Meanwhile, in that other Paradise

The sad truth is that the Administration's foreign policy has run aground on the shoals of its own incompetence.
-Josh Marshall

From Times-On-Line:

AFGHANISTAN was supposed to be the success story. Two months of precision bombing by American B52s — in revenge for the Taliban’s refusal to throw out Al-Qaeda after the terrorist attacks in America on September 11, 2001 — soon had the Taliban fleeing over the border into Pakistan...

...By August 2002 Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, was describing events in Afghanistan as “a breathtaking accomplishment”. He pointed to Afghanistan as “a successful model for what could happen to Iraq if individuals were liberated, allowed to vote freely and to work”...

...Far from Afghanistan being a model for Iraq, Iraq has become a model for Afghanistan. There have been 41 Afghan suicide bombings in the past nine months, compared with five in the preceding five years. IEDs — improvised explosive devices — have become a fact of life. Three were left in roadside handcarts in Kabul last week to detonate as buses went past.

According to United Nations officials, not a day passes without a school being burnt down or a teacher being murdered, often in front of schoolchildren.

If there is one factor most responsible for the Taliban resurgence it is the war in Iraq, which distracted the attention of London and Washington at a critical time. While US marines were toppling statues of Saddam Hussein and then finding themselves fighting a bloody insurgency, the Taliban regrouped and retrained in Pakistan.

As Marshall and Kevin Drum point out, all of this comes at a time when the media is starting to report that the Bush Administration has, in essense, decided to try this approach to foreign policy, "hey, let's stop being douchebags", as if they were even competent enough to have even that as a policy.

This is the first post-World War II Administration that has managed to combine gross incompetency and strategic insanity (and yes, I'm including the Johnson Administration - whose error was the culmination of a sound containment strategy taken too far). They managed to exploit the tragedy of 9/11, of which they managed to contribute, and turned it into a tool for making one gross strategic AND tactical failure after another.

From the time they outsourced at Tora Bora in the Fall of 2001 to the present it has been an unremitting deluge of error -- always projected onto it's nominal victims (Democrats) or its real ones (Afghanis, Iraqis, and American Soldiers) -- as well as those of the future -- the nation as a whole.

It is time for the constant talk of success being imminent to be realized for what it is, as large a lie as has been perpetrated on the American public since the three-fifths clause.

This weekend, Bush's father was in Virginia taking part in a minor ceremony as part of the construction of an Aircraft Carrier which will bear his name. There are more Aircraft Carriers coming down the pike -- and if the GOP continues to steal tacit victory from the jaws of what should be permanent political defeat, eventually they will continue to ignore Democratic Chief Executives and name a carrier after the Chimp-in-Chief, or even worse after Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. The "Pacemaker" as the Cheney (USS-79) will eventually be called will the the mystery ship of the Navy as it will always be in an undisclosed locale and a secret port.

But I digress, recently, the Navy sank a decommissioned American Carrier, the USS America*, and in a true metaphor for our times...



I hereby re-designate that ship the USS George W. Bush.




*Thanks to Mudge for reminding me I forgot to put the name of the ship in, thus leaving my metaphor snark without much of a punch.