How Right Were You, And Why?

I was wrong to impute excessive competence to the government.... This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky? In some way, they got it just as wrong as I did: nothing that they predicted came to pass.

how long will the American public tolerate our military being caught in the middle of a brutal civil war with multiple fronts and several sides? You and I both know the answer: not long at all.

Washington's line echoes the failed ambitions of past US leaders to invent a benevolent imperialism. Mr Bush's reputed role model, William McKinley, sought to distinguish the US from the colonising nations of Europe by bringing democracy to the Philippines. Instead he brought terror and mayhem to US soldiers and Filipinos alike.

trouble plagued the new colony from the start. As Senator Henry Cabot Lodge mildly noted: "Those people whom we liberated down there have turned against us." An army of 75,000 Filipinos began to fight a guerrilla war against their benevolent occupiers. The Americans had the advantage of superior firepower; the rebels enjoyed the privilege of camouflage that accrues to an occupied people. The well-armed Americans hunkered in groups while stealthy guerrillas sowed terror among the coloniser troops--who then retaliated against the populace at large. This pattern culminated in an ambush on the American garrison at Balangiga--the worst massacre of US troops since Custer. In reply, US forces laid waste to the surrounding country.

Mr Bush now cites the democratic postwar reconstruction of Japan and Germany as precedents. But in 1945 the US ranked first among equals as peacemakers, leading a co-operative international project to rebuild shattered opponents. For the old Axis powers, Americans wrote new constitutions reflecting international aspirations, including measures more progressive than US customs. The present effort to keep other nations at arm's length, promising to bring to Iraq a uniquely US experience of war and its aftermath, means there is something old in store for the new axis of enemies.

The American polity is a democracy and this feature constrains its international activities.... American political culture is anti-colonial and anti-imperial: not surprisingly given the country's political origins.