Credibility crud.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note

You know Washington is sinking into quicksand whenever you start hearing that the United States should go through with its militaristic plans because if it doesn't, America will lose credibility.

I hadn't heard that hoary rationalization since the darkest days of Vietnam, but there it was again, in the mouth of James Schlesinger, the former CIA director and current gargoyle of the Washington establishment. "Given all we have said as a leading world power about the necessity of regime change in Iraq ... our credibility would be badly damaged if that regime change did not take place," he told The New York Times this summer.

President Bush picked up the same stick on September 4, when he said that "the world must understand, as well, that its credibility is at stake."

Of all the reasons to go to war against Iraq, that's the worst possible one. It's like saying, "OK, it may be a stupid idea, but since we've said it so many times, we've got to act on it." And it's not as though if Bush doesn't level Baghdad, the Mongol hordes will be storming Washington.

The historian Gabriel Kolko, in his 1994 work, Century of War, examines this "credibility fixation," as he calls it. "Perhaps the single most recurrent justification that leaders of major powers have evoked for risking wars evolved from their belief that their credibility, which allegedly created fear among potential enemies and thereby constrained their actions, depended on their readiness to use force even when the short-term rationality for violence was very much in doubt," he writes.

Kolko, by the way, has a new book out, Another Century of War? Despite the uncreative title, it's full of insights. U.S. interventionism "has led k to leap into situations where it often had no interests, much less durable solutions, and where it has repeatedly created disasters and enduring enmities," he notes. "America has power without...