I don't know David Ignatius from Adam, but his latest column highlights the problem with conventional thinking among old-line conservatives and liberals. He states in the first sentence of his piece, Bush's Misplaced Gambler's Instinct:
It was axiomatic during the Cold War that presidents should not gamble with matters of national security. The stakes were too high. The Bush administration's Iraq policy has long suffered from a lack of that prudence -- and the misplaced gambler's instinct is especially evident now in the administration's plan to send more troops to Baghdad.
The problem with beginning any analysis with a reference to Cold War strategic thinking is the fact that the Cold War has been over for nearly fifteen years. The Soviet Union collapsed from 1989 through 1991 and strategies based upon a bipolar geopolitical regime are irrelevant to today's world. It is time for people to get their head out of the past and understand that we face a very different situation than we did during the Cold War.
Mr. Ignatius says:
The lesson of the Cold War was to be tough -- but also to be careful.
That line of thinking is fine if we just want to contain threats to globalizations and freedom. As 9/11 showed, containment is no longer an appropriate response to threats to our existence. When the Soviet Union was still around, containment in Eastern Europe and the Middle East worked relatively well. We did not have the means or the will to take on a relatively co-equal enemy and the Soviet Union also did not have the means or the will to attack us directly.
The terrorists, who hole up in breeding grounds like Iraq and Afghanistan, have no such reservations. They will attack us without consideration of the costs because, unlike the standoff with the Soviet Union, the costs to the terrorists are infinitely smaller. If the Soviet Union had directly attacked us during the Cold War, they would have put their very existence at risk through nuclear annihilation. The terrorists have no such risk or don't care.
Enough with the Cold War analogies. There is no comparison between the standoff with the Soviet Union and the need to eliminate the terrorist threat by strengthening peace and democracy in the Middle East and beyond. Regardless of whether America has so far failed to win the peace by introducing enough reconstruction personnel, its global strategy of seeking to change the dynamic in the third world is the correct one. It is time for the Cold Warriors to either go away or adapt to the new global security situation.
