The overestimation of American power: sobering lessons from the past.

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RECONSIDERATIONS

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The overestimation of American power: sobering lessons from the past.

Whatever the future holds in Iraq, it is already clear that the American policymakers who made the decision to intervene overestimated the power of the United States to achieve its objectives in that country. What those objectives were remains somewhat open to question. According to the National Security Presidential Directive of August 2002, the ultimate goal was "to establish a broad-based democratic government that would adhere to international law and respect international norms, that would not threaten its neighbors, that would respect the basic rights of all Iraqis, including women and minorities, that would adhere to the rule of law, including freedom of speech and worship." (1) This ambitious objective set a high bar for success; moreover, the lack of interest in postwar planning shown by those most responsible for driving the policy suggests that for them the primary purpose was simply the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. Yet even those most focused on this narrower aim, such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, expressed confidence that the invading forces would be welcomed as "liberators," and surely they did not anticipate that the ensuing situation would prove so intractable and the large-scale military commitment so long-lasting. (2)

Critics of the intervention generally attribute such overconfident expectations to particular characteristics of the George W. Bush administration--such as the highly concentrated nature of the decision-making process, the personality of the key players (including the president himself), or the mind-set of the neoconservative intellectuals who were such vocal advocates of the policy. (3) These special factors certainly seem to be important parts of the explanation for the miscalculations in this case. Yet a broader historical perspective reveals that other policymakers, at other critical moments in the nation's foreign relations, have similarly overestimated the capacity of the United States to determine the course of events overseas or the behavior of other states. While by no means a constant or universal feature of American policymaking, the pattern has been sufficiently recurrent to suggest that we need to go beyond the personal characteristics and ideological commitments of individual officials in explaining it.

In general, indeed, the identification of such patterns of behavior seems to me a good way of illuminating some of the broader factors that have influenced the attitudes and decisions of American policymakers over the years. For example, in an essay I wrote some years ago on "the exaggeration of American vulnerability," I pointed out that unrealistic fears about the vulnerability of the mainland United States to direct attack from outside had been a recurrent feature of debates about U.S. foreign and defense policy since at least the late ninetee...

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