How The Other Half Lives

Brian Beutler: "It occurs to em that if an Iranian leader with great visibility--say, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad--had been videotaped singing 'Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb America,' (which, yes, sounds foolish but you get the idea) it wouldn't be taken lightly here. Fox News would treat it as a sign that the regime was unstable and dangerous and, voila, we'd allow it to bring us a step closer to war." This is probably the single largest foreign policy-related failing among American politicians and members of the policy and media elites: A failure to make a serious effort to ask how things look from the perspective of other countries.