Home front is split on foreign policy

Re “Fighting the real fight,” Opinion, Nov. 6

Excellent analysis. The Bush government’s fantasy of bringing about a Democratic revolution has been about as successful as Mao’s Cultural Revolution was for China.

Peter Smith

Vienna

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Just how many attacks have we had on our soil since 9/11? It’s nonsense to say the war on terrorism is a failure. We can all argue about how it could it have been executed better, but please do not insult my intelligence by writing that it has been a failure.

Trey Harvey

Kansas City, Mo.

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Andrew Bacevich is correct -- the U.S. has to move forward with a new foreign policy based on principles and on a global containment strategy. Perhaps we need to look at isolating, outwitting and out-creating what Bacevich terms “Islamic radicalism” rather than attack militarily. One of his five new international principles begins with this idea: “Let Islam be Islam.” We have to try to do this, and accept that all people aren’t waiting with bated breath for Americans to fix their problems. It isn’t the Western civilized white man’s burden to cram democracy or modernity into the Middle East. How could we ever imagine we understood, much less could change, the minds and hearts of more than 1 billion faithful Muslims?

Let us husband our resources and redeploy our troops out of Iraq.

Dan McCaslin

Santa Barbara

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Every point of Bacevich’s program is defective.

Husband American power: He seems unaware that, concurrent with the Iraq war, U.S. Special Forces are working with indigenous forces in small-footprint/big-impact programs.

Promise only the achievable: He confuses promises with goals.

Let Islam be Islam: OK, but the U.S. and other targeted countries cannot let the radical terrorist element of Islam proceed unfettered.

Reinvent containment: It is specious to apply a Cold War strategy to the current asymmetric threat that is not attached to a nation state.

Exemplify our own ideals: He describes our democracy as “enfeebled.” This ideologically driven evaluation suggests a cultural equivalency that does not exist.

Bacevich thinks that his isolationist passivism is realism. That may fly in his international relations seminars, but most Americans want a proactive response to the threat of radical Islamist terrorism.

William R. Snaer

Lake Arrowhead