One of Barack Obama’s top foreign policy advisers, and a man who many believe could become National Security Adviser in an Obama Administration, apparently gets most of his ideas from children’s literature:
Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if it is causing you too much pain, try something else.
Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”
He spelt out how American troops, spies and anti-terrorist officials could learn key lessons by understanding the desire of terrorists to emulate superheroes like Luke Skywalker, and the lust for violence of violent football fans.
But wait, there’s more:
[Danzig] said that even people who are relatively well off and successful can feel like failures and become alientated from their societies. He said one terrorist told him: “We have been raised on a theory of superheroes. We all want to be like Luke Skywalker.
“When we’re doing mundane things, we lose track of our ambition but when someone comes along, like Asahara, the head of the cult, and presents himself as a messiah and gives us a picture of progress that is ordained by heaven and that we are carrying out a saintly mission on earth that is for us extraordinarily evocative.”
This is what passes for thought among Obama’s advisers ?
Seriously, this guy needs to be canned immediately. Otherwise, I’ll just have to conclude that Obama is fine with having a total loon advising him on foreign policy.
June 17th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Where else would could Democrats get their foreign policies ideas from? No one understands traditional mathematics would consider eliminating all the terrorists achievable, but that does not stop us from eliminating those we can. But Democrats don’t think it worth the trouble unless we can get rid of all of them. If that is not fairytale thinking, what is?
July 25th, 2008 at 2:04 am
The problem with the above line of thinking is that, since a War on Terror can never actually eliminate all terrorists, then how do we define victory? It seems that the alternative is a “War on Terror” that never, ever ends, because Terrorism will never, ever end.
Those who don’t see the problem with a war that never ends need to brush up on their Orwell.