Horse Feathers and Horse Sense

By Stephen M. Walt

Foreign Policy

"Ever since 9/11, commentators of a hawkish persuasion -- and most recently the New York Times' Thomas ("Suck on This") Friedman -- have been fond of quoting Osama bin Laden's statement that "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse."

Pundits like Friedman don't normally embrace any of Bin Laden's other views on world politics, but they like this line because it seems like a good reason for us to obsess about resolve, credibility, and the possibility that even the tiniest setback somewhere might have catastrophic consequences. It suggests that if third parties begin to suspect that the U.S. isn't the "strong horse," they will abandon us in droves and leave the United States isolated and friendless in a hostile world. Conversely, it also suggests that one or two successes will suddenly trigger a similar wave of favorable developments: by this logic, we pass a Health Care Bill, and suddenly those mullahs in Tehran will start quaking in their turbans. It's the latest version of the old domino theory: a single setback somewhere might trigger a cascade of defeats and defections, but a minor victory in some other spot will have positive reverberations all over the world.....

In other words, fighting foolish wars in order to convince people that we are the "strongest horse" is an obvious way to make Bin Laden's fantasies more likely. After all, his greatest achievement to date is not the damage that al Qaeda inflicted on September 11. Instead, his real achievement was helping convince the Bush administration to adopt the neo-conservative program in the Middle East-most notably in the 2003 invasion of Iraq-a set of self-inflicted wounds from which we are still laboring to recover. And one way to avoid such blunders is to disregard Bin Laden's ill-informed notions about equine diplomacy. "