Scheuer - New York;Afghanistan;États-Unis;Pays islamiques;Islamic countries;United States;Islamische

In writing this book, I had the indispensable help of several new and much-valued friends. My book agent, Stuart Krichevsky, runs an impressively tight business ship but is never too busy to talk through problems or compare notes about the joys and agonies of watching our respective sons learn to play the astoundingly difficult game of baseball. My publicist, Jenny Powers, is a marvel at gently but effectively putting importuning journalists in their place, as well as in getting me to the right place at the right time, and doing so with a smile even when my forgetfulness is driving her to distraction. At Free Press, Dominick Anfuso and Maria Bruk Auprin worked with me patiently to tame a good deal of vituperative prose that otherwise might well have prevented the arguments of an already very much nonmainstream analysis from getting a decent hearing. I offer my sincere thanks to each of them.

I also wish to thank a number of writers, historians, and commentatorsmost of whom I have never metwho have had the moral courage to argue that the status quo in U.S. foreign and military policy toward the Islamic world is not adequately protecting America and must be changed. I do not agree with all of what these men write, and, I am very confident, none of them will agree with all I have written here, and several will disagree with a good deal of it. But be that as it may, I have consistently learned from these men, they have caused me to rethink my own positions many times, and they are driving a debate that may yet save America and the West from their governing elites mulish, self-serving, and ultimately self-immolating devotion to the status quo. May I offer my thanks and admiration, then, to Ralph Peters, Mark Steyn, Tony Blankley, Abd al-Bari Atwan, Peter Bergen, T. X. Hammes, Patrick Buchanan, Bruce Hoffman, Martin van Creveld, Robert Pape, Robert D. Hormats, Omar Nasiri, Samuel Huntington, Marc Sageman, and Walter A. McDougall.

And after spending a career focused on foreign states and entities, I am slowly relearning and trying to apply the lessons taught by Americas founders and their constructive successorsespecially by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, and William T. Shermanand by the two Europeans who best taught Americans about the great difficulties in founding and then enduringly protecting a republic, Niccol Machiavelli and Alexis de Tocqueville. The lessons these men taught are timeless; we ignore them at our own and our childrens peril.

Finally, I alone am responsible for all that follows.

Part II: Six Years of War,
20012007

Perhaps the easiest task in todays America would be to write a book maintaining Americas current illusions by assigning President George W. Bushs administration responsibility for all of Americas international troubles since September 11, 2001, and then advance the delusional argument that all will be well once Mr. Bush returns permanently to his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Such a misinterpretation is superficially supportable because several moments in Mr. Bushs presidency will forever reside in the thankfully small compartment of U.S. history reserved for the infamous. The unprovoked invasion of Iraq surely is one such event, as is Vice President Dick Cheneys reptilian contention that Americans who criticize U.S. foreign policy are validating the strategy of the terrorists. In addition, the thought of what history will say about Donald Rumsfelds tenure at the Department of Defense ought to make his relatives shudder down to their latest generation.

There is a great danger, however, in simply heaping abuse on Mr. Bush and his lieutenants because it was on their watch that the much ballyhooed and nearly beatified bipartisan approach to postCold War foreign policy played out its string and collapsed. Rather than crafting a paradigm appropriate to the new era in Americas foreign relations, President Bushalways his fathers sonlaunched a last, desperate, and ultimately futile attempt to keep the Cold Warera policy consensus on track and running toward a revamped version of his dads vague but clearly silly vision of a New World Order. No effort was spared before the 2003 Iraq war. All the traditional buttons were pressedprewar congressional support, extensive UN consultations, and intricate coalition-buildingbut to no avail. The fact that this effort now lies in smoldering ruins has less to do with the competence of President Bush and his colleagues (although, to be sure, competence was not the administrations common virtue) and more to do with the reality that Americas bipartisan governing elite is both unprepared and unwilling to deal with the world as it is, rather than as they want it to be or think it should be. Because of their profound and willful ignorancethere is no kinder or gentler description that appliesAmerica has traveled a path that has seen the lethal nuisance originally presented by Sunni militants transformed into an existential threat that is poised to strike at the core of our social and civil institutions in a way that could change our collective lifestyle for many decades, perhaps forever.