Fear makes us stupid, and its at the heart of Moby Dick Syndrome. When
those in the stronger position are in the grip of MDS they fear an enemy who may not like them but has no desire or capability
to destroy them.  MDS sufferers, however, experience an ungrounded fear
that compels them to think the weaker enemy seeks their utter
destruction. The MDS logic therefore requires that the weaker enemy  must be utterly destroyed before
it destroys them.

MDS is all about a disproportionate fear getting the better of those
who are strong enough not to worry that their survival is at stake.
The insanity lies in the certainty that the enemy is capable of
destroying them and will do so. And so the stronger’s behavior toward the weaker enemy
convinces the enemy that its survival is at stake, which isn’t crazy because this enemy is far more vulnerable. So the weaker enemy
responds with the unbridled rage of the cornered animal, and it
does what it can to increase its power in order to defend itself and to inflict harm on the crazy MDS people who they think, rightly, intend their destruction.

Isn’t this precisely
what we are seeing in the Middle East right now? Are we not now dealing with a weaker enemy which has become far more dangerous and capable of harming us precisely because of American MDS? Only those who are completely ignorant of history can honestly believe that 9/11 was an unprovoked attack. I am by no means justifiying it. I think it was a barbarous act of criminality. And I would agree that sane policy requires that al Qaeda as a terrorist organization be destroyed. But al Qaeda is not Iraq and it’s not Iran. It is not identified with all of Islam. It is in so many ways an American creation. And we cannot prevent future attacks unless we understand the role America and Europe has played in creating the conditions in which organizations such as al Qaeda thrive.

And that’s why Obama is so important. He gets it. Spencer Ackerman has a good piece at American Prospect about Obama’s foreign policy group.  Clinton on the other hand simply does not get it. She buys into the old fear-based mindset as "reality".  Obama does not.

"For a long time we’ve not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled weak or indecisive," another top adviser says. Identifying that fear as the accelerant of the Iraq War mind-set is the first step to a new and innovative foreign policy. John Kerry was not able to argue for fundamental change in foreign policy because he was consumed by that very political fear. Obama’s admonition to Democrats is much like Pope John Paul II’s to the Gdansk shipyard strikers — first, be not afraid.

Refusing to allow fear to control our thinking starts at home with standing up to the conventional thinking that is in the grip of MDS. This is what Obama stands for, and it’s an open question whether the country has enough sanity to embrace his sanity.  It will surely be tested in the general election. Already fools like Maureen Dowd are doing their best to make Obama look "whipped". (What is the matter with that woman?  Remember her bit about Gore practically lactating?  She is really creepy. Keep the children away from her.)

In any event Ackerman’s article gives a good overview of who the key players are in Obama’s foreign policy team, and it does a good job of describing their ambition to bring sanity back to our foreign policy.  They really do what to change the mindset. And people in the establishment understandably are confused because they only deal with established reality, no matter how crazy. Sanity puzzles them: 

To propose rebooting U.S. foreign policy now is, to say the least, ambitious. Many military leaders consider Obama an unknown quantity. At a recent talk, Washington Post correspondent Thomas Ricks said that officers and soldiers serving in Iraq thought that McCain and Clinton would both pursue a foreign-policy commensurate with Bush’s, but Obama left them puzzled. Once in office, Obama might feel compelled to turn his back on the critique he makes on the trail.

But while the doubts about Obama contain fair points, they also, to a certain degree, reflect a triumph of the Iraq War mind-set. Why not demand the destruction of al-Qaeda? Why not pursue the enlightened global leadership promised by liberal internationalism? Why not abandon fear? What is it we have to fear, exactly?

"He goes back to Roosevelt," Power says. "Freedom from fear and freedom from want. What if we actually offered that? What if we delivered that in the developing world? That would be a transformative agenda for us." The end of the Iraq War mind-set, it turns out, may be the beginning of America’s reacquaintance with its best traditions.

I know, such sanity sounds too good for anybody to take it seriously.