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View Full Version : Realpolitik vs. The Code of the Old West



maineman
09-24-2006, 08:10 PM
realpolitik  [rey-ahl-poh-li-teek, ree-]

–noun political realism or practical politics, esp. policy based on power rather than on ideals.

It is my belief that basing foreign policy decisions the way western movie stars decided who and who not to shoot it out with on the streets of Dodge City is never a wise decision. And I suggest that is precisely what our pissant cowboy pResident has gone and done.

Saddam was a bad guy. A really bad guy. But even though he had tried to have Poppy Bush gunned down, and even though he had been nasty to his own people, he did do ONE thing very well. He did stand as a foil to Iranian hegemony in the region. He did stand as a major force AGAINST Islamic extremism, primarily because he and his ba'athist party had as much at stake as any of the other enemies of wahabbism.

If we run our foreign policy like a western movie hero and decide to take out all the guys wearing black hats, we do ourselves a great disservice.

As a result of our failure to consider realpolitik in our foreign policy making in the wake of 9/11, we have succeeded in making the world a more dangerous place and putting America IN a more dangerous place.

The only reason Iran gave Hezbollah in Lebanon the green light to attack Israel was because we had allowed their influence in the region to increase unchecked while we were bogged down in Iraq.

Our war in Iraq, according to the NIE has indeed fueled the growth of Islamic extremism.

And beyond that, on the Pacific Rim, a goggle eyed little gook named Kim Jong Il has been able to take advantage of our reduced stature and clout on the world stage and bitchslap us like a little girlieman by completely ignoring our blustering warnings and firing a bunch of ICBM's into the sea of japan on THE FOURTH OF JULY and we were powerless to do anything. That would not have happened had we not been so weakened diplomatically by the Iraqi debacle.

I don't care what sort of an asshole Saddam was. I am convinced that the United States - and the world in general - would be a safer, less volatile place had we left him in power letting him continue to do the thing he did well, and we had addressed the response to 9/11 and Islamic extremism with an eye toward realpolitik and not simply considered "The Code of the Old West" as our mission statement.