You Said It, Madeleine

Madeleine Albright could have stopped with the headline of her foreign policy piece in the LA Times: Good versus evil isn’t a strategy. It doesn’t get any plainer than that.

But she didn’t.

[T]he administration must stop playing solitaire while Middle East and Persian Gulf leaders play poker. Bush's "march of freedom" is not the big story in the Muslim world, where Shiite Muslims suddenly have more power than they have had in 1,000 years; it is not the big story in Lebanon, where Iran is filling the vacuum left by Syria; it is not the story among Palestinians, who voted — in Western eyes — freely, and wrongly; it is not even the big story in Iraq, where the top three factions in the recent elections were all supported by decidedly undemocratic militias.

The whole thing’s worth a read, but please be duly warned that you may be left a sobbing mess at the memory of a time when we had an intelligent and thoughtful Secretary of State working in allegiance with a president who knew where Iran was without looking at a map, as opposed to the presidouche we’ve got now who needs a map to find his own asshole, in spite of the fact his head is eternally firmly planted in it.