We’ll See
In August of last year (2006), at the end of my month-long trip to Vietnam, I had dinner at a Hanoi restaurant with a middle-aged American with extensive experience living and working in Asia. During our conversation, I remarked how nice it was to be able to travel safely in Vietnam now only thirty years after the end of the war. I then mused how quickly new possibilities emerge and old ones fade for the traveler. The man agreed, and then offered an anecdote neatly illustrating my point:
"In 1972 I was in Baghdad having Christmas dinner with Iraqi friends- a big, sumptuous traditional Arab feast- when one began lecturing me about the Christmas bombing of Vietnam. 'Why,' he said, 'does your country do this? Don't they understand the human consequences?' I patiently replied that I was no supporter of either Nixon or the Vietnam War and told him not all Americans agree with our government's policies.
"Thirty years later, almost to the date, I was sitting with Vietnamese friends in this very restaurant, when the same topic came up. 'Why,' they asked, 'is your government going to attack Iraq? Don't they consider what will happen to ordinary Iraqis?' Again, I patiently explained that I was no supporter of Bush or the Iraq War, and that not all Americans agree with the government's policies.
"So yes, I understand your point."
I thought about his story just the other night, when my parents and I saw the new film "Charlie Wilson's War". The film, set in the 1980s, details the efforts of a hard drinking Texas congressman to assist the Afghan mujahideen repel the Soviet invaders. Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) manages to cajole his fellow congressmen to increase the covert operations budget so the Afghans would have the weapons they needed to shoot down Soviet helicopters. Of course, as we know, the USSR would retreat and the mujahideen would recapture their land. At the end of the film, when Wilson celebrated the Afghan victory, his accomplice (a hard-drinking CIA agent played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) reminded him that what seems like good news today can become bad news tomorrow. Of course, this is precisely what happened as the mujahideen formed the basis of the Taliban government that the U.S would be forced to topple less than twenty years later.
Think of all the changes. No one could have predicted in 1968 that China would embrace market capitalism and the pursuit of wealth not twenty years later. No one could have predicted then that by 2007 the world city with the highest number of billionaires would be Moscow, Russia. No one could have predicted in 1976 that Cambodia and Vietnam would become major tourist destinations less than thirty years later. No one foresaw Iran turning into a repressive theocracy, or Lebanon descending into civil war and chaos. No one would have imagined that formerly Communist Lithuania would have a freer press than the United States.
So here's a question for all you global thinker types as we lurch into a new year. What sorts of changes could we see in the next twenty years? Will we be discussing the Iraq war someday from a cafe....in Pyongyang?
