It has been said that “the prime mover of American interrogation doctrine is none other than the star of Fox television’s 24: Jack Bauer.” Jack, you will remember, ran around torturing suspects for information about their nefarious schemes, information he would then use to save the day. The folks at Guantanamo loved themselves some Jack Bauer.
If Marco Rubio became president, we would be replacing Jack Bauer with Bryan Mills. You might better know Mills as Liam Neeson’s character in Taken (2008). Here, shedding the gentle Jedi image, Neeson took to the dark side as he hunted down human traffickers who had taken his daughter.
At the South Carolina Freedom Summit on Saturday, Rubio showed about as much imagination in battling the terrorist state as his Republican pal, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who said if he could lick those nasty old labor unions, he could lick the Islamic State.
Rubio told the gathering,
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“On our strategy on global jihadists and terrorists, I refer them to the movie Taken. Have you seen the movie Taken? Liam Neeson. He had a line, and this is what our strategy should be: ‘We will look for you, we will find you, and we will kill you.'”
This earned him thunderous applause, if you can believe it.
In the film, Neeson’s spiel is this, and you can see why chickenhawks like it:
Bryan: I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.
Oh dear. Really? That’s it?
I mean, let’s ignore for a minute that this is exactly what the Obama administration did to Osama bin Laden. But that’s not a foreign policy. It is a special forces op. Your entire foreign policy cannot be one extended special forces op.
That’s now how this works. It’s not how any of this works.
And these are the guys criticizing Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy cred?
The thing is, we don’t have to look for ISIL. We know where they are. We don’t have to find them, because they’re not hiding.
Well…okay, maybe Republicans with their horrible geography skills, like Tom Cotton wanting to go after Iran without knowing where Tehran is, need to look for ISIL, but normal people – that is, people who do not watch Fox News – don’t.
Sadly, though Rubio wants to make like Liam Neeson, he lacks the writing talents of French filmmaker Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element).
Neeson reprises the role of Bryan Mills in Taken 2 (2012) and Taken 3 (2014). Rubio, however, will be unlikely to have any sequels because he won’t get the first film made, if you get my meaning.
Not with a foreign policy based on a movie.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
