Fighting the Real Fight

Scholar Andrew Bacevich’s fine piece “Fighting the real fight” matters [LA Times, Nov. 6]! He’s absolutely correct — the USA has to move forward with a new foreign policy based on principles AND on a global “containment” strategy. George Kennan’s containment strategy won the Cold War for us, so perhaps we need to look at isolating, outwitting, and out-creating what Bacevich terms “Islamic radicalism.”
One of Bacevich’s five new international principles begins with this idea: “Let Islam Be Islam” We have to try to do this, and accept that the peoples of the earth aren’t waiting with bated breath for Americans to “fix” their problems. It isn’t the western civilized white man’s burden to cram democracy or modernity into the Middle East. Why should we ever imagine we can understand, much less change, the minds and hearts of 1.4 billion faithful Moslems??
Let us husband our resources and redeploy our men out of Iraq!