Foreign misadventures shouldn't result in isolation. Massive blunders in the use of force shouldn't mean appeasement with dictators and political relativism. America must avoid the comfortable notion that Democracy or human rights cannot be exported, much less imposed and that while the locals grow, if ever, into it, you must talk with, smile at and do business with the local butcher, also known as the country's dictator.

Democracy should always be strongly supported. It can sometimes be exported, and in exceptional cases done so by force. Japan, Germany or even the former Yugoslavia bear witness to this.

But you just don't export Democracy by subcontracting it to Halliburton or to Bechtel. It was not the basic concept that went wrong, but rather the horribly inept and greedy implementation of it. That's what now calls for damage control.

Rummy has become the first casualty of the Republican's electoral rout. If one considers that truth was the first casualty of the Iraq War, then some progress and poetic justice has been achieved.

But, thanks in part to the serial blunders of the Bush administration, most of the 9/11 and post-9/11 threats remain or are coming back, along with new ones. The world is probably now an unsafer place, and dangerously warmer and more unequal to boot.

So, cutting and running out of Bush-induced quagmires in a bout of isolationism shouldn't be an option. A major strategic reassessment of short and long term options is what both the House and the Senate should do as part of their damage control mandate. It would probably mean that many of the Clintonian tenets such as multilateralism and nation-building would gain renewed currency. Under present circumstances, though, any solution would be fraught with costs and difficulties. But probably only Cheney and Rumsfeld were deluded into thinking that being a world power is always both pleasant and profitable.