Autor: Tom Donnelly

The establishmentarian critique of President Bush's policy in Iraq -and the scheming neocons for whom the president is supposed to be the Manchurian Candidate- is that they are blinded by ideology. There is, almost certainly, a grain of truth in this, but it comes from a profound belief in the American creed; it is the establishment that has the greatest difficulty in seeing reality in Iraq clearly.

In the middle of fighting the global war on terror, America has forgotten about their 'strategic competitor' to the East. The Chinese have noticed. The Chinese can barely contain their self-satisfaction these days, and Beijing's recently-released white paper, China's National Defense in 2004, is a 36-page-wide smirk.

One of the enduring controversies of the American experience in Iraq has been the decision to disband Saddam's army after toppling his regime. Current conventional wisdom holds that this was a huge mistake which accelerated the breakdown of order in Iraq.

Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's meeting engagement with Army Specialist Thomas Wilson in Kuwait last week was not just a reality check for an arrogant and isolated Beltway bigwig. Even longtime supporters and transformation advocates have begun to recognize that Rumsfeld is now a large part of the problem.

You don't know what you don't know. And in war, you really don't know. At war in the Middle East, you never really know. Apparently, President Bush's reelection has allowed his lieutenants to embrace this certain uncertainty in regard to the situation in Iraq.

The president's electoral victory on November 2 did not settle this argument, but it gave him a new opportunity to prove his case. Ultimately, a second Bush administration must convince Americans and the world that a tolerant, democratic Middle East is not a desert mirage, but a winnable prospect. And real success must be achieved both in and beyond Afghanistan and Iraq.

More than eighteen months after it began, Operation Iraqi Freedom may be entering its decisive phase. At last, the battle is being joined in the Sunni heartland. When this phase of fighting is done--perhaps in a week or 10 days--there will come a moment when the leaders of Iraq's Sunni community must seize the opportunity this campaign will create.

While the campaign has focused on Iraq, there are other big-picture foreign policy issues at play. Where is Kerry on them? Next week´s election is rightly regarded as the first presidential contest of the post-9/11 world, but it is also a larger referendum on the role of the United States in the post-Cold War era.

President Bush has, ironically, been reluctant to seek that same sort of change. The U.S. military remains essentially unchanged from the world of September 10.

Since this magazine started eight years ago, we have argued that the American military, and especially the U.S. Army, was too small.