Taking a look at the year ahead

As this column opined over a year ago, the United States was likely entering a new age of Jimmy Carter. Recalling the most incompetent and strategically myopic administration most living Americans can recall, 2009 has sadly evoked deja vu of the Carter Administration.

In January 1979, just 31 years ago, Time magazine headlined a cover article “Crescent of Crisis” which illustrated a geographic arc ranging from Afghanistan and Iran in the East, Arabia in the center, and Somalia in the West. At that time, U.S. National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (one of Carter's few competent foreign policy officials), stated, “An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries.”

He was right then and now. Then the world was on the cusp of the Iranian revolution, one of the key geopolitical disasters of the post-WWII era, which toppled the reformist and pro-West Shah and saw the country tumble back into the dark ages of Islamic fundamentalism. Then and now, a radicalized Islam confronted Pakistan and so much of the Crescent of Crisis from Afghanistan to Iraq and Somalia.

War on Terror

While the Obama administration will increase U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan and possibly get pulled deeper into the Pakistani vortex of violence, it appears Yemen could emerge as the supernova of violence in this deepening crescent of crisis. Yemen has long been a rats nest on the Arabian peninsula. The home of the bin-Laden clan, during the Cold War, this mountainous land has long been a playground of PLO radicals and East German and Soviet advisers. In recent years Yemen has proved fertile ground for al-Qaida franchise operations and seems likely to play a wider role.

What started well before 2001 (with the bombing of the USS Navy ship Cole in Aden Harbor) continued through the decade, and will probably realistically continue at various levels for a generation. Despite the often comfortable “Sept. 10th mindset,” we must recognize that we are living in a post-Sept. 11th world, like it or not.

The recent case of the thwarted bombing of a transatlantic U.S. bound airliner sadly underscores the “Sept. 10th mindset” from both the Obama administration and the bureaucratic Homeland Security department, who still are not connecting the dots, communicating with each other or going beyond the bromides of the blame game. We can't always rely on luck.

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