Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger

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Sic 'Dog Whisperer' on terrorists

I WAS watching Cesar Millan, the celebrated "dog whisperer," turn a snarling, vicious Doberman pinscher into a cuddly pussycat in about 3 1/2 minutes on TV when it occurred to me that we are not using our country's best talent in the war on terror.

Cesar is called in to retrain unruly dogs, and he has an amazing way of turning ferocious Chihuahuas and psychopathic weiner dogs into well-behaved creatures who know their place in the home. In most cases the dogs are misbehaving because they see themselves as the "head of the pack," a position in the household all the humans have abdicated.

Cesar spends as much time training the humans as he does the animals. Dog owners have to understand that dogs think in terms of "packs," and there can be only one alpha male running things. When humans treat dogs as "members of the family" and shower them with hugs and kisses and worry about the animal's self-esteem, they are basically telling the dog, "Hey, we're idiots. You're in control here."

Once you see Cesar put both the humans and the dogs in their places and leave the home in relative harmony, you realize he's got quite a talent. So why are we letting him waste it on dogs and homeowners?

Forget Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sitting down with that crazy leader of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- we ought to send in Cesar Millan. Employing his secret "dog whisperer" techniques, it would take Cesar only an hour to take the "mad" out of Ahmadinejad.

He'd have him heeling like a "good boy" and no longer lashing out at other countries and wanting to build a nuclear bomb. None of the mad dogs Cesar Millan tames has any further interest in nuclear weapons.

AFTER REALIZING how much we need Cesar Millan in the war on terror, it came to me that we are wasting other national talents as well. Who better to take the "IL" out of North Korea's Kim Jong Il than Dr. Phil?

A nice sit-down with Dr. Phil might be just what Kim Jong Il needs to figure out why he's such a screwed-up little dictator. When you get right down to it, North Korea is just a big, dysfunctional family in which "Dad" has gone off the deep end.

Dr. Phil's been there before. He started displaying his gift of pop psychology on "Oprah" but now has his own TV show where he sits down with some of the most messed-up families in the country. He listens to each family member's whiny story, then slaps them around a bit and makes them understand the roots of their weird behavior. Then tells them basically to "knock it off." And he does all this between commercials.

It wouldn't take Dr. Phil long to figure out what drives Kim Jong Il to wear mechanic's overalls, starve millions of members of his "family" to death, force the rest to march in very straight lines on major thoroughfares doing Nazi "high kicks" and to bully and threaten countries much bigger than his. I suspect it has something to do with Kim's lack of adequate potty training as a pre-dictator, but I'll leave the scientific analysis to Dr. Phil.

THE OTHER great talent we are wasting in the war on terror is Hawaii's own bounty hunter, Duane "The Dog" Chapman. All we need to do is air-drop Dog and his team of bounty hunters onto the Afghan-Pakistani border and they would run Osama bin Laden to ground in no time.

Just seeing Dog and his family members in their black leather vests, armbands and chokers would put the fear of Allah into al-Qaida. You wouldn't even have to give Dog and his pack guns. They've captured some of the country's most dangerous fugitives armed with nothing more than those big cans of mace or hairspray or whatever it is they carry in their holsters.

After Dog captured Osama, he'd offer him a cigarette, lecture him in a fatherly way about how rude it is to fly airplanes into buildings and kill thousands of innocent people, and by the time Dog got Osama to Guantanamo, the terrorist would be weeping in his beard, thanking Dog for helping him see the error of his ways.

And with the $25 million reward Dog would get, he could finally move from that tacky bail bond office and into some decent digs.

(Send suggestions of other talented people we could be using in the war on terror to the e-mail address below.)