There are at least 3 big ideas in America Goes Backward, a lengthy piece by Stanley Hoffmann in the June 12 New York Review of Books.
1. Law of the jungle redux
Hoffmann views the recent preemptive war in Iraq as Old-World-Order revisited—specifically the catastrophic Old World Order that existed prior to
World War I, AKA the law of the jungle.
Pushing aside the UN, or refusing to accept curbs on the use of US force, can mean one of two things. The US may want to return to pre-1914 conditions, when the only international limitations on the right of each sovereign state to use force were rules dealing with the jus in bello—the ways in which force could be used—but not with the goals. This discards the progress accomplished in trying to form a modern jus ad bellum, a definition of the purposes for which force can legitimately be used (self-defense, collective security) and of the procedures that can authorize the resort to force. Treaties such as the genocide convention and international tribunals created to judge persons responsible for crimes against humanity or war crimes would be discarded. The post-1945 efforts to protect the human rights of individuals against states would also be scrapped. Security in the world jungle would depend exclusively on an efficiently functioning balance of power, or on voluntary self-restraint by a dominant superpower.
Or else the US, seeing itself as the guardian of world order, would leave restraints on other states standing (unless they are its allies), and reserve to itself the right to select those restraints of international law and institutions that serve its interests and to reject all the others. President Bush, in telling others what the US "expects" of them, is coming very close to that position.
It is sad to have to remind those who endorse such positions that in a world consisting of almost two hundred states of very uneven strength and cohesion, and where the many forms of interdependence reduce the actual sovereignty of all, a pure and simple return to the rule of the strongest would be a catastrophic regression. It would promote insecurity, not security or moderation. Those who approved of the war in Iraq for entirely understandable reasons of humanitarianism, of pity for the Iraqi people, and of horror at Saddam Hussein's regime seldom considered that a precedent used for a "good" cause can easily be used by others for causes they would object to: Russia could use it against Georgia, India against Pakistan, North Korea against South Korea.
Paging Thomas Friedman: There are ugly consequences when a country removes the bad guy by taking international law into its own unilateral hands and lies about its own motives. Compared with Hoffmann’s essay—which doesn’t ignore history or the importance of historical precedent—Friedman’s argument seems shallow:
The failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now.
Why? Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.
The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9-11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world.. . Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world.
2. Humanitarian intervention for regime change
3. Terrorism as the last and only resort
9:24:40 PM 
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