The United States Unbound: Post-Mortem of a Power Surge

Justin Vaïsse, Esprit, August-September 2004, pp. 88-100.

Translated by Chet Wiener

Driven by the exigencies of the modern world a film critic decides to give up writing by hand and purchases a computer for word processing. Inwardly he’s disgusted with the salesman who forced him to buy a machine that can calculate the distance between the earth and the sun in record time; all he wanted was to use it like a simple typewriter. But after getting used to the contraption he discovers it is much easier to send articles electronically than by diskette, and so, since his machine came with a modem, he signs up with an internet provider. Despite having managed to get a subscription entitling him to only five online hours a month he still manages to discover a number of interesting film sites. He begins downloading rare films and decides he has to acquire a high speed connection and a new computer with a larger storage capacity, a DVD burner, a large flat screen… The moral of this story is simple and it applies in many domains: means transform ends. Our perspectives on the world change along with our resources. Appetite comes with eating. Humans often find themselves playthings in a dialectic between intentions and capacities. It is with this perspective in mind that I would like to begin discussing the evolution of American foreign policy in the last few decades and particularly the period between the war in Afghanistan (the end of 2001 for decisive combat) and the rise in enthusiasm for the war in Iraq (which could be dated approximately to August 2003). The term hubris has been employed to characterize this period, and it fits just right.

The Origins of Excess

What caused a dominant and rather conservative international power, one which most qualified observers considered had wanted to remain that way, become a “revolutionary” impetus, or to take up an expression used by theorists of international relations “revisionists” of the world order? What were the stages in its thinking that led the United States to chose to engage in a war like the their intervention in Iraq? Why did the Americans underestimate the resistance against them and why did they think they would be able to avoid the dilemmas of their superpower status? These are the questions at the core of America’s hubris and I would like to offer a response before providing a provisional accounting (since the necessary historical distance is as yet lacking) of the consequences of the excesses of 2002-2003.

Let’s go back, for the fun and the irony of it, to a debate that took place in the 1970s between a number of intellectual hawks and the diplomat George Kennan when Kennan’s book, The Cloud of Danger came out.1 In their critiques, and particularly those of neoconservatives, these hawks condemned Kennan for attending solely to the expressed intentions of the U.S.S.R. rather than basing his ideas on the only thing they thought mattered in a sensibly cautious policy: military capacity. Among them was Charles Burton Marshall, a member of the Committee on the Present Danger. Marshall wrote Kennan, explaining:

Conceptual partitions between intentions and capabilities impress me as fallacious… Intentions tend to emerge not in singularity but in groups or sequences. The end in one intention may become means for a successor… Far from being necessarily fixed in nature, intentions tend to be mutable. The theme crops up in a dozen or so of Shakespeare's plays. Diplomatic history—who should know this better than you?—is replete with instances. Surely you recall the ups and downs in the Korean war. At the onset the aim was repulsion of aggression across the 38th parallel. Later, under stimulus provided by a transient tactical success, policy reached for reunification of the whole peninsula. After the Chinese intervention and the debacle on the Chonchon, the goal subsided to something resembling the earlier dimensions. To state the matter as a theorem—a cognitive entity's impulsion to convert latent desires into active ones tends to vary expansively or contractively according to opportunities, temptations, and relative capabilities… Such are niceties about intentionality to be borne in mind in any proper appraisal of the Unites States-Soviet relationship. Intentions—anybody's intentions—not only are. They become.2

The irony is obviously that in looking at the last few decades Charles Burton Marshall’s remarks to George Kennan apply more aptly to the United States than to the Soviet Union. The decisive factor is the Reagan administration’s arms buildup, that is, the rapid climb of the United States’ military might in the early 1980s during the new Cold War. The military budget went from 116 billion dollars (4.6% of GNP) in 1979 to 273 billion dollars (6.2% of GNP) in 1986. It is this particular factor—the extreme increase in American power, in both absolute and relative terms and accelerated by the end of the U.S.S.R., which modified the American perspective on the world. It provides one of the primary origins of the hubris of 2002-2003. Surely neither September 11 as mobilizing and catalyzing factor, nor the ideological preferences of the Bush team can be forgotten. (A Gore administration probably would not have made the same decisions.) But of the three, the arms build-up and its repercussions is the least acknowledged. In other words, by a trick of history, the rapid increase in spending under Carter in 1980, but most of all its successful realization by Ronald Reagan in his aim to thwart Moscow and (explicitly in the case of “Star Wars” technology) push the Soviet system to the limits of its resources, led to excessive confidence in American capacities twenty years down the road. Or, to put it in the terms cited above, “The end in one intention may become means for a successor.”

Another piece of neoconservative writing from the late 1970s provides further insight into the effects of the now unequaled American military machine, particularly concerning U.S. relations with allies. In 1979 Irving Kristol wrote a prophetic article with the provocative title, “Does NATO Exist?” He answered his question in the negative, pointing out particularly how after the Suez crisis the idea of a NATO foreign policy which would look after troubled areas of the planet and defend Western Europe disappeared from the realm of possibility. Now it was up to America to watch over the rest of the world by itself, while the Europeans retreated behind the shield of the Alliance in relation to the U.S.S.R. while seeking to appease their other enemies:

So the nations of NATO and Western Europe—social-democracies all, in their different ways—are at the point of realizing that they will have to drift either to the Left or to the Right… This realization has already spread so rapidly in the leading NATO nation, the United States, that even the American government of today, which when elected two years ago expected to proceed along familiar social-democratic lines, finds itself out of phase with a popular opinion that is moving massively to the Right. It is trying somewhat desperately (if most reluctantly and ineffectually) to catch up.

As it pertains to foreign policy, I would say that this shift of American opinion represents a new American nationalism. It is “new” in a crucial respect: It is in the process of transcending the older isolationist-internationalist polarity that has hitherto established the parameters for all controversies over foreign policy. Oddly enough… it is the isolationist current of thought that has always been nationalistic in temper, while the internationalists have always operated with the global point of view. The new nationalism, however, is based on the proposition that the United States should be the major and most influential world power, and as it gathers ideological momentum—some would say if, I venture to say as—it is going to place a strain on NATO which it can hardly cope with.

Thus the United States is not only now increasing its military budget (over the objections of an administration which hangs grimly on to an enfeebled version of the older “internationalist” conception of America’s role in the world), it is also now forming, at the insistence of Congress and the military, something called a “unilateral force”5—a small army of 100,000 rigorously trained men with a “logistics tail” that will permit it to operate anywhere in the world independently of support from any existing ally.

…The message for Western Europe is clear: il faut choisir. If American military operations abroad are executed entirely by a unilateral force, a corresponding unilateral foreign policy will emerge. From having been the centerpiece of American foreign policy, NATO will become an afterthought, and then a mere memory. Not that the United States will ever repudiate a very keen interest in the defense of Western Europe. But the European partners in NATO will discover the partnership to have been dissolved, and that they are now allies of convenience… And unless they sharply increase their own defense expenditures and efforts… they could end up allies of convenience.

And yet Irving Kristol is not quite as prophetic as it here seems. The only conceptual framework he can envision is the Cold War and he did not foresee the enormous mobilization which included European allies which was deemed necessary for the first Gulf War. But he points to three factors which proved crucial in succeeding events: the nationalist turn in public opinion found after September 11 (which he already sensed in 1979); the increasing division in the transatlantic relationship which resulted from the augmented American military budget; and most of all the systemic deleterious effects of this decoupling on European-American relations and on America’s tendency to act unilaterally.

This manner of thinking, which considers that each country should adhere exclusively to a policy based on its means also clearly appears in the writings of another neoconservative, Robert Kagan. In “Power and Weakness,”6 Kagan puts forth the idea that the European vision of the world, and particularly Europe’s attachment to multilateralism, is related not only to the experience of the construction of the greater European Union. It is especially a consequence of military weakness. And yet Kagan fails to follow his theory through to its logical consequences in relation to the United States; it applies at least as much for the United States as it does for Europe.

In other words the tremendous absolute and relative growth of US military power since Reagan created a new American point of view, a new perspective and a new approach to the world where it has become possible to shape (or reshape) the international environment rather than simply being content with trying to “manage” it or accommodate to it as the Europeans do. This is precisely the basis of placing the “regime change” approach before negotiation or diplomatic pressure. Momentum for this feeling of all-powerful military might came from progress in RMA,7 plus the conviction, which became a veritable doxa for the American hawks, that a policy of force, of movement, of being dissatisfied with the status quo in the face of the Soviet Union (the Reagan doctrine of pressuring the Soviet Empire, supporting “freedom fighters,” the “Star Wars” project, etc.) was what brought on victory in the Cold War. There is much that such a view of history leaves out but it has a degree of truth to it; most of all it provides the neocons with a credo they believed even in the face of criticism by realists and doves in the 1980s. This explains the self-righteousness they exhibited in the face of dominant opinion, a perspective which, according to them, would have led to an indefinite prolongation of the Cold War, had it prevailed.8 The same schema was then applied to the war in Iraq with the idea that driving forward the American advantage and disturbing the status quo in the Middle East would once again force a change in the order of things and reshuffle the cards to America’s advantage.

This sense of having the capacity to act on the world as a vastly superior military power greatly colored the vision of world affairs in general, to the point of distorting American policy makers’ perspectives on things. This is why, after September 11—the essential condition that mobilized American public opinion—their actions were tempered by illusions concerning the extent of America’s ability to achieve its projects in the world. Just remember the watchword of the time: “Lead and they will follow.” The idea was that upon seeing the evidence of American determination the allies would follow because they had no choice; they were confident that a show of American strength commanded respect and guaranteed order; they naïvely believed that legitimacy followed naturally from America’s good intentions, which would be recognized by all, etc. At that time the notion of empire was being applied positively to America by many observers (the benevolent empire, the empire of freedom), a sign of new comfort with the exercise of military power.

It was this appreciation, based on a very high valuation of military resources creating the illusion of omnipotence which led the Bush administration, or at least the hawks within it, to count on a change in the Middle-Eastern status quo, to throw the dice and in so doing minimize or ignore other domains of political reality such as nationalism, the complexity of the local terrain, the anthropological reality of foreign societies, the prevalence of anti-Americanism in the Arab world, the necessity of broad-based legitimacy, etc. This high valuation, this hubris, led the United States to fall into the traps of ethnocentrism described by Stanley Hoffmann during the Viet Nam era in Gulliver’s Troubles.9 Or, as Robert Kagan writes in a metaphoric variation on the dialectical effects of means and ends, holding a hammer, Bush’s America tends to see problems in the world as so many nails to be driven in, forgetting that “power” is not synonymous with “military power.”

When Robert Kagan’s next deals with the problem of America’s lack of legitimacy,10 doesn’t it seem as if the claims in the caricatural view of the world in Of Paradise and Power missed at least one essential dimension of the contemporary world? And isn’t the cause to be found when American power came unbound, precisely the area Kagan did not apply in his schema, that is in the dialectic between capacities and intentions and in the excesses that sometimes result?

Upshots and Backlash

But the 2002-2003 boom in power valuations lost its momentum, the power surge was replaced with realism and with acknowledgements of the limits of military power, even with mea culpas, like those of Professor Fouad Ajami, who provided intellectual ballast for the neoconservatives before the war:

But gone is the hubris. Let’s face it: Iraq is not going to be America’s showcase in the Arab-Muslim world. If some of the war’s planners had thought that Iraq would be an ideal base for American primacy in the Persian Gulf, a beacon from which to spread democracy and reason throughout the Arab world, that notion has clearly been set aside. We are strangers in Iraq, and we didn’t know the place.11

How should we assess this hubristic phase in 2002-2003 when the United States was transformed over the course of a few months into a revolutionizing power? The intervention in Iraq, the neoconservatives’ objective, took advantage of the window of opportunity provided by public opinion after September 11 to push forward its three-pronged objective: (1) destroying the supposed weapons of mass destruction while putting an end to Saddam Hussein’s support of terrorism, (2) quashing a horrible tyrannical regime in order to liberate the Iraqi people and establish, if possible, a democracy, and (3) altering an expensive regional status quo (stationing American troops in Saudi Arabia, which fostered a site of instability in the Middle East, the necessity of supporting authoritative regimes to counter Saddam Hussein…) for a new situation that could open the way to pressuring authoritarian regimes and even diffusing democracy, resolving the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, etc. It is really the launching of a fourth world war using a new version of the end of the Cold War (which was World War III): force the adversary to his limits in order to unleash a new wave of democracy, as happens after every world war. In the process America would demonstrate its military prowess, another aim of the war, especially from the perspective of the nationalist hawks who have little concern for the supposed wave of democratization that would then flow over the region, or who are skeptical of the chances of it actually happening (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld…), but which would be glowing evidence of American hegemony after a decade of demonstrable weakness.

It is too early to give a full accounting of the American action in Iraq, considering the magnitude of the event. (Remember Chou En-lai’s comment about it being premature to claim that all the consequences of the French Revolution could be analyzed after only two hundred years.) But this does not mean a provisional accounting of the situation or an attempt at analyzing the consequences of the war in Iraq on the international position of the United States cannot be made.

All in all the hubris of 2002-2003 has led to a worsening of the American position and an exacerbation of the dilemmas intrinsic to superpower preeminence. In other words, the new throw of the dice seems to have led, at least for the moment, to situations which are less favorable than previously in the main areas where foreign policy is decided. I’ll mention four main areas where conditions have become more difficult: (1) in deliberations concerning law and order; (2) in long term versus short term approaches; (3) in weighing freedom of action versus the sharing of responsibilities; (4) in the push and pull between clearly delineated policy and effectiveness.

Law and Order in International Relations

In domestic policy, at least in modern societies, there is never any manifest contradiction between law and order since the state ensures order by legal means which limit its evoking arbitrary powers. But in the international sphere matters are less clear, especially for the dominant power. On the one hand it is certainly in the interest of the dominant power to promote respect of norms and rules by all the protagonists in the international system rather than dominating. Or, as Rousseau famously put it, “the strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.” The natural consequence for the superpower is that it too must observe these norms to consolidate its position, and therefore voluntarily limit its own freedom of action. But on the other hand this superpower has to guarantee world order, first of all to avoid any challenges to its preeminent position and credibility, and second to reinforce its legitimacy in the eyes of the other protagonists, all of whom benefit from the order it ensures, a true public good provided by the superpower.

But what happens when the superpower has to overstep international norms to prevent the spread of disorder, as occurred in Kosovo in 1999 when the United States (under cover of NATO) interceded without the specific go-ahead of the UN Security Council? In that particular case the loss of legitimacy was compensated for by a large consensus which recognized the necessity of acting to halt ethnic cleansing rather than abiding by strict legal constraints. This was a sort of demonstration of Pascal’s “force without justice is tyrannical, justice without force is impotent.”

But this example brings out the dilemma between law and order, a dilemma incarnated in the 1990s by the antagonism between the State Department, defenders of progress in international law, and the Pentagon, the guarantor of America’s capacity to maintain order. Consider the bureaucratic battles over the antipersonnel mines treaty (an operational necessity in Korea according to the Pentagon which was against it; progress in law in which America should lead the way, according to the State Department which was in favor) and the International Criminal Court (which would be a great impediment to American foreign operations according to the Pentagon and which would promote international stability and the respect of current norms, according to the State Department).

But with the war in Iraq the United States has not gained anything in terms of law or order, at least for the present. To other protagonists the losses are clear, from the moment Washington intervened without the Security Council’s endorsement. But it is also difficult to find any gains in terms of order or stability. The invasion of Iraq has dynamized terrorist recruitment, fueled the perception that a war of civilizations is underway and reinforced anti-Americanism. In addition, it has not destroyed a single weapon of mass destruction and, because of this, it has partially diminished the legitimacy of the fight against proliferation. Nor has it improved the Israel-Palestine situation. And finally, while it has enabled the withdrawal of 10,000 to 15,000 American troops from Saudi Arabia, this was at the cost of stationing a force ten times larger in a neighboring country.

In short, for the superpower the dilemma between law and order was exacerbated when power was unbound in 2002-2003 and America is now in a less favorable position than before the invasion of Iraq. The same holds true for the dilemma between demonstrations of strength—necessary for “showing who’s boss”—and strategic restraint—so as not to appear menacing to smaller powers and avoiding increasing their sense of insecurity and their quest for arms with it. America’s position was strengthened for a few months immediately after its show of strength in Iraq. But a year later, regimes such as those in Iran and Syria know they do not have to fear an American invasion. Rather, Iran—which at first view seems threatened on two sides by the American presence—now has strengthened its position since it can cause difficulties in Iraq if the Americans seem to be too confrontational, especially through their nuclear program. Put another way, the American power of intimidation is effectively diminished. The sole by-product which might be considered a result of the demonstration of force in Iraq, Libya’s disarmament, seems more the result of U.N. sanctions and negotiations that have been taking place since the Clinton administration than an effect of the Iraq invasion.12

Long Term and Short Term Setbacks

The superpower’s second dilemma concerns long versus short term approaches. In the short term the requirements for maintaining order have led, for example, to cooperation with authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and Central Asia in order to fight Islamic terrorism, which then strengthens those regimes. Such a strategy, effective as it may be on a day-to-day basis, bears a long term cost: it feeds the concerned populations’ resentment toward the United States and ultimately fuels political alienation and the injustices on which terrorism feeds. Another strategy would consist in no longer supporting authoritarian regimes, which are more a part of the problem than the solution, in order to encourage the emergence of democracies, the only regimes which could ensure the security of the United States over the long term. This was precisely the neoconservatives’ plan with the Iraq War as the first step. Thus on November 6, 2003 President Bush declared, during the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy (a bipartisan organization set up by Ronald Reagan to promote democracy throughout the word):

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo. . . The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.

But there’s many a slip between cup and lip, and declaring democracy and trying to implant it in one country is not sufficient for a democratic revolution to take place throughout a region. But this is precisely the illusion fueled by the hubris of 2002-2003. And while we await possible improvements the current result is not encouraging: Iraq’s neighboring regimes do not seem to have been shaken by the evolution of the still uncertain events in that country, and in the short term American difficulties have made compromises with authoritarian regimes (Tunisia, Uzbekistan, etc.) more necessary than ever. Here again, Washington has lost for the moment on both registers.

The Pressures and Strains of Alliances

The third dilemma exacerbated by the War in Iraq is the opposition between freedom of action and sharing the burden of responsibility. On the one hand it is in the superpower’s interest to act without being concerned about other countries’ opinions. This allows a greater margin of maneuverability and often a greater degree of efficiency. On the other hand it is also in the superpower’s interest to surround itself with allies for at least three reasons: (1) to share the cost of interventions; (2) to give them a say in the matter at hand in order to preclude criticism of actions they were involved in approving and which they then would be interested in seeing through to the end; (3) allies confer legitimacy on the superpower in the eyes of other countries and public opinion. This of course presupposes shared decision making and taking the allies’ advice into account.

The American power surge of 2002-2003 (“the mission defines the coalition”) was clearly about freedom of action. But the result today is hardly convincing: the United States must take on almost the entire cost (in dollars and soldiers) of stabilization and reconstruction in Iraq; the good will of most allies is nonexistent; there has been erosion of American legitimacy; and most importantly, with between 100,000 and 150,000 troops in Iraq and increasing resistance to American initiatives, America’s capacity to act alone has been diminished.

Moral Inclusiveness and Practical Efficiency

The last of the dilemmas exacerbated by the unbinding and surge in U.S. power in 2002-2003 is the opposition between clear policy—doing what one says and saying what one does—and tactful efficacy—pursuing policies without necessarily making them known to avoid differences of opinion. Bush, because of the hubris described above, gave priority to public exposure in the hope of reaping legitimate benefits: the other protagonists know your position and tend to adapt to it and anticipate your moves; you inject a dose of predictability into the international system; you modify perceptions and public opinion in other countries, etc. But you lose whatever benefits tact might have accrued; and it too has a set of positive attributes: avoiding upsetting other protagonists on matters of principle; appearing to have associated others or secured their agreement in the decision making process (in a famous article Coral Bell praises Clinton-style leadership for presenting the “pretense of a concert of powers”13); avoiding loss of face if one does not do what one claimed, which also allows for a margin of maneuverability; allowing for the possibility of contradicting oneself as precise positions are less visible when they haven’t been subject to general or definitive declarations, etc.

Thus the Bush administration often codified its political choices in advance, as in the case of the doctrine of preemption which was carved in marble by the National Security strategy in 2002. The result was criticism from all corners, particularly from allies, while at the same time providing justification for similar conduct on the part of others. Meanwhile, nothing was gained in terms of legitimacy for what was presented as the one true application of preventive doctrine as universally applicable, the movement against Iraq. In general, the Bush administration made its policy choices clear, even when they could have remain less so, because of its sense of power. Such was the case in the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol (saying the American mode of consumption was not a matter for negotiation) or the notion of “moral clarity” against terrorism (the assimilation of all forms of terrorism) which effectively eliminates any possibility for nuances in a policy which needs one.

***

Rather than glorifying American power, the hubris of 2002-2003, fueled by a real sense of military superiority derived from earlier efforts led, from the perspective of the summer of 2004, to a worsening of America’s international position. This surge in American power, and especially the illusions accompanying it, exacerbated the superpower’s dilemmas while creating conditions on a variety of fronts which were more difficult for America than they had previously been. Perhaps this is a premature assessment and the benefits of the intervention in Iraq will develop otherwise. In that case the neoconservatives’ bet will be as audacious and successful this time as the gamble of 1981-84—even if it is just as ambiguous. But the costs brought of the intervention are already quite high, and there is little reason to be optimistic. The fact remains that in a world which is still unipolar in terms of security, a weakening of the superpower is in no one’s interest. If the costs of America’s hubris seem high, those of an American retreat or a prolonged weakening appear to us to be inordinate.

Justin Vaïsse is an historian, specialist on the United States. He is currently a special assistant at the Centre d’Analyse et de Prévision (Policy Planning Staff) of the French Foreign Ministry. The views presented here are his own. Among recent works he is the author with Pierre Hassner of Washington et le monde; dilemmes d’une superpuissance, Paris: Autrement, 2003.

Translated by Chet Wiener

NOTES

1. George F. Kennan, The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy, Boston: Little, Brown, 1977.

2. Charles Burton Marshall’s letter to George Kennan (February 25, 1978) about Kennan’s Cloud of Danger; Archives of the Committee on the Present Danger, carton 267, the Hoover Institution, Stanford, California. Emphasis in the original.

3. Irving Kristol, “Does NATO exist?” The Washington Quarterly, fall 1979, reprinted in Reflections of a Neoconservative; Looking Back, Looking Ahead, New York: Basic Books, 1983. Réflexions d’un néoconservateur, tr. Raoul Audouin, Paris, PUF, 1987.

4. Irving Kristol refers to American efforts to set up a mobile Rapid Deployment Force, particularly for possible operations in the Persian Gulf.

5. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, New York: Vintage Books, [2003] 2004 [Policy Review 113: June-July 2002; http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html]. La Puissance et la faiblesse, tr. Isräel Fortunato, Paris: Plon, 2003.

7. A revolution in military affairs based on qualitative progress in high technology and particularly in precision bombing. A short time before the intervention in Iraq in 2003 the hawks very confidently not only recalled quite rightly that Iraq was weak but also that America’s efficacy was greatly increased as compared to 1991.

8. Debate on the end of the Cold War is the subject of many books and articles. One caricatural example is Jay Winik’s On the Brink: The Dramatic, Behind-the-Scenes Saga of the Reagan Era and the Men and Women Who Won the Cold War, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

9. Stanley Hoffmann, Gulliver's Troubles; or, the Setting of American Foreign Policy, New York: Council on Foreign Relations/McGraw-Hill, 1968. Gulliver empêtré. Essai sur la politique étrangère des États-Unis, tr. Rosette Coryell, Paris: PUF, 1968.

10. See the afterward to the 2004 edition of Kagan’s Paradise and Power (or his “America's Crisis of Legitimacy,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004), published in France as Le Revers de la puissance. Les États-Unis en quête de légitimité, tr. Isräel Fortunato, Paris: Plon, 2004.

11. Fouad Ajami, “Iraq May Survive, But the Dream Is Dead,” The New York Times, May 26, 2004.

12. See in particular, Martin S. Indyk, “The Iraq War Did Not Force Gadaffi’s Hand,” The Financial Times, March 9, 2004.

13. Coral Bell, “American Ascendancy and the Pretense of Power,” The National Interest:57, Fall 1999.