From some blogs coordinated by a website called the TPM Cafe, some reflections on our foreign policy...if that is what it is:

"Why We're in Iraq
By Ivo Daalder | bio
From: America Abroad
Secretary Rice traveled to Capitol Hill today to testify, for the first time ever, on the biggest foreign policy issue confronting our nation: Iraq. In her opening statement, Rice said this about our objectives:

We know our objectives. We and the Iraqi Government will succeed if together we can:
-- Break the back of the insurgency so that Iraqis can finish it off without large-scale military help from the United States.
-- Keep Iraq from becoming a safe haven from which Islamic extremists can terrorize the region or the world.
-- Demonstrate positive potential for democratic change and free expression in the Arab and Muslim worlds, even under the most difficult conditions.
-- And turn the corner financially and economically, so there is a sense of hope and a visible path toward self-reliance.

Now, read that again, and tell me if this is serious.


Oct 19, 2005 -- 01:07:20 PM EST

Let's remember, there was no insurgency in Iraq before we invaded the country and then totally bungled the aftermath. And there was little chance of Iraq becoming a safe haven for terrorists before we invaded the country and then totally bungled the aftermath. In other words, our first two objectives in Iraq are to undo the disaster our own actions and inactions created!
As for the remaining objectives, demonstrating the "positive potential for democratic change and free expression" is a very long cry from establishing a viable democracy in the heart of the Arab world, which a couple of years ago was declared the official aim of our continued involvement in Iraq. And "turning the corner financially and economically," though difficult, doesn't strike me as setting the bar terribly high.

Which leaves me with this thought: the limited nature of these objectives suggests that the administration may finally be realizing the extraordinary disaster we're in and is trying, desperately, to find a way to declare victory so we can get out."

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Anyone who HAS been in war knows that unless you are in desperate straits, you think your way out before you go in, but this little detail escaped not only The Amazing Rumsfeld and his bald-minded leader, but apparently those whose profession presumably qualified them to lead actual war machines in bloodshed.

The Big Question, of course, is whether there IS a "necessity" for war, and if so when and what it looks like?

It seems to me that claiming such a necessity, when one does not exist, is an immorality of the highest order. Denying such a necessity when it DOES exist is pusillanimous, to be sure; but the inverse is the rampant unleashing of deep psychosis. It requires a self-bound egotism of extraordinary force, so anchored to its fear-driven center as to rule out any objectivity, compassion, or desire to make things better. In fact it stems from an immediate ravening hunger to make things worse.

Thus, W.

A