Hi LindyBill; Interesting article by Michael Young. There's a paragraph that I thought was particularly interesting:
In May 1990, then secretary of defense Dick Cheney asked Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz, respectively chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and deputy defense secretary, to prepare separate papers on America's foreign policy role after the Cold War. Nicholas Lemann, who has written about the episode, notes that Cheney favored the Wolfowitz recommendations, where, essentially, "the Pentagon envisioned a future in which the United States could, and should, prevent any other nation or alliance from becoming a great power." #reply-18041354
This is reminiscent of the foreign policy that Britain had until the US became so powerful. Britain used its influence (military and otherwise) to balance Europe in such a way that no single alliance in Europe became powerful enough to make the world truly unsafe for Britain.
I agree that the equivalent policy should be what the administration pursues. But I don't see what that has to do with Iraq. The Arab Middle East is not about to become a great power, or even to align with any single power. As it now stands, the place is horribly divided. We couldn't make it less cohesive than it already is.
This gets back to some of the points I talked about with the Crusader artillery system. Piddly countries like North Korea are not the real military danger to the US. It's the big guys (Germany, Japan, Russia, China) that have, historically, given us trouble (some of which now have nuclear weapons designed to kill us), and those are the ones that we have to worry about in the future. Iraq and Iran haven't been world powers since many hundreds of years ago and it is impossible to see how they could ever become ones again. They're too small.
-- Carl |
