Slate has an discouraging piece this morning describing how conservative media greeted the drop of the World’s Biggest (Non-Nuclear) Bomb in Afghanistan with almost orgastic celebration.
In particular, this typically sober analysis from eminence sleaze and human gas giant Rush Limbaugh caught my eye:
But I ask you to think back to the campaign, what did Donald Trump say about ISIS? He said we’re gonna take ’em out. We’ve had a bunch of pansies and wussies that haven’t had a serious moment about it. I’m gonna get together with my military people, we’re gonna come up with a plan, we’re gonna wipe ’em out.
Get it? A well-formulated policy isn’t (say) a counter-insurgency strategy that stresses separating civilians and combatants. Heck, no! That’s for pansies and wussies.
No, the right strategy is to find the biggest, baddest bomb you can find, and drop it. The bomb is the policy.
The sheer stupidity stuns. If a strategy fails, it’s not because our COIN wasn’t sophisticated enough, but because we weren’t manly enough? Really?
This is what I call a ‘pre-Freudian’ foreign policy. It’s not based on risk-analysis or long-term thinking. It’s based on the juvenile posturing of an immature male whose hormones are in charge of his brain, and he doesn’t even know it.
Can angry, frustrated manhood constitute a strategy? Over the next few years, we may find out.
(For an adult view of counter-insurgency looks like, and what it can do to the soldiers who try to make it work, read this recent Pulitzer Prize-winning piece.)
