Innocents Abroad
BROSE, CHRISTIAN D.
Innocents Abroad The American military's new global responsibilities. BY CHRISTIAN D. BROSE The end of the Cold War in I 1991 opened a decade of I serious confusion for the -A. United States as...
...Rather than separating two warring peoples, a solution that Priest suggests would have been more realistic, Clinton and his allies demanded an integrated, democratic Kosovo...
...Yet, Priest tells their story with compassion...
...If it is true that soldiers must be like dogs—devoted to their friends and vicious to their enemies—it is also true that their black-and-white vision is unsuited to political and social nuance...
...military Christian D. Brose is assistant editor of the National Interest...
...The United States eagerly deployed its soldiers to keep peace and build nations, but failed to follow through properly with a coordinated army of political and legal advisers, civil engineers, and agricultural specialists...
...foreign policy...
...But military training alone cannot remake splintered societies, enable people to lift themselves out of poverty, or cultivate democratic political cultures...
...Priest offers a rich account of that failed, and still failing, mission...
...These four-star generals amassed great authority when the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act increased both their budgets and regional responsibilities...
...soldiers did their part, but no one else did theirs...
...She is right...
...It must also address its own structure and management, or its pledge to rebuild Iraq may prove empty, and Afghanistan could start looking a lot more like, well, Afghanistan...
...Such policies, and others, were predicated on the naive assumption that military "engagement" would promote professionalism and thereby increase political stability abroad...
...military as a kind of global duct tape: a quick fix for the messy problems of a "unipolar" world...
...The main culprit, argues Priest, a Washington Post reporter, is feckless political leadership...
...Rather, it is the crude manner in which America has oafishly tripped and fallen into various post-Cold War messes...
...Thus, if the United States wishes to adopt the imperial burden it found crying on its doorstep twelve years ago, it must transform a lot more than its national security strategy...
...spent the 1990s pursuing missions plainly antithetical to its nature...
...As Bush the Elder and Clinton the Expedient failed to develop a comprehensive strategic vision, the U.S...
...Her book contains colorful anecdotal evidence to support two central truths about nation-building: It is an all-or-nothing endeavor, and the military cannot take the lead role...
...American soldiers thus experienced profound difficulties as they attempted to create order and build civil society in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo...
...But if the United States should decrease its reliance on the military to achieve its foreign policy goals, as Priest contends, who then needs to start pulling a larger load...
...The second portion of The Mission examines the recently expanded role of Special Operations soldiers, whose marching orders include everything from training security forces in Nigeria to waging the war on drugs in Colombia...
...Priest divides her book into thirds, the first of which looks at the military's five regional commanders in chief, who oversee all operations in their theaters of action...
...And, among other problems, the department has no experienced leaders who can effectively coordinate policy on a regional basis...
...Special Operations soldiers have a lot of steam to let off, having to endure complex and ill-defined missions that are especially prone to failure...
...Nineteen-year-old GIs were ordered to build nations, rather than destroy them— and to win over the "hearts and minds," instead of fighting enemy combatants...
...Special Forces could effect a change of heart in Indonesia's Kopassus forces, and ensure that they not commit atrocities in East Timor...
...In the book's final section, Priest examines the Clinton administration's policy toward the Balkans, particularly Kosovo, where a reluctant war from the air begot an even more befuddled peace on the ground...
...They have increasingly come to embody America's global presence— possessing greater diplomatic leverage than ambassadors and performing functions that previously fell to civilian agencies...
...Yet the Clinton administration cast these young dogs of war into situations where friends and enemies are indistinguishable: Serbs killed and displaced Albanians during NATO's air campaign, and Albanians eagerly returned the favor during the U.N.'s feckless peacekeeping mission...
...The State Department should take the lead, but its sclerotic bureaucracy currently prohibits it from becoming a forceful counterpart to the Pentagon...
...And their main tool of choice for bringing about this new and unprecedented state of affairs was, of course, the military...
...United States as it grappled to define its proper role in the new era...
...Although Priest sometimes casts America's military as imperial, one gathers her problem is not with a forward-leaning U.S...
...Priest calls them "proconsuls to the empire...
...But when the job was done, Colombian farmers simply replanted their lucrative drug crop...
...Green Berets, for example, were sent to train Colombian security forces to fight leftist rebels and destroy the coca crops used to make cocaine...
...military's unparalleled success at waging war even as it repeatedly bumbles peacekeeping missions...
...Successive post-Cold War administrations have treated the U.S...
...Indeed, it takes a special kind of optimism to believe that a few human rights lectures from U.S...
...And (big surprise) they grew even fonder of the leftist rebels...
...The emerging portrait shows a rough fraternity of violent alpha males...
...In her new book The Mission, Dana Priest describes the U.S...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 28
