“Appeasement” to Iran? Yeah right.
May 20th, 2008, 1:29 pm · 2 Comments · posted by jhogg
That so many people are wolfing down this nonsense about talking to hostile governments as “appeasement,” gives the Ballgunner reassurance that 90% of everyone really hasn’t the slightest inkling of how the world works.
It certainly doesn’t work like this:
The foreign policy fight between John McCain and Barack Obama flared up again Monday when the candidates jabbed one another over over how to address the threat posed by Iran.
While the two have been feuding since President Bush last week told the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, that a policy of appeasement is a “foolish delusion,” the heated rhetoric rose a notch after Obama said Sunday night that Iran is not an equivalent threat to the Soviet Union.
“Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we’re going to wipe you off the planet,” Obama told voters in Pendleton, Ore.
I’m certainly willing to agree that the elected legions of the federal government are staffed, with few exceptions throughout history, by the utterly feckless legions of smarmy smiles and brainless platitudes. To the grinning elector-ites, this chest-thumptitude is simply capital. It fires up the rubes, warms up the senses of righteous indignity, makes them sound all heroic, and leaves them feeling like they, too, enjoy a good bathroom stance with the manly W-I-D-E stance.
But outside the people polishing their teeth for the next election, and lurking beneath the bureaucratic brontosaurus of the Pentagon, there exist small pocket of competence that are treading water with all their might trying to keep the nation’s head above water.
These people know the score. They realize that politicians are not the tools of affecting change in the world (they are, in fact, mostly tools.) They realize that this is not a world of absolutes; that we do not get to set all the rules, or take our ball and go home if the game isn’t to our liking.
Having gotten themselves this far, they also probably realize that all roads do not lead to Washington. They realize that you don’t move anything in the mid-East by antagonizing Iran. They realize that the Shia population of the world looks to the mullahs in Tehran. They realize that since Shia militias have fought and won two major battles (some items at link NSFW) lately and the chips are moving across the table quicker than many people estimated.
Knowing Iran’s potential, and having seen disturbances across the region, they’ve figured out that Iran’s hand is not nuclear, is probably no where near nuclear, but is still strong. They can pass cards under the table to Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Shia fighters in Iraq. They can pass a few cards at a time or they can start handing whole decks and disrupt the whole game.
These are people who know that talking to Iran is not appeasement, it is a simple fact of life in working in the mid-East. They realize that the talks are the stuff the CNNs and Fox Newses know about, or even want to know about. It might be that these talks are things neither the president nor the three sock puppets running for office know about.
The U.S. military is a temporary force in Iraq. If it’s there another 50 years that will be a drop in the bucket compared to the entire global history of Persians (Iranians) and Arabs (Iraqis) and Pashtuns (Afghans) who have evolved and grown and fought and conquered and bloodied and allied and married and feuded and carried on like people do for a few good millennium before Europe even entered the global conscious.
It’s politics and sausage and the inevitable dealings with things not as pleasant as we might like.
May 20th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
All through history, the great thinkers of the world have regarded diplomacy as being a tool of the military; Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military thinker from 500 BC, regarded it as a military tool, and his most famous body of work, “the art of war” makes it very clear that the decisions of the diplomats are of the same importance as the decisions of the generals. Gaius Julius Caesar, the famous Roman emperor, wrote extensively on the use of diplomacy in military matters in his “Commentaries” on his invasions of Spain (Gaul) and England (Brittany) 2000 years ago. He considered a good, seasoned diplomat as being on a par with a good seasoned general. Carl Von Clausewitz, the great German military thinker from 200 years ago, wrote extensively on the subject, which gave rise to his famous quote that “war is just the continuation of politics by other means”.
So diplomacy is a skill that is quite useful in warfare, and a huge part of the reason that the Cheney/Bush group has been so piss-poor at conducting war has been that they are functionally retarded when it comes to conducting diplomacy. Remember that fool that they put into the United Nations, Bolton? When the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il decided to test his payload missiles a few years ago they had to call on Secretary of Rice to take over his duties because Bolton had acted so obnoxiously that the UN personal refused to deal with him.
But what do you expect from people who don’t understand war; these jokers even had crooked Karl Rove sitting in on the meetings of the joint-chiefs during the run up to war; not to aid the generals, but to thwart any opposition to their nation building fantasies.
Cheney and Bush are dilettantes in war. Because they lack the skill to function in diplomatic circles, and because they control the unrivaled might of the American military, they have taken a contrary tact. All they do is the exact opposite of what skillful diplomats do; boast , openly threaten and insult. But since both current wars required diplomatic skills to go along with America’s military might, those missions were botched. Cheney and Bush, not the American military, are why we are losing both the Afghanistan war and the mess in Iraq. The key point to Bush’s speech to me is that after 7 years of failure at using “cowboy diplomacy”, the arrogant little twit still has no clue as to why his group is losing both the wars that he has engaged the USA in.
So now once again, the American politicians are playing parlor games. Because the democratic leadership lacked the fortitude to impeach the lot of these no-talent clowns, the American citizens are forced to watch the shameful act of a sitting American President attempting to score cheap political points in a foreign land.
So the man whom has lost the two wars he was responsible for because of his lack of diplomatic skills is pontificating on the proper use of diplomacy. And that’s not all the irony going on here. The man in front of a Jewish audience talking about WWII is in the position that he is in mainly because of his grandfather, a man who was doing business with the Nazis during the same period of history as he is talking about. The same Nazis that were in the process of attempting to exterminate the ancestors of the Jewish audience that applauded him at the end of his speech.
I know that you are correct in saying that there are still plenty of Americans who recognize that we are going in the wrong direction as a nation and only await their time to set things aright; but where in the hell are they? Why are these maniacs still in charge of the nation? Why are the American people sweating out these fools attempting to “secure their legacy” by attacking Iran?
These are dark times for the American citizen, the darkest in my lifetime. And we still have 245 more days of madness to sweat out.
May 24th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Jonas, the new blogs are hidden. We want our ballgunner updates on front Web page!!!!