See? We told you so...

Because our media has become so corrupted and a third of our population is mulishly stupid to the bone, we will probably have to wait for future historians to certify what is plain to anyone paying attention:

The Bush/Cheney foreign "policy" has been -- bar none -- the most dangerous,  malevolently dimwitted collection of myths, wishful thinking and disastrous strategic miscalculations ever seen in American history, perhaps even world history.

In fact, the closest parallel to the Bush administration's blundering around the world may be Herodotus' cautionary story of Croesus:

[...] Croesus, the fabulously wealthy king of Lydia, asked the Pythia [the Oracle at Delphi] whether he should cross the Halys River and attack the Persian king, Cyrus the Great. The Pythia's characteristically enigmatic reply was if Croesus should cross the Halys river, a great empire would fall. When heartened by this answer and he did attack Cyrus, it was he, Croesus, who was defeated.

The hallmarks of Bush's foreign policy -- like Croesus' -- are belief in magical outcomes, dubious supporting intelligence, the will to power with no limits, and a reliance on bellicosity to achieve unrealistic goals. We can add in overestimating one's own position, underestimating one's adversary and failing to heed the advice of those who know better. Most of all, Bush and Croesus heard only what they wanted to hear and then acted upon it.

We saw every one of these flaws in our vulnerability on 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the handling of the Katrina disaster, our diplomatic failures with Iran, our support for the foolish Israeli war on Lebanon. And now -- today -- we have a most ominous failure of wisdom and judgment with the reported detonation of a nuclear device by North Korea.

While experts are still trying to confirm that the seismic jolt was actually a nuclear detonation, it matters little if it was a failed test. A successful test will occur sooner or later if it hasn't yet, and probably sooner. Yes, after all the huffing and puffing about an "Axis of Evil," nothing was done. Bush/Cheney refused to talk, to negotiate, to deal with the North Koreans and thus, the problem.

Josh Marshall summed it all up:

For the US this is a strategic failure of the first order.

The origins of the failure are ones anyone familiar with the last six years in this country will readily recognize: chest-thumping followed by failure followed by cover-up and denial. The same story as Iraq. Even the same story as Foley. [...]

President Clinton eventually concluded a complicated and multipart agreement in which the North Koreans would suspend their production of plutonium in exchange for fuel oil, help building light water nuclear reactors (the kind that don't help making bombs) and a vague promise of diplomatic normalization.

President Bush came to office believing that Clinton's policy amounted to appeasement. Force and strength were the way to deal with North Korea, not a mix of force, diplomacy and aide. And with that premise, President Bush went about scuttling the 1994 agreement, using evidence that the North Koreans were pursuing uranium enrichment (another path to the bomb) as the final straw.

Remember the guiding policy of the early Bush years: Clinton did it=Bad, Bush=Not whatever Clinton did.

All diplomatic niceties aside, President Bush's idea was that the North Koreans would respond better to threats than Clinton's mix of carrots and sticks.

Then in the winter of 2002-3, as the US was preparing to invade Iraq, the North called Bush's bluff. And the president folded. Abjectly, utterly, even hilariously if the consequences weren't so grave and vast. [...]

The Bush-Cheney policy on North Korea was always what Fareed Zakaria once aptly called "a policy of cheap rhetoric and cheap shots." It failed. And after it failed President Bush couldn't come to grips with that failure and change course. He bounced irresolutely between the Powell and Cheney lines and basically ignored the whole problem hoping either that the problem would go away, that China would solve it for us and most of all that no one would notice.

What is not in doubt is that the world has become vastly more dangerous and complicated overnight. While Bush was fantasizing about Saddam handing WMD over to terrorists, he was ignoring the desperate and crazily defiant regime in North Korea that might very well be willing to sell nukes to the highest bidder.

Any time North Korea was mentioned by Bush or his spokesmen, they insinuated that a nuclear North Korea was as good as a fait accompli. This was, I'm sure, a calculated gambit to sow more fear and confusion here at home while at the same time confounding the Democrats and blaming Clinton for the situation.

And now that the worst has, it seems, come to pass, they'll be telling us, "See? We told you so! Clinton's failed policy of appeasement is to blame. We must get tough!"

So here we are. A glance at cable news is enough to see the lineup of Serious Men telling us that in their expert opinion, "Something Must Be Done." If that something looks like war, so much the better. One talking head solemnly declared that the NK regime must be shunned, punished, isolated, blah, blah, blah -- as if isolation didn't produce this impasse in the first place. All the chest-thumping is accompanied by animations of missiles flying eastward over the Pacific and being magically intercepted by our mighty missile defense technology. Hoo boy!

Somewhere in the ruins of Delphi, the Pythian ghosts are laughing...slightly hysterically.