US strategy towards Iran and North Korea

The Bush and the Obama administrations hyperventilate when it comes to Iran and North Korea, two 'axis of evil' states, so defined by Condi Rice.

Is the US sniffing 'pixie dust'? Is it like Peter Pan, the boy who never wanted to grow up?

Grandiose is a policy towards Tehran and Pongyang that is doomed to failure. The big policy guns, civil and military, believe in the myth that bluster, saber rattling, and invasion will bend the leaders of these two countries to Washington's will?

In the real world, it doesn't work like that: consider Bush 43's war in Iraq. It may have toppled Saddam Hussein but it left the country in shambles, and now what's more humiliating, the hand picked prime minister is doing everything to humiliate his American masters who put in power. And even more bruising to Washington's ego, Bush's war strengthened Iran's presence in the region, like it or not; t'was a notion that was blithely ignored by the 'tough minded' advisors who gave no thought of what is the US going to do when Saddam was chased from power. And boy, do we know: the body count, Iraqi and US and the corpses of the coalition of the willing speak powerfully from the grave.

The US is like the big bad wolf of the Grimm fairy tale: he huffs, he buffs, he blows the house down but he does get to eat his prey. They outwit him.

Somehow the occupiers of the White House think like hucksters; they can get away with Madison Avenue hype. In this life, as good capitalists that they are, you have to pay, and pay is a word that apparently doesn't exist in their vocabulary.

As such, the US is always threatening war or sanctions or boycotts to bring Iran and North Korea to their knees. And that flimflam rarely works.

The words of the late leader of Guinee Sekou Toure make no impression on the self satisfied policymakers in Washington: 'better to be a free man standing on his own two feet than a slave on his knees'. Toure utters these words when he refused Degaulle's offer to defer independence for a union of French controlled countries more than a half century ago. His refusal cost the country dearly, for the French stripped the independent country of Guinee of everything they could before leaving, including the light bulbs. But Guinee was decolonised, free, and stood up on its own two feet.