Axis of Evil is Not a Foreign Policy

I've been thinking about this since yesterday and finally got the time to post.

North Korea explodes (or attempts to explode) a nuclear weapon and the US, via President Bush, condemns it - and rightly so, although somewhat hypocritically. Iran continues to develop a nuclear capability that conventional wisdom says will lead to a bomb and US foreign policy is to talk tough - a policy which failed with North Korea.

So here we are with a policy towards two countries that actually have or are pursuing weapons of mass destruction that is essentially, "Stop! Or I'll say stop again!" while simultaneously bogged down with a war in a country that didn't have nor was developing those weapons (mendacity of our current administration aside.)

What I'm getting at is that the Bush administration is either woefully incompetent when it comes to foreign policy or criminally negligent. Have there been any successes? I can't think of any. The sad part is that I'm pretty sure we could be doing good in the world and we're not. So instead of helping stave off the genocide in Darfur or working towards a more peaceful world, our foreign policy is "fight the terrorists over there." Well, great. Send in the military, make more enemies, foment civil war in Iraq have nothing but empty rhetoric for everybody else and keep telling the American people everything is fine and we'll win the long war.

Is it 2008, yet? We can only hope that somehow the 2006 midterms at least bring some accountability to these people.