Cowboy Diplomacy Rides Again

As far as I can tell, the British media doesn't really seem to have grasped the importance of the Iranian angle to Bush's escalation speech. I've been banging on about it here but it doesn't seem to have been given the coverage it deserves in the British media.

It's almost enough to make a person wonder whether he's barking up the wrong tree.

But then again.

Only this president, only in this time, only with this dangerous, even messianic certitude, could answer a country demanding an exit strategy from Iraq, by offering an entrance strategy for Iran.

Only this president could look out over a vista of 3,008 dead and 22,834 wounded in Iraq, and finally say, “Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me” — only to follow that by proposing to repeat the identical mistake ... in Iran.

Only this president could extol the “thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group,” and then take its most far-sighted recommendation — “engage Syria and Iran” — and transform it into “threaten Syria and Iran” — when al-Qaida would like nothing better than for us to threaten Syria, and when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than to be threatened by us.

This is diplomacy by skimming; it is internationalism by drawing pictures of Superman in the margins of the text books; it is a presidency of Cliff Notes. And to Iran and Syria — and, yes, also to the insurgents in Iraq — we must look like a country run by the equivalent of the drunken pest who gets battered to the floor of the saloon by one punch, then staggers to his feet, and shouts at the other guy’s friends, “Ok, which one of you is next?”

Full transript here (via).

And there's more (via a comment by rick). And more. And more. And a bit more. I could go on but you probably get the picture.

And there are some British voices who have noticed too. Our old friend Con Coughlin is all for this escalation against Iran. Well, who would have thought it?

In a previous post, I suggested that Blair might understand that British involvement in attacks on Iran would be a step too far for him. I may have been over-optimistic. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that Blair is today making a speech on the need for continued support for American policy and stressing the need for British armed forces to "be war fighters" and for us to "pay the cost of that fight, whatever it may be".

Or perhaps it isn't.

By the way, Olbermann, for all that he's often bang on the money on Bush's many failings, made a rather grotesque claim in his special comment. A vista of 3,008 dead and 22,834 wounded in Iraq? I think you'll find the vista is far more littered with corpses than that, Keith. Or do only Americans count?