Gilligan Security

by digby

Mike Stark at Calling All Wingnuts had a chance to talk to Joe Klein and he asked him about why he believed that nuclear war should be on the table.He said:

Joe: Oh… Oh… OK. I said that it should be an option. And I do believe that it should be an option. But let me tell you what I actually believe about this. First of all, it should be an option and I think it doesn’t do us any harm for the Iranians, if they are going to go around saying crazy things, to think that we might act crazily as well.

Mike: So it’s not really an option…

Joe: No, but let me say this. It’s not really an option because I don’t believe that the Bush administration, given the disastrous foreign policy of the last five years, has the credibility or the wherewithall to act unilaterally attack Iraq (sic)…And as a matter of principle, throughout my entire career, my entire career I’ve believed that we can only use force when we do it in concert with out allies as we did in the first Gulf War, as we did in Kosove when it was NATO. So for you to say that I am in favor of nuking Iran, you sound like one of those left wing bloggers who are so routinely innaccurate in everything they write about.

I believe that Klein accurately represents the level of sophistication we see in many American political circles these days, which is this notion that if we act crazy we will scare the hell out of the wogs.

Tom Friedman said much the same thing after 9/11:

No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through – but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: “We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld – he’s even crazier than you are.”

There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right.

Suppose your local police department suddenly threw out all the rules and started acting “crazy” on the theory that the criminals would get scared and stay home. Would that actually make your town safer or more dangerous?

This is such a deeply immature view that I honestly don’t know these influential middle aged men are even allowed to drive much less be taken seriously on foreign policy. The United States is a superpower. We do not need to “act crazy.” Indeed, acting crazy is the last thing a superpower should ever do. It makes others miscalculate because they think we are unpredictable and dumb.

booga booga

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