Semi-Daily Journal Archive

The Blogspot archive of the weblog of J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics and Chair of the PEIS major at U.C. Berkeley, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Danger: Godwin's Law Violation in Progress!

Newsweek's Michael Hirsh compares Bush's strategic judgment to Hitler's:

Hirsh: Bush's Poor Leadership in Terror War: Again, lest I'm accused of being partisan (I'm really just a reporter, and a very disappointed hawk), I would just refer you to the rebellion within Bush's own party.... We did not have a clash of civilizations four years ago, but we're getting closer to one now. As violent anti-Western protests sweep the Islamic world, and what remains of the moderate Muslim community is cowed into silence, how unbearably sad it is to cast one 's mind back to the eve of 9/11.... No one had much use for Al Qaeda, even in the Islamic world. Global polls like those taken by Pew and the German Marshall Fund showed a remarkable degree of global consensus in favor of a one-superpower (in other words, American-dominated) world. The silver lining of 9/11 was a chance to reaffirm the legitimacy of America's role as trusted overseer of the international system.... How then did we arrive at this day, with anti-American Islamist governments rising in the Mideast, bin Laden sneering at us, Qaeda lieutenants escaping from prison, Iran brazenly enriching uranium, and America as hated and mistrusted as it ever has been? The answer, in a word, is incompetence. We now have testimony from enough Republicans and Bush loyalists—-from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill to former CIA senior director Paul Pillar--that the administration knew all along how flimsy its WMD case against Iraq was. We also now know, from Berntsen and others, that the administration knew then how solid the intel on bin Laden's and Zawahiri's whereabouts was. So catastrophic was Bush's decision to shift his attention and resources to Iraq, when bin Laden was panting at Tora Bora, that one is tempted to rank it with Adolf Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941, at a time when Great Britain was prostrate and America was still out of the war (a decision that almost certainly cost Hitler the war then and there)....

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