Digby: Ethical Realism

Your Sunday night reading assignment, should you decide to accept it, is this article in The American prospect by Flynt Leverett, former member of the Bush administration, who quit in 2004.

His assessment is one of the most clear eyed views I've seen of the ramifications of the Bush Doctrine as it's been applied in the middle east. He calls for a return to "realism" which not so long ago was considered a dirty word by people like me. But I've learned a few things in the past few years --- there is something far worse than foreign policy realism and it's called neoconservatism in full effect, a lethally stupid combination of puerile Trotskyite idealism with a belief that brute force is the only path to democratic utopia. Combine that with epic ineptitude and you have the chaos that the Bush administration will bequeath to the next administration. And if a Republican succeeds him, the roots of neoconservatism are now deep enough in the party establishment that it will probably carry on for some time.