General Michael Rose, former commander of the UN force in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1994-5, has been in the public spotlight again for over a year now, since he called for the impeachment of Tony Blair over the Iraq War. Yet, as his article in yesterday's New York Times shows, while he obviously believes the Iraq War a catastrophic mistake, he is not ready to condemn America to the "has-been" pile of world powers in history. Rose draws several parallels between America and the Iraq War, and Britain and the American Revolution. A war fought with too few resources, followed by extensive hand-wringing over the strategic position of the world power - the situations share these characteristics. And Rose only limits his comparison to the Iraq War - it's very easy to argue that the Vietnam War should also be lumped in here. More discussion, including the important differences (both good and bad) between the British and American situations, inside.

The unfortunate differences: First, Rose reminds us that it took the courage and brains of William Pitt the Younger and his supporters to recover. Sure, it took guts to admit the war needed to end in the first place, but that was not all that was needed; leadership towards innovation was also necessary. Right now, the presidential candidates on the Democratic side make the right noises on the war, but then don't sem to promise much in the way of change to make sure we won't end up in this position again. After all, didn't this happen once before with Vietnam? How many times do we have to go through a foreign quagmire before we realize that, at the very least, we need to commit the troops necessary to win right from the start?

Second, the Industrial Revolution was a stroke of astonishing fortune that simply would be difficult to repeat. Having a small sliver of an advantage in the timing of the Industrial Revolution helped Britain tremendously, much more so than an equivalent gap would help with anything today (such as the flattening of the world, powerful as that is turning out to be).

 The good differences: First, the advantage of America over any potential rivals is a much larger gap than Britain had at its time. Whereas China and India could compete with us in the future after this war is over, France, Spain, and other European powers were competing with Britain right then and there. There was no time to relax before their possessions were being challenged. We have some time to reconsider our foreign policy.

Second, and in the end the most promising, is that we have a successful model to follow in Britain after the revolution, and we have already survived one crisis like this which we failed to handle very well (Vietnam). And countries always go through periods where the vast majority thinks the prestige is falling. In the end, the next time you're listening to somebody declare that this war has ended our power in the world, just remember that hyperbole on the far left, nice as it can sound to us, can be just as exaggerated as hyperbole on the far right.