World’s Cop Has New Look, Old Attitude

The ghosts of Vietnam aren’t booing anymore. Or if they are, people aren’t hearing them. They don’t seem spooked.

The United States, once again, is trying on the uniform of the world’s policeman. Excuse me, make that the world’s police officer . Times have changed, somewhat.

These changes are subtle, a matter of degree. Today the world’s cop is no longer some guy with a thick neck, a big stick and a grammatical disorder--”Shut up, you puke. You don’t know nothing!”--who’s got an itch to bust down doors and bust heads.

This officer of the ‘90s deliberates. He (or she) will openly discuss other “options” to force. These will be printed in the newspapers and broadcast on TV. Allies will be consulted, world bodies will convene.

And, in the end, the United States will go in just the same.

But today, more Americans seem to feel better about that, as if they had been consulted themselves, as if they had seen the horrors in Somalia, or Iraq, or Bosnia, firsthand. Television, especially, brings it up close.

Indeed, the cry these days is, “What’s taking us so long?”

(The other day at the gym, the guy huffing next to me on the StairMaster said in all seriousness that we should push into Baghdad, evacuate everybody in buses and then bomb the place to smithereens.

(Kathie Lee Gifford, another foreign policy expert, offered her own suggestion on “Live with Regis and Kathie Lee.” “Nuke ‘em!” she said, then giggled. The studio audience cheered.)

In the meantime, I’ve noticed something else. Start people talking about America’s global military posture and the analogies with The Good War of the 1940s far eclipse those with the one that ended in murky disgrace.

The world’s police officer in the ‘90s is more of a Dudley Doright than anything else. Or so we like to think.

As a measure of how firmly this new-old way of thinking has taken hold, consider the joke that Spy magazine played recently on some 20 members of the freshman class of representatives on Capitol Hill.

Magazine staffers posing as the host of a New York radio talk show rang up the representatives to ask a string of innocuous questions followed by a request for their position on U.S. involvement in Freedonia. Did they approve of what the United States was doing to stop what was going on?

Freedonia is the fictitious nation immortalized by the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup,” about which none of the honorable congressmen and women had a clue.

Opined Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), “I think all of those situations are very, very sad, and I just think we need to take action to assist the people.”

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) ‘fessed up to not being familiar with U.S. policy on Freedonia. “But it’s coming to the point now that a blind eye to it for the next 10 years is not the answer.”

Understand that the world’s police officer is expected to have the answers, all sorts of them. Why, we’re the only superpower left.

And it’s not just George Bush--the President who ordered U.S. troops to foreign lands four times in as many years--who seems to feel this way. Bill Clinton has intimated the same.

Moreover, before he’d been picked as Clinton’s secretary of defense, Les Aspin suggested that the military brass still haunted by Vietnam ought to just lighten up. Aspin noted that we are the side that survived the Cold War, and then, of course, now we’ve got all those “smart” bombs.

There’s more than an element of fantasy to it all. Who knows? Maybe there’s already a video game out with the same theme. Points might be subtracted when the smart bombs don’t concentrate hard enough on their target and wipe out a new subdivision instead of the Ministry of Defense.

Or maybe the game is something along the lines of The Mario Brothers Deploy. Instead of rescuing a wailing princess, the bros could crown a nation’s self-esteem. They would fight, or disarm, or succor foreigners because it’s The Right Thing To Do.

And, sometimes, it is. There are times when our nation’s military must put aside its schedule of rehearsals and do it for real.

In some ways, I’ve got to count myself with Rep. Brown, she who would like to help the people of Freedonia out. Humanity suffers when atrocity is ignored. Hitler showed us that.

Yes, all wars have their ghosts, and it’s up to us to decipher what it is they are trying to say.

Because the tenor of their messages seems to change with the wind.