The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris
A century of unwise American military adventures is probed in this perceptive study of foreign policy over-reach.Daily BeastandTimecontributor Beinart (The Good Fight) highlights three examples of Washington's overconfidence: Woodrow Wilson's hubris of reason: the belief that reason, not force, could govern the world; the Kennedy-Johnson administrations' hubris of toughness during the Vietnam War; and George W. Bush's hubris of dominance in launching the Iraq War. In each case, Beinart finds a dangerous confluence of misleading experience and untethered ideology; the Iraq War, he contends, was fostered both by a 12-year string of easy military triumphs from Panama to Afghanistan, and a belief that America can impose democracy by force. (The book continues the author's ongoing apology for his early support of the Iraq War.) Beinart's analyses are consistently lucid and provocative&mdash;e.g., he calls Ronald Reagan a dove in hawk's feathers, and his final conclusion is that Obama will need to... decouple American optimism from the project of American global mastery. The book amounts to a brief for moderation, good sense, humility, and looking before leaping&mdash;virtues that merit Beinart's spirited, cogent defense.(June)Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.