Opinion (Andrew Bacevich): Bush's illusions

BOSTON: The Bush administration's increasingly desperate search for a "way forward" in Iraq masks a larger and more troubling reality: In Washington, crisis management has now supplanted principled policy.

The world's only superpower no longer acts; instead, it reacts, usually to whatever happens to be the latest bad news out of Baghdad. As events in Iraq slip out of his control, President George W. Bush's strategy for waging his "global war on terror" lies in ruins. He is navigating without a compass.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Recall that for the architects of Operation Iraqi Freedom, taking down Saddam Hussein never qualified as more than a preliminary objective. Baghdad was not Berlin. It was Normandy, the jumping-off point for a much larger enterprise.

From the outset, proponents and critics of Bush's global war disagreed as to the actual purpose of that endeavor. According to its supporters, the aim was to implant the president's "Freedom Agenda" across the greater Middle East. The intent of U.S. strategy was to liberate, draining the terrorist swamp by propagating liberal democratic values throughout the Islamic world.

Skeptics saw the Freedom Agenda as little more than eyewash. The real object of the exercise, they insisted, was to assert U.S. control over the oil-rich Gulf. The aim of the global war on terror was not to share the blessings of liberty but to expand the perimeter of the American empire.

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