Wednesday, December 7, 2011

I think we need to communicate better

And by "we" I mean our elected leaders.  To the rest of the world.  As is obvious from other posts, I was thinking about Pearl Harbor today.  It was a horrible miscalculation by the Japanese.  They may have underestimated how America's incredibly mighty industrial production machine could respond to the sneak attack by cranking out more military weaponry than the rest of the world put together.  Since the beginning of mankind.  Personally, I doubt they miscalculated how much America could do if it wanted to.  I think they miscalculated whether America would do everything it could until the Japanese were destroyed as a military (and imperial) power.  Osama did the same thing.  In fact, history is littered with similar figures (hope Osama said hi to Saddam when he saw him in Hell).  As I thought about it, the problem became very clear.  We (America) are not communicating our will to use our might sufficiently clearly to the right audiences.  We have before, such as when the Great Communicator Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down that wall.  And it worked.  The old Soviets not only knew we could beat them, Reagan did a good job of communicating that we would beat them.  The rest is history (largely written by us since we won).  I am going to vote for the best person to communicate with the rest of the world.  Not sure who, yet.  But he sure won't need a teleprompter.

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