Cheney's a mole

Nicolas Kristoff comes to that conclusion.

Nicholas D. Kristof writes in his New York Times opinion column (subscription required): "Is Dick Cheney an Iranian mole?"

"Consider that the Bush administration's first major military intervention was to overthrow Afghanistan's Taliban regime, Iran's bitter foe to the east. Then the administration toppled Iran's even worse enemy to the west, the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq."

Kristof is joking, of course. "Mr. Cheney isn't an Iranian mole. Nor is he a North Korean mole, though his we-don't-negotiate-with-evil policy toward North Korea has resulted in that country's quadrupling its nuclear arsenal. It's also unlikely that he is an Al Qaeda mole, even though Al Qaeda now has an important new base of support in Iraq.

"Like Kennedy and Johnson wading into Vietnam, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney harmed American interests not out of malice but out of ineptitude. I concede that they honestly wanted the best for America, but we still ended up getting the worst."

I'm not sure I agree with that last paragraph, at least not as he posits the conclusion that "they wanted the best for America." I think their motives are far more complicated than that, involving a desire for a political reordering in which Republicans become a permanent majority, a renewal of executive branch dominance, messianic visions, Oedipal urges, and a belief in "unfettering" corporate interests, particularly in the oil and military industrial complexes. But I'm glad that Kristoff is coming around to something I pointed out more than a year ago.