Mad Social Scientist

Bush launched the greatest foreign policy debacle since Vietnam, and more people in the elite are starting to admit it. But will the national mood shift against Bush? I think it might, especially if posts like this start to become conventional wisdom. Here's a quote from a private letter from WSJ reporter Farnaz Fassihi:

It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.

But read the whole post from TPM. To try to categorize the Bush approach to Iraq, I have to reach for Pangloss and even Brezhnev.