The illusion that keeps us bound to failure

In connection with my remarks on what we should have done in Afghanistan, here is an apposite comment from Mark Helprin’s important article in the Fall 2004 Claremont Review (previously discussed by me here) that a reader just sent me:

We cannot reasonably hope to cover the entire Middle East if, a year and a half after conquering Iraq, we must make the trip from the fortified zone in Baghdad to the fortified airport in infrequent armored convoys. The only way to do it is to coerce existing regimes to accomplish it for us, which is possible by directly threatening their survival, something from which we have refrained by and large because of the paralyzing notion that once we destroy a regime we are bound to stay. We are not. We are bound only to defend the United States. We suffer the illusion that our withdrawal would bring anarchy, when, for example, we have not withdrawn from Iraq and it is the most anarchic of all the states in the region.

It is deeply distressing that after several years of our chaotic and absurd foreign policy, it is still only the same tiny handful of writers—Helprin, Angelo Codevilla, myself, and a couple of others— who are making this eminently sensible argument.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 25, 2006 10:52 AM | Send