Cornered in square one

[bemildred]

Trying to go back to the beginning in foreign policy, the Bush administration has hit a dead end.

After years of proclaiming that it understood international politics better than its predecessors, the Bush administration is now trying to undo the damage its first seven years have wrought -- trying, in effect, to take U.S. foreign policy back to where it was before President Bush was sworn in.

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In 2001, the administration declared a revolution in the practice and substance of U.S. foreign policy. It ridiculed liberal internationalist ideals of multilateral cooperation. It opposed using U.S. military power dressed up as "nation-building." It wrote off global warming as Al Gore's obsession, and it said it wouldn't get bogged down, as its predecessors had, in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

Then after 9/11, the administration went even further, developing a radical new doctrine for the preemptive use of military force. The war on terrorism became its defining issue -- indeed its supreme purpose superseding all else, strategically as well as morally.

Today, the world looks very different. And in trying to reverse the damage done during its first seven years -- including an overstretched military and a loss of global prestige and influence -- the administration, ironically, has quietly adopted many of the policies it once scorned.

You mean there are no do-overs?

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-weber13jan13,0,2830703.story?coll=la-opinion-center

[baldguy]

1. It'll take the next 100 yrs to undo the damage the Brush Regime has wrought,

[bemildred]

2. Consider 1907.

By 2107 the world as we know it now will be unrecognizable. And there is no going back, no matter how much the fundies and the reactionaries want to. But we could at least try to work with change instead of trying to dam it up so it sweeps us away ...