Yee Haw!

It was a loud shrieking rebel yell (pictured above) that killed Howard Dean’s presidential political campaign dead in its tracks. “The one-time Democratic frontrunner’s campaign never recovered from his ‘yee-haw’ moment the night of his defeat in the 2004 Iowa caucuses. The former Vermont governor got carried away while reciting a list of states he had targeted for victory. ‘The Scream’ became The Story of the night. And the campaign.” SFGate.com, September 12, 2012. We’ve seen such comments from lots of wannabee candidates that killed their chances at the polls, and perhaps we have another one just now.

GOP front runner, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker – a budget-slashing union buster – was making a point about his leadership skills being just what our foreign policy required. And so he opened his mouth, and as his foot was heading in, uttered he was just the leader to take on ISIS because: "‘If I can take on 100,000 [pro-union] protesters, I can do the same across the world,’ Walker told a packed crowd at the Conservative Political Action Committee, in response to a question about how he would fight the terrorist group, which has killed thousands in Iraq and Syria.” Huffington Post, February 26^th.

He later clarified his remarks in an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal: “"Let me be perfectly clear, I'm just pointing out the closest thing I have to handling this difficult situation is the 100,000 protesters I had to deal with,’ Walker said…The governor said he did not regret the comment… ‘You all will misconstrue things the way you see fit,’ he said. ‘That's the closest thing I have in terms of handling a difficult situation, not that there’s any parallel between the two.’” Huffington Post. “Mission accomplished,” no doubt. Can you see the negative political ads running with all this audio-visual fodder?

Whether Mr. Scott’s adherents care about such flagrant missteps remains to be seen, but in a pernicious world of malevolence, blind hubris laced with deep ignorance is a dangerous combination, one that has no bias based on political affiliation. Last time I looked, Wisconsin union supporters were unarmed in their protests, much less blasting with suicide bombs, seizing tanks and other sophisticated weapons to be immediately used to kill anyone who disagreed with them, slaughtering people with differing religious beliefs into genocidal mass graves, ransoming and then beheading foreign captives on video.

As a foreign service brat, a kid who spend a pile of years in the Middle East, I saw the Mr. Walkers of that era as dangerous politicos who poisoned the well, generated the epithet of “ugly Americans,” drew new levels of local resentment and provided the kinds of recruitment tools that international extremists crave in their perpetual quest for new bodies to feed into their explosive mix. And while foreign policy is never the decider in recent American presidential elections – “It’s the economy, stupid!” – the hard dollar cost of such deep and unthinking ignorance has cost this nation trillions of dollars in waste and deficits, all while making the global stage much worse and vastly more dangerous for American interests everywhere.

Indeed, it was the American destabilization of Iraq – literally fomenting a bloody struggle between Sunnis and the majority Shiites – that created the rich and fertile soil of deep resentment, humiliation and economic waste (exacerbated as global warming destroyed hundreds of thousands of regional Sunni farms) in which ISIS planted its venomous seeds. Not that the United States should ignore the violence that defines modern Iraq and Syria, the global threat of ISIS and its ilk; we cannot and we must not.

But having leadership that believes that a completely foreign-policy-inexperienced politician can use rather irrelevant union-busting skills to counter a super-malevolent and well-armed military force is patently absurd. Want to bet that Mr. Walker really doesn’t even know why Shiites and Sunnis don’t get along (they did for a while in Iraq until we swatted the bees’ nest)? One of the most important factors in this conflict? That Sunnis believe in a literal reading of the Qur’an by all the faithful, while Shiites see that holy tome as a mystical revelation from God that only the most senior cleric can divine and explain? Ask that question of Republican John McCain, and he’ll give you the correct answer.

While the Democrats may be cheering for Mr. Walker to maintain his slim lead over his fellow Republican contenders – believing rightly or wrongly that he would be an easy candidate to defeat – I for one would like to know that our presidential choices in 2016 will be between two individuals with enough humility, intelligence and understanding to face the evil forces in the world with more than blind and stupid answers for exceptionally complex and powerful forces that threaten our very existence and where misplaced responses could cost this nation trillions and trillions more to counter ignorance-based decisions. In my eyes, Mr. Walker went from being a very-right-of-center fiscal conservative to becoming the kind of ignorant fool we cannot tolerate in the top spot.

I’m Peter Dekom, and whether our next president is a Democrat or a Republican, we really do not want to elect an obvious idiot to that position.