Maureen Dowd: Poppy's progeny still in his adolescent rebellion period

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

WASHINGTON -- I wasn't sure how to ask John Kerry, so I just blurted it out: "Is there anything we need to know about your relationship with your father?"

I didn't think the country could take another vertiginous ride on the Oedipal tilt-a-whirl. It's hard not to see the Bush unilateral foreign policy -- blowing off allies and the United Nations to rewrite the ending of a gulf war his father felt had ended appropriately -- as the ultimate act of adolescent rebellion.

"I know what you're saying," Kerry murmured.

The globe got whipsawed by a father-son relationship so twisty and rife with undercurrents that we're still not sure if W. was trying to avenge his father with Saddam or upend his dad's legacy in Iraq -- or both. Or was he just following the gloomy, brass-knuckled lead of his surrogate father, Dick Cheney?

Little Bush cited big Bush as a rationale for war in Iraq, referring to Saddam as "the guy that tried to kill my dad at one time." Now Bush's ex-counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, has said that the war in Iraq "greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

-more-

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/166837_dowd30.html

[meow2u3]

1. So much for the grownups being in charge

eom

[donhakman]

2. A gift for daddy?

I don't know if Bush followed the lead by his Daddy's chosen cabinet to make Iraq the #1 priority or if he even tried to resist it and got beat up and blamed the bruise on a pretzel.


In my opinion the US is operating like a half wit by abandoning soft power and using only hard power that alienates countries and forments hatred.


A country can not function without both hard and soft power.

If I try to point to a success in creating a Democracy in any of the countries that the US used hard power of regieme change, guns and bombs in Latin America there may not be a single one except Mexico and that is very debatable and complex.

The fledgling democracy that is trying to grow in Russia was achieved with a combination of hard and soft power.

The current Iraq formula is indeed a script of abject failure.

Guns are required for extremists like bin Laden and the Arab Brotherhood but the vast moderate population who could welcome democracy are alienated without any use of soft power to gain even a modicum of respect for the US at this point.

The staunch hard line of 'America right or wrong', 'kill em all and let god sort them out' , 'the end justifies the means' and 'principles are fine but are usless if you lose' are all a formula of failure for all concerned.

Heart and mind together, hard and soft power together can plant seeds of democracy.
Hard power alone plants weeds of hatred.
Soft power alone plants feeble seeds open to infection.

It takes both...

and Bush has neither a high functioning heart or mind.

DH