House of Eratosthenes

Bret Stephens, writing in the Wall Street Journal. I wonder if the fellas will relate to this better than the gals…or if the gals will understand it much better than the fellas…

I once overhead a guy try to make a date over the phone. His end of the conversation went roughly as follows:

“How about Friday?” (Pause.) “Not Friday? Because I’m free most of the weekend.” (Pause.) “Not this weekend? What about next Saturday?” (Pause.) “Are you free at all next week?” (Long pause.) “Well, are you ever free?”

Apparently she was not, at least as far as he was concerned.

Now it’s the turn of the Obama administration to play the guy who won’t take a hint. And it falls to the Islamic Republic of Iran to be the girl who’s hard — actually, impossible — to get.

Tehran’s most recent abrupt rejection came last week, when it reportedly decided that it was not enough for the U.S. to trash four binding Security Council resolutions demanding that Iran cease enriching uranium. Nor was it enough that France and Russia were prepared, with America’s blessing, to convert Iran’s existing stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to a grade of 19.75%, a hair’s breadth shy of the 20% needed for a crude nuclear device.

There’s an easy explanation for why we keep getting suckered into this; it’s because the alternative is so “unthinkable.”

I’m afraid the twilight is now upon that era of diplomacy. The dawn came with the Armistice and the League of Nations; the dew had all burned off the grass by the time Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, and the alternative to diplomacy was really thought to be unthinkable. Everything since then has been one phony peace after another. Tenuous…temporary…fleeting…illusory…delusional. No, worse than all those: blackmailed.

The litmus test of whether a decision is later recalled as a wise one, is not the horror with which future generations might view the alternatives. It is whether they can appreciate the quality of thinking that went into it. How good of a job was done, by those making the decision, fitting it into an overall, self-validating plan, which included quality contingencies for all of the possible ensuing events.

By the time you’re asking that question of “What the hell were ya thinkin’???” it’s a safe bet yesterday’s decision is all-but-disqualified from the running of decisions you can look back on fondly.

Tomorrow’s generation will not look back fondly on our six-to-nine decades of “oh please oh please stop your invading/assembling/enriching pretty-please.” They will have to deal with all the weaponized terrorists that would have burdened them had we chosen the alternative…except the terrorists in this “real” timeline will be far, far wealthier. To say nothing of a great deal better practiced in how to manipulate the leadership of western civilization to do their bidding.

Hope the fellow on the phone eventually shed his cluelessness, and got himself a wife who was more appreciative of his slavishness and time-management acumen. Be that the case or not, I’ve a feeling he doesn’t look back too fondly either on his yesteryears of…oh, what do we call this…I want to be charitable, since I think the point’s been made. Let’s call it flexibility.

Whatever. Unwise decisions. From the right vantage point, they’re pretty easy to spot.

Update: If you’re looking for something to cheer you up after reading the above, don’t go looking to Byron York — who takes note of a new belief, fast becoming more popular, that perhaps Obama is approaching international diplomacy the same way he once approached community organizing:

During last year’s campaign, I spent some time in Chicago looking into Obama’s career as an organizer. A number of the people he worked with back then — he was on the job for all of three years, from 1985 to 1988 — are still in the field today, and they have vivid memories of their time with future president. Talking to them, and looking back over Obama’s record, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that as an organizer, Obama started a lot of projects, gave a lot of inspirational talks, but accomplished very little.

Among other things, Obama tried to find new jobs for displaced steelworkers, to create after-school programs, and to bring new political power to public housing residents. But he truly succeeded at just two things. One, he pushed the city of Chicago to open up a summer-jobs office on the far South Side, where there had not previously been an office, and two, he helped force the city to clean up asbestos in a 1940s-era housing project in the same neighborhood.

That was it.
:
That’s not to say that Obama left no legacy as an organizer. The colleagues I talked with all remembered him fondly. Several said he inspired them to improve their lives. But these were all people who shared his goals. They wanted to believe in him and in their shared enterprise.

Does Mahmoud Ahmedinejad fit into that category? The Taliban? Kim Jong-il?

Now that Obama is the president of the United States, he is the power figure, not the supplicant or the protester. Certainly a president still needs to convince foreign leaders to give him what he wants, but when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world, Obama isn’t the underdog. His years on the South Side are little help.

You can see Obama’s community organizing approach at the White House every day, in the attempts to marginalize Republican opponents, or in the attacks on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. But handling the life-or-death issues of America’s relations with the world — that’s a new job entirely. And Obama has no experience that prepares him for it.

“Obama has no experience that prepares him for it.”

What was it people were saying about Palin during the campaign ’08, including conservatives? Oh, that’s right, she doesn’t have enough experience, even though the actual presidential candidate on the other team had …. 3 years of community organizing?

I swear, some of the thinking that goes on nowadays is so…. otherworldly. The progressives certainly have done a good job over the last century in demolishing our countrymen’s capacity for rational thought.

Bummer, indeed.
- KG | 11/03/2009 @ 15:11
What was it people were saying about Palin during the campaign ‘08, including conservatives? Oh, that’s right, she doesn’t have enough experience, even though the actual presidential candidate on the other team had …. 3 years of community organizing?

The chutzpah of this prattle. And worse, it being repeated over and over again. The bottom half of the GOP ticket had more executive experience than the two halves of the Dem ticket COMBINED, and yet the left had the unbridled temerity to raise this as a supposed ‘disqualifier’ against Palin.

Course, now, we’ve got Gaffe-Machine sitting in the veep’s office. Gosh, I’m so glad we kept that Bible-thumping, moose-skinning, redneck hockey mom out of there, aren’t you? The guy we got instead is SUCH an improvement.
- cylarz | 11/05/2009 @ 01:05

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

When No Means NoTuesday, November 3rd, 2009

When No Means No
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009