GPack on America's Foreign Policy Pathologies

An excellent piece -- read the whole thing:

"[T]he crisis in Iran has flushed out all the pathologies of American foreign-policy thinking, or feeling, in the post-Bush era. It's become weirdly difficult for commentators on both the right and the left to have anything close to a normal reaction to what the world is seeing. Instead, everything gets filtered through what you think about Bush, Iraq, Obama, Israel, and other subjects that have extremely tenuous connections to internal politics in Iran and the actions of the people and the state there. On the one hand, certain neoconservatives and hard-line defenders of Israel (Max Boot, Daniel Pipes) have sounded not in the least sorry about Ahmadinejad's corrupt re-election, or even come right out and welcomed it, demonstrating that neoconservatism is an offshoot of Leninism in its preference for the morally bankrupt position of "the worse, the better." (Credit where it's due: Bill Kristol's view on the events in Iran is uncharacteristically restrained.) Martin Peretz so despises the Islamic world that he's convinced himself (going on nothing more than a "sense") that Iran, contrary to all the evidence, is overwhelmingly Ahmadinejad country.