Another Clark Bar in the Pool

Anyone who cracked up over the Clark Bar floating in the pool in the film “Caddy Shack” knows what the candy represented.

Now George Bush is dumping new Clark Bars into a critically important foreign policy pool in Pakistan… only there's nothing sweet about his dumps, which already have been eaten, digested and eliminated, threatening to foul world events yet again.

WTF, Dubyah???? Did we really need to provoke an already reeling world by sending a drone into Pakistan to launch a missile strike that killed 20 civilians, when Pakistan has nuclear weapons and isn’t sure if we’re friend or foe? Are you just wagging the pachyderm? Or are you defacing the Oval Office desk with your signature, leaving a lingering stench of your ineptitude before you leave?

According to today’s New York Times, the strike was “part of an escalating campaign by the Bush administration to hit the Taliban and their Qaeda backers at their bases in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

“The Bush administration has intensified the drone attacks after backing away from using American commandos for ground raids into the tribal belt. A ground assault on Sept. 3 produced an angry public riposte from the chief of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who said he would defend Pakistan’s borders ‘at all costs’ against such intrusions, an unusually strong statement from one ally to another.”

OK, it’s almost Halloween, so there are a lot of scary movie reruns on cable TV right now. But, after a brief period of relative calm in his war games (somebody please teach the Prez how to use a Game Boy), Dubyah has reduced me to that badass Indian spirit in “Amityville Horror” growling, “Get Out.”

Please, Dubyah… just when Oliver Stone’s movie “W” was convincing some of us that you’re human, must you scare the Clark Bar out of us again? Take a nap! Visit a grade school and read the kiddies a story about a goat! Lock yourself in the bathroom and enjoy a moment of personal pleasure! Just please, please, pretty please… don’t make another one of your notoriously critical blunders in our dealings with Pakistan!

Bruce Riedel, formerly one of the CIA’s senior Middle East analysts and later an assistant to the President on the National Security Council, has just published an insightful book: “The Search For Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, And Future” (Brookings Institution Press. $26.95). Among the many points Riedel makes is that al Qaeda does not, as Dubyah claims, hate the U.S. because of our freedoms and way of life… “As [Osama] bin Ladin has said, ‘if that were the case, Al Qaeda would have attacked Sweden.’ ”

So, what does Riedel recommend for dealing with terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere? Primarily, that we need a more sophisticated approach. Noting that Bin Ladin is an “evil genius” who predicted that the world economic/financial crisis we are undergoing is “exactly what would happen when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began,” and that Bin Ladin actually pointed specifically to the home-mortgage bubble in the United States, Reidel says we must tackle the “fundamental challenge of… Al Queda’s narrative.” That sounds like he thinks we need to talk. (To read the Newsweek interview with Riedel visit http://www.newsweek.com/id/165952/page/1)

After a Pakistani parliamentary resolution last week that encouraged dialogue with willing militants, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, echoed Riedel’s opinion by stating, “There is an increasing realization that the use of force alone cannot yield the desired results.”

Does this mean we should toss chocolate truffles into the pool instead of Clark Bars? I don’t think so. I think we need to stock up on Chateauneuf du Pape and enroll leaders from both political parties in adult education courses on diplomacy.