New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has an excellent column on how we have blundered along with our foreign policy. Seems we have a habit of creating a mess then have to spend lives and money cleaning up those messes. In her column, Doubts About Certitude, she says:

"In a bit of unpoetic justice, Bob Gates helped create the mess in Afghanistan decades ago and now has to try to clean it up.

At the C.I.A. in the ’80s, Gates conspired with Charlie Wilson and the Saudis to help the insurgents in Afghanistan turn back the occupation of a superpower. Now he’s guiding the attempt of the occupying superpower to turn back the insurgents, some of whom are the same ones he armed to defeat the Soviet Union.

Trying to do a good thing that also seemed like a strategically brilliant thing — help the Afghan Davids repel the raw aggression of the Soviet Goliaths — we created the monsters that have come back to haunt us, and we learned how little control we have over history.

We trained a whole generation of jihadists and armed them. We paved the way for the Taliban takeover and the rise of Osama bin Laden. We created the Islamist power in the northwest frontier of Pakistan, swelled by millions of Afghan refugees. We enabled the conditions for bin Laden’s safe haven. We contributed to the instability of Pakistan".

Expanding on that theme, can any of us really forget Dick Cheney sitting with Saddam Hussein making arms deals to help him fight our bitter enemy Iran? Or how about supplying arms to Somalia in order to checkmate the 'red terror' in Ethiopia in the 1970's? Our foreign policy apparently is often defined by who hates our enemies more than a reasonable doctrine of what is in our national interest. Reading Dowd today is an important reminder of how dramatically our foreign policy must be overhauled. We need to define what is in our national interest, the issue of economic terrorism and the failed nation state. We live in a complex and increasing 'tribal world' and it requires really innovative and creative thought.

There is never a better time than now for a new 'Obama Doctrine' that sweeps aside the old and embraces the world as it really exists. Time to lose our baggage and start anew.