Griper Blade: If it's not Working, Do More of it

There's seems to be a predictable line of thinking to the Bush administration's approach to foreign policy. I'd say it was a line of reasoning, but let's not aggrandize anything.

First, they come up with a course of action. This action generally involves being a hard ass. This is because the only people in the world who are fully adult are Americans and all anyone else understands is a spanking.

When whatever you're doing isn't working, the problem is that you're not being a big enough dick about it. If whatever you're doing isn't getting you anywhere, it's because you're not doing enough of it. This, after all, was the thinking behind the "surge" -- what we were doing wasn't failing because it was the wrong thing to do, it was failing because we weren't doing enough of it. The only problem with war in Iraq was that the war wasn't big enough.

And, so it is with Iran. The Bush administration's been freaking out about Iran for some time, using bellicose language and an approach to diplomacy that can only be described as "not diplomacy." As this approach failed to get anywhere, the obvious solution was to be bigger asses. When asked about Iran at a press conference last week, Bush answered, "I believe that the Iranian -- if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace. It would -- this is -- we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. And I take this very -- I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously."

Here's a fun game, let's ask our man in Iraq, al-Maliki, what he thinks of Israel. You probably wouldn't get much of a different answer from him than you would from Ahmadinejad. Israel's not the most popular kid in that particular neighborhood...

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