This is his worst column for a while.

First, he fesses up to his twenty-year boner for Truman. The guy who dropped nuclear bombs, started a deeply unpopular war, violated the constitution, and left office with sub-30% approval ratings.

Somehow George Bush failed the Truman-purity test, but seemingly not by much. Or maybe Brooks recognizes that the Halliburton-Blackwater Plan kinda fell short of the Marshall Plan in terms of its aims and effectiveness.

Second, Brooks laments that a "new pluralistic world has given rise to globosclerosis, an inability to solve problem after problem."

Maybe so. But fuck me if there weren't some major problems back in Truman's day that went unsolved. Just spitballing here, but the start of the Cold War sort of emphasized some of the fissures that existed post-WW2, and we didn't manage to address at the time. This is not to blame Truman or Acheson or anyone else for Stalin welshing on the Yalta or Potsdam deals and blockading West Berlin, I'm just saying that they didn't solve all the big problems of the day.

Brooks picks up on the unsolved problem du jour, namely the (collapsed?) Doha trade talks. Who screwed it up? China and India, according to Brooks. He may want you to think that American farm subsidies had nothing whatsoever to do with the impasse, but this is was a factor. And Susan Schwab, the chief US negotiator, has suggested that the incredible complexity of the deal probably ended up breaking the consensus.

After a brief moan about the China-Sudan connection and Iran's nuclear ambition providing further evidence that stuff happens that we don't agree with, he stumbles on this conclusion:

"in a multipolar world, there is no way to referee disagreements among competing factions"

Kay, just a couple of paragraphs previously, Brooks has crapped on about stalled WTO negotiations. Clearly his understanding of the WTO does not extend to the realization that the WTO has a Dispute Settlement Body. I suppose when you have been on the unilateralist bong for the last few decades, inconvenient facts like this inevitably slip your mind.

Now the part that cracks me up. Because Brooks reckons there are no referees, we get stuff like "the failure of the Doha round and the gradual weakening of the international economic order."

What the fuck does this mean? Does a failure to further liberalize international trade equal a weakening of the existing regime? Actually, what is the "international economic order"? It's sounds crudely Darwinian, in the realm of shitkicking neo-imperialism... maybe Krugman can clear it up.

But this is the coup de grace: "A few years ago, the U.S. tried to break through this global passivity. It tried to enforce U.N. resolutions and put the mantle of authority on its own shoulders. The results of that enterprise, the Iraq war, suggest that this approach will not be tried again anytime soon."

Where do you begin? King George was in it for regime change, benign domino theory, revenge for daddy, etc; Dick wanted the oil, Don wanted to play Rommel, and Karl wanted a re-election platform. All of this was SO IMPORTANT they were willing to bypass the UN and go it alone.

The will of the UN was for Saddam to disarm. It was not to see another Gulf War. It mandated Blix to enforce it's will, its will having been expressed in the first resolution. The second resolution, authorizing war, was rejected. So just a reminder, in case 2003 is a little hazy and you're a little more susceptible to neocon revisionism and spurious claims that we were carrying UN backing when we invaded Iraq. It's all stinking bullshit, and the Times evidently can't shake itself of the smell.

And finally, we get the prescription from Brooks, the "mechanism to wield authority". A League of Democracies. Remember that old chestnut, TPM veterans? A brainchild of the Truman Project - as a opposed to the Truman Show - as I recall.

Still, whenever you come across these silly articles from Brooks and his discredited Neocon thumbsuckers, leaving aside the scattered deceptions and all round ignorance, you have to marvel that NATO never cops a mention.

Not only is NATO a purely military outfit, comprised entirely of democracies many of whom are traditional allies, and with a very creditable history all-considered; and NATO is also responsible for the the extremely important Afghanistan mission, and surely this would be in better shape had King George not goat-fucked Iraq after the rest of the world advised him to stay out the farmyard.

But perhaps most significantly, and this is what makes it incomprehensible that Brooks and his friends never mention the organization, is that it was founded in 1949.

By Truman.