Can You Dig the Zbig?

Readers here will know that it is something of an understatement to say that I am no fan of Jimmy Carter. A self important jerk, and even worse President, Carter left a mess in the Middle East, yet declared “victory!” simply because he bribed Egypt and Israel into signing a peace agreement.

Empty headed foreign policy on the scale of Carter’s failures simply cannot be attained by just one incompetent peanut farmer from Georgia. Nope, as empty as Jimmy’s cardigan sweater was, even he could not have been solely responsible for the disaster that was his presidency. Thankfully, a man has stepped forward in recent days to announce his candidacy for “Carters Idiot Rasputin”.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Zbigniew Brezezinski:

Spiegel: Dr. Brzezinski, President Bush compares the dangers of terrorism with the dangers of the Cold War. He has even spoken repeatedly of a "nation at war" and will only accept "complete victory." Is he right or is he using exaggerated rhetoric?

Brzezinski: He is fundamentally wrong. Whether that is deliberate demagoguery or simply historical ignorance, I do not know. For four years I was responsible for coordinating the U.S. response in the event of a nuclear attack. And I can assure you that a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union on a comprehensive scale would have killed 160 to 180 million people within 24 hours.

No terrorist threat is comparable to that in the foreseeable future. . . .

Spiegel: Is fear, as at the thought of a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists, not something very natural?

Brzezinski: Certainly, such a notion is not entirely unrealistic, but on the other hand we are not confronted with the Soviet nuclear weapons arsenal. I do not wish to minimize the danger of a single or even multiple terrorist acts, but their scale is simply not comparable.

Got that? In Zbig’s world, just because Russia had more nuclear weapons they are by definition a greater danger as compared to today’s terrorists. No consideration of underlying intent, no consideration of willingness to use said weapons and no consideration of likelihood of an actual nuclear attack. If this is any representation of Zbig’s logic path, we may also be able to assume that he subscribes to all those “you may already be a winner mailings”, plays the lotto and is just certain that he is going to win really soon!

One thing Zbiggy and I agree on is that the terrorist threat is not comparable to the Ruskies. We know this with certainty if for no other reason than the terrorists have already attacked us in this country. They have taken the measure of what they would like to accomplish and decided that, yes, attacking the U.S. absolutely makes sense given their goals. The did on 9/11 and they also hit the World Trade Center in the ‘90’s. Does Zbiggy really think they’d hesitate to use a nuke if they had it?