The Middle-East Fairyland of GWB and Obama

Although we mentioned Obama earlier, we should not fail to mention GWB, evidently another dreamer.

What comes through most strongly from the Wikileaks documents...is that U.S. Middle East policy is premised on a web of self-justifying fictions that are flatly contradicted by the assessments of American diplomats and allies in the region. Starting with Bush's second term and continuing through the Obama Administration, Washington has ignored the strong and repeated pleas of its regional allies--from Jerusalem to Riyadh--to stop the Iranian nuclear program. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation in the documents is the extent to which both the Bush and Obama Administrations have concealed Iran's war against the United States and its allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states, even as those same allies have been candid in their diplomatic exchanges with us. U.S. servicemen and -women are being dispatched to combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan where they are fighting Iranian soldiers and assets in a regional war with the Islamic Republic that our officials dare not discuss, lest they have to do something about it. --Lee Smith, quoted in PowerLine

Someday, somebody's going to draw the parallel between "nation-building" and "community organizing." It ain't going to be pretty.