Obama and Iran: chess or checkers?
It is said that Obama plays chess.
Let’s hope so. Because this seems like a rookie move to me. And he’s playing with the masters.
[ADDENDUM: Maybe the mullahs would like to order one of these to play with. And here’s a Wiki piece on the history of chess.]
Chess is not a difficult game to learn to play.
It IS a difficult game to learn to play well….
Buckle up ’cause it’s gonna be a long 4 years.
I love chess, and enjoyed your Wiki link. I am an enthusiastic chess hacker. I play like I comment at your blog: fast! I get very impatient with serious chess which takes forever between moves. Yet, I will happily play fast hacky chess for hours on end.
I love that more women are playing chess. To me, Judit Polgar is one of the most attractive women in the world. Her synapses are sublimely dense … in all the right places. Ahhhh. I must stop. This is probably a PG-Rated blog.
NYT: Sex and Chess
Thus we see the way a typical man’s (mine) mind works. Pick any subject, and the sequence works similarly:
(subject) Obama ~~ chess ~~ sex!
I get very impatient with serious chess which takes forever between moves. Yet, I will happily play fast hacky chess for hours on end.
I don’t like to play that way ‘cuz if I win I feel like it was luck and if I lose, I feel like I was stupid and reckless.
I kinda sit and grind over moves. I’ve no formal chess-study, or lessons, or strategy, but I can hold my own. I’m hard to beat and sometimes I beat much better players.
But don’t kid yourself, the really good chess players just memorize different board positions and execute moves rotely depending on how the board looks. There is a finite number of moves in any board set-up….
Obama is stupid and arrogant, and that leads to bad chess-playing and hard-feelings….
We are also told that Obama reads Shakespeare, Melville, Emerson, and the Bible.
I believe that he cracked those books once upon a time, just like he learned the moves of chess, but I’ve seen no evidence that he went any deeper than that.
My bet is that Obama has put far more effort into his jump shot in basketball than any of those things.
It seems like a rookie move, precisely because it is a rookie move. Of course, Obama is a rookie, so it’s not exactly unexpected… 😡
The White House is no place for OJT. Rookie or not, The Chosen One (TCO) should have understood the rules of the game. Iran has one goal right now- the destruction of Israel. As long as the US supports Israel, there will be no talks. Hence the comment that there has been no change in American policy.
The real question is whether or not TCO will throw Israel under the bus. I think if Israel is attacked, TCO will do nothing. His off-the-cuff remarks indicate in does not think well on his feet. I believe his chess skills are no better.
A peace overture like this is also just the right note. If we end up having to take down Iran’s nuclear capability with the military, we can always say we went the extra distance for peace.
This helps bring on board the Euros and the peaceniks, so when we blast Iran we have a united front.
On the other hand, it it could even lead to peace and compromise, which would be way cooler than nuclear war.
It is offensive that the oil money the West pays to Iran is used to fund nuclear weapons to use against us.
I don’t think the ICBM’s are for “Peaceful purposes”. Unless “Peaceful purposes” means creating a nuclear holocaust.
I said in a response to an earlier post that Persians invented chess – apparently they did not as it’s origins were in India (then moving to Persia). That being said they have been playing it for centuries upon centuries and Obama is no match. Neither is he a match for the Chinese who have been playing Weiqi (Go in Japanese and Baduk in Korean) since it originated there over 2,500 years ago. Both of these games have simple rules yet are extremely complex.
Unfortunately the stakes are too high.
Fred2 — I see no reason to believe that Obama’s video did ingenious multiple purposes for moral cover if we do have to take them on with the military and to bring the Europoeans and peaceniks on board if we do.
Unfortunately, I think Obama believes that he has the golden tongue and the multi-cultural cred to woo the Iranians and just about anyone else.
I see no possibility that the video will lead to peace anymore than such overtures have worked with other Western leaders.
Fred2,
You must remember, before waxing so enthusiastically upon how the Euros are going fall over themselves to help out now that an “overture” has been made, that the Euros were the ones negotiating with the Iranians while bush the younger was in office.
Since the Iranians are on the verge of an Israeli destroying nuclear weapon – I’d say the previous Euro efforts didn’t work out too well….
In absence of sufficient information, the default option should be the following: do not explain by conspiracy or some elaborate convoluted plan what can be explained by sheer incompetence. With such advisers as Brzezinski and Samantha Power, his foreign policy is doomed to failure.
Let us very much hope that Obama is not playing chess. That would be the too-clever-by-half approach doomed to failure. World events change very rapidly, and it is more important to adjust to those than to have an elaborate fantasy of setting up the pieces just so. Thinking one can “play chess” with world events is a very dangerous arrogance.
Adventure novels and spy novels trade on the idea that there are these complicated machinations going on behind the scenes, and the great players win. Those who have actually been in the business (LeCarre, for example) describe something quite different: plant a mole or turn a spy. Keep him secret. Then let your opponents do the complicated figuring. The Russian KGB did not have superior long-range chess strategies against us, but simple brute force strategies. Intimidate people; spread falsehoods. They used them because they are effective.
To elaborate on my original comment, there is one thing that really good chess players do – they force their opponents to play the game on their terms.
This is true not only for chess, but for any competition. You either have a plan, or you end up being part of someone else’s plan.
In other words, player A has a game plan he wishes to accomplish, so he creates situations on the chess board that require player B to respond in a specific manner whether player B realizes it or not.
Player B thus ends up in a completely reactive mode, leaving the overall control of the game to Player A.
In the end, player B loses to player A because player B is playing by player A’s gameplan.
It’s even more lopsided a contest when player B doesn’t have a clue how to regain control over the game.
This is what we are seeing now with Obama.
He didn’t ever really have a gameplan for international diplomacy, and as with so many other facets of the Executive Branch he’s winging it without any overriding strategy or substantive end goal in mind.
End result, the US is in for a long 4 years of international abuse as the Obamabots refuse to face the reality that simply electing The Messiah didn’t automatically cause everyone to suddenly love us, and end up swinging at every string that is dangled in front of them like a mouse being played by a cat.