In adopting neoconservatism as its grand strategy, the Bush administration took a breathtaking gamble. It broke from the conventional foreign-policy wisdom of both parties, cleaving to an aggressive but idealistic new vision of America’s role in the world. The strategy would either succeed spectacularly, touching off the promised domino effect of freedom in the Middle […]
Laura Secor
Laura Secor is a freelance author living in New York.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Top Gun
War and the American Presidency By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. • Norton • 224 pages • $23.95 America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism By Anatol Lieven • Oxford University Press • 304 pages • $30.00 It has become a cliché to hurl back at President George W. Bush his […]
Posted inArticle
Diplomatic Dissent
Last Wednesday, a group of 26 former senior diplomats and military commanders spoke out against the foreign policy of the Bush administration. Their statement did not explicitly endorse Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign, but it called for Bush’s ouster in November. The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, made headlines more […]
Posted inDispatches
Ballot Insecurity
Six months ago, the question on the lips of most critics of the occupation of Iraq was one that the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani had posed: Why not hold elections by June 30? At the time, the U.S.–led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) claimed that it was just not possible. The United Nations agreed. And so […]
Posted inArticle
Mess-opotamia
On June 30, a temporary, appointed Iraqi government will assume what the Bush administration now calls “limited sovereignty” over a country still policed by troops under foreign command. The six-month period during which that interim caretaker government, outlined Wednesday at the United Nations Security Council by special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, will have nominal control of […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Foreign Discomfort
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic By Chalmers Johnson, Metropolitan Books, 400 pages, $25.00 America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy By Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay, The Brookings Institution, 246 pages, $22.95 President George W. Bush’s foreign policy has been nothing if not […]