Saturday, May 27, 2006
By MARIO SZICHMAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The gist of James Kitfield's book "War & amp; Destiny" is neatly contained in its subtitle: "How the Bush Revolution in Foreign and Military Affairs Redefined American Power."
In this book, as in many others about recent U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the prologue and final pages are more insightful and more somber than some of the interior chapters -- which probably were written earlier, when the government was more hopeful about redrawing the map of the Middle East and the press was more lenient about the great designs of the Bush administration.
Kitfield is an authority on national security and foreign affairs for The National Journal, a small but influential magazine among Washington insiders. He knows how to listen to his sources and how to find a big story in small nuggets of information.
Chaos, some success
His accounts of the march to war and his experiences in Iraq show the operation's gradual descent into chaos with some successes -- the capture of Saddam Hussein, the parliamentary elections of January 2004 -- dotted by miscalculations, especially in its plans for the reconstruction of the Arab world.
During his brief visits to Turkey and Kuwait, Kitfield captures the mood of certain segments of the Islamic world, and he starts to suspect that the idyllic world envisioned by the Bush administration has nothing to do with the reality of the Middle East. A disappointed Kitfield laments that the Bush revolutionaries focus "on the hard-power/military force side of every equation, almost to the point of blinding them to other possible solutions."
It is too early to foresee the outcome in Iraq, although some are afraid that the "Plan for Victory" will soon sound as hollow as the battle cry of "Mission Accomplished." But one seemingly reliable prognosis was given by Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser for the first President Bush.
Scowcroft said that the idea of the U.S. acting on its own is "fundamentally, fatally flawed ... If we get to the point where everyone secretly hopes the United States gets a black eye because we are so obnoxious, then we'll be totally hamstrung in the war on terror. We'll be like Gulliver with the Lilliputians."
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