The Moose wonders who is more incompetent - Donald Rumsfeld or Ashlee Simpson?
Well, at least Ms. Simpson has had to own up to her mistake. Rumsfeld, on the other hand, is another matter. The Moose's feelings were summed up by these words in today's New York Times editorial, "President Bush's misbegotten invasion of Iraq appears to have achieved what Saddam Hussein did not: putting dangerous weapons in the hands of terrorists and creating an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq."
It is high time for smart conservatives, (even my brethren neo-cons) to recognize that the manner in which this Administration has conducted this war has been devastating to future efforts to employ force to defend American interests and values. The Bush Administration has handed isolationists on the right and the left a major victory.
The Moose does not share many lefties' fanatical distaste for the neo-cons. Many in their ranks are idealistic supporters of liberal ideals when it comes to humanitarian interventions. For instance, most neo-cons stood with the Clinton Administration in the Kosovo conflict when others on the right trashed the Democratic President.
However, the Bush's Administration's mishandling of this conflict makes it far less likely that the U.S. will intervene in the future. Dafur is a case in point. Paradoxically, a President Kerry may be more able to use military force than a re-elected President Bush, because he will have more credibility with the international community and the American people than the current incumbent.
The New Yorker editorial endorsing Kerry makes the key point for neo-cons -
"But a sad and ironic consequence of this war is that its fumbling prosecution has undermined its only even arguably meritorious rationale - and, as a further consequence, the salience of idealism in American foreign policy has been likewise undermined. Foreign-policy idealism has taken many forms - Wilson's aborted world federalism, Carter's human-rights jawboning, and Reagan's flirtation with total nuclear disarmament, among others. The failed armed intervention in Somalia and the successful ones in the Balkans are other examples. The neoconservative version ascendant in the Bush Administration, post-9/11, draws partly on these strains. There is surely idealistic purpose in envisioning a Middle East finally relieved of its autocracies and dictatorships. Yet this Administration's adventure in Iraq is so gravely flawed and its credibility so badly damaged that in the future, faced with yet another moral dilemma abroad, it can be expected to retreat, a victim of its own Iraq Syndrome."
Neo-cons for Kerry - it may be the decisive electoral factor that everyone is overlooking!
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