Quote(s) of the Day

Two quotes today... one looking at the issue's substance, the other at how it's been spun.

"Bush’s war in Iraq has been repudiated, the midterm elections did this. There is now wide open intellectual space to debate America’s next foreign policy...

...Now is the time for an honest post mortem of Bush foreign policy. Bush foreign policy has failed not just because of incompetence or bad luck in Iraq. The entire intellectual edifice of Bush foreign policy – such as it is – is deeply flawed. And let’s be clear. The Bush administration’s grand strategy is not simply a variation on earlier postwar liberal internationalist grand strategies – as some conservatives and liberals suggest. It was a radical departure from America’s postwar liberal hegemonic orientation – and the world has bitten back."
--G. John Ikenberry (current professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, and former State Dept. employee) asking how deep the failure of the Bush foreign policy goes.

With the exception of maybe the first month or two of the Afghanistan mission, the failure goes all the way down, in my opinion. It's just been a total disaster, the extent of which even early Bush cynics like myself never anticipated.

The saddest part is that we cannot even give them the benefit of good intentions. All of this failure is rooted in the hijacking of our country's foreign policy by a small, and narrow-minded, group of ideologues who believed that the great tragedy of 9/11 gave them a blank check to make reality their dreams of U.S. military supremacy on the world stage, starting with a pet project in Iraq. And now they are using the plight of the Iraqi people-- who have suffered the most for their lack of foresight-- to justify postponing the inevitable for another year or two.

The next quote touches on that and their efforts to deflect blame for their crimes...

"I'm sorry that these starry-eyed neocons who looked at George Bush and saw a genius are disappointed that the rest of the country didn't support their vision. They were given more of a chance to prove themselves than dreamers and fools usually are --- and they failed on a grand scale. This is what the Bushites deserve and what they should expect for ram-rodding through a war without real public support and then screwing it up royally. The families of all these dead and wounded soldiers, unfortunately, didn't deserve this and neither did the poor Iraqis who didn't know they were going to be guinea pigs in a 7th grade neocon thought experiment based on cartoons and psycho-babble.

Blaming the American people is an excellent political strategy, however, and I hope these conservatives keep it up. There's nothing that betrayed voters like more than to be called stupid, cowardly and traitorous."
--Blogger 'Digby', on the rhetoric that assigns blame in every direction except for those actually responsible.

The election was supposed to change all this. In 2007, we'll find out if that's the case.