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Bluff Called - Now What?

On August 31st, there was this deadline for Iran to stop doing the [nucular] thing, or else. Well, Iran basically told us to go plook ourselves, and said a bunch of other incendiary things about us and Israel and the holocaust and all that, probably just to get us even more riled up, then laughed when the deadline passed and "or else" didn't happen. In fact, the Bushies are all into this diplomacy track now, former Iranian president Khatami is hanging out in the US and Ahmadinejad is headlining at the big UN soiree.

Now what? Are we going to bomb Iran now? It's like having a stare-down in the playground and only when the other kid walks away laughing, you throw a rock at him. That's the problem with acting like a badass. When you get your bluff called, you look even worse than if you simply came up short in a more diplomatically rooted argument. But this is serious too. Other countries are watching this. North Korea for one. Remember them?

Whenever we exercise our democracy by criticizing the adminstration, they and all their sycophants start screaming that we "embolden our enemies". Well, if you square off at somebody, then don't do anything when they call your bluff, what does that do, hmmm? I'm not saying we should send in the B-52s just to save face. That would be even more retarded! They just need to tone down the cowboy rhetoric, keep the diplomatic back-channel wide open, and start acting like a member of a world community.

Actually, Bush should have insisted on meeting with Ahmadinejad. If Bush truly is the tough guy he thinks he is, sitting down with his rival and saying, "Look man, we both know we have a problem here. Let's figure out what we're gonna do about it. Let's agree that we live in the same world together, despite our differences, and take it from there." That's what real leaders do. Not only would it shock the hell out of everybody, it would change everything. It would show the world that we really want to solve these problems, not simply create yet another controversial pretext for another war. Sadly, though, I think the latter is indeed the goal. Not only that, Bush's people certainly know that he could never hold his own in a debate, let alone a discussion, with Ahmadinejad. Forget about who has the moral high ground, Bush simply doesn't have the skill, or the balls, to face his enemy.