Total Insecurity: The Myth of American Omnipotence

Now that we know the public was duped by an administration looking for politically saleable motives for a “pre-emptive” invasion of Iraq, the question is: Why did the US invade?

Carol Brightman takes us through the various stages of the war, documenting the unexpected defeat of the “coalition” at the hands of the Iraqi resistance and pondering the significance of this loss for America’s vaunted military supremacy. She then returns to confront the unanswered question with another. Why, in spite of both military and political defeats, does the US want permanent bases in Iraq? The answer is the great fear that OPEC will switch its international transactions from the dollar to the euro. Iraq actually made the switch in November 2000 and, given the dollars steady decline, did well. Now it has paid the price. Iran did similarly in the summer of 2003 and it, too, was targeted by the White House, but the resistance in Iraq has delayed further adventures, for the moment.

Carol Brightman has been a leading critic since the Sixties. She contrasts the new movements with the old, writes passionately on the reawakening of dissent brought on by the Iraq war, and coolly suggests that it will take more than regime change in Washington to bring Americas fears to the table.

Carol Brightman edited Viet-Report in the 1960s and is the author of Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. She wrote Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure and edited Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. She received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and lives in Walpole, Maine.