The September 11th attacks occurred in 2001. Four years ago now. In World War II, America mobilised after the Pearl Harbor attacks, and in four years was the leading force in defeating two powerful world powers in Japan and Germany. In four years America went from an isolationist nation with a relatively small military by European standards, to the world's dominant superpower. In the last four years, rather than the advancing of a great nation, we have seen the limits of the policy of empire. Michael Hirsch compares Roosevelt and Bush in the article; "9/11 -- and Counting Four Years In, No Clear Plan" .

Hirsch sees the biggest difference as Bush's lack of planning and ad-hoc manner of pursuing his foreign policy and military aims. From the article;

What Bush failed to note was that it took FDR and Truman precisely 1,347 days, from Dec. 7, 1941, to the surrender of Japan on Aug. 15, 1945, to win WWII, pacify the enemy and largely secure the peace that followed. By comparison, 1,461 days have now passed since that terrible day in 2001. And even now there is no end in sight to the "global war on terror." What is perhaps more unsettling, there is no detailed strategy for winning this war.

Hirsch notes that this war is different to WWII. There were concrete state actors in Germany and Japan in WWII. In this war however, the US has fought two nation-states in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were quick military successes. But this has not translated into secure, stable, democratic nation-states. Iraq seems to be in a constant state of insurgency.

Hirsch also argues that the US policy of reasserting its strength, through unilateralism, or what Keating called American exceptionalism; has become the US projecting weakness. The military has reached its limits in Iraq; American allies are wary of US intentions; the rises in oil prices make the US even more bound to Saudi Arabia; and the US continues to borrow from Asia and Europe to fund its private and public debts.

From the article;

Most disturbing of all, the man who once called himself a "war president" has not formulated a well-thought-out plan for winning this war, either in public or privately within his administration. In place of a strategy, Bush mainly repeats his vague pledge to spread democracy "with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," ....

The Bush Administration and American Republicans are exceptionally focused on politics. They have successfully marginalised the American Democrats by changing how politics is conducted in the US. This has led to American Republican victories in the House, the Senate, the Presidency and ultimately, any wider political appointment including the Supreme Court.

Despite this political and electoral success, there has not been any competence in governance. The constant seeking of political outcomes has destroyed their ability to govern.

Many parties choose the rhetoric of "values" and "Morals" over policy. This is because values and morals are harder to attack, and refute, in the media than concrete policy. This means that political parties now operate in an amorphous political state. Constantly meeting populist political demands, instead of governing from a stance of rigorous, or empirical policy.

This totally disrupts a party's or government's ability to govern well. Even worse, this lack of policy foundation, is often substituted with absolutist ideology. Rather than the ideology informing policy, and then being empirically tested with outcomes, we get the ideology being adhered to despite constant and overwhelming failure.

This has been a description of the Bush Administration in a nutshell. They have thrust poor governance on the US because they see public policy formulation as damaging to their political dominance. Instead they use inflexible ideology as policy, which invariably leads them to inferior outcomes that exacerbates the existing poor governance.

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More Reading on American politics

• American Politics
• Four More Years
• Without The Trappings Of Court
• To Be President
• Alien Acts
• Seditious Libel
• Ongoing Iraq