Robert Kuttner whacks you with the plain truth.
Bush's foreign policy is a shambles. The architects of the Iraq war have been proven wrong on every contention they made -- the imminent weapons of mass destruction, the alleged Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, the supposed ease of occupation and reconstruction. Thumbing America's nose at "old Europe" proved a major blunder. Bush now needs the United Nations to clean up his mess, but he is insisting on US control. France and Germany, not to mention Russia and China, aren't exactly lining up to donate money and troops to bail Bush out. The administration line -- that the Iraq mess proves that the place is a magnet for terrorism -- just isn't selling. This is a hornets' nest that Bush's policy stirred up. GIs are still getting killed for a war that the American public is turning against.
Bush's vaunted Israel-Palestine "road map" is a path to nowhere. Colin Powell, the prudent internationalist in the nest of reckless hawks, has been reduced to a pathetic token. Barring some improbable breakthrough, photo ops of Bush in a flak jacket won't divert the spotlight from the real damage.
This, just a day after this shockingly forthright observation by
James Carroll:
THE WAR IS LOST. By most measures of what the Bush administration forecast for its adventure in Iraq, it is already a failure.
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The Bush administration's hubristic foreign policy has been efficiently exposed as based on nothing more than hallucination. High-tech weaponry can kill unwilling human beings, but it cannot force them to embrace an unwanted idea. As rekindled North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs prove, Washington's rhetoric of "evil" is as self-defeating as it is self-delusional. No one could have predicted a year ago that the fall from the Bush high horse of American Empire would come so hard and so quickly. Where are the comparisons with Rome now? The rise and fall of imperial Washington took not hundreds of years, but a few hundred days.
Sooner or later, the United States must admit that it has made a terrible mistake in Iraq, and it must move quickly to undo it.
The wheels, my friends, fell off miles ago. We have a world-class turkey on our hands - in our country, in our economy, in our safety, in our sense of security and in our White House. Blame Clinton all you want. You're spitting in the wind. These crackheads running the country now have got to go. I don't think we can afford to wait until 2004.
