Daniel Larison, still failing to penetrate the depths of the hawkish mind

Over at the American Conservative, Dan gives it his best shot in a post labeled “Almost All Sanctions Are ‘Unserious’”, but still comes up short. Maybe it’s the damn feathers, Dan.

In dogged fashion, Dan tries his best to make it clear to hawks why arguing about “serious” versus “unserious” sanctions are a waste of time:

All sanctions are ultimately “unserious” in that they are reflexive responses to international events that often achieve nothing good. Sanctions frequently can’t deliver the results that their advocates claim that they can, but they can be dreadfully serious in their ability to wreck relations with other states and make bad situations worse.

See, guys, you can’t “sanction” other countries to the bargaining table. Your beloved “serious” sanctions only make them madder and drive them away from the table.

Dan, that’s exactly why hawks demand “serious” sanctions. Because they want to “wreck relations with other states and make bad situations worse.” The point is not to achieve peaceful reconciliation but rather to eliminate the possibility of its existence!

Back in the day, the Reagan Administration, in its negotiations with the Soviet Union over intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, pushed the “Zero Option” (total elimination of all such missiles) with unrelenting zeal. After that supreme debacle now known as the end of the Cold War, neocon über schmuck Richard Perle, an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, ruefully admitted that the whole “point” of the Zero Option was that it was so disadvantageous to the Soviets that they would never accept it. Because who wants peace!*

Afterwords
In 1992, Perle published an unintentionally amusing novel, Hard Line, in which Mikhail Gorbachev proves to be Josef Stalin with a wine stain. Seriously! Well, I read it, and at least three other people did too, three people who obviously did not have the slightest idea of who the fuck Richard Perle was. Their unintentionally amusing reviews are available on Amazon. Here’s one reviewer’s mystified take:

I must have missed something, considering the amount of praise heaped on the author on the dust jacket, I thought I was about to read *War and Peace*. There was nothing new here, and the story line moved around like a heart monitor display—no consistent track—grabs something here, something there. This really is a very disappointing book.

*And then they did accept it! Those bastards! Those cunning, cunning bastards!