those most basic principles show iraq, and brooks' commentary on iraq in a new light. the muddled thinking and writing on iraq are part of a larger muddle on foreign policy doctrine.

in 1989 the cold war ended but america's thinkers did not replace george kennan's cold war doctrine of containment with a new doctrine to meet the new world. we responded reactively and tentatively, sometimes with trial ballons of a new world order, but mostly with keeping on keeping on. bob dole said after the implosion of the soviet union, "this is no time to be cutting military spending." oh,why not? we never had a debate on that.

we maintained, and still maintain, cold war structures and alliances fifteen years after their raison d'etre ended. nato has been expanded rather than disbanded. we have kept our treaty obligations to defend taiwan and south korea even though an attack on either, horrendous though it would be, certainly does not have the meaning that would have had during the cold war.

we went along piecemeal in our responses to world crises. we intervened in bosnia and in haiti, two ultimately bloodless forays but without any overarching answer to the question "why?"

9/11 came along and showed that that question and its answer were not just academic. we had/we have, no doctrine for understanding and framing a response to 9/11.

president bush said immediately thereafter that our war was not with islam. why not? we never had a debate on that either.

so we hit afghanistan, a no-brainer as the home of the taliban which housed al qaeda. but from the beginning the president defined the war broader, as a war on terrorism and rumsfeld immediately wanted to strike somewhere else. why? the only reason was that he didn't want all of our eggs to be in one basket, he didn't want the success of our initial response to be defined by what we did in a place where the word "quagmire" had been accurately used to describe the soviet's venture.

so he asked if 9/11 hadn't given us the "opportunity" to hit iraq. that was the extent of the thinking that went into it. we needed to diversify our portfolio. let's take a swing at hussein. we've been there and done that, we can do it again.

i do not fault the administration for invading iraq. i supported the war and i believe that we are marginally better off today than we were with hussein in power but the lack of doctrine has led to confused thinking about how success of that mission should be defined, of why we really did it, of what we really accomplished, and what we should do next.

bush has, justifiably taken hits for basing the war on hussein's non-existent possession of weapons of mass destruction.

other conservative thinkers wanted to ground the war in a higher moral purpose, the liberation of iraq, on establishing a "shining city on the hill" as a model for arab democracy.

the president took up the cudgel. when baghdad fell his father called him to congratulate. "it's a great day for america," said bush41. "it's a great day for the people of iraq," said bush43.

the raison d'etre for the war had shifted or had been augmented by liberation thinking, which is exactly the kind of "nation-building" that bush and the conservatives had dismissed liberals as proposing.

without wmd though they were left with a pale horse indeed to ride strategically and so reacted ad hoc, as american foreign policy had been doing since 1989.

so you have the startling situation of neocons like brooks and protocons like william safire both proclaiming that success in iraq will be defined by the establishment of a democracy there.

where did the conserative focus on national security at all costs--of real politik, of the difference between authoritarin regimes and totalitarian regimes, of the difference between "our" dictators and "their" dictators--where did all of that go?

it went out the window in 1989 and wasn't replaced by any new doctrine.