I learned a fair bit about chess when I was a kid. I had a knack for it. Somewhere in my teens I read Kipling's "Kim", getting my first acquaintance with the concept of "The Great Game" of international relationships. What it amounts to, overall, is that international politics/policies/actions are much like a 3-D chess game: Complex.
Bush and his people just aren't that good at it--not that I think any other woulda-beens or wannabes are any better.
The U.S. is handicapped by our TV mentality and do-good-itis. Start with a problem, throw money and technology at it, and there will be a clear-cut happy ending in 22, 44 or 88 minutes. Plus advertising time. We're not wired up for the long haul in much of anything.
The obvious example is our botch in Vietnam. We messed up bigtime on the political end of it, being totally out-propagandized by our enemies. So, we pulled out, promising the South Vietnamese ongoing financial and materiel support. "Ongoing" was two years. Third year, the NVA won, entering the south with more armor than the Russians had when going into Berlin. It took some twenty years for us to mostly recover from the debacle.
If we pull out now, we're not leaving behind a bunch of cold-blooded rational thinkers like the Asians and the Kremlin. We'd be showing the yellow stripe, insofar as the population of the middle east is concerned. We'd be, in their eyes, proving that we're wussies; all show and no go. That would be an encouragement to bring IEDs out of Iraq and other places, right here to the U.S. And the leaders of those countries are fully aware of that.
The Iranian goal is the *expletive deleted*it Crescent, from Iran to Egypt, with Israel becoming a footnote to history. And full control of all that oil. With the oil money, they can then have all the nukes and delivery systems they want, they believe. It's just a matter of time.
Chess game: How many moves ahead--and countermoves--can you envision?
Art
