Heartbreaker
As an overview of everything that has gone wrong with the Bush
administration's Iraq venture, Peter Galbraith's New York Review of Books
piece -- "How to Get Out of
Iraq" -- makes for a captivating read: dispassionate and clear,
informed by personal experience but not visibly settling quarrels, it's a
sobering and saddening account of all the lost opportunities and botched
enterprises that are now coming home to roost for us in Iraq. All
Americans, those who supported and those who opposed Bush's "war of
choice," are now stuck with a losing hand. Throwing Bush out of office in
November might help reboot some of the processes his administration has
trashed, like our foundering international alliances; but it can't turn the
clock back in Iraq, where, as Galbraith outlines, we have set the stage for
a disastrous civil war.
Meanwhile, bizarrely and appallingly, the president keeps gleefully
throwing away what few cards we have left. Arabs don't trust us? Hey, it's
the perfect time to tell Israel that those West Bank settlements are okay,
after all, never mind what our diplomatic position has been all these decades!
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