Reagan this, Bush that. . .

I wonder if all the Rightwingers who give sole credit to Ronald Reagan with winning the Cold War, which was the culmination of 40 years of policies of containment originated by Truman and Marshall, and a decade of detente initiated by Nixon and continued by Carter, are going to be so quick, in light of the former Soviet Union’s reemergence as a aggressivie, hegemonic militaristic power, to blame Bush and his epic failure of leadership for losing the post-Cold War? After all, by fracturing the Western Alliance, and squandering US military and diplomatic capital on Iraq, while reifying the legitimacy of using unilateral military force against non-threat nations for the furtherance of national interest, he has certainly made Putin’s decision to attack the Georgian Republic a far easier one. With America’s political capital in the world depleted, and it’s military stretched to continue a 5+ year war in Iraq, Bush has eliminated potential obstacles to Putin’s policies.

Not if Neocon-warmonger and Iraq War cheerleader Bill Kristol is any indication. Kristol, whose predilection for fatuous prediction was epitomized by his assurances that warnings of sectarian strife between Sunni and Shia Iraqis was mere “pop sociology” not only fails to mention the contribution of Bush’s successive failures in Iraq as placing the US at any disadvantage vis-a-vis the Russian invasion, he vapidly claims that Iraq has strengthened America’s ability to project power and succor democracy:

The further good news is that 2008 has been, in one respect, an auspicious year for freedom and democracy. In Iraq, we and our Iraqi allies are on the verge of a strategic victory over the jihadists in what they have called the central front of their struggle.

Of course he neglects to mention that there were no jihadists in Iraq prior to our invasion, save those hiding in the North outside the control of Saddam’s regime, or those hiding from Saddam’s brutal but sectarian Baathist secret police — not when he can claim another Mission Accomplished moment.

Rather than assign any blame to Bush’s witless and counterproductive policies — which of course he and his PNAC cronies urged upon the administration — Kristol is quick to assign blame to the next country he wants President McBushII to invade — Iran:

Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: “While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.”

Kristol mendaciously ignores the other elephant in the Cooper article — the role which Iraq has played in dissipating US influence and resources:

Russia’s emerging aggressiveness is now also timed with America’s preoccupation with Iraq and Afghanistan, and the looming confrontation with Iran. These counterbalancing considerations mean that Moscow is in the driver’s seat, administration officials acknowledged.

“We’ve placed ourselves in a position that globally we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything,” Mr. Friedman of Stratfor said. “One would think under those circumstances, we’d shut up.”

Of course the “We” here who placed the US in a position where “we don’t have the wherewithal to do anything” is George Bush and feckless neocons like Bill Kristol, who insisted we’d be greeted as liberators, that the Iraq war would pay for itself, and that centuries-old sectarian, ethnic and tribal divisions which still threaten to tear Iraq asunder were mere pop sociology.

So it’s this for Reagan, and that for Bush. Reagan won the Cold War, but then Iran lost it.

MORE: Kristol, of course, trotted out the standard Munich analogy, or rather mis-analogy, and fellow PNAC-traveller Robert Kagan does the same in the WaPo, only with a bizarre twist — he can’t recall the details of Nazi Germany’s pretextual accusations against Czechoslovakia which precipitated the Sudetenland crisis, ostensibly because Nazi Germany’s contrived dispute with the Czechs was “morally ambiguous.”

The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.

I recall the details of the Sudeten Crisis — and they weren’t morally ambiguous in the slightest. Nazi agents organized a minority of ethnic Germans with the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia into bands of thugs who simultaneously terrorized politically opponents and Slavic neighbors, while lodging false reports of political oppression and physical brutality by Czech police and groups against Czech citizens of German descent, which were sensationalized and amplified by the Nazi propaganda machine in papers like Der Sturmer. The ostensible leader of the Czech Sudeten Germans, Konrad Heinlein, was taking orders directly from the Nazis with an eye towards the Nazis’ ultimate goal of stripping Czechoslovakia of its formidable border fortresses in the mountains, and thus facilitating its ultimate dismemberment and absorption into the Reich. As Rob points out, the situation with respect to South Ossetia actually is beset with considerable ambiguity.

The fact that Kagan views Hitler’s contrived accusations against the Czechs and the dispute largely manufactured by Nazi agent provocateurs which precipitated Munich as “morally ambiguous” could have enormous explanative potential, given the moral vacuousness of neoconservative policies.