Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Blindness to Nuance
InU.S. Third World policy during the Cold War (with "communism" blotting out local particularities and making for ugly interventions--see for example Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam), and today, in the "war on terror," for example in Somalia. We will argue for a long time over the exact role of the U.S. in the Somalia disaster (as we continue to argue over Cold War cases such as Vietnam), but Somalia is not the only recent case that makes one wonder about the extent to which a superpower such as the U.S. is able to learn from past experience. Remember, for example how unprepared the U.S. was for the occupation of Iraq (how many speakers of Arabic again, early on?) and, even more important, how irrelevant decisionmakers believed this to be? Granted that the choice in these cases often is from a range of bad options, but if you're considering steps with the potential of turning a society or government upside down, at least do your homework. As Vietnam, Iraq, etc. show, long term that's in your own interest also.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
This reminds me of a something that Robert McNamara once said in an interview vis a vis the Vietnam entanglement. He said that that the big lesson for him from the long conflict was that the
United States should never again get involved in a protracted occupation of a region without developing an understanding of the history and culture of that region.
Absolutely brilliant observation, no?
McNamara had a BA in Econ from Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard -so you can forgive a historian's hubris here!
wonder if we'll ever hear something like that from Rummy, perhaps in a documentary film entitled: "I now know, what I didn't know; and I also know how little I know; but there are still things I know I don't know"
Post a Comment