One Shambles After Another

The Dubai Ports contract looks like being another major Bush administration stuff-up: read Georgia10 at Kos for background then the New York Times for reaction.

And while you are at the NYT, former neo-con Francis Fukuyama has a new piece, After Neoconservatism:

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly... There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.

The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles...

Lest you get too excited by all that, Fukuyama reminds us all that he is still a true believer in the neo-con vision:

Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them...

So the vision of a US Global Empire is fine, it's just a little fine-tuning that is required.

Fukuyama should really be hiding under a rock these days. Instead he gets paid to write six-page articles for the Times. Go figure...

I am tempted to say "F$%& You, Mr Fukuyama!" but that would be crass and vulgar.

What the USA needs to understand is that the rest of the world is made up of REAL PEOPLE!!! We have hopes and dreams and feelings just like you! Stop trying to conquer us or control us or blow us up, and just sit down and TALK TO US!!!