What a Foreign Policy

Digby works himself into a fine rant here, starting out with a comment on a particulary silly op-ed ("The propaganda value Iran gained from its lone female hostage, the mother of a 3-year-old, was incalculable." Huh?) by one of the winger ladies (Kathleen Parker, a Chris Matthews talking head). But the best, most concisely insightful stuff follows later on in his post:

I agree that it's entirely possible that the Iranians and al-Qaeda and all sorts of unsavory types around the world have become emboldened by American (and British) military policy, but I doubt that it has much to do with women in combat. The problem is that our president, in his ignorance and hubris, has just proved to the entire world that the United States has no earthly clue what it is doing. The administration even insists to everyone who will listen that the US intelligence services couldn't find water if they fell off a boat.

Any administration that really cared about national security would not have lied about something so obvious as Saddam's mythic weapons cache with such assuredness and then blamed the entire US intelligence service when they were not found. If you want to make a country look weak and inept, that's one excellent way to do it.

And then there is the fact that the Iraq occupation itself is in total chaos. The North Koreans went right ahead a built a bomb while John Bolton was swinging his ineffectual little stick around. Guanatanamo is an immoral embarrassment that nobody on earth sees as anything more than an unsophisticated propaganda ploy that blew up in our faces. And after almost seven years we have no idea where Osama bin Laden is.

Let's just say that those, among many more, might be the bigger propaganda victories with "incalculable" value to the enemy than some British sailor in a headscarf.

Parker is parroting the Dick Cheney fifth grade schoolyard school of foreign policy. The entire world rests on whether the United States out trash-talks the enemies of our nation, who are lurking everywhere, throwing rhetorical zingers about our national manhood. Failure on the ground is meaningless in any substantial sense. What matters is if we keep swaggering around like we know what we are doing even when its patently obvious that we don't.

The problem, you see, is that up until now they haven't taken us seriously. Only by repeatedly making threats, giving bellicose speeches and invading countries willy nilly will they realize that we can't be defeated. To the Schoolyard School, Ahmadinejad is, therefore, a very serious foe even though he's actually a sort of circus clown who doesn't wield any real power. He is a first class insult artist. Indeed, Parker's instinct to capitulate to his taunts by banning women from the military is testament to how formidable he is to these people. One off-hand comment about British manhood and she starts shrieking like a ninny that he's right.

Cheney knows that the way to win his GWOT has nothing to do with better intelligence, competent leadership, sophisticated diplomacy or even superior military might. What we must do is psych the terrorists out with our patented Hollywood macho style (and that doesn't include wimminfolk on the boat.) As Parker says in her column, it's all about how we are perceived.

Pay no attention to all the actual dead people lying around. They're just extras in our rhetorical battle of wills.

I like Digby at Hullaboo for the most part. He sometimes goes over the top, but often his writing is just too good.