Saving Face in the Washington-Insider Pissing Match
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Foreign policy is no longer about how America should react to events in the world. It has become a matter of ‘branding,’ a chance to hang a presidential catch-phrase on history and put the opposition party in a semantic box. “You’re either with us or against us” is so mindless a statement when made by the planet’s only remaining super-power, it’s hardly a surprise it brought down two hundred and fifty years of international reputation.
Terrifying the world is not the same as having a defined foreign policy, but it worked elegantly against any shred of moral opposition within Congress that might have saved us from the disaster of George Bush’s Middle East ‘policy.’ The world wasn’t the only entity terrified by terrorists and 9-11 rhetoric. The Democratic Congress curled into an eight-year fetal position, unable to raise a single objection for fear of being seen ‘weak’ on terror. Gotcha-politics raised to a new and unprecedented level.
(WashingtonPost, Kennan Had a Vision, by Derek Cho…