Echoes of George Kennan

Common Dreams has posted an essay entitled "Mirror Image" by Nicholas Thompson which quotes Kennan's testimony 1966 testimony about Viet Name before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Kennan was the architect of America's cold war "containment" policy toward Communism. Here's a quote:

"[T]here is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant and unpromising objectives," he said. Kennan, were he alive today, would have little patience for the Bush administration's frequent call to stay in Iraq because a commitment was made and so many soldiers have already died. Just because the US had shot itself in one foot, he told the Senate committee, didn't mean it should fire away at the other.

. . .

Kennan concluded his Senate testimony with a well-known quotation from John Quincy Adams. "[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy," said our sixth president. "She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."