The American Prowler has a very good column here titled "We Used to Have a Deal," By Lawrence Henry. It is very much worth your time reading the whole thing, but these exerpts are the high points:
The United States used to have a deal with the world. We would buy things from other countries, confidently assuming that those countries would sell them to us. We would also sell things to other countries, confidently assuming that they would want to buy them. And if some of those countries had a problem or two (dictators, human rights violations, oppressed peasants, etc.), as long as they kept those problems pretty much to themselves, we would leave them pretty much alone. That deal has historical antecedents. Unlike the colonialist conquerors of Europe, we stayed secure behind our twin oceans, which made a commercial approach to the world appealing to us. And it suited our natures as a people. On our own continent, the two biggest single expansions -- Thomas Jefferson's $15 million Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and Secretary of State William H. Seward's 1867 buy of Alaska for $7,000,000 -- were deals. Of course, America did things wrong in pursuit of that policy. The words "banana republic" come to mind. But, all in all, it proved a pretty peaceful, if some would say cynical, way to behave.
And
With the attacks of 9/11, it became clear that a monstrously hostile entity -- radical Islamic terror -- existed in the world, and that their very reason for hostility was the deal itself. And they were determined to break us before the deal broke militant Islam entirely. The Golden Arches and Britney Spears videos were mortally dangerous to them. It became clear as well that all terrorists and all nations that encouraged and harbored them -- and virtually all Middle Eastern nations did so in some fashion or other, being too weak to fight America any other way -- were one and the same. So when President George W. Bush decided, after 9/11, that the deal was off, he hurt those parties. He hurt them badly. He broke their rice bowls, to use a phrase from the brokerage industry. And when you break somebody's rice bowl, that somebody gets mad. George W. Bush had a historic insight: Everything has changed. And he is acting on it, as more than one commentator has remarked. Terry McAuliffe? Jacques Chirac? Gerhard Schroeder? The seven -- or is it nine? -- Democratic would-be Presidential candidates? The Eastern establishment press? The academy? It's no wonder they're mad. Their world is gone. Say that again, and hear it clearly. The old world is gone.This is as good a one stop summary of why we are in Iraq for the long haul as you are going to find. And "the Deal?" Another name for it is American Hamiltonian Grand Strategy. America's post WW2 long term Grand Strategy was to assimilate the world through trade and popular culture. Free trade was to bind nations together and prevent nations built on economic autarky like Nazi Germany from disrupting the world order. Popular culture was to spread the meme of American freedom and prosperity, so tyrannies could not hold out against their people's demand for the good life. Thus ended the Soviet Union. In this our Grand Strategy has worked, and in this it has failed because we let our vigilance falter with the Arab-Muslim world. 9/11/2001 means we must take a more direct and shorter-term approach because our ocean barriers can no longer shield us from insane men that want to kill us in our businesses and homes.
This isn't directly related to the above post, but you might find Gen. McCaffrey's opinion piece on the need for more troops interesting.
I don't think its fair to lump ALL 9 Democratic Presidential candidates in the same catagory as Chirac and Schroeder. Liebermann, at least, seems to have grasped that 9/11 requires that we change the way we deal with regimes that harbor terrorists but are willing to "do business" with us. This would explain why he has stood firm in his support of the decision to go to war in Iraq, while Gephard and Kerry have flip-flopped and Edwards has suddenly gone mute on the issue.
I disagree. Our post World War Two Hamiltonian grand strategy, devised 1943-45, had not even a shred of assimilation in it. It was just business - we wanted wealthy, peaceful, civilized neighbors.
And that hasn't changed.
We just learned that some societies are such losers that peaceful means of acheiving this end don't work, and that letting them continue to be losers gets Americans killed at home.
So we're going to use force to eliminate the short-term threats, if necessary by conquest and occupation, and peaceful means of reforming those societies thereafter if possible. We'll try Hamiltonian style first, which will let them keep most of their existing culture (a la Japan 1945-53). If that doesn't work, we'll try holding them down while we mainline Hollywood and Material Mom culture into their veins, such that they become like us. Whatever works. I.e., cultural genocide for loser societies is a next to last resort.
Physical genocide is the last resort.
Porphyrogenitus,
I wouldn't take McCaffrey serious. He notoriously lied when he was Drug Czar. He had the Dutch vs USA crime figures reversed. Showing that prohibitionist America had less crime when it actually had more. And that was just one.
Google - McCaffrey lies
I may or may not take McCaffery seriously as a person but I take the issue he adresses in the opinion piece seriously.
There are some details and some ways he goes about it that I think are perhaps intended to cause Bush harm if he were to follow McCaffery's suggestion to the last detail (indeed, I got a e-mail from someone, basically making the point you are, that I'm going to post tommorrow).
However, I think that if his piece helps start a debate on expanding the active military (rather than simply annoying the NG, as Clark's earlier stuff was aimed at dooing), then that's a Good Thing. How that will be accomplished would probably differe in key ways from what McCaffery outlines. But I think the issue needs to be dealt with.
Trent,
A nit. I think the term "rice bowl" came into the vocabulary from pre-WWII China hands in the military, just like "going Asiatic" did.
Free trade is ´not just a strategy, it's first and foremost about freedom. It also didn't just "fatten a number of less than totally friendly parties", it also increased American propsrity.
Take last year's tariffs on steel; they cost more jobs in the steel-using industries than the whole steel-industry has and served to stifle the growth of the American economy:
Did Bush steel our market?
Economic stupidity
Paying A Price For Steel Tariffs
And that's just one product category. The Smoot-Hawley tariff's from 1930 did it across the board and caused the depression. Lawrence Henry seems to want to repeat the experience. Or maybe he wants to destroy the American economy in the hope that it will hurt Europe and the Middle East even more.