In the short run, the Second Gulf War has been a great success for United States arms. Critics charge that, over medium and longer time frames, President Bush's new National Security Strategy and its call for preventive military action to forestall "rogue states" that seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction risk embroiling the United States in an open-ended series of adventures that could overstretch the nation's capabilities and ultimately undermine the very national security that the strategy is supposed to safeguard. Perhaps the most important lesson of 2002-2003 is that few of the key independent arbiters of public opinion the media, academics, and opposition politicians on whom the democratic marketplace of ideas theory depends can in fact be relied on to carry out the functions the theory expects of them. If we are to avoid future episodes of runaway threat inflation, myths of empire, and potentially dangerous foreign policy adventures based on these, independent intellectual and political forces must be far more aggressive than they have lately been in seeking expertise and evidence, evaluating it, and calling to account those in power for their arguments and proposals. |
