wotiwrote

Stephen Graubard - emeritus professor of history at Brown University - has written a short piece in the FT (subscription required) about the 'fantasies' supporting Dubbya's foreign policies. I liked this para:

Many in Washington know there is no strategy for realising the objectives set forth by the president on January 20. The knowledge of radical Islam in the US remains primitive and rhetorical. The Bush administration has undertaken nothing analogous to the efforts made to understand the Soviet Union in the time of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The federal government has yet to engage the leading independent think-tanks or universities to encourage them to discuss the context of foreign policy as it has been transformed by recent events. America once prided itself on helping instruct the world about arms control, and on how that knowledge helped contain the Soviet Union. There is no comparable command of the problems represented by terrorism.