Winnie the Pooh (Walt Disney)

Winnie the Pooh, Luke Skywalker and violent soccer buffs could help the U.S. make national security decisions if Obama becomes president, the senator's key adviser told a foreign policy conference in Washington.

"Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security," said Richard Danzig, potential national security adviser for an Obama presidency and Bill Clinton's former Navy secretary.

The London Telegraph reports Danzig, speaking at a conference last week hosted by the Center for New American Security, found a paragraph from a Winnie the Pooh book offers the simple lesson for U.S. foreign policy that if something causes you too much pain, you should try something else:

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. But sometimes he thinks there really is another way if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it."

Danzig said the U.S. may be successful in crushing specific terrorist organizations and plots, but it can never entirely remove the threat of nuclear proliferation or bioterrorism.

He claimed to have acquired much of his information about how terrorists think from conversations with Aum Shinrikyo, an imprisoned terrorist who blasted extremely toxic sarin nerve gas into the Tokyo underground in 1995.

(Story continues below)

Luke Skywalker (Star Wars)

According to the report, he also suggested U.S. soldiers, spies and anti-terror experts should learn that insurgents wish to be like superheroes such as Luke Skywalker.

"We have been raised on a theory of superheroes," Danzig said a terrorist told him. "We all want to be like Luke Skywalker."

The terrorist purportedly said even successful people can feel like failures.

Danzig said, "When we're doing mundane things, we lose track of our ambition, but when someone comes along, like Asahara, the head of the cult, and presents himself as a messiah and gives us a picture of progress that is ordained by heaven and that we are carrying out a saintly mission on earth, that is for us extraordinarily evocative."

He insisted, "The parallels with al-Qaida are obvious."

The Obama campaign adviser also said the U.S. should take a lesson from violent soccer fans.

"One of the best books I've read on terrorism in recent years was not about terrorism at all," he said. "It's Bill Buford's book, 'Among the Thugs,' which is a description of soccer violence in Britain."

Danzig said Buford became fascinated with soccer aggression and gives examples of brutality between soccer fans.

"But he describes with relentless honesty how he finds sickening things attractive," Danzig explained. "He says violence lets the adrenaline flow; it's like sex, you live in the moment."

 

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