Bush's self-fulfilling prophecy

From the closing chapter, “My Life” by Bill Clinton:

“ … President-elect Bush came to the White House for the same meeting I had had with his father eight years earlier. We talked about the campaign, White House operations and national security. He was putting together an experienced team from past Republican administrations, who believed that the biggest security issues were the need for national missile defense and Iraq. I told him that, based on the last eight years, I thought his biggest security problems, in order, would be Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, the absence of peace in the Middle East, the standoff between nuclear powers India and Pakistan and the ties of the Pakistanis to the Taliban and al Qaeda, North Korea, and then Iraq. I said that my biggest disappointment was not getting bin Laden, that we still might achieve an agreement in the Middle East, and that we had almost tied up a deal with North Korea to end its missile program, but that he would probably have to go there to close the deal. He listened to what I had to say without much comment, then changed the subject to how I did the job. My only advice was that he should put together a good team and try to do what he thought was right for the country.”

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Ironically, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, Bush was right. That “experienced team from past Republican administrations” – known as neoconservatives – has made Iraq our number one security problem.

And, Bush is dead set on the missile defense system, earlier known in the Reagan administration as “Star Wars,” and once astutely described by a politician as “trying to hit a bullet with a bullet.”

Interestingly, aside from the cost and ineffectiveness of such a missile defense system, the new warfare Bush claims we are facing doesn’t do much to sell his proposal. Such a program is hardly effective against IEDs and suicide bombers.