To the Rescue!

I'm probably one of the last bloggers in the world to read this, but a student has to study sometime! Yesterday, Josh Marshall made an excellent point about the Bush administration's apparently fugal marginalization of its Allies, NATO in particular. In the process of making the point, it must be said, Marshall expresses some of the very same things I've been trying to say in several posts this week; fortunately for you, he's far more coherent than I, and writes in much shorter sentences -- though, he's certainly not as handsome, ruggedly speaking, of course, that is, if you're into the harried academic look of one who appears to have slept in the clothes he's wearing, Anyway, yes, if you haven't followed a word I've been trying to say lately, here goes:

This is foolish. We didn't know the French had strong tendencies toward geo-political weenie-ism? Of course, we did. Dealing with that fact is one of the jobs we hire our presidents to fulfill. If NATO goes down the drain, the fact that the French or the Belgians or the Germans were petulant won't make it any less of a loss for us. Perhaps getting UN approval for invading Iraq was never in the cards. But taking action in Iraq without forcing a NATO train wreck should not have been that hard. Their lameness, if that's what it is, doesn't change the fact that we've come to this moment because of this administration's arrogance and swaggering incompetence.

[. . .]

The president and his crew are acting like that not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is high school kid who's always running into reverses and always blaming it on someone else. At first you think he's getting a bad shake until you see the same thing happening over and over again. It's always someone else's fault. The South Koreans are lame. The Europeans are lame. Our Arab allies are lame. Everybody is lame. We're given excuse after excuse. But at the end of the day the result seems to be our historic alliances, if not in shambles, then at least thoroughly beat-up. After all, what profiteth a man if he gain regime change in Iraq, and yet lose the whole world order in the process?

There -- now aren't you happy he's around?