Good Cop Bad Cop
Friedman actually writes something interesting and provocative. Obama-Cheney ticket/strategy vs. Iran. Good cop/bad cop. Says the problem with the Bush admin is it’s all bad cop, and can’t take “yes” for an answer. It almost makes sense:
After Iraq and Pakistan, the most vexing foreign policy issue that will face the next president will be how to handle Iran. There is a cold war in the Middle East today between America and Iran, and until and unless it gets resolved, I see Iran using its proxies, its chess pieces — Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and the Shiite militias in Iraq — to stymie America and its allies across the region.
And that brings me back to the Obama-Cheney ticket: When it comes to how best to deal with Iran, each has half a policy — but if you actually put them together, they’d add up to an ideal U.S. strategy for Iran. Dare I say, they complete each other.
Vice President Cheney is the hawk-eating hawk, who regularly swoops down and declares that the U.S. will not permit Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Trust me, the Iranians take his threats seriously. But Mr. Cheney’s Dr. Strangelove imitation is totally wasted with President Bush and Secretary of State Condi Rice. Because the president and secretary of state have never been able to make up their minds as to what U.S. policy toward Iran should be — to bring about regime change or a change of behavior — it’s impossible to have any effective diplomacy.
If she were taking advantage of Mr. Cheney’s madness, Secretary Rice would be going to Tehran and saying to the Iranians: “Look, I’m ready to cut a deal with you guys, but I have to tell you, back home, I’ve got Cheney on my back and he is truly craaaaazzzzy. You guys don’t know the half of it. He thinks waterboarding is what you do with your grandchildren at the pool on Sunday. I’m not sure how much longer I can restrain him. So maybe we should have a serious nuke talk, and, if it goes well, we’ll back off regime change.”
Instead, we just have Mr. Cheney being Mr. Cheney, but the Bush team neither carrying out his threats nor leveraging them to drive meaningful diplomacy with Tehran. There’s no good cop, it’s just a bad cop/bad cop routine — a big reason our Iran policy has been a failure. It has not stopped the Iranian nuclear program or changed the regime.
Well, that’s because the cop hasn’t been sufficiently bad yet, and has yet to use his billyclub on the Iranian nuke facilities. Unclear which part of the Baghdad talks and or working through the IAEA and European intermediaries counts as insufficiently good cop. Not clear what kind of policing calls for sucking up to a criminal regime that still publicly exults in taking over our embassy and is currently involved in the murder of American soldiers.
“For coercive diplomacy to work you need to be able to threaten what the regime values most — its own survival,” said the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Robert Litwak, author of the book “Regime Change.” “But for coercive diplomacy to work, you also need to be ready to take yes for an answer.”
…
But Mr. Obama’s stress on engaging Iran, while a useful antidote to the Bush boycott policy, is not sufficient. Mr. Obama evinces little feel for generating the leverage you’d need to make such diplomacy work. When negotiating with murderous regimes like Iran’s or Syria’s, you want Tony Soprano by your side, not Big Bird. Mr. Obama’s gift for outreach would be so much more effective with a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.
One other problem. What if “yes” is a big fat fib? I’m sure there must be a Sesame Street episode that deals with how much trouble you can get into if you tell one. But the mullahs don’t watch that show and haven’t exactly developed a reputation for truthfulness. They’ve lied about Iraq. They lied about Afghanistan. They lied their support for al Qaeda. They’ve lied about Lebanon and Gaza. They appear to have lied about involvement in Lockerbie. They’ve lied about the Beirut barracks bombing. Let’s suppose the Iranians … bear with me here … prevaricate about their nuclear program and these other issues, and it is decided the big Tony Soprano bat must be used. Will Friedman have any more stomach for rough stuff than he did last time he advocated a war over nukes? And would President Big Bird ever swing that bat?
This is (one of) the problem(s) with President Big Bird and the rest of the Sesame Street Party’s candidates. They cannot be relied on to protect U.S. and world security interests, because they are convinced they can chase the clouds away and make it a sunny day.
Topics: Iran, Sesame Street, pols
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:41 pm on Sunday, November 18, 2007
4 Responses to “Good Cop Bad Cop”
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November 18th, 2007 at 11:40 pm
“Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.”–Friedman, 1999
When dealing with a country that never lifted a finger against the United States (the FRY), Friedman’s position is is that we should bomb them back to the middle ages if they don’t do as we command. When dealing with a country that has attacked our embassies, and helped terrorists kidnap and murder Americans, that threatens to destroy the United States every day on the floor of their bogus parliament, and that is now trying to build nuclear weapons, Friedman wants to negotiate.
Thomas Friedman is a moron. Always has been, alway will be.
If you want to follow policies that are good for power-hungey liberals, but bad for the United States then listen to Friedman’s hogwash, and follow his advice Otherwise…ignore the idiot.
November 19th, 2007 at 5:55 am
Dave, you don’t understand. In Kosovo, the Serbs were killing Muslims!
November 20th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Salty, it’s even easier than that: a Democrat was President.
November 20th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
How the almost exclusive global purveyors of terror and mass mayhem got ensconced as the prototypical victims of their targets should go down in (truthful) history books (assuming anyone is ever allowed to write one) as one of the greatest PR and DisInformation coups of all time.