We Now Live in a More Dangerous World

Where have these guys been? This Administrations foreign policy has been an unmitigated disaster since shortly after Bush came to office. Ideology rather than hard intelligence has driven this president. The end result is we are much worse off than before he came to office, and have fewer resources to respond to the worldwide deterioration.
WaPo

"I am hard-pressed to think of any other moment in modern times where there have been so many challenges facing this country simultaneously," said Richard N. Haass, a former senior Bush administration official who heads the Council on Foreign Relations. "The danger is that Mr. Bush will hand over a White House to a successor that will face a far messier world, with far fewer resources left to cope with it."


[...]former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright [...] said yesterday that the United States now faces the "perfect storm" in foreign policy. "The U.S. is not as unilateral as it is uni-dimensional," she said in an interview. "We have not been paying attention to a lot of these issues. . . . Afghanistan is out of control because not enough attention was paid to it."

The Bush Administration seems unable to think systemically, or at least does so in a rather unsophisticated way. Clearly they saw the "symbol" that was the US Iraqi invasion would intimidate our enemies into backing off. Any good chess player knows potent positions of your weapons is much more powerful than using them. Once you use your offense, you tell everyone what your military hand is and people can plan appropriate counter measures. All of our enemies have done just that. Now worldwide, the US looks like a paper tiger who is bogged down in Iraq and impotent to influence world events, and our enemies are full speed ahead to prove the point.

"North Korea is firing missiles. Iran is going nuclear. Somalia is controlled by radical Islamists. Iraq isn't getting better, and Afghanistan is getting worse," said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and a leading conservative commentator. "I give the president a lot of credit for hanging tough on Iraq. But I am worried that it has made them too passive in confronting the other threats."


Senior administration officials said the United States is in a much stronger diplomatic position than it has been in the past in dealing with adversaries such as North Korea and Iran. On both fronts, the administration has engaged in much more aggressive multilateral diplomacy than it did in Bush's first term, and that effort could still bear fruit, they said. Hadley predicted the results of aggressive diplomacy would be seen in the next few days with a strong condemnation of North Korea at the United Nations. "We saw this coming. We worked the diplomacy," he said. "North Korea went ahead, and in so doing didn't defy [only] us but defied the entire international community."

These guys are in denial big time. Since when do you sacrifice military advantage for diplomatic advantage? How can we possibly be perceived as stronger as a nation when we've already played our military option and failed? It sure feels good to stretch those muscles to make war after all those years of frustrating diplomacy, right? It has to be a good thing, right?