May 24, 2004

A Bleak Mood

President Bush is hearing increasingly bleak warnings that the U.S. occupation of Iraq is heading for failure -- from Republican and Democratic members of Congress, current and former officials and even some military officers still on active duty. Iraq Setbacks Change Mood in Washington [LATimes.com]. So what is Dubya going to say tonight? If it's just the same old "stay the course," one's got to wonder who is steering the ship of state in the US these days.

Even more ominously, this same L.A. Times article reports that Republicans themselves are rapidly becoming the most pessimistic, charging that the "neocons" have led the party astray with expansive foreign ambitions.

"We need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts, a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy, by force if necessary," Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the conservative chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a speech. "Liberty cannot be laid down like so much Astroturf. Law and order must come first."

Nice phrase -- "global social engineering." Illustrates how, without its now-defunct WMD and terrorism rationales, this Administration's only remaining justification for the War in Iraq is far more to the left, and cleary way more liberal, than anything Clinton or his Democtratic predecessors ever did.

 Posted by glenn

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