.. incredible! The incompetence of USA leadership today is
incredible....

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080519/cohen
snip
also unlike before, there is no effective domestic opposition to
hawkish policies in Washington or Moscow, only influential proponents
and cheerleaders.

How did it come to this? Less than twenty years ago, in 1989-90, the
Soviet Russian and American leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W.
Bush, completing a process begun by Gorbachev and President Reagan,
agreed to end the cold war, with "no winners and no losers," as even
Condoleezza Rice once wrote, and begin a new era of "genuine
cooperation." In the US policy elite and media, the nearly unanimous
answer is that Russian President Vladimir Putin's antidemocratic
domestic policies and "neo-imperialism" destroyed that historic
opportunity.