Needed: A Big Stick is what the Washington Post editors prescribe today.
The subtitle already differentiates the authors from the normal crowd of human beings, those in contact with reality:
Iran and Syria are waging war in the Middle East. Will the West fight back?
It is hard to imagine what news sources these people have.
The last time I checked, and I did check recently, the U.S. is fighting a war against Iraq, Israel just fought a war against Lebanon and Israel is also fighting a permanent war against the Palestinians. Syria and Iran are not waging war.
But it gets better than that:
The assassination [of Gemayel] was a shockingly audacious attack on Lebanon’s democratic forces and their U.S. and European allies.
Pierre Gemayel was probably a decent man, I don’t know much about him, but a man who, being a Christian, claimed Shia Lebanese "may be the quantity, but we are the quality." sounds like a racist to me not like a democrat.
The democratic forces in Lebanon these WaPo editors seem to love are those who support the uphold of an undemocratic system. Parliament seats in Lebanon as well as government positions are distributed by quotas for various religious groups. These quotas are based on a demographic count done back in 1932 and have little to do with todays real numbers. Lebanon does not have a one wo/men one vote system in a true sense. Gemayel and the democratic forces are the ones who cling to this system and do fight against the true democratic one Hizbullah demands.
On Iran the editors write:
Iran meanwhile presses ahead with its barely disguised nuclear weapons program: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently promised to increase the number of centrifuges enriching uranium from the current 328 to 60,000.
As Seymour Hersh recently wrote, the program is so barely disguised, that the CIA does think that it does not exist and that the IAEA has found no hint of such a program either. To operate 60,000 centrifuges is of course consistent with Iran’s public plans for civil nuclear energy use.
Coming from their very unreal assembly of facts the writers then demand, not to talk with the Iranian or Syrian government unless the U.S. has some "sticks" to carry into those negotiations – sticks being UN resolutions or sanctions by an "ad hoc coalition" to put pressure on Iran and Syria. The chances for the administration to get such "sticks" are, given the facts, essentially zero and the editorial does not say where they could be found.
That the editorial starting from unreal facts ends with unrealistic demands is not astonishing. But astonishing to me is how people, who, I assume, know the reality, feel the need to write such unreal stuff at all.
If they would argue for giving money to big pharma while having lots of pharma shares, I would understand the need to deceive and to be unreal. But in the case of talks with Iran and Syria, what is there to gain for them by writing such diatribe.
Do the authors really believe that "staying the course" and not to talk about mutal interests with Iran and Syria will further US interests?