No Grand Strategy and No Ultimate Aim
Stephen Holmes on US policy in Iraq
- Incoherent Empire by Michael Mann
Verso, 278 pp, £15.00, October 2003, ISBN 1 85984 582 7
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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Vol. 26 No. 9 · 6 May 2004 » Stephen Holmes » No Grand Strategy and No Ultimate Aim (print version)
Pages 9-14 | 6790 words