The Bush Doctrine, Explained.

Via Andrew Sullivan, my favorite cross-party intellectual, comes this example that explains at the level of even the meanest understanding why the policies of the Bush Administration, if not utterly repudiated in January, 2009 will result in disaster for the United States. The Logic of Cheney:

Reading the transcript from Limbaugh's show, one realizes what Cheney's vision of the future is: a Middle East permanently occupied by American forces, because any withdrawal anywhere means a victory for the terrorists everywhere. Money quote:

[The Democrats] seem to think that we can withdraw from Iraq and walk away from it. They ignore the lessons of the past. Remember what happened in Afghanistan. We'd been involved in Afghanistan in the eighties, supporting the Mujahideen against the Soviets and prevailed. We won. Everybody walked away, and in the nineties, Afghanistan became a safe haven for terrorists, an area for training camps where Al-Qaeda trained 20,000 terrorists in the late nineties, and the base from which they launched attacks on the United States on 9/11. So those are very real problems, and to advocate withdrawal from Iraq at this point, it seems to me, simply would play right into the hands of Al-Qaeda.

So what would be the feasible conditions for withdrawal? I see none. Even if we were to "win," as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Cheney sees that as a reason to stay. If there is any chance of "losing," we also have to stay. The same logic applies to Pakistan were Musharraf to fall. And Saudi Arabia if that autocracy were to collapse. If the criterion is now space for Islamist terrorists to return, then we don;t so much have mission creep as mission explosion. We're talking empire here - for ever. At least that's the logical conclusion of Cheney's control-fixation. And, of course, as these occupations create more terrorists, Cheney uses that as more reason to keep fighting. There is no end to this strategy - just permanent war, occupation and terror.

Andrew Sullivan, you understand is a conservative, in the traditional sense of the word, not a raving lunatic as in the modern usage.

I also cannot resist a link to this Msmooth takedown of the Neocon blogshpere's latest attempts to deny their way away from accountability for Iraq. Do keep in mind, that if you go and look at this, the original Redstate.com post that led to the derision below, that thes exact type of people make up the talent pool of future Republican administrations. These are their up-and-coming political and intellectual foot soldiers.

We seem to have discovered a new stage in the traditional Kübler-Ross process:

1. Denial: “The media doesn’t show the good news in Iraq.”

2. Anger: “The treasonous far-left-liberals and their media lapdogs are making us lose in Iraq.”

3. Bargaining: “If we send x-thousand more troops to Iraq, victory will be ours.”

4. Depression: “Did you catch 300 yet? [munch-munch-burp] God, it made me hate liberals even more. [channels flipping] They wouldn’t last a day in ancient Sparta.”

5. Advanced Literary Theory: “The hegemonic binary of ’success’ and ‘failure’ traumatizes the (re)interpretive possibilities of an ethos of jouissance regarding the War in Iraq.”

Not to be phallogocentric here or anything, but we have to go with the non-fancy everyday definition of ‘mistake,’ meaning when you try to do something, like for instance apply aftershave to your face while your date waits in the hallway, but perform an action which thwarts your desired ends, like for instance mixing up your bottle of aftershave with the bottle of bobcat urine you bought to keep the deer out of the herb garden.

Maybe somebody could be all like, “But nobody knew it was bobcat urine, so how is that a mistake? How was it obvious that there was ever a correct set of decisions to be made, if nobody reasonably considered the chance of covering themselves with bobcat urine?

Dude smells of cat pee. That’s all I’m saying.