Bremer: The Cut-and-Run Transition: "You won't read this in your daily paper or see it on the nightly prime-time news, but I assure you that what we're witnessing in slow motion is likely to be one of the great imperial defeats in history.

"In 2002, the Bush administration released the National Security Strategy of the United States in which it codified the idea of preventive, not preemptive, war -- if we even think you may be thinking... we'll take you out -- and the idea that our country should feel free to act alone to preserve its unparalleled and historically unique position as sole planetary superpower. It would be the global sheriff ('dead or alive'), the global hyperpower, the planet's military hegemon, 'the New Rome.' It took less than a year for that 'New Rome' label to drop into the ashbin of history; now, the belief that nothing can stay our military might has been shown to be a hollow claim (no matter the destructive power we're capable of raining down on another land)."

Bremer: The Cut-and-Run Transition: "You won't read this in your daily paper or see it on the nightly prime-time news, but I assure you that what we're witnessing in slow motion is likely to be one of the great imperial defeats in history.

"In 2002, the Bush administration released the National Security Strategy of the United States in which it codified the idea of preventive, not preemptive, war -- if we even think you may be thinking... we'll take you out -- and the idea that our country should feel free to act alone to preserve its unparalleled and historically unique position as sole planetary superpower. It would be the global sheriff ('dead or alive'), the global hyperpower, the planet's military hegemon, 'the New Rome.' It took less than a year for that 'New Rome' label to drop into the ashbin of history; now, the belief that nothing can stay our military might has been shown to be a hollow claim (no matter the destructive power we're capable of raining down on another land)."