The National Interest articles from June 2004

The National Interest archives from June 2004

Transferring sovereignty.(returning authority to Iraqis)
June 22, 2004... SINCE NOVEMBER of last year the United States has been committed to transferring sovereignty to the Iraqis after June 30, 2004. Even though Iraqis themselves will be making their own decisions regarding the civil order the critical issue of...

Auditing arrogance.(post-war Iraq )
June 22, 2004... THREE MONTHS before the start of the American operation in Iraq I visited the United States, where I met with Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Our conversations were difficult. When I commented that the...

Rethinking the strategy.(American foreign policy in Iraq)
June 22, 2004... IN ORDER TO deal effectively with America's predicament in Iraq, it is essential to understand that we had begun to walk down the road to Baghdad long before September 11, indeed, quite before the Bush Administration came to power. After the...

Insecuring Iraq.(restoring security)
June 22, 2004... WHEN Saddam's regime collapsed last year, security for Iraqis collapsed with it. Saddam's brutal rule may have offered Iraqis few benefits-but crime was low and civil strife was largely contained. In the chaos after the collapse, violent...

Vivisecting the Jihad.
June 22, 2004... ONE OF THE most crucial and controversial questions confronting Western counter-terrorism analysts revolves around the possible transformation of Iraq from an obscure footnote to a crucial battlefield in the War on Terror. The recent fighting...

Gauging the Aftermath.(post-war Iraq)
June 22, 2004... SINCE WE last wrote for The National Interest--in the Winter 2003/04 issue ("Scoring the Ira Aftermath"), presenting data on security and economic trends in Iraq from the fall of Baghdad through autumn 2003--the news coming out of Iraq has...

Thinking through liberation.(democratization of Iraq)
June 22, 2004... FOR THE PAST year a four-letter word has emerged as the key to the future of the Middle East. This word--Iraq--is being presented in some Western media outlets as a code word for chaos and "another Vietnam", but it has a different resonance in...

Strengthening the Fainthearts.(policy in Iraq)
June 22, 2004... WASHINGTON loves to panic over impending snowstorms, ongoing heat waves, the Redskins' playoff chances, and policy implications. The panic has set in on Iraq because American policy there carries enough of a whiff of incoherence about it not...

Retreating in good order.(withdrawl from Iraq)
June 22, 2004... THE UNITED States should begin a strategic withdrawal from Iraq now because it was never in the interest of the United States to invade that country in the first place. The mood in the United States before the war, created by the Bush...

Fighting for oil?(geopolitics of policy on Iraq)
June 22, 2004... IT IS HARD to find any public statement from an American official justifying the ouster of Saddam Hussein in terms of oil. Yet oil had everything to do with regime change in Iraq--and it would be hard to find an official elsewhere, and...

Averting an Iraq syndrome.(early withdrawl from Iraq sends wrong message)
June 22, 2004... WHILE Iraq-related debates continue to dominate the headlines, Morton Abramowitz, in the Spring 2004 issue of The National Interest, was the first senior member of the foreign policy establishment to attempt to furnish a veneer of intellectual...

Losing the peace?(Middle East policy)
June 22, 2004... AT THE TIME of triumph a year ago when Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled and the Iraqi army vanished, the most ardent supporters of George W. Bush's war argued that Iraq was merely the second stage, following the Afghani operation, of a grand...

Rescuing the future.(Iraqi-American relations)
June 22, 2004... AMERICA'S Iraqi experience since the end of its brilliant military campaign has been an object lesson in what not to do. However, it is not too late to reverse the downward spiral and to implement in clarity and conviction what can and should...

Recovering our nerve.(Iraq policy)
June 22, 2004... "GETTING the wind up", is an old British expression for panicking. To be "windy" in the trenches during World War I was to be openly terrified. Since the graphic revelations of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Washington, DC,...

Spain's Atlantic option.(relations with United States, Latin America)
June 22, 2004... THE UNEXPECTED victory of the Spanish socialists in the general elections last March, just a few days after the bombing attack in Madrid, has changed the face and direction of Spanish politics. Its most obvious and immediate impact has been on...

Reorienting transatlantic defense.(future role of NATO)
June 22, 2004... THE FUTURE of NATO has been a subject of intense debate, including in the two most recent issues of The National Interest. In the Winter 2003/04 issue, E. Wayne Merry unveiled a picture of an Atlantic Alliance that is casting about in search of...

A strategic defense initiative: building a better shield.(ballistic missile defense)
June 22, 2004... THE TERRORIST attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, were both good and bad news for the Bush Administration's early commitment to the near-term deployment of defenses against ballistic missiles. The good news was that the...

Sand in our eyes: U.S.-Saudi relations after Iraq.
June 22, 2004... OSAMA BIN LADEN has certainly achieved one of his cherished goals from the appalling mega-terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 that destroyed the World Trade Center and mauled the Pentagon. He has upset U.S.-Saudi relations and effectively...

Sitting on bayonets: America's postwar challenges in Iraq.
June 22, 2004... WARS ARE ill-judged by their military outcomes or by the political repercussions that may follow in their wake. They often unleash social and political forces the ultimate impact of which can only be discerned years on. And they frequently...

The democratic imperative.(global engagement and intervention by liberal democracies)
June 22, 2004... SPORADICALLY, chaotically, at times violently, the inexorable force of democratic hegemony is reshaping the world. Long gone is the East-West divide. In the wake of communism's collapse, no array of closed societies or illiberal ideologies...

Democracy's Trojan horse.(global governance)
June 22, 2004... JUST BEFORE the new century began, Marc Plattner, co-editor of the influential Journal of Democracy, wrote of the brave new globalized world coming into existence: A borderless world is unlikely to be a democratic one. For while...

Behind the Silk Curtain.(Despot Watch)(Uzbekistan leader Islam Karimov)
June 22, 2004... ISLAM KARIMOV was such a happy and contented Communist Party leader that, when his domain inconveniently became the independent republic of Uzbekistan in 1991, he simply took all the trappings of Soviet Communism--one-party rule, state control...

China's growing appetites.(demand for industrial raw materials impacts trade, foreign policy)
June 22, 2004... THERE IS a major new issue looming in global geopolitics which has so far attracted little attention from either policymakers or pundits. It is the emergence of China as the world's largest consumer and importer of many industrial raw...

The cult of precaution.
June 22, 2004... THE EUROPEAN Union is seeking a common foreign policy", which will not be the policy of a nation-state, based in national interest and realpolitik, but a policy suitable to its transnational identity and universalist aims. Environmental...

Not the faith of their fathers.(Thirty Days: An Inside Account of Tony Blair at War)(Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader)(The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty)(House of Bush: House of Saud)(American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Peter Stothard, Thirty Days: An Inside Account of Tony Blair at War (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 240 pp., $13.95. Philip Stevens, Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader (New York: Viking, 2004), 265 pp., $24.95. Peter Schweizer...

Where have all the cowboys gone?(Surprise, Security, and the American Experience)(Benign or Imperial?)(Against All Enemies)(Power, Terror, Peace, and War)(An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terrorism)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004), 150 pp., $18.95. Owen Harries, Benign or Imperial? (Adelaide, Australia: ABC Books, 2004), 138 pp. Richard A. Clarke, Against...

Russia's straight-talk express.(A World Challenged: Fighting Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Yevgeny M. Primakov (Foreword by Henry A. Kissinger), A World Challenged: Fighting Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (Washington, DC: The Nixon Center/Brookings Institution Press, 2004), 150 pp., $22.95. "IF THE United States works...

Prudence and the Prince.(The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now)(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Carnes Lord, The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2003) 275 pp., $26. UPDATES OF Machiavelli's Prince are not unknown. Dick Morris's recent New Prince (Renaissance, 1999) is a low but...

Requiem for a genocide.(decline of native populations)
June 22, 2004... IN HIS Brief Description of New York (London, 1670), Daniel Denton says, in the quaint English of a son of a Presbyterian manse on 17th-century Long Island, To say something of the Indians, there is now but few upon the Island, and...

Can NATO survive Europe?(Response)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2004... This magazine invited four distinguished analysts to respond to my "Therapy's End" essay (Winter 2003;04). They did so in the Spring 2004 issue. This is my response to them. When the USSR imploded, General Lee Butler suggested that his own...