Glenn Greenwald had an interesting analysis of Barack Obama's promise of bringing a new leadership to Washington, but so far it's just talk. And here's what Obama has said:
There are those who offer up easy answers. They will assert that Iraq is George Bush's war, it's all his fault. Or that Iraq was botched by the arrogance and incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Or that we would have gotten Iraq right if we went in with more troops, or if we had a different proconsul instead of Paul Bremer, or if only there were a stronger Iraqi Prime Minister.These are the easy answers. And like most easy answers, they are partially true. But they don't tell the whole truth, because they overlook a harder and more fundamental truth. The hard truth is that the war in Iraq is not about a catalog of many mistakes -- it is about one big mistake. The war in Iraq should never have been fought. . . .
[T]he American people weren't just failed by a President -- they were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. And most of all by the majority of a Congress -- a coequal branch of government -- that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day.
I appreciate Obama outside stance, but I wonder if it is possible to operate outside the prevailing model of politics that brought Bill Clinton to the middle the last time a deomcrat was in power. Greenwald aslo finds a prescient quote from Adam Smith that appropriatley describes the Beltway Establishment today:
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.
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