Nicho0las Kristoph writes an amusing column on the hypothesis that Dick Cheney is actually a mole in the service of Iran. He argues almost persuasively.

Then he says "Even at home, Iran's leaders have been bolstered by President Bush and Mr. Cheney. Iran's hard-liners are hugely unpopular and the regime is wobbly, but Bush administration policies have inflamed Iranian nationalism and given cover to the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Why focus on Dick Cheney rather than his boss? Partly because Mr. Cheney, even more than Mr. Bush, has systematically pushed an extreme agenda that has transparently served Iranian purposes. And domestically, his role in the Scooter Libby scandal — and his disgraceful refusal to explain just what he was doing at the crime scene — ended up paralyzing executive decision-making and humiliating our government.

Is that really just one more coincidence? Or could it be another case of Mr. Cheney's following instructions from his Iranian bosses to damage America?

O.K., O.K. Of course, all this is absurd. Mr. Cheney isn't an Iranian mole. Nor is he a North Korean mole, though his we-don't-negotiate-with-evil policy toward North Korea has resulted in that country's quadrupling its nuclear arsenal. It's also unlikely that he is an Al Qaeda mole, even though Al Qaeda now has an important new base of support in Iraq.

Like Kennedy and Johnson wading into Vietnam, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney harmed American interests not out of malice but out of ineptitude. I concede that they honestly wanted the best for America, but we still ended up getting the worst.

So what are the lessons from this episode?

Our national interests are as vulnerable to incompetence as to malicious damage. So we must identify and abandon the policies that backfired so catastrophically. The common threads of those damaging policies are clear: a refusal to negotiate with "evil"; an aggressive willingness to use military force to solve problems; contempt for our allies; and the bending of legal and moral principles to allow indefinite detention and even torture, particularly for anyone with olive skin and a Muslim name.

Whenever we've suspected a mole in our midst, we've gone to extreme lengths to find the traitor. This time, betrayed not by a mole but by failed policies, let's be just as resolute. It's time to uproot policies that in the last half-dozen years have damaged American interests incomparably more than any mole or foreign spy ever has in the last 200 years. ".


I think he's right. We have been harboring the mole of stupidity about human nature, the mole of indifference to genuuine workiable principles, the mole of apathetic callousness.

A