Summary of PIPA/KN Poll Results (Sept. 26-30)

POLL SHOWS AMERICANS OPPOSE GRANTING THE PRESIDENT THE UNILATERAL POWER TO GO TO WAR WITH IRAQ, AND DO NOT REGARD IRAQ AS THE US'S MOST PRESSING FOREIGN POLICY PROBLEM

A poll of 709 randomly selected adults from a sample of households (with telephones) that accurately tracks the distribution of US Census counts for the US population on age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, geographical region, employment status, income, education, etc. shows that:

(1) 60% of Americans think "Congress should retain the right to vote on whether the US should go to war with Iraq," while only 38% think that "Congress should give the President the power to decide to go to war with Iraq";

(2) 23% of Americans think that "Congress should not, at this time, give the President authority to use force against Iraq," 43% of Americans think that "Congress should give the President authority to use military force against Iraq if the UN Security Council votes to authorize such action," and 33% think that "Congress should give the President authority to use military force in all ways he determines appropriate, including for the US to invade Iraq on its own."

3) 64% of Americans agree that "the US should only invade Iraq with UN approval and the support of its allies," while 35% disagree.

4) On the question of disarmament vs. regime change: when the sample was asked to choose between two statements, 68% chose a statement saying "If Iraq allows the UN to conduct unrestricted inspections, the US should agree to not invade Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein as long as Iraq continues to cooperate, because we should go to war only as a last resort," while 30% chose a statement saying "The US should invade Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein, whether he cooperates with UN inspectors or not, because the UN inspectors might not find all his weapons."

5) Despite the statement of many informed people that there is no good evidence that Iraq now possesses the ability to strike the US with weapons of mass destruction, 79% of Americans believe that "Iraq can strike the US with WMDs," while only 19% believe Iraq does not have that capability.

6) Only a minority of Americans regard Iraq as the most pressing foreign policy problem facing the US. When asked to rank order five foreign policy problems (1. "Osama bin Laden's terrorist group al-Qaeda." 2. "The situation in Iraq." 3. "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict." 4. "The situation in Afghanistan." 5. "The India-Pakistan conflict."), 43% gave top priority to al-Qaeda, 34% gave top priority to Iraq, 17% gave priority to Israel-Palestine, 4% gave top priority to Afghanistan, and 2% gave priority to India-Pakistan.

A fuller description of the PIPA/Knowledge Networks Poll is available (together with an account of its methodology) at:
http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/ConflictIraq/ConflictIraq.pdf

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Nobel Peace Prize 2002 - Official Announcement (Oct 11)

     The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2002 to Jimmy Carter, for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.

     During his presidency (1977-1981), Carter's mediation was a vital contribution to the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, in itself a great enough achievement to qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize. At a time when the cold war between East and West was still predominant, he placed renewed emphasis on the place of human rights in international politics.

     Through his Carter Center, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2002, Carter has since his presidency undertaken very extensive and persevering conflict resolution on several continents. He has shown outstanding commitment to human rights, and has served as an observer at countless elections all over the world. He has worked hard on many fronts to fight tropical diseases and to bring about growth and progress in developing countries. Carter has thus been active in several of the problem areas that have figured prominently in the over one hundred years of Peace Prize history.

     In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power, Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international co-operation based on international law, respect for human rights, and economic development.

     Oslo, 11 October 2002

http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/2002/press.html

Reporting the war in Iraq (Oct 15)

Of interest in the NY Times today (Oct. 15) is one sentence that appears in the middle of an article to which is not related – an article entitled "U.S.-French Split on Iraq Deepens: Compromise Effort Is Stalled Over Security Council Role." The sentence is:

"Congressional officials said the Central Intelligence Agency had already begun covert operations in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq."

This is the first mention in the NY Times that I have noticed of this, though the Times did report on Sept. 24: "Senior military officials said no American military forces were operating in southern or western Iraq [N.B. no mention of northern Iraq]. . . . One senior official said a number of Americans from several federal agencies [hmmmmm] had flown in and out of the Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Iraq to coordinate with opposition groups there."

But there has been quite a bit of reporting on U.S. military activity in Iraq since early August on the website www.debka.com – which includes the following among its headlines today:

"US-UK Aircraft Bomb Air Defense Command Center Tuesday at Al Kut 100 m. Southeast of Baghdad Near Iranian Border/DEBKAfile Military Sources: This is First Allied Raid from East, Made Possible by Secret US-Iranian Accord for Over-flights from New US Base at Herat, Afghanistan."

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Extracts from a NY Times article on "military contractors" (Oct 13)

The New York Times had an interesting piece in the business section today entitled "America's For-Profit Secret Army: Military Contractors Are Hired To Do the Pentagon's Bidding Far From Washington's View." A few excerpts:

"Mercenaries . . . are thriving -- only this time they are called private military contractors, and some are even subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies. The Pentagon cannot go to war without them. Often run by retired military officers, private military contractors are the new business face of war. . . . In the darker recesses of the world, private contractors go where the Pentagon would prefer not to be seen . . . In the last few years, they have sent their employees to Bosnia, Nigeria, Macedonia, Columbia and other global hot spots.. . .

"During the Persian Gulf war in 1991, one of every 50 people on the battlefield was an American civilian under contract; by the time of the peacekeeping effort in Bosnia in 1996, the figure was one in 10. . . .

"MPRI, formerly known as Military Professionals Resources Inc., may provide the best example of how skilled retired soldiers cash in on their military training. Its roster includes Gen. Carl E. Vuono, the former Army chief of staff who led the gulf war and the Panama invasion; Gen. Crosbie E. Saint, the former commander of the United States Army in Europe; and Gen. Ron Griffith, the former Army vice chief of staff. There are also dozens of retired top-ranked generals, an admiral and more than 10,000 former military professionals, including elite special forces, on call and ready for assignment. 'We can have 20 qualified people on the Serbian border within 24 hours,' said Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, the company's spokesman and a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. 'The Army can't do that. But contractors can.' For that, MPRI is paid well. Its revenue exceeds $100 million a year, mainly from Pentagon and State Department contracts. Retired military personnel working for MPRI receive two to three times their Pentagon salaries, in addition to their retirement benefits and corporate benefits. . ..

"Colonel [David] Hackworth, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran [and a well known critic of the military], said[:] 'It's a very dangerous situation. It allows us to get into fights where we would be reluctant to send the Department of Defense or the C.I.A. The American taxpayer is paying for our own mercenary army, which violates what our founding fathers said.' They are not mercenaries in the classic sense. Most, but not all, private military contractors are unarmed, even when they oversee others with guns. They have even formed a trade group, the International peace Operations Association, to promote industry standards. . . .

"Only a few members of congress have expressed concern about the phenomenon .. . Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont . . . Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat . . .

"It's hard to tell where the United States military ends and MPRI begins. For the last four years, MPRI has run R.O.T.C. training programs at more than 200 universities, under a contract that allowed retired military to put their uniforms back on. It recently lost the contract to a lower bidder, but MPRI offset the loss with one to provide former soldiers to run recruitment offices. . . .

"Contractors cannot arm themselves -- they risk losing their status as noncombatants if they do and, in the extreme, could be declared mercenaries and subject to execution if captured. Yet in the gulf war, contractors were in the thick of the battle, providing maintenance to tanks and biological and chemical vehicles [sic] as well as flying air support. Should there be a war in Iraq, the line could be even blurrier. . . . 'We sort of blur the lines,' Col. Steven J. Zamparelli of the Air Force said in an interview. In an article in 1999 for the Air Force Journal of Logistics, Colonel Zamaparelli [sic] said: 'The Department of Defense is gambling future military victory on contractors performing operational functions in the battlefield."

The article is on-line:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/13/business/yourmoney/13MILI.html

        Though the Times article doesn't mention it, this development is very much along the lines of what Philip Bobbitt, in *The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History* (NY: Knopf, 2002), describes as the transformation of the prevailing historical form of the state from the "nation-state" into what he calls the "market-state," a form of the state which no longer claims as its principle of legitimation the welfare of the people, but merely claims to act to maximize the opportunities of its citizens.
        Bobbitt writes: "The real shift [is not away from the state altogether, as some have claimed, but rather] simply from public purposes to private purposes, from a state that takes its legitimacy by assuring the common welfare to one that instead relies on providing the broadest possible opportunity for the satisfaction of individual interests."
        Something like this must be behind the thinking of the present administration. According to Bobbitt, "we must free ourselves from the assumption that international law is universal and that it must be the law of a society of nation-states." The present administration seems to have freed itself from this assumption pretty effectively. But what is interesting is that the general public is still attached to a universal vision of international law -- which is rather extraordinary, given the regular and systematic denigration of the United Nations to which the U.S. population has been subjected by the mainstream media.
        This attachment on the part of public opinion to the idea of the UN is, I think, what is behind the current U.S. pretense of negotiating with the members of the Security Council, even as administration spokespersons and the president do all they can to undermine the public's acceptance of the legitimacy of this institution.

Meanwhile, what is going on in Iraq? Who knows? But for what it's worth, here are extracts from Debka's latest military analysis, dated Oct. 13 [Or go to http://www.debka.com for the latest]:

"The debate going back and forth in Washington last week over what kind of government will rule Iraq after Saddam Hussein is gone – in which secretary of state Colin Powell, the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, the Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clark and the New York Times have been actively engaged – distracted attention from some important military developments:
        A. The US-Turkish special forces takeover of northern Iraq with the help of pro-American Kurdish and Turkmen units is complete. Americans commandos have been beefed up by US Marines and engineering units. The stretch of territory now in US hands ranges from Sinjar near the Syrian border in the west and runs east as far as 10-15 miles north of the oil town of Mosul. Then, still further east, US-led forces have by-passed the friendly Kurdish stronghold of Erbil, which commands the highway to the second northern oil city of Kirkuk, to fetch up on a line roughly 20 miles south of Erbil, 35-40 miles north of Kirkuk. DEBKAfile ´s military sources report that Iranian Badr Force units, a sort of Iranian Revolutionary Guards foreign legion, have joined the US-Turkish thrust into the area of the northeastern Iraqi key town of Sulimaniyeh. Comprising mostly Iraqi and Afghan exiles, this force has linked up with the US-led covert offensive in Iraq under a secret Iran-US military cooperation pact, first revealed in DEBKA-Net-Weekly No. 78 on September 27.
        B. In the west, a military standoff has developed along Iraq´s Jordanian border region, an area considered the strategic gateway to the Iraqi heartland - Saddam´s hometown Tikrit and Baghdad. The military sources of DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly ´s (No. 79, October 4) reported fierce battles taking place from late September into the first week of October, between US special units and Middle East commandos, around the H-2 and H-3 bases, centers of command cores, air defense installations, missile bases and air force facilities.
   The fight put up by the Americans prevented Iraqi transporters from reaching those west Iraqi bases and positioning several mobile surface missile batteries. But reinforced Iraqi units fought back and prevented the American-led assault troops from coming close enough to those bases to lay them to siege. The prime cause of this standoff was Washington´s reluctance to throw adequate air might into backing up US-led ground forces.
        C. In the south, the American war command continues to beef up its troop concentrations in bases ranging from Cairo-West, Jordan – mainly in the air-ground base of Ruwayshid near the Iraqi border, Eritrea and Djibouti in East Africa, the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, Socotra (Yemen), and Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain along the Gulf.
   Last week, the Americans tested the operational systems of the new base they have built at Herat in eastern Afghanistan, but then ran into a snag. Iranian defense minister Admiral Shakhmani first declared on October 4 that Iran would not shoot at American warplanes “straying´ into its airspace on their way to attacking Iraq. DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly´s military sources reported this was interpreted in Washington as permission for American planes to take off from the Afghan base to the east and reach Iraq through Iranian skies. A spokesman in Tehran later denied its defense minister ever made this statement, putting paid to the use of Herat for striking at Iraq from the east, which would have rounded off the American aerial siege of Iraq.
   According to DEBKAfile ´s sources in Tehran, Iran-US relations were the main topic of the talks British foreign secretary Jack Straw held in Tehran Thursday, October 10. Straw obtained some promises from the Iranian leadership that included: refraining from selling weapons to Iraq, buying Iraq oil or sending Iraq supplies in the course of the American offensive. Iran agreed to send a secret delegation to Baghdad headed by Revolutionary Guards commander Yahya Rahim-Safavi to test Iraq´s readiness to consider a leadership change in Baghdad who would accept UN Security Council resolutions to the letter, thereby obviating the need for war.
        D. DEBKAfile´s military sources report that some of these developments slowed down the impetus of the US-UK air offensive against Iraq´s air and air defense resources. While air raids continue against Basra and Talil in the south and H-2 and H-3 in the west, Iraqi air command and control centers in the north near Kirkuk and at Taj in central Iraq have not been touched.
        E. Most alarming are signs that the Islamic extremist al Qaeda is back in action and its initiation of a fresh wave of strategic terrorist strikes. The group´s two chiefs, who appeared to vanish off the face of the earth eleven months ago in the thick of the Tora Bora battle, began to surface in the first week of October and signal that they are very much alive and as threatening as ever. Bin Laden was reported on October 4 by a Saudi correspondent, who talked to al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, as preparing to reappear soon and “wake up the sleeper cells”. His senior deputy, Ayman Zawahri, declared in a recorded interview aired by the Arab satellite TV station on October 6 that 'the youth of Islam will target key sections of your economy'."

The entire piece can be read at: http://www.debka.com

Here's a link to what Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers (published in the New York Times in June 1971 and revealing US duplicity to the public about Vietnam), had to say on Saturday [Oct 19, 2002] on CNN about US Iraq policy (the page has a link to [A chapter from his new book, "Secrets, a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" which is available online at www.ellsberg.net. Iraq-related excerpts from Daniel Ellsberg's speech is in honor of Mordechai Vanunu (the man who blew the whistle on Israel's nuclear arms program)]:

http://www.ellsberg.net/weblog/10_19_02.htm

An excerpt from the interview:

"It's possible to tell the truth. The message I would like to get to people inside right now: if they feel that what the President and the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense are saying is deceptive of the public, is not founded on the evidence that they know passing across their desks or they know, by expertise, I would like them to consider doing what I wish I'd done in 1964 and 1965, rather than waiting five years, as I did until 1969. They should consider going to Congress and the press and telling the truth with documents. They shouldn't do what I did, wait until the bombs are falling. That's why I think the message in my book is urgent. So urgent, in fact, that I decided to put the first chapter on the internet tonight on Ellsberg.net. You don't have to buy the book to read that. That tells us what is happening right now. It's about the week that Congress passed the first Tonkin Gulf Resolution, having now—this is the time to read it, when they've just passed the second one."

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Here's an impressive graphic presenting raw data of the president's declining public approval ratings:

http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/MyHTML2.gif

Perhaps the US citizenry would be receptive to a well-argued case that the president is not living up to his oath to "the best of my ability [to] preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Subj: On 'Counting on Democracy'
Date: 10/22/02 10:57:09 AM Pacific Daylight Time
 
Below :
1. Forms for writing to local PBS stations to ask them to show 'Counting on Democracy'
2. Greg Palast: PBS stations in NY, LA, and SF plan to show 'Counting on Democracy'
3. More information on 'Counting on Democracy'
4. Link to a recent Toronto Star critique of US media

___________________________________________
1. FORMS TO WRITE TO LOCAL PBS STATIONS

You can use these forms to write to local PBS stations to urge that the new documentary on the 2000 US presidential election, COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY, should be shown in this area :
          http://www.kcts.org/inside/contact/index.asp
          http://www.kbtc.org/contact.htm

__________________________
2. GREG PALAST'S WEBSITE

PALAST INVESTIGATION OF FLORIDA VOTE THEFT TO AIR ON PBS, FEATURED AT HAMPTONS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Friday, October 18, 2002

In the face of the controversial decision by the PBS network to refuse to transmit the investigative report, the nation's top PBS stations will independently broadcast COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY. Directed by Emmy-award winner Danny Schechter, the 57-minute documentary follows BBC television reporter Greg Palast as he discovers how Katherine Harris removed up to 57,000 legal voters from registries – most black – five months before the 2000 election.

While the public broadcast network chiefs refused to schedule this important report, WNET (New York), KCET (Los Angeles), KQED (San Francisco) and dozens more are insisting on showing the exposé before themid-term elections. (See full schedule at http://www.GregPalast.com.) The film will be featured this Sunday at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

____________________________________________
3. MORE ABOUT 'COUNTING ON DEMOCRACY'

Here's a link to information about the documentary "Counting on Democracy":
http://www.itvs.org/countingondemocracy/film.html

__________________________________
4. CANADIAN CRITIQUES US MEDIA

Here's a Canadian journalist's critique of the refusal of US media to present critical perspectives:

          http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1001-07.htm

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Below is a link to an article by John Lewis Gaddis in the latest number of *Foreign Policy* that analyzes a report issued by the Bush administration on Sept. 17, 2002, entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America." Gaddis, a well-known diplomatic historian who has written extensively on the history of the Cold War, considers this "the most important reformulation of U.S. grand strategy in over half a century" and argues that it represents a plan to preserve and exploit its current global hegemony.

This much is clearly stated in the NSS document. Gaddis also argues that implicit in the document is a plan specifically aimed at one region of the globe: the Middle East: "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. There's been nothing like this in boldness, sweep, and vision since Americans took it upon themselves, more than half a century ago, to democratize Germany and Japan, thus setting in motion processes that stopped short of only a few places on earth, one of which was the Muslim Middle East."

Gaddis points out some problematic assumptions in the Bush grand strategy: (1) that U.S. forces will be welcomed as liberators in Iraq; (2) that the U.S. has and will be able to maintain what he calls "the moral high ground" after having withdrawn from a number of international agreeements like the Kyoto accord, the ABM treaty, and the International Criminal Court and while engaging in preemptive unilateral attacks on sovereign nations; (3) whether the administration's claim to be acting in the name of universal human values -- values that are, as the NSS document puts it, "true for every person, in every society" -- is credible.

The article can be found at:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_novdec_2002/gaddis.html

US 'breakout' strategy
Date: 10/28/02

 
Like the analysis in a previously posted article by Prof. Gaddis, a recent analysis of Prof. Ikenberry of Georgetown in Foreign Affairs betrays no doubt about the "imperial" or "neoimperialist" character of the new U.S. grand strategy. Ikenberry picks up the term BREAKOUT to characterize this strategy, because of the role it gives to leveraging current U.S. superiority in military technology into a permanent advantage.

Unlike Gaddis's article, Ikenberry's was written before the publication on September 17, 2002 of the document entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," so he refers to "this emerging grand strategy." To this extent, his article is outdated: there can be no doubt that the grand strategy has emerged and is being implemented.

Below are excerpts from Prof. Ikenberry's article in the September/October 2002 number of Foreign Affairs:
______________________________
AMERICA'S IMPERIAL AMBITION
G. John Ikenberry

Foreign Affairs, September/October 2002

THE LURES OF PREEMPTION

In the shadows of the Bush administration's war on terrorism, sweeping new ideas are circulating about U.S. grand strategy and the restructuring of today's unipolar world. They call for American unilateral and preemptive, even preventive, use of force, facilitated if possible by coalitions of the willing -- but ultimately unconstrained by the rules and norms of the international community. At the extreme, these notions form a neoimperial vision in which the United States arrogates to itself the global role of setting standards, determining threats, using force, and meting out justice. It is a vision in which sovereignty becomes more absolute for America even as it becomes more conditional for countries that challenge Washington's standards of internal and external behavior. It is a vision made necessary -- at least in the eyes of its advocates -- by the new and apocalyptic character of contemporary terrorist threats and by America's unprecedented global dominance. These radical strategic ideas and impulses could transform today's world order in a way that the end of the Cold War, strangely enough, did not. . . .

America's nascent neoimperial grand strategy threatens to rend the fabric of the international community and political partnerships precisely at a time when that community and those partnerships are urgently needed. It is an approach fraught with peril and likely to fail. It is not only politically unsustainable but diplomatically harmful. And if history is a guide, it will trigger antagonism and resistance that will leave America in a more hostile and divided world. . . .

PROVEN LEGACIES

The mainstream of American foreign policy has been defined since the 1940s by two grand strategies that have built the international order. One is realist in orientation, organized around containment, deterrence, and the maintenance of the global balance of power. . . . The other . . . is liberal in orientation. It seeks to built order around institutionalized political relations among integrated market democracies, supported by an opening of economies. . . .

AMERICA'S HISTORIC BARGAINS

These two grand strategies are rooted in divergent, even antagonistic, intellectual traditions. But over the last 50 years they have worked remarkably well together. The realist grand strategy created a political rationale for establishing major security commitments around the world. The liberal strategy created a positive agenda for American leadership. . . .

A NEW GRAND STRATEGY

For the first time since the dawn of the Cold War, a new grand strategy is taking shape in Washington. It is advanced most directly as a response to terrorism, but it also constitutes a broader view about how the United States should wield power and organize world order. According to this new paradigm, America is less bound to its partners and to global rules and institutions while it steps forward to play a more unilateral and anticipatory role in attacking terrorist threats and confronting rogue states seeking WMD. The United States will use its unrivaled military power to manage the global order.

This new grand strategy has seven elements. It begins with a fundamental commitment to maintaining a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor. . . .

. . . The United States grew faster than the other major states during [the 1990s], it reduced military spending more slowly, and it dominated investment in the technological advancement of its forces. Today, however, the new goal is to make these advantages permanent -- a fait accompli that will prompt other states to not even try to catch up. Some thinkers have described the strategy as 'breakout,' in which the United States moves so quickly to develop technological advantages (in robotics, lasers, satellites, precision munitions, etc.) that no state or coalition could ever challenge it as a global leader, protector, and enforcer.

The second element is a dramatic new analysis of global threats and how they must be attacked. The grim new reality is that small groups of terrorists --perhaps aided by outlaw states -- . . . cannot be appeased or deterred, the administration believes, so they must be eliminated. . . .

The third element of the new strategy maintains that the Cold War concept of deterrence is outdated. . . . such an approach renders international norms of self-defense -- enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter -- almost meaningless. . . .

. . . Even without a clear threat, the United States now claims a right to use preemptive or preventive military force. . . .

As a result, the fourth element of this emerging grand strategy involves a recasting of the terms of sovereignty. . . . Terrorist do not respect borders, so neither can the United States. Moreover, countries that harbor terrorists, either by consent or because they are unable to enforce their laws within the their territory, effectively forfeit their rights to sovereignty. . . .

The fifth element of this new grand strategy is a general depreciation of international rules, treaties, and security partnerships. . . .

Sixth, the new grand strategy argues that the United States will need to play a direct and unconstrained role in responding to threats. . . .

. . . NATO or the U.S.-Japan alliance . . . are now seen as less useful . . . In these circumstances, it is increasingly difficult to maintain the illusion of true alliance partnership. America's allies become merely strategic assets that are useful depending on the circumstance. . . .

Finally, the new grand strategy attaches little value to international stability. There is an unsentimental view in the unilateralist camp that the traditions of the past must be shed. . . .

IMPERIAL DANGERS

. . . the neoimperialist approach is unsustainable . . .

. . . a related problem: once the United States feels it can take such a course, nothing will stop other countries from doing the same. . . .

When . . . costs and obligations are added to America's imperial military role, it becomes even more doubtful that the neoimperial strategy can be sustained at home over the long haul -- the classic problem of imperial overreach. . . .

A third problem with an imperial grand strategy is that it cannot generate the cooperation needed to solve practical problems at the heart of the U.S. foreign policy agenda. . . .

Finally . . . it risks a backlash . . . [H]istory shows that powerful states tend to trigger self-encirclement by their own overestimation of their power. Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and the leaders of post-Bismarck Germany . . . were all brought down when other countries decided they were not prepared to live in a world dominated by an overweening coercive state. . . .

BRING IN THE OLD

. . . Bush has not fully articulated a vision of postwar international order, aside from defining the struggle as one between freedom and evil. The world has seen Washington take determined steps to fight terrorism, but it does not yet have a sense of Bush's larger, positive agenda for a strengthened and more decent international order.

This explains why the sympathy and goodwill generated around the world for the United States after September 11 quickly disappeared. . . .

Rather than invent a new grand strategy, the United States should reinvigorate its older strategies, those based on the view that America's security partnerships are not simply instrumental tools but critical components of an American-led world political order that should be preserved. . . . [T]his imperial temptation . . . will leave the world more dangerous and divided --and the United States less secure.

The article can be purchased for $5.95 on-line at:
          http://www.foreignaffairs.org/