Wake Up

Last week Billmon over at Whiskey Bar posted an excellent piece that confronts whether or not the invasion of Iraq is a mistake that will haunt us a lot longer than we might think.

But after listening to the various conference speakers — academic scholars, mostly, with a smattering of defense analysts — I’m starting to suspect the worst effects of the PNAC agenda can no longer be avoided, at least not without a fairly sweeping revolution in American politics, too sweeping to be credible.

I think the invasion of Iraq may go down in history as one of those decisions — like Germany’s decision to back Austro-Hungary’s ultimatum to the Serbs, or the U.S. decision to cut off oil shipments to Japan until it withdrew from China — that have consequences extending far beyond what the makers of those decisions ever expected. The neocons, who have been failing upward for the past three decades, may have finally created a mess too big to be cleaned up.

Billmon talks about both what’s gone wrong, what is likely to go wrong in the future, and just how hard it will be to fix things when Kerry isn’t likely to make the dramatic changes in foreign policy that would be needed to keep things from sliding even further down the hole. It’s very much worth a read.

[via Electrolite]