WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In September 2002, the Bush administration released a 31-page strategy statement that took cognizance of the new type of international conflict facing the civilized powers. It was this national strategy statement that got us to where we are today with two rogue nations, Taliban Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, disarmed and other rogue nations feeling the heat. Terrorists everywhere have sobered up a bit.
The Truman administration's policy of "Containment," proclaimed in 1947 and meant to contain the Soviet Union and its aggressive puppets, was replaced by the Bush administration in 2002 with a policy of "Pre-emption," for after September 2001 the administration's policy planners had noticed that "America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones." Coming to the point, the new national strategy statement noted that, "The gravest danger our nation faces lies at the crossroads of (religious) radicalism and technology." Thus in such a world, "We cannot let our enemies strike first."
The Truman administration's 1947 policy of "Containment" was opposed by much of the American left for decades, and a whole school of egghead thought rose up complaining that it was the Truman administration that had made Soviet communism hostile to America, not Stalin or communist ideology. Now, of course, that which passes for the American left today is carping that American recklessness and self-indulgence have set the terrorists against us.
Susan Sontag, the literary egotist, adumbrated the complaint immediately after Sept. 11, when in The New Yorker she sermonized: "The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality (!) and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this (the suicide attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon) was not a ‘cowardly' attack on ‘civilization' or ‘liberty' or ‘humanity' or ‘the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?"