Word: vitalizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Perry is struggling to come up with workable new guidelines. He has been thinking about separating the country's interests abroad into three categories: vital, important and humanitarian. This would roughly match the three main types of intervention the U.S. ponders most often: peacemaking, in which warring parties must be forced to stop fighting; peacekeeping, where the parties have accepted a peace agreement; and emergency humanitarian aid, often in warlike conditions. All of them are potentially bloody. "Our level of military involvement must reflect our stakes," says Perry. The Gulf War fell into the first category, and Bosnia the second...
...alliance and jeopardize American leadership in Europe." Secretary of State Warren Christopher warns that the Bosnian conflict might spread, but it remains unclear what danger the Albanian army poses. Meanwhile, William Perry, the Secretary of Defense, testified to Congress last month that the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia "affects the vital national security interests of the U.S. by maintaining the strength and credibility of NATO and, most important, by stopping the war." That use of the word vital is the heart of the issue and the argument. When officials of the Truman Administration suggested in 1950 that South Korea...
...weeks after Perry used the V word, he seemed to have changed his mind. In a speech in Philadelphia he labeled Bosnia a place "where our vital interests are not threatened, but we do have an important stake in the outcome." Asked to explain this contradiction last week, Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon said Bosnia was important, though not vital, but the maintenance of U.S. leadership in NATO was at stake in the peacekeeping mission. "We're protecting NATO," Bacon said. "That's vital...
...this straight: Bosnia is not a vital interest; it's an "important" interest. NATO is a vital interest. NATO is mixed up in Bosnia, so to defend our vital interest in NATO we have to fight in Bosnia. By this logic, it would make no difference whether Bosnia were an "important" interest or a "somewhat important" or an "utterly trivial" interest; we'd still have to send troops there because of our desire to preserve NATO. Bacon's explanation skips over the really hard question raised by Perry's comment: Is the defense of merely "important" interests worth the lives...
...interests abroad. Even the prudent George Bush, who ordered U.S. troops to Somalia in the first place, was rethinking the old guidelines just before he left office. He suggested that "military force might be the best way to protect an interest that qualifies as important but less than vital." Force is a key adjunct to diplomacy, he argued, and "real leadership requires a willingness to use military force." Richard Haas, the former White House aide who wrote that speech, explains, "It was an attempt to come up with a slightly more flexible rationale for using force. It was also...