Tuesday, June 27, 2006

But who's Josephine?

It's a point of comparison that just won't go away: Napoleon. For some reason, the GWoT comparisons have been most frequent to George W. Bush , but it looks now like the American Enterprise Institute is anxious to get someone more Evil stuck with the tag. So, as the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire informs us:

As AEI puts it in an announcement for a July 20 lecture by [Frederick] Kagan at the think tank’s offices: "For as there have been international norms, there have been states that have refused to play by the rules. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has embraced this role for Iran, but he is merely the latest in a long line of leaders to attempt to revamp the international system."

His role model? Perhaps Napoleon. "Idolized by many for his military successes and domestic reforms, he has also been accused of carrying out a "criminal" foreign policy and blamed for the decade of wars that marked his reign," AEI says.


The funny thing is, you can read the blurb and not have it be a stretch that it's actually talking about Bush -- "refused to play by the rules," "revamp the international system," and of course "idolized by many." Also noteworthy is that the discussant for Kagan's talk at AEI is Bill Kristol, meaning that the seminar room would be not a bad place to detect what Bush's Project for a New American Century backers really think about the current direction of his foreign policy.

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