Deja vu all over again

In case you're loosely following the dustup in Lebanon right now, hearing who's involved, and having trouble consistently fitting the players into our overall Middle East strategy vis a vis Iraq like I have been, read this post from Balloon Juice.

Assuming that invading Iraq had something to do with 9/11 (unlikely but hell, they all claim it does), that basically means that everything that we did since jilting the Afghan war went directly to serve not one but both of our major adversaries in the mideast, al Qaeda and Iran. We basically rewarded them for attacking us. Our leaders have pulled off a disaster hat trick that may yet put the Athenian Syracuse expedition to shame.

Our current policy is as quixotic and self-defeating as the worst of our Cold War decisions where we routinely supported very bad people who hated us because they partly fit into a certain geopolitical niche. It's obvious from decisions like these that there is no overall end goal and that we are most definitely on the defense, merely putting out spot fires while the entire forest readies to explode in our faces.