How daydreamers caused
Iraq nightmare

  Fred Kaplan has written an insightful book -- Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power -- about the ideas that have supported the president's understanding of foreign policy. The basic premise of these theories was the president's conviction that his predecessor's foreign policy was wrong in every respect. When he came to the White House, he determined that there would be no more nation building, as in Bosnia, no more active intervention in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, no more concern about shadow groups such as al-Qaida.

  The task of his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was not so much to challenge his assumptions as to reassure him and help him to develop the explicit theories to support what he wanted to do. Thus, when Richard Clarke warned Rice that al-Qaida was planning massive attacks on the United States, she apparently did not pass that warning on to the president.

  Note that the Iraq war was and still is a massive effort at nation building. We are engaged in a "war on terrorism" and the ineffable Rice bustles back and forth to Israel to tell both warring parties what they "need" (one of her favorite words) to do.

  The new ideas sounded profound and important. After 9/11, the whole world had changed. The Cold War was over, and the United States was the last superpower. It could do whatever it wanted to protect itself and in any part of the world it might choose, especially with the new super weapons that Donald Rumsfeld promised would make wars quick and painless and would require only a few troops.

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  Both notions bore little relationship to the real world. The world's only superpower did not enjoy absolute power. It had to form alliances to accomplish its goals, even if the Cold War was over. The United States could act on its own on occasion, but in the long run, it still had to establish coalitions, as the president's father had done with considerable skill during the first Gulf War.

  The president did promise to consult with our allies, but that meant he would come into a meeting, tell the heads of other countries what he had determined to do, and invite their cooperation. But they were not included in the decision-making because the world's only superpower had already done that. The president of the United States was the absolute leader of the Free World.

  The "surge" is an offspring of this mentality. It was another "big" idea: Put American troops on the streets and bring order to Iraq (and buy off the Sunni tribes). Thirty thousand, 35,000 more troops would do it. Same old idea: Change our tactics a bit, and we would find a way to victory. The current fighting in Iraq shows that it has not worked. But big ideas did not have to work to become policy. Listen to Fred Kaplan:

  "They grew entranced by the new kinds of power -- the new kind of world that these ideas might bring into being. The ideas morphed into a vision, the vision into a dream. After Sept. 11, they took their dream into the new world -- acted it with open eyes -- and saw it dissolve into a nightmare." 

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Read the Chicago SunTimes' Daily Southtown articles.