Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Foreign Policy Revised
After a while, I get tired of seeing the president surround himself with ass-licking sycophants and lunatics. Today we have a small addition to this sad tradition: Amir Teheri, the fabricator beind the yellow stripe story, was invited to the White House for a face-to-face with Preznit Drinky with a small group of “experts,” which, these days, translates as “known liars.”
What’s next, an Iranian National Congress feeding manure right into the Pentagon pipeline? I wonder if the CIA has labeled Teheri as a fabricator, and if so, if the president will ignore that evaluation as well and then claim the CIA mislead him.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has published its quarterly report showing an increase in the amount of violence in Iraq. We are at an average of 600 attacks per week in Iraq right now. Iraq’s electrical and water grids are still at or below pre-war levels. This is after three years, 2,500 American lives, and $320 billion spent, which is more money in inflation-adjusted dollars than the United States spent to help rebuild all of Western Europe under the Marshall Plan.
This, of course, after this administration sold the war on WMDs that were never there. After this administration said the war would cost way less than $300 billion, way less than $200 billion, and that Iraq might even be able to pay for its own construction.
By the way, Afghanistan has devolved into chaos.
If this is what a successful foreign policy looks like to you than you are simply a lunatic. Drinky has been reduced to drawing comparisons between himself and Truman, vainly hoping that the future will suddenly, magically, start looking better and that he will be proclaimed a genius…even though his administration had no idea there were no WMDs…even though they clearly had no idea of the price and length of the involvement…even though they let Afghanistan degenerate into chaos, with Karzai’s government controlling little beyond Kabul.
No, the only thing that will save this foreign policy now is dumb-assed luck.
David Sirota has a great piece about the definition of “centrism” over at the Huffington Post. The article is a distillation of his book he’s recently published. As an aside, Noam Chomsky has been saying for years what Sirota’s now saying. It is good that the message is being repeated, anyway.
Speaking of Chomsky, I overheard Attention Deficit this morning ridiculing him for archly observing that the United States harbors terrorists. She dismissed this a ridiculous. Perhaps she should brush up on some modern US history regarding Orlando Bosch.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 3:59 PM 
