No Grand Strategy and No Ultimate Aim 
Stephen Holmes on US policy in Iraq
- Incoherent Empire by Michael Mann
The defining reality of today’s international order is no longer 11 September but America’s increasingly bloody occupation of a turbulent Iraq. So why did the Bush administration shift its attention from tracking down Osama bin Laden and a limited number of al-Qaida fugitives to reordering the Iraqi political system in line with American interests and values? This diversion of resources from a clandestine war against a proven enemy to the uphill stabilisation of a wretchedly abused and fractured society seems extraordinarily illogical, even self-defeating. Commentators seeking to make sense of it are now filling the bookstores with volumes devoted to the American ‘empire’. But how appropriate is this evocative term?
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Stephen Holmes teaches at New York University School of Law. His most recent book is The Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror.
Other articles by this contributor:
Transitology · Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia by Stephen Cohen
Neo-Con Futurology · the incoherent thinking behind US foreign policy
Free-Marketeering · Naomi Klein
Looking Away · Questions of Intervention
Give me the man · the pursuit of Clinton
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