ARTICLE: “As ‘Neocons’ Leave, Bush Foreign Policy Takes Softer Line: Ms. Rice Changes Approach To Iran and North Korea; Democracy Still Key Goal; Cheney’s Waning Influence?” by Jay Solomon and Neil King Jr., Wall Street Journal, 6 February 2006, p. A1.

All this article really says is that we ended up with the Kerry foreign policy without Kerry and the Democrats. The neocons created an overhang of serious length by invading Iraq with little-to-no desire or interest in executing the second-half effort with the vigor necessary to win the peace.

The great “shift” is nothing more than the operational/rotational tie-down created by Iraq. This denies the second Bush administration of many of the options favored by the neocons, who saw the writing on the wall and left the scene.

And thus the “neo-realists” led by Rice “rise” to the top by default. True, Rice is a better bureaucratic fighter than Powell was, but his standard was so low that anybody in that job would have scored higher simply by engaging in something other than full-time ass covering.

If a truly new foreign policy mindset was at work in the Bush administration, the neocon view of the world wouldn’t still be driving the budget/QDR process in the Pentagon, and we’d see that Pentagon back in the business of supporting diplomacy rather than diplomacy simply hiding our current military inadequacies.