Big Swinging Wanker of the day
by digby
I agree with David's post below, in that in a perfect world we'd have some sort of "force for good" that would stop mass carnage around the world. (One might even think something like "God" would take up such a cause, but clearly he's not interested in the job.) But since we obviously have no human institutions capable of organizing such missions or putting such problems at the top of our priority lists, we're stuck with a bunch of very bad options when these horrors present themselves. It's frustrating and heartbreaking. But I think we all know that the Imperial United States --- even with the best of intentions, which is not a given --- often causes more problems than it solves in these situations. Huge caution required.
Anyway, I wanted to comment on what exactly Bill Clinton said:
Clinton warned that it would be unwise to opt against action because “there was a poll in the morning paper that said 80 percent of you were against it."
"[Y]ou’d look like a total wuss,” he continued. “And you would be. I don’t mean that a leader should go out of his way or her way to do the unpopular thing, I simply mean when people are telling you ‘no’ in these situations, very often what they’re doing is flashing a giant yellow light and saying, ‘For God’s sakes, be careful, tell us what you’re doing, think this through, be careful.”
Clinton went on to say that a poll showing a lack of support wouldn't provide cover for Obama if things got worse down the road. The president would just be left looking "like a total fool," he said.
Yeah, looking like a wuss is a huge reason to make decisions of war and peace. And the uppermost thing in Obama's mind must always be whether he will look foolish if he fails to intervene in a civil war in the most volatile part of the world.
I had always admired Clinton for not being one of those idiots who saw foreign policy as a dick measuring contest. I assumed it was because he was secure in that area in other ways and didn't need to swing it all over the place to reassure himself ...
Apparently, he was just hiding his insecurities.
Apropos of this story, Rick Perlstein commented on Facebook today:
A too-good-to-check story has it a perplexed foreign policy mandarin once asked LBJ what the point was of escalation in Vietnam, and that the President pulled out his generous endowment in response and laid it upon the table: "This is the point." Plus ça change. Good to know.
I'd be tempted here to propose that things would be different if a woman were in charge, but I'm afraid some women would feel they have more to prove in this department even than the average man.
Humans are primitive. And powerful humans are even more primitive than most.
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