NYRB: A Bunch of Pointy Heads, Sittin' Around Talking about the Election

[BurtWorm]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17511

Strangely, they're all male. :wtf: But it's worth reading what they have to say.

The Election and America's Future
By Alan Ryan, Anthony Lewis, Brian Urquhart, Edmund S. Morgan, Garry Wills, Ian Buruma, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Mark Danner, Michael Ignatieff, Norman Mailer, Ronald Dworkin, Russell Baker, Steven Weinberg, Thomas Powers





For what has been called "the most consequential election in decades," we have asked some of our contributors for their views.—The Editors

[BurtWorm]

1. Mark Danner: The Iraq project exposed a vulnerability in the American will

For many in the Bush administration, the conquest of Iraq was a cherished goal long before the attacks of September 11. But when the time came —after the attacks offered them a "window" in which to carry out their war, restoring to Republicans the traditional political advantage in managing national security that had vanished with the cold war—these officials chose to minimize the difficulties of the war and refused to build the political support necessary to fight it with sufficient troops, money, and determination. They clung to a war of the imagination, one fought with high-tech weapons, few troops, and little cost, in which democracy would magically emerge from the Iraqi streets. The lack of troops in particular, and the characteristic stubbornness that has made the administration singularly unwilling to admit a mistake and—much more seriously—unable to correct one, created, in the first weeks of looting and chaos, a fault line under the Iraq occupation that has grown steadily deeper and broader, and undermined every effort to construct a stable order there. Worse—and it is this that the next president will be forced to confront—that political cowardice has created a vulnerability precisely in the spot that the Iraqi insurgents, and ultimately Osama bin Laden, expected to find it: in the American will.