Related Article"For it's becoming clear now that poverty wasn't what caused a group of middle-class and reasonably well-educated Middle Easterners to fly three airplanes into buildings and another into the ground. It was, rather, resentments growing out of the absence of representative institutions in their own societies, so that the only outlet for political dissidence was religious fanaticism."
There's that word.
Related ArticleWe can set in motion a process that could undermine and ultimately remove reactionary regimes elsewhere in the Middle East, thereby eliminating the principal breeding ground for terrorism. ...
If I'm right about this, then it's a truly grand strategy. What appears at first glance to be a lack of clarity about who's deterrable and who's not turns out, upon closer examination, to be a plan for transforming the entire Muslim Middle East: for bringing it, once and for all, into the modern world.
W. needs four more years to have a chance to see this strategy through and hopefully help to make the Middle East a better place and the world safer for America.
The strategies that won the Cold War—containment and deterrence—won't work against such dangers, because those strategies assumed the existence of identifiable regimes led by identifiable leaders operating by identifiable means from identifiable territories. How, though, do you contain a shadow? How do you deter someone who's prepared to commit suicide?
Timely to review the NSS in the wake of our invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam. I wonder what Gaddis would say about his statement:
These plans depend critically, however, on our being welcomed in Baghdad if we invade, as we were in Kabul. If we aren't, the whole strategy collapses, because it's premised on the belief that ordinary Iraqis will prefer an American occupation over the current conditions in which they live. There's no evidence that the Bush administration is planning the kind of military commitments the United States made in either of the two world wars, or even in Korea and Vietnam. This strategy relies on getting cheered, not shot at.
I would hope that Gaddis would conclude that our welcome was by and large welcoming and that our presence is desired. We are getting shot at, but it is more of a continuation of the war by a small minority. I hope we have the will and commitment to stay the course. GWB has crafted one of the boldest foreign policies in the 20th century. I believe the rewards outweigh the risks. As someone who spent nearly 30 years in the foreign policy community, I applaud what he is doing. Carter, Clinton and Albright were a disaster and we are still living with the consequences of their legacy.
I'm responding to your response here, because this is where I first encountered Gaddis' notion of Bush being "Wilsonian."
I read it more as Bush's objectives being Wilsonian in nature, but not at all in the way that he is willing to go about implementing his objectives, so his approach to the realization of Wilsonian ideals is not Wilsonian at all.
Is that closer to the mark?