Stabbed in the back by reality

[Bgno64]

http://local.lancasteronline.com/4/24111

...It’s easy now to forget what the national mood was like shortly after Sept. 11. We were thoroughly and rightly spooked, and the country was susceptible to the idea that if future attacks were to be prevented, terrorism had to be eradicated at its root. The United States would not merely have to go after the individuals responsible for Sept. 11: We would have to change the entire culture of the Middle East.


Though it was never really discussed in these terms, the Iraq war was in fact one of the biggest social engineering projects ever undertaken by this country, or any country. And this from a political party that abhors social engineering when it takes the form of welfare or affirmative action. Conservatives have opposed such programs because they believe them to be based on wishful thinking. Yet the Iraq war was the same thing, writ large.


Some conservatives excused this utopianism by saying we had no choice. But of course we had choices; we simply weren’t given choices by an administration bent upon war. The country, at that time, was desperate for resolute leadership, and it was given to us. Unfortunately, those leaders took us down a path where, as the writer Josh Marshall noted last week, “Our guns and our money and ideas are no match for their history and their hate.”

...


The problem, though, is that the dreamers who got us into Iraq haven’t been chastened by their failure. Instead, they’re insisting that we once again rush in where the prudent fear to tread.


Responding to the explosion of violence in the Mideast last week, prominent neoconservatives advocated “seizing the moment.” Typical was Michael Ledeen, who wrote on the National Review Online that it is “time to go after the training camps in Syria and Iran."


Because surely everything will work out this time around, right?


Or maybe the blowback will be even worse.


“We must face the fact,” said John F. Kennedy in 1961, “that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient — that we are only six percent of the world’s population — that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind.”


Since Sept. 11, we have desperately wanted to believe otherwise. But believing does not make it so.


We have been strong, but we have not been smart. That’s got to change.


For if it doesn’t, the carnage in Iraq is only the beginning.

[OneBlueSky]

1. “We must face the fact,” said John F. Kennedy in 1961, . . .

“that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient — that we are only six percent of the world’s population — that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind.”

Since Sept. 11, we have desperately wanted to believe otherwise. But believing does not make it so.

We have been strong, but we have not been smart. That’s got to change.

For if it doesn’t, the carnage in Iraq is only the beginning.

- spot on . . .