Global Strategy or Grand Illusion?
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI writing in The New York Times

March 18, 2008

American troops bogged down in Iraq, a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, an overstretched military and National Guard, simmering tensions with Iran and North Korea, and growing hostility toward the United States around the world: these are just some of the consequences of Bush administration foreign policy over the last seven years. To the Slate columnist Fred Kaplan, these woes all stem from two grand misconceptions held by the White House and its top advisers: that the world fundamentally changed after 9/11, when in fact “the way the world works — the nature of power, warfare and politics among nations — remained essentially the same”; and that in a post-cold-war era, the United States “had the power to set the terms of the new world order” and could therefore act unilaterally, without entangling alliances and without compromising “with competing concepts or interests.”

Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos
Fred Kaplan (left)

DAYDREAM BELIEVERS
How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power
By Fred Kaplan
246 pages. John Wiley & Sons Inc. $25.95.

The devastating consequences of the administration’s embrace of such idées fixes (along with its cavalier dismissal of facts and arguments that did not support its big theories) has been examined before, of course, most notably by the New Yorker writers Seymour M. Hersh and George Packer in their groundbreaking books, “Chain of Command” (2004) and “The Assassins’ Gate” (2005), respectively.

What sets Mr. Kaplan’s “Daydream Believers” apart is his emphasis on the Bush administration’s failure to come to terms with a post-cold-war paradigm, which, he argues, left America’s power diminished, rather than enhanced, as former allies, liberated from the specter of the Soviet Union, felt increasingly free to depart from Washington’s directives.
Also illuminating is his close analysis of the impact that the White House’s idées fixes had, not just on the Iraq war but also on other foreign policy problems like North Korea, and his detailed examination of the formative role that the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky played in shaping President Bush’s determination to try to export democracy around the world.
Parts of “Daydream Believers” will seem terribly familiar to readers of books about the administration and the war in Iraq.

For instance, Mr. Kaplan’s discussion of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s stubborn determination to wage the war in Iraq with a small, fast force — a decision that was meant to illustrate his theory of military transformation, but that in fact had crippling consequences on the United States military’s ability to restore law and order in Iraq and to manage the occupation — pales next to the Washington Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks’s detailed account of this monumental miscalculation in his seminal 2006 book, “Fiasco.”
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