A "Yerpan" View of Preznit

Today’s edition of the International Herald Tribune has an op-ed piece by William Pfaff that is well worth the read. It’s called “If Bush ruled the world” and has these salient comments on preznit [emphasis added]:

• “Intellectual poverty is the most striking quality of the Bush administration’s new National Security Strategy statement…”


• “The statement's only visible purpose is to address a further threat to Iran, as its predecessor, in 2002, threatened Iraq. The only actual "strategy" that can be deduced from it is that the Bush administration wishes to rule the world. The document is nonsensical in content, insulting to other nations and unachievable in declared intention.”


• The document's foreign readers will have two reactions. The first will be that it can't be serious. The second will be that it has to be taken seriously since these people have spent three ruinous years in a futile effort to control Iraq; they must be assumed capable of doing the same thing again to Iran.


• “… the effort in Iraq has been worth it because now "tyrants know that they pursue weapons of mass destruction at their own peril." (One has also learned that those who pursue nonexistent weapons of mass destruction also do so at their peril.)”

All in all, the piece is a pretty damning indictment of preznit’s so-called “foreign policy”, especially coming from a newspaper that is widely regarded in “Yerp” as an authentic voice of America.

Full disclosure statement: I have a warm spot for the Trib, as my father worked there before the “domestic” edition folded in the newspaper strike in the 60’s. The IHT had been a joint effort of the NY Times and the Washington Post, before the Times bought out the whole thing.