The Iraq Syndrome, R.I.P
. By: David Brooks | The New York Times (Times Select)
Americans are having a debate about how to proceed in Iraq, but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American power and influence. What’s most important about this debate is what doesn’t need to be said. No major American leader doubts that America must remain, as Dean Acheson put it, the locomotive of the world.
Americans are having a debate about how to proceed in Iraq, but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American power and influence. What’s most important about this debate is what doesn’t need to be said. No major American leader doubts that America must remain, as Dean Acheson put it, the locomotive of the world.
The US thus, wily nily, been steered away from the fact that that America must remain the leader and the locomotive of the world. Instead of dictating issues, the US has been reduced to street fighting, so to say and a slogging match which has become a long haul. The longer the US remains, the lesser becomes the credibility of the US as a world leader because the insurgents are 'choking' the US' strategic flexibility and hence its credibility.
Why is it that the US which rarely intervened directly and' even when it did, it was a swift operation and immediate disengagement after installing its proxy, has become so embroiled in Iraq and as a result is losing the fear psychosis that US intervention brought?
What has brought about this change in strategic thinking?
Is this new direction of strategic thinking a permanent change or will it recoil to its original mode where the world shook in anxiety if US troops got airborne.
This is more surprising since unlike yesteryears, the US is the sole global superpower!