The insomnia after the American dream

[dArKeR]

Mainstream US intellectuals believed their system was fit to remake the world, but the Iraq crisis is provoking a backlash of isolationism and xenophobia

By William Pfaff
THE OBSERVER , LONDON
Thursday, May 20, 2004,Page 9

The US and Britain have an Iraq crisis on their hands, but the US has something worse: a crisis of thought and assumption in the mainstream intellectual community over foreign policy.

The second crisis involves much more than the derailment of US policy in Iraq. It concerns what has been done and said to redefine the US' place in global society and, by implication, in contemporary history, since Sept. 11 -- after which, as Americans said, nothing could ever be the same.

A "new America" was said to have emerged, but it would be better to say an old one found new empowerment. It was recently described by former US ambassador to France Felix Rohatyn as "more radical and more committed than ever to the need for unchallenged military dominance. It is more individualistic than Europe, more religious, conservative and patriotic ... will influence everything America does from now on, both in its foreign and its domestic policies."

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/05/20/2003156251

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1. I wonder if the American people will wake up in time for the election.

Interesting article.

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The mainstream commentators and foreign policy experts never imagined defeat in Iraq. The latest US election-year books on foreign policy are entirely concerned with managing the challenges of success and hegemony. Nearly all express a calm confidence that the US has entered a new stage in its relations with the rest of the world, produced by the singularity of US power and the superiority of its conceptions of how the world should be ordered (not to speak of the mandate confided to the US, and particularly to the present administration, by the English-speaking deity).

A year ago, when these books were drafted, few in the policy community and the corps of commentators, and no one in the Bush government, expressed any doubt that US military power was invincible; that it rested on moral foundations that are beyond serious reproach; that pacification, control and reform of Iraq and the Greater Middle East by the US and its allies was both feasible and desirable; and that the "war on terror" was finite, intellectually and morally coherent and winnable.

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The war on terror was founded on an edifice of illusions that virtually no one in the US policy community questioned. That has collapsed. Since they really were illusions about the US itself, the collapse has internal implications.

The country suffered a disruptive and doubt-filled domestic aftermath of the defeat in Vietnam for more than a decade. The war in Iraq was supposed to give the US the triumph it was denied in Vietnam. Instead, it has doubled the defeat. The consequences of this, abroad as well as at home, are unforeseeable.