Larry Keiler's List: PBS War On Iraq Series

• The expectation is that, in fact, we won't have to do a lot of battering; the Iraqis will actually be quite happy that we have invaded their country; and that this will be a low-cost operation. Now this may be totally unrealistic. But, nonetheless, I think it is the thinking of the administration that not a lot of battering actually has to take place.

  • Oh boy, were they wrong about this! (Don't forget, this was before the actual invasion of Iraq.)
    Still, I think there was a period -- a short one -- where the Iraqis actually did cheer the US. But the US squandered that good will.
• it worked in part because the other members of NATO knew that the United States had an enormous amount of power and was willing to use it. But it also worked because the United States respected the views of smaller members of NATO and, at times -- in fact, more often than many people realize -- changed its own views and approaches in deference to them. So there was a very fruitful interaction, it seems to me, between hegemonic authority on one hand and multilateralism on the other. In NATO that's really what made it work.
• And I think that's what has to happen now if we are going to achieve the same kinds of things we achieved in the Cold War. We obviously cannot do it alone. We obviously need allies.

  • But this is not what happened, ultimately. The Bush administration really tried to bully and bamboozle other nations, and the other nations weren't really having any of it.
• the doctrine of preemption has a long and distinguished history in the history of American foreign policy.

  • Distinguished is not the word I would use. Dismal, maybe.
• But the idea is coming back, and it's coming back for some of the same reasons that it was there in the 19th century: because, again, we face a situation of domestic insecurity, of being insecure in our own homes and work places, which was the condition of frontier existence in the 19th century. So, in that sense, it's not totally surprising that preemption would come back.
• But the Bush National Security Strategy was very explicit in saying that our ultimate objective is to see that democratic governance spreads everywhere in the world.

4 more annotations...