(no subject)

The New York Times Book Review has been running a lot of political pieces lately, perhaps in an effort to exacerbate my longstanding inability to keep straight it and the New York Review of Books. Last week's cover story was about books of advice for Democrats by former candidates, and they also reviewed books about liberalism by Robert Reich and E. J. Dionne. This week is all about empire, mostly the American one. The last page, in another nod to the NYRB, has nothing to do with books: It's a conversation between two Yale history professors about America's foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. And I'm posting because I like the closing line:

GADDIS. I'm angry about something as well. I'm angry that the current administration thought creatively about the situation it confronted on Sept. 11 and responded with a serious reconsideration of American strategy, but then they screwed it up in Iraq. They violated a really fundamental principle. It's the dog-and-car syndrome. Dogs spend a lot of time thinking about and chasing cars. But they don't know what to do with a car when they actually catch one. It seems to me this, in a nutshell, is what has happened to the Bush administration in Iraq.