Not the Onion, No Really

It's good to know that not every member of the Obama team has Ché posters on the wall; some of them have Pooh. From the Telegraph:

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.”

.......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 maybe this is where the "let's just sit down and just talk to everyone" philosophy comes from. Sure, it sounds good, except for being naive and completely divorced from how the world really works. Except for that.

Hey, maybe we can get Iranian operatives out of Iraq by giving the troops umbrellas and having them march up and down the streets of Baghdad saying, “Tut, tut! It looks like rain...”