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A runaway metaphor is not the worst sin in the world. But if former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig really is a potential national security adviser under President Obama, he's doing his potential future boss no favors when he talks like this:Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if it is causing you too much pain, try something else.
Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”
He spelt out how American troops, spies and anti-terrorist officials could learn key lessons by understanding the desire of terrorists to emulate superheroes like Luke Skywalker, and the lust for violence of violent football fans.
(Lest anyone suspect that the Telegraph is exaggerating Danzig's role in the campaign, note Obama called Danzig "one of our key foreign policy advisers" in November 2007.) The best explanation of the metaphor in the article comes here:
Mr Danzig spelt out the need to change by reading a paragraph from chapter one of the children’s classic, which says: “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. But sometimes he thinks there really is another way if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it.”
(So in the Danzig/Obama foreign policy vision... who's Tigger? We know Piglet has already been banned from the metaphor out of sensitivity to Muslims. Apparently Sen. Harry "the war is lost" Reid is Eeyore under this scenario.)
Jen Rubin suggests "Obama get rid of advisors who make people wonder if he is really ready to sit at the grown-up’s table." We've already seen Obama defend his summits-anytime-anywhere-with-anyone policy by pointing out that Iran, Venezuela and Cuba are geographically tiny, a strikingly irrelevant piece of data in a world of asymmetrical threats.
It's good that Obama is going to Iraq and Afghanistan. And he would be wise to articulate a national security policy that relied more on personal meetings with Gen. David Petraeus and less on reading Winnie the Pooh.
As in the days of Noah...
