http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3331&fpsrc=ealert060104

1st page only see the link for the rest.

David’s Friend Goliath

By Michael Mandelbaum Page 1 of 3


January/February 2006

The rest of the world complains that American hegemony is reckless, arrogant, and insensitive. Just don’t expect them to do anything about it. The world’s guilty secret is that it enjoys the security and stability the United States provides. The world won’t admit it, but they will miss the American empire when it’s gone.


Everybody talks about the weather, Mark Twain once observed, but nobody does anything about it. The same is true of America’s role in the world. The United States is the subject of endless commentary, most of it negative, some of it poisonously hostile. Statements by foreign leaders, street demonstrations in national capitals, and much-publicized opinion polls all seem to bespeak a worldwide conviction that the United States misuses its enormous power in ways that threaten the stability of the international system. That is hardly surprising. No one loves Goliath. What is surprising is the world’s failure to respond to the United States as it did to the Goliaths of the past.

Sovereign states as powerful as the United States, and as dangerous as its critics declare it to be, were historically subject to a check on their power. Other countries banded together to block them. Revolutionary and Napoleonic France in the late 18th and early 19th century, Germany during the two world wars, and the Soviet Union during the Cold War all inspired countervailing coalitions that ultimately defeated them. Yet no such anti-American alignment has formed or shows any sign of forming today. Widespread complaints about the United States’ international role are met with an absence of concrete, effective measures to challenge, change, or restrict it.

The gap between what the world says about American power and what it fails to do about it is the single most striking feature of 21st-century international relations. The explanation for this gap is twofold. First, the charges most frequently leveled at America are false. The United States does not endanger other countries, nor does it invariably act without regard to the interests and wishes of others. Second, far from menacing the rest of the world, the United States plays a uniquely positive global role. The governments of most other countries understand that, although they have powerful reasons not to say so explicitly.

Benign Hegemon
The charge that the United States threatens others is frequently linked to the use of the term “empire” to describe America’s international presence. In contrast with empires of the past, however, the United States does not control, or aspire to control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies. True, in the post-Cold War period, America has intervened militarily in a few places outside its borders, including Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But these cases are exceptions that prove the rule.


These foreign ventures are few in number and, with the exception of Iraq, none has any economic value or strategic importance. In each case, American control of the country came as the byproduct of a military intervention undertaken for quite different reasons: to rescue distressed people in Somalia, to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, to depose a dangerous tyrant in Iraq. Unlike the great empires of the past, the U.S. goal was to build stable, effective governments and then to leave as quickly as possible. Moreover, unlike past imperial practice, the U.S. government has sought to share control of its occupied countries with allies, not to monopolize them.

One policy innovation of the current Bush administration that gives other countries pause is the doctrine of preventive war. According to this doctrine, the United States reserves the right to attack a country not in response to an actual act of aggression, or because it is unmistakably on the verge of aggression, but rather in anticipation of an assault at some point in the future. The United States implemented the doctrine in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq.

Were it to become central to American foreign policy, the preventive war doctrine would provide a broad charter for military intervention. But that is not its destiny. The Bush administration presented the campaign in Iraq not as a way to ensure that Saddam Hussein did not have the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons at some point in the future, but rather as a way of depriving him of the far less dangerous chemical weapons that he was believed already to possess. More important, the countries that are now plausible targets for a preventive war—North Korea and Iran—differ from Iraq in ways that make such a campaign extremely unattractive. North Korea is more heavily armed than Iraq, and in a war could do serious damage to America’s chief ally in the region, South Korea, even if North Korea lost. Iran has a larger population than Iraq, and it is less isolated internationally. The United States would have hesitated before attacking either one of these countries even if the Iraq operation had gone smoothly. Now, with the occupation of Iraq proving to be both costly (some $251 billion and counting) and frustrating, support for repeating the exercise elsewhere is hard to find.

America the Accessible
The war in Iraq is the most-often cited piece of evidence that America conducts itself in a recklessly unilateral fashion. Because of its enormous power, critics say, the policies that the United States applies beyond its borders are bound to affect others, yet when it comes to deciding these policies, non-Americans have no influence. However valid the charge of unilateralism in the case of Iraq may be (and other governments did in fact support the war), it does not hold true for U.S. foreign policy as a whole.

". . . doctrine of preventive war," besides being a contradiction in terms, is a novel concept that produces an unstoppable insurgency, resulting in perpetual hostile occupation. What kind of military and foreign policy genius would dream this up?

Rumsfield, Chenny or Bush? Oh wait maybe O'rileey or Paul Wolfowitz or maybe good old tk. He knows everything and is always right. Just ask him. Oh bow down to the great tk.

Yes, it was a rhetorical question.

ignore him----- he is a waste of oxygen

"What kind of military and foreign policy genius would dream this up?"

A much better one than you SG. You have admitted being slow on the up take lets hear your view.

The website the article is from is interesting site. I found this Q & A with Stanford scholar Larry Diamond:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3354

from which this quote was obtained: "I think history will skewer Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and the whole senior Pentagon leadership. I think we’re learning increasingly that Rumsfeld was working in the preparation for the war, and quite possibly in the way the postwar was planned and envisioned with the vice president. I think it was a pipe dream."

I've not seen this site before but it appears, at first glance, to be as unbiased as anything available. I copied the article posted and will read it tonight.

I like it a scholar from Stanford suing the Bush admin and that is unbiased.

My fav quote. He starts off by answering "I don't" know than tells us how much he knows about what he does not know.

"FP: What is a reasonable time frame for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq?

LD: I don’t know. I think that we need to begin withdrawing troops within the next 12 to 15 months, and it seems to me that we ought to be able to be out more or less completely within three or four years—four years as an outer boundary. If we get more cooperation, and if the Iraqi forces congeal more rapidly, we can do it sooner. But then you’ve got the problem reported in the New York Times of Iraqi units being woefully underequipped, which is a long, sad, pathetic, familiar story in terms of what happened to our own forces. So I just wonder: Are we going to get serious about this or not? Getting serious means embracing the urgency of the situation. And part of that urgency is equipping [Iraqi] forces to stand on their own."

By unbiased I mean carrying views from across the spectrum not necessarily that particular Q & A.
So, what in your opinion, is a reasonable time frame for troop withdrawal from Irag?

When the job is finished... When we win the war on terror...

You will only get the same answers as the administration is giving because there is no REAL answer.

Impossible to answer in a situation that is dynamic and fluid .

That is certainly one excuse for avoiding the question.

Funny how you have answers for just about everything else!

Wacky,

You assumtion is we need to withdraw or it is in our best interest. Why do we have to withdraw?

Because we should have never been there in the first place!

Preventing more americans from dying on Iraqi soil is in our best interest as well.

That is your opinion.
If evey American quit driving today we will save 40k lives this year. You in?

If people stopped having sex there would be no birth and ultimately that would prevent all death. You in?

Of course it was my opinion, I never said nor implied anything less but thanks for pointing out the obvious Einstein!

"If people stopped having sex there would be no birth and ultimately that would prevent all death."

Not true there is invitro.

Try again smart guy.

Stop procreating then moron. The point is the same which is your argument is moronic which is no surprise considering the source...

Nice distraction...

Since I answered your question you answer mine, why is it in our best interest to be in Iraq with Americans dying daily?

First to take out a known bad guy that wanted to strike us or help those that would. Next To stop the spread of Islamo facism. It's working so far.

Why this known bad guy? Are there no other known bad guys? Let me see, hmmm maybe the asshole who attacked us in the first place would have been a better place to start! Nah let's attack some "bad guy" that wanted to strike us first but did not when there is a bad guy who did attack us... Sound logic! Maybe if I put it in terms you claim to comprehend. So you are hanging in this gay bar, dude walks up to you and punches you in the face, then runs to the ladies room. You finally wake up from the knockout punch really pissed off and can't find the dude who knocked your **** silly but you know he went into the bathrooms. So you go and punch the dude dancing on the pole because you heard or though he might have wanted to do that himself. Logically you make no sense!


To stop the spread of Islamo Facism. Are you really that naive to think we are stopping it from being spread? If so? What evidence do you claim supports that theory?