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The Role of A Lifetime
Gene Lyons 9/3/2008
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With presidential elections increasingly resembling what are inaccurately styled "reality TV" programs, it shouldn't surprise us to find U.S. foreign policy treated as an action/adventure film scenario. We're not choosing a president so much as casting a cinematic "commander in chief," whose capacity for violent action in an international crisis is deemed his main qualification.

Republicans audition enthusiastically for the role, but Democrats answer casting calls, too. Witness Hillary Clinton's famous 3 a.m. telephone-call ad. A perceived diffidence about dispatching bombers and launching missiles to pound Third World villages is seen as a disqualifying weakness. The nation's crack corps of op-ed commandos and talk-show bombardiers, many of whom last experienced violence in third grade, sell popcorn and lead cheers. It makes them feel important.

Artistically, the prototype may have been "Air Force One," an enjoyably preposterous 1997 picture featuring Harrison Ford as an action-hero president who foils a mid-air hijacking by Kazakh terrorists. It's a role the younger Ronald Reagan would have loved. The film also features Glenn Close as the shaken but loyal vice-president and Gary Oldman as the sneering, egomaniacal terrorist ringleader
-- one-dimensional evil personified.

To quote Huckleberry Finn, "it would make a cow laugh" to watch Ford flinging the last highjacker out the plane's cargo bay into the ocean with a Reaganesque, "Get off my plane." A cow, perhaps, but not one overheated Netflix reviewer, who reported watching the movie several times, awarding it four stars: "Who wouldn't like a president like Harrison Ford's character, he kicks butt!"

Who, indeed? Not for nothing were 14-inch "action figures" of President Bush in fighter-pilot regalia for sale soon after he announced "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. Today, it's Sen. John McCain who most obviously seeks the role, with his cocky, wisecracking fighter-jock persona and penchant for blustering tough talk.

Yeah, McCain was joking when he sang "Bomb, bomb Iran." But in the most serious sense, he wasn't. There's no doubt McCain actually thinks hitting Tehran would accomplish something apart from killing thousands of Persians and convincing much of the world that the United States has become a dangerous, irrational bully.

Does Iran have an anti-democratic, authoritarian government? It does. You definitely wouldn't want to live there. But is Iran a threat to you and me?

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