LONDON -- Embattled U.S. President George W. Bush has asked for new ideas to help him on Iraq and on how to disentangle from the Middle East morass. He will of course get plenty, but he needs to be very careful over what he chooses.
Whether the stream of new thoughts and suggestions come from enemies or friends, from triumphant Democrats or crestfallen Republicans, from the political left or right, from searing columnists or think-tank strategists, all Americans seem to be laboring under one fatal delusion: that America can decide -- by its sheer military might and economic size -- the course of Mideast events and influence world ability and development.
The U.S. establishment seems not to have absorbed a basic reality that those outside America can see so clearly: that power has passed from the great American Republic just as it once passed from Rome, from the Hapsburgs and from the British Empire, and that neither 15 carrier fleets, nor arsenals of missiles, nor all the resources of Yankee ingenuity can bring it back.