Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Iraq's Future – and Ours
- 2 The Right War for the Right Reasons
- 3 Iraq: Losing the American Way
- 4 Intervention With a Vision
- 5 An End to Illusion
- 6 Quitters
- 7 A More Humble Hawk; Crisis of Confidence
- 8 Time for Bush to See the Realities of Iraq
- 9 Iraq May Survive, but the Dream Is Dead
- 10 The Perils of Hegemony
- 11 Like It's 1999: How We Could Have Done It Right
- 12 Reality Check – This Is War; In Modern Imperialism, U.S. Needs to Walk Softly
- 13 A Time for Reckoning: Ten Lessons to Take Away from Iraq
- 14 World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win
- 15 The Neoconservative Moment
- 16 In Defense of Democratic Realism
- 17 ‘Stay the Course!’ Is Not Enough
- 18 Realism's Shining Morality
- 19 Has Iraq Weakened Us?
- 20 Democracy and the Bush Doctrine
- 21 A Time for Humility
- 22 Birth of a Democracy
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Iraq's Future – and Ours
- 2 The Right War for the Right Reasons
- 3 Iraq: Losing the American Way
- 4 Intervention With a Vision
- 5 An End to Illusion
- 6 Quitters
- 7 A More Humble Hawk; Crisis of Confidence
- 8 Time for Bush to See the Realities of Iraq
- 9 Iraq May Survive, but the Dream Is Dead
- 10 The Perils of Hegemony
- 11 Like It's 1999: How We Could Have Done It Right
- 12 Reality Check – This Is War; In Modern Imperialism, U.S. Needs to Walk Softly
- 13 A Time for Reckoning: Ten Lessons to Take Away from Iraq
- 14 World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win
- 15 The Neoconservative Moment
- 16 In Defense of Democratic Realism
- 17 ‘Stay the Course!’ Is Not Enough
- 18 Realism's Shining Morality
- 19 Has Iraq Weakened Us?
- 20 Democracy and the Bush Doctrine
- 21 A Time for Humility
- 22 Birth of a Democracy
- Index
Summary
This volume is not a history of the war in Iraq, nor is it a systematic exploration of the issues raised by the war. It contains no government documents or presidential pronouncements, and there is not a single public official among its contributors. Though a diverse collection of opinion pieces and journal articles, it does not pretend to cover the full range of views on the American effort to overthrow and replace the regime of Saddam Hussein. It is a sampling taken exclusively from writers who belong, by self-identification or by the character of their arguments, to the political right. It is partial, partisan, incomplete – and yet it represents what is perhaps the most interesting and consequential foreign-policy discussion now going on in the United States.
This is true, in the first instance, because the levers of American foreign policy are in the hands of a Republican administration whose outlook has been shaped decisively by certain currents of conservative thought. George W. Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq did not spring directly from the pages of the Weekly Standard, Commentary, or the Wall Street Journal, but the influence of these and like-minded publications on the actions and rhetoric of the administration is unmistakable. The Bush Doctrine, with its combination of military assertiveness and democratic idealism, may have been declared in the wake of 9/11, but the intellectual groundwork for it was laid years before by the editors, pundits, academics, and think-tank denizens who call themselves – and are now widely recognized as – neoconservatives.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Right War?The Conservative Debate on Iraq, pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005