It must be difficult to be so very wrong ... from a review of Halberstam's book War in a Time of Peace.
America Adrift: Writing the History of the Post Cold Wars "-- and why Robert Kaplan's "coming anarchy" has, despite assorted financial crises, wars, and mass slaughters, proved less than anarchic against the general global order that prevails."
"The question now is how long that will really last. A push by hard-liners within the Bush administration for a tougher response -- especially a military strike on Iraq -- could well shatter the antiterror coalition Powell has been assembling. And as the anguish of September 11 passes, the problems of American hegemony that Halberstam describes will remain. Vulnerable or not, the United States is too powerful compared to the rest of the world, and the nature of the "war" it is fighting is too diffuse and long-term, for Americans not to return to some degree of complacency -- although they may never again reach the height of hubris that prevailed on September 10. Contrary to President Bush's fighting words, this is not a war for existence or for survival; the "enemies of freedom" that he referred to in his eloquent September 20 speech to Congress are not the Germans or the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, powerful industrialized nations bent on challenging American hegemony; they are mere ragtag holdouts, tiny "cells" of misfits who failed even to seize power in their own small home countries. However dangerous it might be, this global war is more like a mop-up mission, courtesy of U.S. special forces, the CIA, and the FBI."
"[the former Yugoslavia] sinkhole in southern Europe did not impede one bit the march to Maastricht -- the really big European story of the 1990s. Meanwhile, for most Americans, Kosovo was only a sideshow to the Lewinsky affair, and Bosnia was overshadowed by the fight over the national budget." - plenty of Europeans regret Maastrict now.
"because the 42nd president [Clinton], whom the author calls a "complete political animal," did things by poll numbers and surrounded himself with weaklings, amateurs, and political hacks. Yet as we saw in the months before September 11, the "professionals" in the second Bush administration looked rather confused as well, repeatedly flip-flopping on engagement and angering the very "allies and friends" with whom Bush once pledged to strengthen ties. All of which suggests that the problem is more the times than the man."
but here, inadvertently correct:
"As George W. Bush has shown, restoring gravitas to the office of the president will not be a problem as long as the nation remains fully engaged in the war on terror. But if the complacency that Halberstam describes returns, so too will the political dilemmas that attend it."
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