The American Spectator

abated as the result of over 60 military operations conducted by the U.S. Armed Forces between 1949 and 1989. Gore Vidal cites this fact in his missive entitled Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated , but there is no doubt that at the fall of the Berlin Wall international good will for America was at an all-time high that was more or less maintained through the month of September, 2001.

This result was the hard-earned effort very much in keeping with the vision of Earth described by the very un-neocon James Baker: “I was of a generation that embraced wholeheartedly the concept of Pax Americana, an America engaged as a force for creative and constructive change around the world…. In my mind, this has always simply been a given.” The key feature of Baker’s outlook — like that of Woodrow Wilson, in an irony of its own — is the ingrained desire that American intervention be a tool for peace, undertaken by peaceful means, with violence only as a last resort: that is, after the war had already started. The profundity of the war in Iraq is precisely the sharpness of its break in American policy from that venerable principle.

AND SURE ENOUGH the war in Iraq has brought on a current crisis that will shape American politics for, at a minimum, the next four years. Regardless of one’s opinion on that war, and on those who support and oppose it, the feeling of doom and gloom that prevails when the conversation turns to Iran and our options ought to be held at some kind of bay. The consolation of history lends a perspective of its own which ought to encourage not only prudence but steadfastness. Earth has been more lost to us than this. The Herculean task of American foreign policy is to eliminate our enemies faster than, in the process of elimination, we can create them. In the process, it’s is good to know, and to know how, we squared the circle in even darker times.