"As much as Bush may look like a cowboy and act like a yahoo, his foreign policy generally, and the Iraq war specifically, are actually a dramatic departure from the paradigm of the dour, sensitive gunslinger that for generations seemed to serve as a kind of template for American conflict. Under George W. Bush, America is no longer a cowboy nation. It is more like a cyborg nation with a brand-new paradigm -- not the cowboy but the Terminator, the robot from the popular films of that name. Call it Pax Schwarzenegger. ... Wolfowitz didn't like the idea of sacrifice or recognition of consequences or humility either, and he certainly didn't like the idea of accepting the tragic dimension of conflict. As he saw it, America had to be unassailable and implacable. It had to be so mighty that it would terrorize any other nation or coalition of nations. It had to convincingly demonstrate that this was now a unipolar world, that the pole was the United States, and there was nothing that anybody could do about it and thus no reason to try. Basically, the country had to become the Terminator."
<http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/04/10/terminator/index1.html>
[Second, there's this piece in the NY Times:]
War in Iraq Provides Model of New Way of Doing Battle
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr. and THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON, April 9 — The march on Baghdad exemplifies 21st-century warfare, allied commanders and outside military experts say: swift, agile and decisive, employing overpowering technology to bring relentless violence to bear in many places at once.
"The superior technology we now possess is, perhaps, the most obvious difference between the gulf war and the present conflict," Vice President Dick Cheney, who was the secretary of defense 12 years ago, said today. ...
Strikingly, top commanders appear to have vanquished the idea that generals always fight the last war. They took only small pieces from the lessons learned from wars as recent as the victory in Afghanistan, as celebrated as the first gulf war, as odious as Vietnam or as defining as World War II.
Air Marshal Brian K. Burridge, the commander of British forces in the American-led coalition, called this three-week campaign "something that military historians and academics will pore over in great detail for many years to come."
Even as senior Pentagon officials warned today that tough fighting lies ahead — and the specter of unexpected chemical attack lingers — they could not disguise their glee at the way things were playing out. ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/international/worldspecial/10COMB.html>
Carl
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