America - a world unto itself

These lofty aims have given way to a desperate effort to arrest a downward spiral towards chaos and disintegration. There are no really satisfying answers in Iraq. All of the remaining options are bad. A defeated US pulling out of Iraq would be disastrous for international order. Digging in with more troops and incurring opprobrium for a failed venture will only do further harm to the already gravely damaged reputation of the US. Who believes any longer that the US would ever invade North Korea or Iran? And if we do not believe that, we can surely guess what the regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran think.

With North Korea, Washington has proven incapable of preventing an impoverished dictatorship from consistently endangering the peace and stability of the world's most economically dynamic region. What sort of message does that send?

But the US cannot simply wash its hands of Iraq and go home. As others have observed, the consequences of defeat in Iraq will be much more serious than those in Vietnam. Of course, the risks are different this time. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union and China, but in Iraq no other great power is involved. In that sense, the risk is lower.

When North Vietnam defeated South Vietnam, there was widespread concern that the dominoes would fall in South-East Asia to communism. That did not occur.

But in the Middle East the risk is that with the balance of power destroyed between Iraq and Iran, Tehran will seek to intimidate neighbouring countries such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Jordan.

As Nicholas Kristof said recently in The New York Times, instead of invading Iraq and creating a pro-American bulwark, the US fought Iraq and Iran won.

In the end, it is impossible to fathom exactly what the Bush team thought it was doing after the fall of Baghdad. Unlike Vietnam, Bush never had to worry that escalation in Iraq would bring an all-out global war. Instead, he seems to have been conned by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld into accepting that more troops were not needed.

Now, when it is probably far too late, he thinks another 21,500 troops will do the trick in downtown Baghdad. I doubt it. The US eventually had 540,000 troops in Vietnam (compared with barely a quarter of that number in Iraq), and still it failed.

The conclusion must be that Americans simply don't understand the world. Partly this is to do with the sheer size of US power. America is a world unto itself and tends to see everything as a reflection of itself. But at least another part of the problem, in Vietnam and Iraq, is cognitive dissonance: a serious lack of understanding of other cultures (and that occasionally includes Australia).

As president Theodore Roosevelt said more than 100 years ago: "The country that loses its capacity to hold its own in actual warfare will ultimately show that it has lost everything." That is certainly not what we, as allies of the US, want to see as the epitaph of contemporary US foreign policy.