Jay Bookman’s analysis of the foreign policy goals of the Bush administration is a must read (I found the link at Camworld). Basically, Bookman’s argument is that the current Bush foreign policy is the outgrowth of a philosophy adopted by the decision makers in the Bush administration (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, for starters) that envisions America as the world’s preeminent power, imposing its will on all others.

Bookman does a good job of deducing what connects the dots that we’ve seen since 9/11. Why Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the axis of evil? As it turns out, they were on the list before George W Bush even became President. As made clear in the National Security Strategy document published on September 20, the administration sees America’s role as a power that overshadows all others and imposes its will on everyone else in the world. And, more importantly, that maintains a massive military presence that no other nation can compete with. The most disturbing part states blatantly not only will we address threats, but that we will preemptively attack countries that we fear might be threats.

Am I comfortable with an interventionist foreign policy? Yes, absolutely. I’d like to see the US do what it can to alleviate human suffering around the world, whether it’s due to preventable disease, hunger, or governments that have no respect for human rights. I want us to ensure the security of Americans and of as many other people in the world as possible. I understand that we must sometimes go to war to do so. However, when you start invading countries because you think that they might pose a threat, you cross a line. It makes the United States a different sort of country.

It was exactly this sort of vision that led the United States down a destructive path during the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union left a trail of millions of corpses around the world while fighting for global preeminence. The fact that we don’t have another great power to offset us (for now) certainly doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t create similar wreckage in our attempts to keep everyone else in the world down.

Ultimately, I don’t know how much there is to fear from these plans, because either in 2005 or 2009 we’ll have a new President, and besides that, the country has enough other problems that devoting such a massive amount of our attention and resources to kicking around countries all over the world just isn’t feasible. Furthermore, I doubt that the American people are arrogant and nationalistic enough to buy into such a vision anyway. I’m quite impressed that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the piece.

Did you know that I’m supposed to be pinging blo.gs to let it know when my site is updated? I didn’t. Anyway, it should be notified when I add a new item now.

My favorite new feature in Windows XP over Windows 2000 is the grouping of buttons on your task bar by application, and the way that it stacks up like buttons and turns them into the menu when your task bar fills up instead of just making a long row of ever-smaller buttons. Frankly, I was shocked that Microsoft would come up with an idea so useful and so simple. The other day, I read somewhere that the BeOS grouped buttons in its task bar (which had a different name, of course, perhaps the Fetcher) in exactly this way. Knowing that Microsoft hadn’t come up with this feature quickly restored the world to its proper state, and I feel much better.

John Gruber is going through the RSS conversion. First, you start using a news aggregator that you like, then you feel dumb for not providing an RSS feed for your Web site, and then you kind of stop reading all those sites that don’t have RSS feeds. There are some sites that don’t support RSS that I still follow, but the truth is that I read them sporadically at best, regardless of how good they are. That’s still a better situation than when I didn’t use a news aggregator at all and I simply stopped reading all personal sites for weeks at a time because I didn’t make time to stroll through my bookmark list to see who was writing what.

Last week, Jacob Weisberg made a pretty powerful argument in favor of going to war with Iraq in a Slate dialogue. As you guys know, I’m all over the map on the Iraq issue. Perhaps I should make a list of pros and cons that I update weekly or something.

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was denied a visa to enter the United States after being invited to attend the New York Film Festival, presumably due to the new harsher restrictions on visas being granted to people from Muslim countries.

I’m pretty frustrated with the runaround that federal judicial nominee Miguel Estrada is getting from the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. I believe that judges who put their ideology ahead of interpreting the law as it is written (like Justice Scalia) should not be confirmed to the bench, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with Estrada. The two knocks against him seem to be that memos he prepared when he worked in the Solicitor General’s office (during Clinton’s presidency, for what it’s worth), and that he has been anonymously accused of blocking applicants to clerk for Justice Kennedy for being too liberal. Surely Democrats can do better than this. Anonymous accusations have no place in the process, and no living former Solicitor General thinks it’s acceptable to request Estrada’s memos. The Democrats need to save their ammo for more pernicious candidates.

The bottom line here is that the 5th Circuit Court is split 4-4 between Republican and Democratic nominees, and the Republicans were pretty savage in preventing Clinton’s nominees from getting onto the court. Now the Democrats don’t want to let Bush’s nominee give the Republicans a majority on that court. While being equally petty may work from a game theory perspective, I wish the Democrats wouldn’t go that route.

Somebody paid $44,000 for the so-called “crooked E” sign from Enron at an auction yesterday.

Fareed Zakaria: The Lonesome Doves of Europe. Another interesting piece, this one criticizing the European response to a potential war in Iraq. I confess to being amazed at the European reaction to the war plans, because they seem so reflexive. Just as I’m offended at the insistence that we must go to war with Iraq as soon as possible, I’m equally offended at the insistence that there’s no reason to stand up to Iraq at all.

Michael Kinsley: Ours Is Not To Reason Why. Kinsley offers a scathing attack on the lack of a coherent argument in favor of war in Iraq by the Bush administration. The USA Today reports on efforts to get Saddam Hussein to slink off into exile. I don’t think anyone would like to see Saddam Hussein live out the rest of his days on the French Riviera, but I think that would be a better outcome than further devestating Iraq in a attempt to dislodge him. I do have to laugh when the White House says that it would like to see Saddam tried for war crimes, seeing as how they’re dead set against international law in general, and many of them have certainly countenanced and accepted plenty of horrors in the Cold War quest to “spread democracy.”