Friday, May 16, 2008

Danger: Tough Talk & Wishful Thinking

By Robert Parry
May 16, 2008

If the American people should have learned one lesson from the past seven years, it is that the careless mix of tough talk and wishful thinking gets good people killed – and pushes even powerful nations to the brink of bankruptcy.

Yet, the current and possibly future Republican presidents combined these two dangerous elements on the same day: George W. Bush eschewing “appeasement” in the Middle East and John McCain offering a dreamy image of military victory in Iraq by 2013.

Read on.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This Robert Parry offering is really an excellent analysis of the apparent drawing of lines in the sand for an Obama/McCain presidential contest this fall.

I hope Parry is right, and the public shares his basic perception that it's boiling down to a choice between more of the same old neo-con Middle East militarism versus a return to the creative use of diplomacy and international law.

Unmentioned however was Hillary Clinton's contribution to all this. At the same time that Little George was preaching to the Likud choir in the Israeli Knesset and McCain was fantasizing about a five-year plan for victory in Iraq while speaking in Columbus, Ohio, Senator Clinton declared that if Iran ever attacked Israel, as far as she was concerned the United States should "obliterate" Iran.

Thanks for the timely, tasteful, constructive input towards peace in the Middle East, Hillary.

Now, any wacko, homicidal sectarian faction anywhere in the Muslim or non-Muslim world that would like to see the United States escalate its military footprint into Persia can figure out a clever, cost-free way to instigate the dirty deed: whack Israel with a terrorist strike, and leave behind some bloody fingerprints that point back towards Tehran. Both the neo-cons and the neo-libs will leap forth to take that bait.

That terrifying scenario - that Bush will attack Iran as an October surprize before leaving office - is of course the biggest joker in the whole electoral deck. We know what John McCain and Hillary Clinton's likely response to such heightened bloodletting will likely be, but what about candidate Obama?

More shock and awe, and a wider, scarey Middle East war, may ominously reshuffle the partisan cards in a way that makes Robert Parry's anticipated matchup between GOP militarism and Democratic calls for a change of course this November little but tragic and wishful thinking.

Bill from Saginaw