Bush did a number of incompetent things which, collectively, were helpful to the Iranians.

Gates deliberately and competently did things which were helpful to the Iranians.

Thus, there is some commonality between the two, as far as US policy toward the Iranians go.

Sometimes a snark is just a snark.

Is "hyperbole for effect" the same as "fire for effect"?

... if they were all being run by radical Islamists, they would have a strong ideological commitment to echother. The program of radical Islam is after all to unite the "Umma" to fight the Western infidel.

Mr. Catchy,

Power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and Chavez has the guns. He has his men running the military and he has his own militia. And he has the unrestricted funds of the state oil monopoly to keep his guns loyal. There is nothing to restrain him now, whatever is left is a facade. There is no shifting a man like that, if he keeps his nerve, short of an actual revolt with enough force to overcome his guns.

In comparison to Chavez, as I understand it, my dictator Marcos had a much more independent military (stronger independent institutions) and no unlimited funding source. Chavez will last.

As for the unions, its the easiest thing in the world to co-opt them. They are natural avenues for corrupt control. MArcos did, Batista did, and the former Venezuelan regime did too. If the money is there, there is no more useful ally to a dictator or a corrupt politician than a union.

... you're probably right that if the Islamists really started looking scary (by taking over some major states), Chavez would either break off that alliance or be out of office soon after.

On the other hand, I'm not 100% sure of that. People like to find excuses to do crazy things out of emotional impulses, and the anti-American impulse is pretty powerful. I could plausibly see the ANSWER left rationalizing support for an Islamist anti-American pact, and Chavez et al. convincing themselves that supporting it is a good idea. I don't think that the world whipping itself into an anti-American frenzy is out of the realm of possibility at all. Such things tend to pick up steam as they go along.

We don't wait to do something only when it becomes a threat to the existence of the United States. No one I know or ever heard of has ever said anything like that.

For example, the pirates off of the coast of Somalia don't threaten the continued existence of the United States but we, rightly, sent a destroyer or two out that way to help deal with them. A bunch of idiots in speedboats with RPG's certainly don't threaten the United States but they do threaten some shipping lanes and that is enough to provoke a response from us.

I don't mean to underestimate the amount of damage Al Quaeda has and can do. In fact, they have shown that they can inflict a great deal of damage but that doesn't mean we should equate the threat from them with the threat from our larger and much more dangerous historic/future foes. If China invaded Taiwan in 5 years they could start a world war. I may be wrong, but I don't think Al Queada has the ability to do that much damage to us.

You might wish for enlightened dictatorship, but I don't and I don't consider Bush to be enlightened or even all that bright on a world leader scale, but he has certainly like one following his 'mandates' of '00 and '04.

Los of people are coming late to the table on this.

Add 10-15% to the 30 once it became common knowledge that Iraq didn't posses WMD and a further 10-15% once it became quite clear that the Bush Administration had completely bungled the effort.

...trusted Bush that the idea was fundamentally sound. I don't know if they still hold that view or not.

I've put out a cogent and coherent risk-based argument in favor of flattening Ba'athist Iraq a number of times, which holds whether or not they had nukes at the moment the decision was made (and which, memorably, even Harley said "almost makes sense").

All wars are elective, even the Russians had the option to lay down arms when the Nazis rolled in, and I've seen a pretty good mathematical treatment of just how little it would have taken to push them over the edge when the Germans were outside of Moscow. (Side note: The "good" thing about the Nazis, if you can stand a little violence to the term, is that they were so intent on stuffing everybody into ovens that they created even more resistance than a regular invader would.)

(A response to 9/11, I mean).

The invasion of Iraq happened *not* just because of something/anything said or done or thought or plotted or imagined by the present administration, but because the *American people* (as they say) were still seething about 9/11, and (not to put too fine a point on it) badly wanted to kick some Arab butt. Afghanistan simply wasn't enough, and wasn't even Arab anyway.

Am I the only one here who still remembers how wildly popular this war was at the outset?

But, for better or worse, and not too surprisingly, said "American people" were not particularly interested in the attempt to establish "democracy" over there.

Not, at any rate, if it took more than a year or two.