Eyeless in Iraq: A book review by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

[LittleApple81]

An excellent analysis and book review. He reviews two books:
America Unbound: The Bush Revolutionin Foreign Policy
by Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay
Brookings Institution Press
and
The George W. Bush Presidency: An Early Assessment
edited by Fred I. Greenstein
Johns Hopkins University Press

snip...

The preventive war against Iraq was a war of President Bush's choice. It was not, as World War II was, forced upon the United States. It was not, like the Korean War, the first Gulf War, and the war against the Taliban, a response to overt acts of aggression. Nor did the US drag itself incrementally into full-scale war, as in Vietnam. The professional military kept its enthusiasm for a war on Iraq well under control. There was no popular clamor for the war. If the US had never gone to war against Iraq, most Americans would hardly have cared, or even noticed. It took one man to decide for war and promote it, sending many thousands of troops there while most other nations doubted that a war was justified.


snip...

The triple role also resurrects the imperial presidency. Again there are warnings from the American past. On February 15, 1848, during the war with Mexico, a young Illinois congressman sent a letter to his law partner pointing out the constitutional and practical flaws in what we now call the Bush Doctrine. "Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion," Abraham Lincoln wrote William H. Herndon,

and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure.... If today he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, "I see no probability of the British invading us"; but he will say to you, "Be silent: I see it, if you don't."

The Philadelphia convention, Lincoln said, had "resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us."

snip...

The American president as the world's self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner? "We must face the fact," President John F. Kennedy said,

that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient—that we are only 6 percent of the world's population—that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind—that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity—and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.

more...






http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16677

[enough]

1. Is there a link?

Looks interesting.

[LittleApple81]

2. Sorry... I loved the illustration and then thought that was the link...

Need to take my memory pills...
added the link.
Thanks.