Mr Bush "has conjured the undead..."

He may or may not be right in any single assertion, but Spengler certainly writes the good essay.

Every so often I visit the family crypt of the Wittelsbacher dynasty in Munich's Frauenkirche, to make sure that the former kings of Bavaria are still there. They give every appearance of being dead, but deceased undesirables have a way of showing up at inconvenient moments - for example, former US secretary of state James Baker III. Like King Saul conjuring the spirit of the prophet Samuel, President George W Bush has conjured the undead of his father's administration, namely the Baker-Hamilton "Iraq Study Group". Samuel's ghost told Saul in effect (I Kings 28), "You're toast," and the unfortunate president will hear the same message from his new defense secretary, Robert M Gates, and the rest of his fellow spooks.

 
The sina qua non of a ghost is that it is condemned for eternity to reenact the delinquencies of its past life. That is just what we should expect from Robert Gates.

He continues in the same vien.  "Deceased undesirables have a way of showing up at inconvenient moment...", indeed.

(T)he Bush administration's threats against Tehran are not a response to Iran's nuclear ambitions, but rather the cause of Iran's nuclear ambitions, according to the sages of the Carter and the Bush Sr administrations. It is a peculiarly self-referential argument, but not a new one, for that is just how the "realists" viewed the Soviet Union in 1981.

I am not pleased with Mr Gates's appointment; not at all.