Man who won the Cold War
Containment: The father of U.S. policy warned against invading Iraq.
By Scott Shane
Feb 18, 2004
"Kennan is a remarkable figure - there's no one of comparable influence,"
says Steven David, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins University.
"It was a matter of his being at the right place at the right time with the
right idea."
-snip-
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush adopted a doctrine of
pre-emption that broke explicitly with the idea of containment. He invaded
Afghanistan, vowed to hunt down terrorists around the world and ordered the
toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, calling it an intolerable
threat.
In a 2002 interview, Kennan expressed deep skepticism about the plan to
invade Iraq. And the failure to find weapons of mass destruction there has
prompted administration critics to assert that the war has only proven that
containment was working in Iraq.
"I think containment is completely relevant for any potential enemy that has
a return address - Iraq, Iran, North Korea," says Bruce Cumings, professor
of history at the University of Chicago. "We've been containing North Korea
for half a century."
Cumings calls Kennan's warnings about the Iraq war prescient. "Kennan was a
member of a generation that built the post-war world system, and
multilateralism was at the core," Cumings says. "The Bush administration has
badly damaged that system by refusing to work with allies and ignoring the
views of France and Germany, which now seem to have been quite accurate."
-cont.-
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/printedition/bal-te.journal18feb18001642,0,5497057.column?coll=bal-pe-asection
--
"From the brief time that we did spend occupying Iraqi territory
after the war, I am certain that had we taken all of Iraq, we would
have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit - we would still be there,
and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of
the occupation. This is a burden I am sure the beleaguered
American taxpayer would not have been happy to take on."
- Norman Schwarzkopf, from his 1993 autobiography, "It Doesn't
Take a Hero."
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