"..The shameless fools whose Iraq folly empowered Iran's hard-liners are back, smearing Obama as an appeaser ...Neocon stalwart Danielle Pletka also made a not-so-subtle attempt to use the turmoil in Iran to justify Bush's invasion of Iraq.... , she and fellow American Enterprise Institute pundit Ali Alfoneh wrote, "Encircled by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, besieged from within by disgruntled citizens, the supreme leader has turned to a bellicose strongman to preserve the system that elevated him." Earth to Pletka: George W. Bush is not president anymore, and even if he still was, the U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are not going to attack Iran. It would be more accurate to say that the soon-to-depart U.S. troops in Iraq are encircled by Iranian forces than the other way around.The nadir of neocon idiocy, however, may be a piece by Robert Kagan that appeared in Wednesday's Washington Post. Titled "Obama, Siding With the Regime," it argues that because Obama wants to begin negotiations with Iran as soon as possible and does not want to appear "hostile to the regime," his "goal must be to deflate the opposition, not to encourage it." In other words, Kagan is saying that Obama would prefer to rush into a deal with a repressive, anti-Western Iranian regime than do what he is in fact doing, which is to recognize that U.S. meddling is counterproductive and wait and see what government emerges from Iran's current turmoil. That Kagan adduces no evidence for his bizarre assertion is hardly surprising, because there is none. Kagan's real purpose is to smear Obama as a craven appeaser, and the only way he can do that is to paint a ludicrously crude caricature of Obama and the foreign-policy realism he has embraced...."
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