"150,000 US soldiers cannot secure protection for their president"

[Bucky]

From Time:

Bush's Five Fatal Mideast Mistakes

President Bush travels to Jordan this week amid a consensus among U.S. allies in the Middle East that the region is monumentally worse off now than it was when he took office six years ago. In Iraq, there seems little prospect of achieving anything that could be construed as a U.S. victory — and as a result, it is unlikely to send the promised tidal wave of freedom crashing across the Arab world. Instead, Iraq has effectively disintegrated into a Sunni-Shi'ite civil war that threatens to spread instability throughout the region.

Elsewhere, Israelis and Palestinians have descended into one of the most intractable cycles of conflict in their long struggle. In Lebanon, the national unity agreement that ended almost two decades of civil war in 1990 appears to be unraveling, as sectarian factions are again edging toward another bloodbath. Meanwhile, Arab autocrats remain entrenched, Arab democrats are feeling abandoned, and Iran's Islamic revolution is enjoying a second wind. For all the grand ambition of President Bush's interventions in the Middle East, a veteran Western diplomat recently offered TIME the following glum assessment: "The region is in as serious a mess as I have ever seen it. There is an unprecedented number of interconnected conflicts and threats."

The fact that Bush is holding talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki not in Baghdad, but in the comparatively tranquil Jordanian capital of Amman, has not gone unnoticed. "One hundred and fifty thousand U.S. soldiers cannot secure protection for their president," mocked a Jordanian columnist, who called the choice of venue "an open admission of gross failure for Washington and its allies' project in Iraq."

And those five little mistakes are...?

1. Bush ignored the Palestinians.
2. Bush invaded Iraq.
3. Bush misjudged Iran.
4. Bush hurt Israel.
5. Bush alienated Muslims.

I'm not sure how to take the humor of this list (click here to read the full article). If you alienate Muslims in the Middle East, that's not making a mistake. That's being a mistake.

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. Is that a Licolnesque Colbert or a Cobert-esque Lincoln?

[Demeter]

2. Bush Also Ignored, misjudged, hurt and alienated Americans

and invaded their privacy. Destroyed the economy, increased poverty, decreased security, etc. etc.