(no subject)

[fpb]

I cannot believe that Obama is now proposing, as his Big Idea, to bribe the Taliban out of the war. Does he imagine that has not been tried in decades of war? And does he not imagine that they will take the money with a grin on their faces - said grin becoming rather fixed when they realize how far the dollar has been devalued - and use it to purchase more plastic explosive and heavy machine-guns? Come on, Mr.President, this is a real world.

Comments

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Come one, Mr.President, this is a real world.

Give them time; they've only just met. :)

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Not only has this been tried, it was tried within the last year by Pakistan. Didn't work.

Is Obama a complete idiot?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I doubt it. I do suspect, however, that he has no wish to look at Afghani and Muslim reality in the face. In his life, he has always met polite, upper-class Muslims of the same kind as himself, and the savage and homicidal obstinacy of the Taliban is something, I suspect, that simly contradicts all his categories. And it is also true that the Taliban are something new, unprecedented in Sunni Islamism. In spite of long years of war and of several major defeats, they have never shown any sign of developing serious internal divisions, let alone of turning on each other. They are cohesive, like Khomeinist Shia or a Western political party. As someone pointed out, in other cases of war with Sunnis, you could have counted on someone important breaking with his friends and becoming vulnerable to bribes or the thirst for vengeance. But if that had been the case with the Taliban, it would have taken place long ago. To the contrary, not only have they held together in spite of severe defeats and long and unprofitable struggle, they have also spread to Pakistan (in which there is a bitter irony, given that Pakistan virtually invented them).

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

In his life, he has always met polite, upper-class Muslims of the same kind as himself

I really wasn't going to comment on this post, but please tell me that was a Freudian slip?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Not in the least. The operative words are "polite, upper-class" - members of an international aristocracy who have as much in common with each other as with their own countries, if not more so. I met them in Oxford. Obama is the type to the life.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

It was the "Muslim" part I was questioning. As written, it read as if you've actually thrown in with the "Obama is a secret Muslim" crowd.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I certainly do think that his religious identity is marginal. But then, many American presidents including Lincoln and probably Washington were not Christian. (The most recent was Taft, who was a Unitarian and stated in so many words that he did not believe in the Incarnation.) If Obama were a Muslim, he would be quite outrageously out of skew with the average - rather like a family of Egyptian diplomats I knew in Rome, whose teen-age daughter used to laze around the semi-public local pool with my sister in a bikini in the summer, and would consider aloud becoming a Christian because she had liked Jesus Christ Superstar so much. It is his ignorance, and not his knowledge, of Islam, that bothers me.

[cjmr.livejournal.com]

Has he never heard the old aphorism about Danegeld and Danes?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I do not suppose Kipling was on his curriculum at Harvard - colonialist, y'see.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

The Gods of the Copy-Book Headings will take a terrible vengeance upon him ... and, unfortunately, us for as long as he's our leader.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

I may be accused of being crass or cynical or whatever, but many of Obama's political bent do tend to believe that spending money on a problem actually can make it go away.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Cynical... but credible.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

He does show an alarming lack of comprehension regarding economics, and seems never to have heard that that which one taxes one destroys, that which one subsidizes one has more of.

At the risk of repeting the obvious

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.