The Iraq experiment and US National Security

In the aftermath of the attacks on 11 September 2001, the Bush administration adopted an aggressive strategy designed to attack and eliminate a set of threats now understood to be large and urgent. The strategy championed three big ideas-offensive action, regime change and preventive war-that put the United States on the road to Baghdad and a fourth, democratisation, that increased Washington's ambitions once it was there. Nearly four painful years later, many of the hopes that accompanied the preventive attack on Iraq have been dashed. Washington now lives with fresh reminders that even a supreme power is not omnipotent and cannot readily bend others to its will. But whatever happens in Iraq, the rogue state-terrorist-proliferation threat is not going to disappear anytime soon, the powerful impetus of 11 September will continue to cast a shadow over the US debate, and consequently the ideas championed by the Bush administration will remain on the agenda. Iraq raises serious questions about the costs and feasibility of these ideas but does not undercut their basic logic.