EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- Corporate Win: Supreme Court Says Monsanto Has 'Control Over Product of Life'
- Cornel West: Obama 'Is a War Criminal'
- Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New 'Highly Toxic' Pesticide
- In 'March Toward Disaster,' World Hits 400 PPM Milestone
- Revealed: How US State Department 'Twists Arms' on Monsanto's Behalf
Popular content
Today's Top News
Washington's Serious Stars
US foreign policy experts who got the Iraq war badly wrong are still somehow holding sway.
This is another one of those very "serious" weeks in Washington, when we put aside matters like senators skulking about in men's rooms and turn our attention to the life-and-death questions as General David Petraeus testifies to Congress on the progress of the surge in Iraq. Our concern here is not the testimony itself, since it's been obvious for some time that Petraeus will say that the surge is showing sufficient signs of success for Congress to continue funding the war.
Cynosure though he will be today, Petraeus in fact has only a limited role to play in seeing to it that the US continue its mad engagement. The stars of that dispiriting drama will be the phalanx of foreign policy experts based in Washington, who will, in the wake of the general's testimony, fan out across the cable channels and op-ed pages, arguing that giving the surge one more chance is the only "serious" option.
These, you see, are the "serious" foreign policy people. It's good work if you can get it. You may be thinking that you become a serious foreign policy person by often being right about foreign policy. But this just shows how little you know about how these things work.
No - you become a serious foreign-policy person in Washington by dint of meeting two criteria. First, you should adopt the most hawkish position you can plausibly adopt, so that you come across as appropriately "tough-minded". Second, you must note what all the other serious foreign policy people are saying and take care to ensure that your position is sufficiently indistinguishable from theirs for you to be lumped in with them when the time comes for the Washington Post to write a group profile of Washington's serious tough-minded foreign policy people.
For skilled practitioners of the art, this tends to work out marvellously, career-wise. Take Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon, the two emblematic seriousistas of the Bush age. Both are scholars at the Brookings Institution, a centre-left thinktank, and both are nominal Democrats. Both were also early fans of the Iraq war. Pollack achieved special notoriety with his book The Threatening Storm, which persuaded many a liberal who might otherwise have looked askance at a war undertaken by the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney war to support it.
Here in America, we're taught that in the realm of ideas, no less than of products of commerce, the free market sorts everything out - it rewards the good ideas and punishes the bad ones, and at the end of the day fairness will obtain.
Well, the famous invisible hand seems to have left the world of foreign policy seriousness untouched, because Pollack and O'Hanlon, far from paying any price for their errors, are just as celebrated as ever. They published a major op-ed piece in the New York Times in late July touting the progress being made in Iraq, and O'Hanlon's byline appeared again on the page a mere five weeks later. This week, cable bookers will be calling them so often that they might as well set up cots in the studios.
Of course, all this hasn't worked out too well for the country or the world. But that's tolerable in Washington, because the important thing here is that the status quo should not be disrupted.
A friend immersed in the foreign policy world once described to me the enormous pressure that people in that orbit felt to support the war in 2002-03. The status quo then: back military force, especially when a president is advocating it, and don't take a position that could remotely be construed as soft-headed, post-Vietnam liberalism. The status quo today? Not much different, really. The American people desperately want the war to end as soon as possible. But it isn't up to them. It's up to the experts. Seriously.
- michael.tomasky@guardian.co.uk
© 2007 The Guardian
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
13 Comments so far
Show AllWar and chaos is what the oligarchy wants and their experts are doing a great job of it.
Tomasky is too hard on the "experts." They have consistently said all along that "success is just around the corner" and "all we have to do is wait a few more months." Certainly everyone has had plenty of time to get used to waiting a "few more months" by now. You know our pretzeldent says if everyone had gotten used to waiting a "few more months" in the Vietnam era we would never have left and so we could still have troops fighting there and we would never have invaded Iraq and would have avoided this whole mess.
"Here in America, we're taught that in the realm of ideas, no less than of products of commerce, the free market sorts everything out - it rewards the good ideas and punishes the bad ones, and at the end of the day fairness will obtain."
I'm starting to feel like Naomi's publicity agent, but I think a link to her *Guardian* site is appropriate here, too:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/shockdoctrine/story/0,,2165053,00.html
I watched Gen. Petraeus testify this afternoon and one of the first things out of his mouth was I wrote this report myself and no one has seen it until now. That's strange when for the past two or three week it's been all over the media that the White House was writing the report.Anyone with any knowledge of what's going on in Bush's war already knew what the General was going to say and could have written the report that says just what the moron want's to hear.The whole damn hearing will be disgusting,misleading and lies.
Apart from the looming and present tragedy underway when people of privilege place self-interest first, it's quite remarkable how often these patterns of human nature repeat. This political "minuet of protocols" reminds me of a play performed when I was a college student. Entitled, "School for Scandal," character names were such as: Lady Sneerwell, Joseph Surface, etc. How different are the present courtiers only disguised in military garb performing the same sychophantic functions. I don't believe there really is a "selfish gene;" however those that can so blithely put their careers before the lives of others demonstrate a flaw in their not so human natures that is tantamount to a higher form of bankrupcy, that of spiritual destitution. Again, I remind readers of karma... it is an equal opportunity employer and status provides no impunity, quite the contrary. Those given much are intended to use their resources on behalf of others, not to slay them while playing parlor tricks. Where too many persons have let their egos slip is mortifying.
General Betrayus is doing just that.
clyde paige,
I think Petraeus was attempting to testify in a lawyerly fashion, something the Bushies love to criticize everyone else for trying. He said that he wrote his "testimony" himself and had not let anyone see it. Of course he wrote his testimony drawing heavily from the report, and the report is what the White House had a big hand in writing. And it may well be true that he did not let anyone see his exact prepared testimony. Oh, that general is so clever!
The Surg eon General says just another million years is this war needs.
Funny that "expert shill", Michael O'Hanlon, who the NYTimes allowed to spread his pro-war, pro-surge success propaganda (with Ken Pollack) in a recent OP-ED ("War we may win") was the only Cheney mouthpiece to comment dismissively on the B-52 W80 nuke 'mistake mission' --- for which serious investigative blogs are homing in on Cheney as the Gen. 'Jack Ripper' launch commander.
Hope the Times does not get more caught in the ringer than its ties.
Funny how these pro-war cons turn-up almost everywhere there is the smoke of treason and the smell of global corporate empire screwing Americans.
No one better describes the dysfunctionality of such advisors & 'experts' than Daniel Ellsberg does in his book "Secrets". Everyone along the chain has to protect his sponsor/superior by verbally offering rosy scenarios, even when the assessments of their own staff or intelligence operatives is very negative.
The problem is the frame. The Dems should be saying this is an illegal occupation. Then, it doesn't matter if the surge is working or not. Once you start talking the language of Bush, adopting his frame, you lose. Game over.
Might as well not even show up.
The Dems don't get this. They are too cowed by the corporation presence, the mainstream media and the culture of war that dominates their minds.
Pathetic.
There was one woman congress member who kicked butt today.
She basically told off Betray us. Her approach was rare.
What was going on today with Dems? Betray us' whole presentation was a massive lie. They should have challenged him up and down the line, because his policies are getting our young people killed.
But no, they basically got schooled today.
Let's not forget such experts as Bernard Lewis and other historians like him. The Wall Street Urinal has had nothinng but glowing stories about him.
Let's face the sad realilty: the man and woman on-the-street is intellectually and psychologically incapable of responding to the cascading plethora of negative news, year after year. The entire capitalist/communist experiment has been taken over by the unforseeable demands of the technocracy and its machines, as pre-envisioned by much of mid-century sci-fi. We have come to idolize this state of affairs both consciously and un-consciously. Counter-vailing enthogenic transformation didn't happen as hoped, at large enough levels. The jig is up.....isn't it?