A flavorful excerpt:
>When George W. Bush was campaigning for President, he and the people
>around him didn't seem to be proposing a great doctrinal shift,
>along the lines of the policy of containment of the Soviet Union's
>sphere of influence which the United States maintained during the
>Cold War. In his first major foreign-policy speech, delivered in
>November of 1999, Bush declared that "a President must be a
>clear-eyed realist," a formulation that seems to connote an absence
>of world-remaking ambition. "Realism" is exactly the foreign-policy
>doctrine that Cheney's Pentagon team rejected, partly because it
>posits the impossibility of any one country's ever dominating world
>affairs for any length of time.
>
>One gets many reminders in Washington these days of how much the
>terrorist attacks of September 11th have changed official
>foreign-policy thinking. Any chief executive, of either party, would
>probably have done what Bush has done so far - made war on the
>Taliban and Al Qaeda and enhanced domestic security. It is only now,
>six months after the attacks, that we are truly entering the realm
>of Presidential choice, and all indications are that Bush is going
>to use September 11th as the occasion to launch a new, aggressive
>American foreign policy that would represent a broad change in
>direction rather than a specific war on terrorism. All his rhetoric,
>especially in the two addresses he has given to joint sessions of
>Congress since September 11th, and all the information about his
>state of mind which his aides have leaked, indicate that he sees
>this as the nation's moment of destiny - a perception that the
>people around him seem to be encouraging, because it enhances Bush's
>stature and opens the way to more assertive policymaking.
>
>Inside government, the reason September 11th appears to have been "a
>transformative moment," as the senior official I had lunch with put
>it, is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of
>which officials had previously been unaware as that it drastically
>reduced the American public's usual resistance to American military
>involvement overseas, at least for a while. The Clinton
>Administration, beginning with the "Black Hawk Down" operation in
>Mogadishu, during its first year, operated on the conviction that
>Americans were highly averse to casualties; the all-bombing Kosovo
>operation, in Clinton's next-to-last year, was the ideal foreign
>military adventure. Now that the United States has been attacked,
>the options are much broader. The senior official approvingly
>mentioned a 1999 study of casualty aversion by the Triangle
>Institute for Security Studies, which argued that the "mass public"
>is much less casualty-averse than the military or the civilian élite
>believes; for example, the study showed that the public would
>tolerate thirty thousand deaths in a military operation to prevent
>Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. (The American death
>total in the Vietnam War was about fifty-eight thousand.) September
>11th presumably reduced casualty aversion even further.
>