I have to admit that I am just aghast at how President Bush and his team are so astonishingly mismanaging the entire Iraq situation. Today’s headline: U.S. Ends Effort for U.N. War Approval
And Declares Diplomatic Window Closed. But what about those of us that think the United Nations is a good idea, not some sort of global conspiracy to emasculate America?

And then there’s former president Bill Clinton’s remark on 60 Minutes that we as a nation need to begin thinking about what will happen when we’re not the biggest superpower. I agree, but Rush Limbaugh, pundit git at large, certainly doesn’t…

On Limbaugh’s radio program, he called Clinton a traitor for stating what is not only obvious, but what has been discussed in diplomatic and political circles for decades: the collapse of Russia doesn’t mean we’ll be #1 forever. It means that once China has their act together, they’ll probably sweep past us and be the dominant influence in world politics. They certainly have the numbers to do so. Doesn’t seem so radical to point that out, does it?

What most amazes me is that we’re going oh, so backwards in what can be pretty laughably called American “diplomatic efforts” to resolve the Iraqi situation without war. Indeed, why are we there in the first place? It seems to me that after 9/11 we as a nation had good reason to go after Al Queda (though I still haven’t seen unquestionable hard proof of the connection, but that’s another story, and, for what it’s worth, I am convinced that they were the perpetrators nonetheless), but when they proved slippery as an opponent (as the American Revolutionaries were to the British in the late 1700’s with our guerrilla approach versus the highly regimented organization of the British), we somehow ended up switching our focus to Saddam and his group of thugs in Iraq.

But what business do we have in Iraq? Isn’t one of the principal tenets of American justice “innocent until proven guilty”? Now it seems to be “look at us funny and we’ll send 200,000 troops to kick your nation back into the stone age”. It sucks, and I’m sorry to be part of it.

Even if Iraq has the so-called weapons of mass destruction – which they likely do have, along with every other nation in the world, hostile or friendly – and even if they hate our guts – which isn’t news – why are we pushing them into a corner, now, with our current aggression?

What’s most disturbing, in the end, is that we seem to be happily throwing away all the diplomatic efforts expended since World War II (if not before that) with a trigger-happy cowboy of a President who seems at least one can short of a six-pack, and it’s not only embarrassing, it’s scary. It’s irrevocably changing the face of global politics and multinational relationships, and I really believe that we’ll look back on this in a decade and realize just what a ghastly mistake our Iraqi efforts really was.

And that’s something our kids get to inherit. A world without the United Nations to help diffused international tension, a world where the EU has split up again and aggressions between England, France and Germany have resumed, a world where no-one trusts the United States and are eager to find a more stable, safer international partner. A world where we get to find, yet again, the violence doesn’t solve problems. It just begets violence.