You know perfectly well that sitting it out and looking the other way is not what I said or what I meant. We need to know how to fight, not how to be the neighborhood bully. The fact is that the Cold War and WWII and Korea and the Balkans were all all fought by building alliances and by making sure that our allies got something out of it, sometimes a lot more than they deserved. The same goes for the First Gulf War. Bush I put together a a magnificient alliance, even the French signed up.

Bush II's problems in Iraq and Afghanistan are not due to the perfidy or cowardice of our allies, but to his team's intransigence and bull-headedness, his go-it-alone, my-way-or-the-highway, screw-you, attitudes, their attempt to carry out his policies exactly the way they wanted to simply because they could, on the cheap and without having to give anything up for it. In short, they followed the Plan we've been discussing here right down the line, and it didn't work because no one but they had a stake in it.

I always assumed this was just an error in execution, now I can see it was a deliberate and malicious policy that the Neocons had been refining for years, one that they had plans on foisting on the whole world, and one that was misguided and perverse at the core, by design, not by accident. And it didn't work.