Add Zbigniew Brzezinski to the list of politically prominent people who've lately succumbed to algoreitis simplex, the mysterious brain infection so named for its most obvious manifestation: the eagerness of its victims to indulge in ludicrously exaggerated condemnations of George W. Bush's war on terrorism. Brzezinski, poor thing, has become symptomatic in the pages of the current New Republic, where our patient presents as a former Carter administration national security adviser who is nevertheless unembarrassed to cite a later administration for unprecedented foreign policy failure.

Under Bush, Brzezinski writes, "America's credibility has been tarnished among its traditional friends, its prestige has plummeted worldwide, and global hostility to the United States has reached a historical high." So far as Dr. SCRAPBOOK is concerned, that one sentence alone ought to seal the diagnosis: The man is demented; he can't remember his own career.

Preliminary investigation suggests that Brzezinski himself has experienced a previous, significant episode of cataclysmic foreign policy incompetence involving: (1) the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; (2) Jimmy Carter's subsequent admission that he'd been surprised by how mean Russian communism turned out to be; (3) the fall of the shah and the Iranian hostage crisis; (4) a humiliating botched effort to rescue those hostages; (5) the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua; (6) the Sandinista regime's aggressive attempt to export communism elsewhere throughout Latin America, unchecked by the United States; and (7) a great many additional, similar, and infamous fiascos we don't have room to list.