Stuff happens when I am in Berlin

Stuff always seems to happen when I am in Berlin. As a missionary, I experienced the reunification of the two German republics first hand. I wasn’t here for the fall of the Berlin wall, but I took part in much of what came immediately after. I thought at the time I understood what was happening, but now I am not so sure. I know so much more now about the complexities of German history that much of what at the time seemed so black-and-white now takes on a rich texture of colors and patterns even as it fades into the past at the same time.

Ten years later I arrived in Berlin with my family in the shadow of 9/11 and the threat of a new war on terror. The expected bombs soon fell in Afganistan and soon thereafter the (from me) unexpected ones in Iraq.

In that year that everything changed for the United States I filtered it all through the BBC and the German newspapers. I still had trust in President Bush to do the right thing, and I am still not sure whether he did or not. Certainly nothing turned out as we expected it to. One could argue that the fall of the wall and the fall of the twin towers are related. The Soviet decline begins with their failure in Afghanistan, and caused Gorbachev to rethink the entire foreign policy of the Soviet Union. So Bin Laden was a product of the Cold War and that the Soviet pull-out of Afganistan and the later US failure to help the country stabilize in the resulting vacuum set the world down the path that put American soldiers in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Now another ten years have passed and I sit in the Goethe-Institute I read of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden and the new awakening of the Arab Spring. I am 40 instead of instead of 30 instead of 20 and I wonder what these events mean for the future. I no longer think that I can make sense of it the way I thought I could before.
As any president would, Obama is taking credit for the success of the operation against Bin Laden, but it appears that the groundwork that led up to the assault on his compound in Pakistan goes back to well before the begin of Obama’s presidency. The president has also taken some credit for the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere that the newspapers have been calling the “Arab Spring.” Yet I wonder how much of these changes would have been possible if it had not been for the US policies of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan in the decade leading up to today.

And yet another “yet,” it is clear that the Bush presidency and the US made countless mistakes and miscalculations in their foreign policy during the last ten years, and I wonder how much we have hindered the possible progress that could have been made in that time if we had not created so much animosity for the West over the last decade. Is it possible that change could have come quicker if we had left the muslim world alone, if they had left us alone? If we had reacted differently?