She's learned nothing

Condi's remarks during her "SURPRISE!" visit to the US Embassy in Baghdad --

But this mission, bringing a stable and secure Iraq, is also essential for the security of the United States of America. Because on September 11th when those 19 men drove our own airplanes into the Pentagon and into the World Trade Center and would have driven it into the Capitol in Washington, we realized that we were no longer isolated from danger and terror, that the great oceans that had protected us for almost 200 years were no barrier to fear and destruction on our own territory, and we recognized at that point that we were going to have to come to the source of the problem, that we were going to have to go on the offense, that no matter how well we tried to defend America with port security and airport security, we couldn't play defense because the terrorists only have to be right once and we have to be right 100 percent of the time.

And that's an unfair fight, and therefore we decided we had to go on the offense. And that meant coming to the source of the problem here in the Middle East and trying nothing more grand than trying to actually bring about a different kind of Middle East. And a different kind of Iraq, an Iraq freed of Saddam Hussein, an Iraq freed of the tyranny that was a part of this land for so long, that's the different kind of Iraq that can be a pillar of that different kind of Middle East.

I spent some time a couple of summers ago reading the biographies of the Founding Fathers. And I'm going to tell you something. By all rights, the United States of America should never have come into being. If you looked at fighting the greatest military power of the time, Great Britain; if you looked at trying to conquer this new land; if you looked at the squabbling between the Founding Fathers, they were wonderful, but boy, did they fight.

Note, inter alia, the description of Iraq as the "source" of 9/11, the supposed foreign policy conservative talking about a grand project to remake the Middle East, and yet again a botched historical analogy, as it is now the Iraqi insurgents who are taking on the "greatest military power of the time," which, like Britain in 1776 is handicapped by its long distance from the fight and the mischief-making of its rivals.

One other thing: a recurring symptom of the Bush administration's delusions is not that they don't read history, but they read the wrong kind of history. Amid all the biographies and histories drawing on the US and UK, have they ever read any books about, like, the Middle East?