We have all known for quite some time that THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES, even though most Repugs continue to maintain the delusion that the President is a fully clothed emperor. They are in particular admiration of his elaborate foreign policy costume. It's clear to more and more of us Americans that Bush is incompetent, as well as dangerous. With regard to his so called anti-terrorism policies, it is becoming clearer and clearer that Bush is actually causing terrorism to increase globally. Worse, still, Bush is steering us recklessly into an international crisis, to such an extent that even long-term Republican expert strategists, such as Brent Scowcroft and Richard Armitage, are alarmed at the dangerous situation that Bush and Chaney and Rice and the neoconservatives have gotten us into. Oddly, though, many right-wingers criticize Bush regime and Israel for not being aggressive enough!
LINK:
http://www.tompaine.com/...
EXCERPT:
"New Middle East" Out of Control
By Jim Lobe
TomPaine.com
Friday 11 August 2006
"Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergency," noted Washington's former U.N. Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, in an uncharacteristically alarming column in Thursday's Washington Post.
The column's title, "The Guns of August", was a reference to a book about the diplomatic follies and indecisive battles that launched Europe into a devastating world war in 1914.
"A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay," Holbrooke warned. "...The combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history's only nuclear superpower confrontation."
Among other things, noted Holbrooke, a top candidate for secretary of state if Democrats had won the presidency in 2000 or 2004, Turkey is threatening to invade northern Iraq; the world's largest anti-Israel demonstrations are taking place in downtown Baghdad; Syria may yet be pulled into the Lebanon war; Afghanistan is under growing threat from a resurgent Taliban; and India is threatening about punitive action against Pakistan for its alleged involvement in the recent train bombings in Bombay.
Particularly alarming to Holbrooke, as to a steadily growing number of Republican realists and other members of the traditional U.S. foreign policy elite, is the apparent complacency of the Bush administration in the face of these events.
Indeed, since the outbreak of the Lebanon crisis four weeks ago, a succession of former top Republican policy-makers-including Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to former presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush; the younger Bush's former deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage; and Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass-has called publicly for a major reassessment of U.S. Middle East policy and its conduct of the "global war on terror."