February 16, 2002

Edward Luttwak breaks down the

Edward Luttwak breaks down the Bush administration's tri-partite "axis of evil" strategy in today's Sunday Times:

Of course in each case the American aim is different: to induce Iran’s turn away from extremism to the moderation so evidently favoured by a majority of the voters in every recent election; to induce the North Korean dictatorship to stop selling its most dangerous weapons; and to end Iraq’s dictatorship, by force if necessary.

These decisions may be right or wrong, but they do not derive from the personal quirks of George W Bush. The Bush presidency may yet fail because of its budgetary priorities, which many see as favouring the rich, or because of a too-slow economic recovery, or even because of the Enron scandal. But this presidency is most unlikely to fail because of its foreign policy, shaped by professionals in a very professional way.


(I don't know anything about how the editing process is conducted at newspapers like the Times, but whoever attached the headline "Bush will go to war even if it puts him out of power" to this article either didn't read it very carefully, or deliberately mischaracterized it. This is at best a minor angle of Luttwak's essay. Moreover, his point is that Bush's bellicose language arises from sincere conviction as well as from a carefully-conceived strategy, rather than from the dim-witted, pandering machismo that is the favored explanation of many British columnists. It seems to me that such mismatched headlines crop up with extraordinary frequency in British newspapers. )

Update: this op-ed by Rupert Cornwell makes a similar point. How un-Independent of him. On the other hand, there's this.

Posted by Dr. Frank at February 16, 2002 08:04 PM | TrackBack