it.
While Munich is about universalism, about taking care of the world and the lives of dis-
tant others, Vietnam is domestic in spirit. It is about taking care of one's own, following
the 58,000 dead from that war. Vietnam counsels that tragedy is avoided by thinking tra-
gically. It decries incessant fervor, for it suggests how wrong things can go. Indeed, it was
an idealistic sense of mission that had embroiled the United States in that conflict in South-
east Asia in the first place. The nation had been at peace, at the apex of its post-World War
II prosperity, even as the Vietnamese communists—as ruthless and determined a group of
people as the twentieth century produced—had murdered more than ten thousand of their
own citizens before the arrival of the first regular American troops. What war could be
