Soft words or the big stick?

TWO additions to the now-sagging bookshelf labeled “Empire, American, New” could hardly be more dissimilar, offering radically divergent explanations for how and why U.S. foreign policy in recent years went off the rails and equally different (and simplistic) prescriptions for what’s needed to get us out of our current mess.

Written by a senior counterintelligence official at the CIA, “Imperial Hubris” offers a scathing critique of the U.S. government’s conduct of its war on terror. Title notwithstanding, it is not so much hubris the author cites but an altogether different set of failings: provincialism, a disregard for history, a willful determination to ignore inconvenient facts and, worst of all, “widespread moral cowardice.” These, he charges in language that is by turns angry, caustic and derisive, are the sins that beset official Washington. As a direct consequence, the nation today faces dangers far greater than most Americans, dazzled by faux military triumphs over the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, appreciate.

At their best, post-Sept. 11 U.S. policies have lacked seriousness, with Exhibit A being what the author calls the “wretchedly ill-conceived” Afghan intervention that permitted the great majority of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters to escape. At worst, U.S. policies have played directly into the enemy’s hands. In this regard, Anonymous, his identity concealed as a condition for securing agency clearance to publish the book, characterizes the invasion of Iraq as “Osama bin Laden’s gift from America.” With the Bush administration “completing the radicalization of the Islamic world,” the United States has unwittingly made itself Bin Laden’s “only indispensable ally.” To persist in our current course, the author warns, is to invite catastrophes that will make Sept. 11 seem trivial by comparison.

For Anonymous, the beginning of wisdom lies in correctly gauging the nature of the struggle in which we are engaged and in taking proper measure of our adversary. Thus far, he writes, neither the political classes nor the national security apparatus has succeeded in doing either. The problem we face, he notes, is not a reign of terror conducted by fanatics but a “worldwide Islamist insurgency” arising from specific, identifiable grievances and intended to achieve concrete and limited goals. Bluntly, Muslim anti-Americanism derives from the policies pursued by the United States in the Islamic world over the course of several decades -- policies that Islamic radicals aim to overturn. The No. 1 insurgent objective is to pry loose America’s grip on the Persian Gulf.

Bin Laden is the insurgency’s mastermind and inspiration. Anonymous is, to put it mildly, taken with the Al Qaeda leader, whom he describes as “the most respected, loved, romantic, charismatic, and perhaps able figure in the last 150 years of Islamic history.” The author’s point, even for those of us disinclined to see the man responsible for murdering several thousand Americans as romantic, is that we are up against a formidable foe, a warrior chieftain of clear vision, resolve and great ruthlessness who has tapped a deep vein of Muslim discontent to which our own policies contribute. “For bin Laden, the most effective recruiting tool imaginable is for the United States to keep doing what it has been doing in the Islamic world for the past thirty years.”

President Bush’s frequent remonstrances to the contrary notwithstanding, it’s not who we are (or claim to be) that got us into this fix. Rather it is what we have done and continue to do.

Some critics likely will charge Anonymous with engaging in moral equivalence. That is mistaken. He instead insists that to grasp the political context of America’s war with Islamic radicalism requires admitting the unlovely history of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world long before George W. Bush. To acknowledge this political context is to expose the Bush administration’s response to Sept. 11 as feeble and ineffective, he says. Although it is “far too late for public diplomacy, or talk of any kind, to defuse Muslim hatred, except at the margins,” he writes, U.S. leaders continue to think otherwise. The United States won’t succeed in pacifying the Muslim world by liberalizing it, and he derides Bush administration plans to export democracy as “ill-advised and hallucinatory.”

For Anonymous, the only solution is the sword: to wage all-out war against the radicals and sympathizers of the Islamist cause. He advocates “relentless, brutal, and, yes, blood-soaked offensive military actions until we have annihilated the Islamists who threaten us, or so mutilate their forces, supporting populations, and physical infrastructure that they recognize continued war-making on their part as futile.”

The author considers Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s earth-scorching march to the sea an appropriate model for what needs to be done. Yet he appears oblivious to the possibility that the outcome, in both its operational and moral implications, might more closely resemble Hitler’s march on Moscow. One concludes the book grateful for the author’s insights and grateful too that as an intelligence analyst he has no direct role in actual policy formulation.

“The Folly of Empire” is far less bloodcurdling but it offers a prescription that is equally unpersuasive. John B. Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic, takes his readers on a brisk walk across the familiar terrain of America’s rise to global power from the age of President McKinley to the age of the younger Bush. The author has surveyed the relevant secondary literature and has a sure eye for the telling quote. But in the end, this is an exercise in reductionism, advocacy journalism posing as history.

For Judis, empire is always folly, which any U.S. statesman worth his salt ought to know. Been there, done that, doesn’t work: That might serve as a synopsis of this book’s message.

Granted, at the beginning of the last century the United States did briefly entertain imperial ambitions. But as a direct result of painful experience in places like the Philippines and Mexico, Judis writes, the dominant U.S. statesmen of the age, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, concluded that the quest for empire was foolhardy. Efforts by outsiders to impose their will on a population inevitably induced a powerful nationalistic backlash. The result was to corrupt the agents of empire, who arrived bearing promises of enlightenment but ended up perpetrating atrocities.

Moreover, the outbreak of the European war in 1914 persuaded Wilson that the pursuit of empire by other great powers also endangered the United States. The corollary of imperialism was not only exploitation but also intolerable global turmoil.

Wilson sought to end these evils and to put in place an international order characterized by tolerance, diversity and “a global democracy of equal and independent nations.” For Judis, the quest begun by Wilson is America’s true calling, one that embraces “an understanding of world history, a strategy for peace and prosperity, and a moral and religious approach to international relations.” By his account, every successful president since has adhered to Wilson’s hopeful vision. From Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, each has nurtured international institutions and worked within a multilateral context while moving steadily toward the creation of a community of nations adhering to a common moral code.

Then came George W. Bush bearing his “dark, pessimistic view of the world.” If for Anonymous several decades of misbegotten policies in the Islamic world landed the United States in its present pickle, Judis sees the problem as a product of the last three years, during which the current administration gave the back of its hand to the rest of the world. Even before Sept. 11, Bush, under the sway of crabbed right-wing nationalists, had signaled that the United States was turning away from liberal internationalism. After Sept. 11, under the sway of neoconservative ideologues, he embraced full-throated imperialism.

But as in the Philippines a century ago, so too in Iraq today: Grandiose imperial designs quickly gave way to an ugly insurgency. The outcome -- to include in both cases U.S. troops dishonoring themselves -- mocked U.S. claims of liberating the oppressed, Judis says.

The story is neat, tidy and shorn of ambiguity. Judis even brushes away Wilson’s own considerable flaws -- including duplicity, bigotry, intolerance and megalomania -- to render him as the antipode of the current president: an exemplar of sophistication and multicultural rectitude. So too is the moral crystal clear: All that is necessary to bring the world back into harmony is to abandon Bush’s doomed imperial project and restore the Wilsonian tradition of statecraft.

For Anonymous, the remedy to our current predicament lies in the unstinting use of power to beat our adversaries into submission. For Judis, power itself is the problem. If the United States forfeits power and the prerogatives that come with power, conforming to the will of the international community, humankind will resume its march toward Wilson’s Utopia.

It is difficult to judge which prescription is more naive. *