Better a Kirkpatrick Than a Bolton

Jeane Kirkpatrick always impressed me as among the most hard-headed and realistic of the neo-cons. While this neo"godmother" was usually wrong, she showed a much better grasp on reality than, for example, her fire-breathing successor as UN Ambassador, John Bolton. For this reason, I am not terribly surprised to see that Kirkpatrick wrote the following on Iraq before her death:

Unfortunately, what we face in Iraq today is a vacuum of power, a lack of stable institutions needed to govern, and the problem that the promise of democracy for which our nation stands may be lost in the essential scramble for safety and stability in the streets. This is one of the reasons I am uneasy about the war we have made here--for we have helped to create the chaos that has overtaken the country, and we may have reduced rather than promoted the pace of democratic reform.