American Foreign Policy in Kosovo and Iraq

Choices are made daily by every government in the world. Choices are made about taxes, war, law, and a large amount of national and international issues. One of the most important choices a country can make relates to Foreign Policy. This decision is so important because it involves the world and therefore affects people in these foreign countries. One of the most influential countries in the area of foreign policy is the United States of America. Throughout modern history America has made many decisions relating to foreign policy, some good and some bad. Some of these decisions have put American Soldiers in danger in distant lands and others have given foreign countries both joy and pain. I personally agree with U.S. foreign policy for the most part.

I have to admit that my agreement may be slightly biased. I am a Sergeant in the United States Army and therefore have been trained to unquestioningly agree with and obey the orders and decisions that are passed down by the U.S. government. However this is not the reason I agree with U.S. foreign policy. In 2001 I spent six months serving as a peacekeeper in Kosovo under the UN and NATO. This experience in the war-torn province of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia has changed my life forever. It is for this reason that I believe in the U.S. government and their decisions on foreign policy.

It was 1999 when President Clinton along with the United Nations decided to intervene in Kosovo. At the time the Serbian government leader, Milosevich, was leading an ethnic cleansing campaign to eradicate all of the Albanians. This forced the UN to lead a seventy-nine day air campaign against the Serbian forces. During this time many buildings were destroyed by the explosions and many people killed. When the air raids ended Milosevich and the Serbian military were forced out of the province and the UN (comprised of over 30 countries from all over the world) stepped in to provide peacekeeping forces.

It was 2 years after this decision that I made my way to Kosovo. My first week there I remember feeling like I was a character in a war movie. Everywhere I went were signs of death and destruction. As we drove through cities there were damaged and destroyed homes and buildings that had been burnt down or bombed during the fighting. I remember one particular sight the most. On the edge of a prominent city there was something that resembled a bus. It was more like a frame of a bus with only a few pieces of what was once the outer-shell still attached. The leftover frame of the bus was charred black as were the contents inside. I found out later that this bus had been full of people who were all burned alive after the Serbians attacked. This was just one of the many horrifying things that I saw. Until this point these things were only something I had seen on TV, heard about on the radio, or read in a magazine or newspaper. It was the UN intervention that caused these horrible things to stop happening. The reason I include this story is because U.S. Foreign Policy played a huge role in this peacekeeping mission. I have personally experienced the good side of American Foreign Policy.

I must however mention that not every American intervention or foreign policy has been a good one. Iraq, for example has been a disaster in the area of Foreign Policy. I had the unfortunate privilege of spending a year in Iraq between 2005 and 2006. I saw similar devastation as that I had witnessed in Kosovo, however on a much larger scale. I saw the casualties of war, both Soldier and Civilian alike, come through the base hospitals. During my time in Iraq I traveled throughout the entire country working as a Broadcast Journalist for Military Networks around the globe. As a result I got to see the whole picture and the truth behind the war in Iraq. The fact of the matter is that our invasion of Iraq was immoral and unethical, as is our continued presence there. We are causing much more damage than good over there. If you want proof of that you just need to go look into the 2006 Zogby polls in which over 70% of the Iraqi's polled believed that the U.S. presence was the cause of the continuing violence in the region. These same Iraqi's believed that if we were to pull troops out of Iraq the situation would fix itself. I will save my personal experiences in Iraq for another article. Suffice it to say that I have lost my faith in American Foreign Policy with the Bush administration.

There have been many occasions that the US government has made bad choices, just as any other country in the world. There is no man, group, or even country in the entire world that always makes the right decision; it is only through a balance of failure and triumph that we as human beings can succeed. Rather than focus on the bad I choose to remember the good; which in my mind very much outweighs the bad (with the exception of the current administration).