The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2004

actual ideas, not arguing over who had lunch with Richard Perle. Janowski alleges that U.S. policy is to create an empire, but he does not define “empire.” Over the past two years, the United States has employed a variety of means to deal with what it defines as threats to its security, and has shown a willingness to use mili- tary force to do so even when it lacks the explicit support of an internation- al organization or the support of all of its traditional allies. This sounds more like the definition of an inde- pendent nation-state than an empire. Before our invasion, our Iraq policy consisted of indefinitely stationing large numbers of troops in Saudi Arabia; endless air patrols over the northern and southern thirds of the country; a Swiss-cheese sanctions regime, under which Saddam Hussein mysteriously grew richer and stronger; and an inspections regime that he first treated as a shell game and then con- temptuously refused to work with at all. Saddam continued to support ter- rorism, and attempted to develop WMDs and dominate the region. This was an untenable situation. Janowski neither acknowledges this nor suggests what he would have done differently. Nor does he discuss what should be done now. He asserts that there were no WMDs. The pos- sibilities that Iraqi WMDs were moved elsewhere or hidden, or that the WMDs were dismantled by Saddam to ride out the new round of inspections, receive not the slightest consideration or acknowledgement. Janowski exhumes Cordell Hull and exhorts us to concentrate on international economic affairs, leaving behind “obsolete” political-military paradigms. The United States, on a firmly bipartisan basis, tried some- thing like this in the 1990s, cutting the Foreign Service, CIA human intelli- gence collection and the military, while also virtually obliterating public J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 7 L E T T E R S