The other night I watched the film "The Deer Hunter." Afterward, I remembered why it took me so many years to be able to watch Vietnam movies.
It all came tumbling back -- the tragedy, the innocent victims, the waste. Too often in Washington we tend to see foreign policy as an abstraction, with little understanding of what we are committing our country to: the complications and consequences of endeavors. It is easy to get into war, not so easy to get out. Vietnam lasted more than 10 years; soon, we will slip into our ninth year in Afghanistan. We have been in Iraq for almost seven years.
When I came to the Senate in 1997, the world was being redefined by forces no single country controlled or understood. The implosion of the Soviet Union and a historic diffusion of economic and geopolitical power created new influences and established new global power centers -- and new threats. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, shocked America into this reality. The Sept. 11 commission pointed out that the attacks were as much about failures of our intelligence and security systems as about the terrorists' success.
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