It's too delicious. Today there's more from Daily Kos on the embarassment of what passes for the American government. He's done his homework, citing the reaction of several sources around the world to the administration's call this week for other nations to contribute money and blood to its own disaster in Iraq.

First, here's part of his own excerpt from a Guardian guest piece by Richard Perle which appeared the day after the "war" began:

Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony, he will take the UN down with him. Well, not the whole UN. The "good works" part will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions [...]

In other words, the rest of the world is to send its troops to get killed so that a U.S. president it fears and despises can take the credit for an invasion it bitterly opposed.

The rest of the world may be crazy, but it ain't stupid.

But there is no agreement about an alternative to the current U.S. involvement in Iraq, and in fact I haven't seen any real alternatives proposed. Like so much else wrought in domestic and foreign policy by this stolen White House, the move was so unprecedented, the violence done was so great, resolution cannot be accomplished simply through interdiction.

We may never recover ourselves. How can we expect Iraq to do so?