Bush Claims Foreign Policy Successes

Think Progress has two posts demonstrating the strange universe of George W. Bush. Here's the first:

This morning on the Today Show, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow argued that “nobody has been more diplomatically active than we have” in the Middle East, citing all the phone calls White House officials have made in recent days....

As Amanda of Think Progress points out, real diplomacy requires more than a few superficial phone calls. The current White House pales in comparison to administrations of the last 35 years who have paid far more attention to diplomacy in the Middle East.

Here's the other post from Think Progress:

The White House released a fact sheet yesterday entitled, “Setting the Record Straight: President Bush’s Foreign Policy Is Succeeding.” The sheet declares not once but four times that the administration “is rallying the world behind its policy,” and claims that “a consensus is building behind the President’s foreign policy approach.”

A lot of this of course is not even spin by the White House but simply stubborn propaganda that flies in the face of reality three and a half months before midterm elections. The Bush bubble, however, is alive and well as Ken Silverstein of Harper's reports (hat tip to Laura Rozen of War & Piece who's blog has been a terrific source of information during the latest crisis in the Middle East):

I reported in May that despite the deteriorating situation in Iraq, no National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has been produced on that country since the summer of 2004. The last NIE, a classified document that the CIA describes as “the most authoritative written judgment concerning a national security issue,” was rejected by the Bush Administration (after being leaked to the New York Times) as being too negative, though its grim assessment subsequently proved to be highly accurate.

Regular readers can pass on this, but here's a thought or two for new readers. It's bad enough that there's a potential Bush's incompetence and recklessness could drag us into a third war, possibly with Iran. There's also a potential Bush could drag us into a far larger and more deadly multinational war with no plan or rationale to justify it. This is a good time to remind everyone that the economic and military power of the United States is not unlimited. There's no doubt we can knock countries like Iran and Syria back into the stone age, but further war on a massive scale could easily do enormous damage to our own economy and future.