WSJ opinion: on American commitment-phobia

http://www.hoover.org/pubaffairs/dailyreport/archive/90343404.html

“…Americans have never shown an appetite for the tribal and ethnic wars of South Asia and the Middle East. The shadow of our power lies across that big region, it is true. But we blow in and out of these engagements, generally not staying long enough to assure our friends and frighten our enemies.

Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator who recast Pakistani politics away from that country’s secular beginnings and plunged into the jihad and its exertions, once memorably observed that being an ally of the United States was like sitting on the bank of a great river where the ground is lush and fertile, but that every four to eight years the river changes course and the unsuspecting friend of American power finds himself in a barren desert. Mr. Obama has not given the protagonists in the Afghan war the certainty that he is in it for the long haul…"

by teru kuwayama at 2010-04-09 16:12:11 UTC | Bookmark | | Report spam→