A Nadir of U.S. Power

It's not exactly morning in America.

In Iraq, things get ever uglier, and the old remedy of extra troops now seems tragically futile. The Bush team has recently tried putting thousands of additional soldiers into Baghdad, and the result after two months is that violence there has increased.

Iraq is often seen as a special Rumsfeldian screw-up. But in Afghanistan, the Bush team quickly handed off to a model pro-Western leader backed by a broad NATO coalition. And what are the results there? The government is wobbling, warlords run drugs and the pro-al-Qaeda Taliban have 4,000 to 5,000 active fighters in the country.

It's not just military efforts that are faltering. Five years ago, President Bush launched an experiment in tough-talk diplomacy, warning foreign leaders that they must be with us or against us in the war on terrorism. At first this yielded at least one achievement: Pakistan sent troops for the first time into its wild border regions to root out Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. But that success has now gone into reverse. Pakistan recently withdrew its soldiers, in effect ceding the border territory to the radicals.

WaPo

Moving in that direction, but it will likely get far worse.

When you see Uncle Sam on the side of the road with a sign that says, "Will invade developing nations for food", then you know we're getting close to the "nadir of US power"...

There are always new depths to Bush--and I don't mean that as a compliment. When we are down to the level of drunken mud wrestling, then perhaps that will be the lowest we can go.