Word: vitality
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Presidents have the freedom to pick their wars and fight them as they choose, without worrying about setting off a thermonuclear war. The U.S. could go into Somalia and Haiti knowing it would never involve 500,000 troops for years, because the final outcome in those countries is not vital to America's national interests--we do not believe we are in a long twilight struggle with Somali warlords. The U.S. can also decide to pull its forces out on a fixed schedule without worrying about losing credibility or toppling dominoes...
...still blunder. It might get into a struggle--in Bosnia, say--that it could not win in a reasonable time or at an acceptable price. Even so, the imperatives of the cold war have been replaced by an entirely different limiting factor: the difficulty of finding America's vital interests at stake in other people's conflicts. During the cold war the question was posed as, Is there any reason we can't intervene? Now it is, Why should...
...pointless mission in Beirut were killed by a suicide bomber in 1983, the Reagan Administration struggled to draw lessons from the disaster. The next year, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger offered a checklist for evaluating the future uses of military forces abroad. Such actions should be necessary to protect vital national interests, he advised, and permit the use of powerful force to achieve a decisive victory. The objective must be clear and attainable by military means, and it must be supported by Congress and the people...
...brushed aside the Weinberger rules when he sent the Army first after General Manuel Antonio Noriega in Panama and later to Somalia to safeguard relief shipments. Bill Clinton felt free to ignore the rules in Haiti, which is what a President gets paid for deciding when the nation's vital interests are at stake and trying to rally the support he needs. "Military force," says Brent Scowcroft, who was National Security Adviser to George Bush, "ought to be an instrument of U.S. foreign policy and interests. That means you use it sometimes when you don't have popular support...
...Acceptability Factor is Harvard Dining Services' oh-so-scientific attempt to answer the vital question: What percentage of students who walk into the dining hall will actually end up taking a single portion of this dish? With the most scrumptious dishes, students will often take more than a single portion or occasionally even stuff themselves silly with "seconds" or (date we say) "thirds." That's why the numbers for the tastiest entrees are greater than...