Part of the PNACian principle is to establish, by dint of American economic superiority, a military hegemony. That hegemony appears to have been broken by the threat of asymmetry proven by the apparent stalemate of Iraq. I would argue that desire to express and project a military hegemony is part and parcel of our selection of wars. That indeed is why Bush will argue that 'We cannot afford to lose in Iraq'. In that regard, it is not so much for Iraq, but for American military hegemony.
The cost of a failed hegemony is, of course, that those many thousands of Americans now free from the draft *must* be eventually conscripted, because we will be engaged in more places due to a lowered set of military expectations of us from our enemies. This is indeed an extension of the Baby Bin Laden Theory. Yet we have been unable to convince the polity of Americans to long let our military monster off its leash in order to forestall 'the inevitable'. This makes sense but it erodes the usefulness of military hegemony.
The bases upon which America might provoke a military action unilaterally are well-established. We don't seem to have a problem bombing Afghanistan forward (heh) into the Stone Age, nor threatening the same to Pakistan when it comes to directly percieved threats to American soil like Bin Laden's AQ.
But the American military industrial complex, which has proven to be far less of a threat to democracy than Ike warned, is a forward thinking beast. All of the most important weapons systems we have been designing and engineering are about establishing an escalating obsolescence. The fundamental theory is that we can spend our enemies into bankruptcy by leapfrogging conventional warfare technology at a rapid clip. This process and publicity about this process give America confidence and potential enemies sleepless nights and paranoia. The facts about post-Cold War America are that we have the ability do do a great deal more damage than we do.
My position is that America should be a military hegemony and that we can do so at an expense much lower than that of empire. Maintaining that hegemony may require more shock and awe and collateral damage than we expended in Iraq to date while Petraeus and the Pentagon perfect strategies and tactics for Counter Insurgency in the ongoing wars against jihadis and other asymmetric threats.
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