Krugman: Gut Check Time

Similar to Patrick Cockburn's piece noted below, Paul Krugman's latest is a sobering reminder of what Team Bush wrought when they began their incessant temper tantrum for war:

There has been notably little U.S. coverage of the "Downing Street memo" - actually the minutes of a British prime minister's meeting on July 23, 2002, during which officials reported on talks with the Bush administration about Iraq. But the memo, which was leaked to The Times of London during the British election campaign, confirms what apologists for the war have always denied: the Bush administration cooked up a case for a war it wanted...

Krugman provides a handy link where you can read the memo in question.

Iraq was perceived as a soft target; a quick victory there, its domestic political advantages aside, could serve as a demonstration of American military might, one that would shock and awe the world.

But the Iraq war has, instead, demonstrated the limits of American power, and emboldened our potential enemies. Why should Kim Jong Il fear us, when we can't even secure the road from Baghdad to the airport?...

The people who sold us this war continue to insist that success is just around the corner, and that things would be fine if the media would just stop reporting bad news. But the administration has declared victory in Iraq at least four times. January's election, it seems, was yet another turning point that wasn't...

In effect, America has been taken hostage. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the terrible scenes that will surely unfold if we leave (even though terrible scenes are unfolding while we're there). Nobody wants to tell the grieving parents of American soldiers that their children died in vain. And nobody wants to be accused, by an administration always ready to impugn other people's patriotism, of stabbing the troops in the back.

But the American military isn't just bogged down in Iraq; it's deteriorating under the strain. We may already be in real danger: what threats, exactly, can we make against the North Koreans? That John Bolton will yell at them? And every year that the war goes on, our military gets weaker...

In other words, the people who got us into Iraq have done exactly what they falsely accused Bill Clinton of doing: they have stripped America of its capacity to respond to real threats.

The left has been accused of "blaming America first," which has always been a strawman argument--but it's even more so these days, because it's not "America" that's dragging this country down, but a bunch of whacked out, quasi-religious yahoos who no more represent the United States than Saddam Hussein represented Iraq. Given the utter lack of attention they paid to anyone advocating anything other than WAR NOW, the blame for the Iraqi tragedy can be placed squarely upon them. They--and the people who supported them--should pay the price politically. What they did was incredibly dumb--as dumb as Hitler's insistance on laying siege to Stalingrad.

We'll be paying for their mistakes for a long time...