The only thing on the march is bad foreign policy

Writing in Salon, Juan Cole takes apart the continuing fiasco of the Bush administration foreign policy piece by piece. In particular, the administration has long viewed Turkey and Pakistan as the bookends of its greater Middle East policy, two staunch allies as the anchors of policy.

In the past few weeks, of course, tensions in these two nations have reached new highs, with Turkey furious about terrorist attacks originating in Iraqi Kurdistan and Pakistan's increasingly precarious political situation punctuated by a massive attack against former prime minister Bhutto.

Overall, it's a disturbing and scary picture of an administration that is invested in the Iraq war to the complete exclusion of any strategic approach:

Like a drunken millionaire gambling away a fortune at a Las Vegas casino, the Bush administration squandered all the assets it began with by invading Iraq and unleashing chaos in the Gulf. The secular Baath Party in Iraq was replaced by Shiite fundamentalists, Sunni Salafi fundamentalists and Kurdish separatists. The pressure the Bush administration put on the Pakistani military government to combat Muslim militants in that country weakened the legitimacy of Musharraf, whom the Pakistani public increasingly viewed as an oppressive American puppet. Iraqi Kurdistan's willingness to give safe haven to the PKK alienated Turkey from both the new Iraqi government and its American patrons. Search-and-destroy missions in Afghanistan have predictably turned increasing numbers of Pushtun villagers against the United States, NATO and Karzai.

There's really nothing else to say.