NOT JUST INCOMPETENCE….Michael Hirsh has a decent rundown in Newsweek today of how badly George Bush and his team have botched the war on terror, although I’d take minor issue with this:
How then did we arrive at this day, with anti-American Islamist governments rising in the Mideast, bin Laden sneering at us, Qaeda lieutenants escaping from prison, Iran brazenly enriching uranium, and America as hated and mistrusted as it ever has been? The answer, in a word, is incompetence.
Yes, there’s been incompetence to spare, but there’s also been considered policy at work, policy that deliberately marginalized our allies, tackled fake threats at the expense of real ones, made preemptive war our default preference, and criminally misjudged the actual nature of the conflict we’re in. Even if it had been executed well, it still would have been disastrous.
But sure: incompetent too. The damage that George Bush has done to the United States is going to be with us for a very long time.
