It’s time to rein in America’s crusading zeal and move toward a policy of restraint. We’re suffering from a bad case of foreign-policy overextension, and the only cure is taking a step back to reexamine our global role.
In Iraq, crime does pay. The insurgency is about more than just politics or ethnicity.
Realists, neocons, and liberals all agree that American failure in Iraq would be a catastrophe beyond Iraq. Really? How exactly?
Many Americans, including some of senior rank, appear to hold candy-coated views of the post-World War II U.S. occupations of Germany and Japan. Dealing with Iraq will be hard enough without enshrouding ourselves in myth.
Classifications such as interventionist and isolationist, hawk and dove, realist and idealist, and multilateralist and unilateralist do not make much sense in the absence of the Cold War's defining conditions.