Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld all reeked of self-confidence as they drove us off the cliff in Iraq. Obama, Kerry, and Hagel look like fools as they try to tempt us to splash through a mud hole in Syria, committing the unforgiveable sins of thinking out loud, something they’re clearly not very good at, and lying out loud as well, which, clearly, they’re not very good at either. Republicans have a right to laugh at the president’s incompetence.
One can hope, or perhaps wish—something that I’m pretty good at—that this whole farrago of folly will further dampen Washington’s continuing fascination with Middle East adventures. Starting wars for noble reasons, and to keep AIPAC off your ass, will perhaps start to lose its charm for the Washington establishment. Attitudes currently visible and viable only at the fringes will perhaps work their way inward, like a fungus in reserve. Well, one can hope.
Afterwords
What is the special charm that the Middle East holds? I think that, in the Washington imagination, it offers an arena to do “something big” that Washington itself does not. DC these days resembles the Western Front during WWI—every twist and turn of the battle lines so clearly defined and so well defended that the No Man’s Land between them stretches for miles. Obama would dearly love to “reform” entitlements and thus win the undying love of the Wall Street billionaires, which could last as long as two election cycles. But the Republicans won’t give it to him. The Tea Party folks won’t sign anything Obama will, and anyway, in their guts, they don’t want to cut back on Social Security and Medicare. It was, above all else, Obama’s decision to cut Medicare that created the Tea Party. Mitch McConnell and the Republican establishment won’t give Obama a deal because they want the Wall Street gang to know that if they want a deal, they have to elect a Republican president, not a Democratic one. As for the debt “crisis,” well, no one really gives a damn.
