Radosh.net

"A year from now I'd be surprised if there's not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush" -- Richard Perle, just about exactly one year ago.

I've been hard on John Kerry's failure to stake out and hold a decent position on Iraq, thus fumbling what should have been his winning campaign issue. And I'm hardly the only one. Charles Krauthammer nailed him to the wall on this a few days ago. But it bears repeating that any insinuation that Bush's position on Iraq is the better one because it's more consistent is ludicrous. I know Americans prefer strong and wrong to weak and right, but on this point, Americans are freakin' idiots.

Let me make clear, since I angered some Kerry supporters with my last post, that any one of Kerry's Iraq positions (and the newest version is not bad) is far better than Bush's. Bush's refusal to even acknowledge that there's a problem -- in essence putting election politics ahead of national security -- is downright frightening.

Meanwhile, EJ Dionne mentions something I've been meaning to blog for a few days now: "In light of President Vladimir Putin's recent moves, it's not hard to imagine that my conservative friends would pose this question if a Democrat were in the White House: Who lost Russia?" Indeed. Iraq is not an anomoly. It's emblematic of this administration's disasterously haphazard foreign policy.

Finally, I'm not sure what to make of this, but there it is. Will Bush (or Kerry) declare victory and leave as soon as January? [Update: Josh Marshall, more savvy about such things than I, says plausibly that it's a trial balloon. A way for the Bush camp to test out an exit strategy for increasingly worried voters who want one without alienating voters who still believe the official "why exit when everything is so lovely here" line.]

Posted by Daniel Radosh

9:39 PM