{"id":17177,"date":"2022-03-07T09:36:19","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T14:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=17177"},"modified":"2022-03-07T09:36:55","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T14:36:55","slug":"washington-foreign-policy-experts-could-get-us-all-killed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/07\/washington-foreign-policy-experts-could-get-us-all-killed\/","title":{"rendered":"Washington Foreign Policy Experts Could Get Us All Killed"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

2014 photo via Wikipedia https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=oCN6WabWEBw<\/p><\/div>\n

The Biden administration appears to be blundering ever close to a war with Russia. People can condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the killing of civilians without fantasizing that the U.S. military has a magic wand to stop that war.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the American media and a herd of pundits is pushing for military intervention such as No Fly Zones –\u00a0 as if shooting down Russian planes would not quickly spur World War III. \u00a0\u00a0 American newspapers and television networks are broadcasting brazen propaganda<\/a> that they sometimes recognize is\u00a0 deceptive. When did swallowing and re-tweeting bogus propaganda become the ultimate virtue signaling?<\/span>\u00a0 The Biden administration is\u00a0 withholding\u00a0 the vast majority of documents on U.S. policy on Ukraine and & cherry-picking disclosures to burnish its image. Biden administration speedily declassified a list of weapons i<\/a>t claims it recently shipped Ukraine but what about all the other documents from last 10 years on U.S. interventions in Ukraine? Americans deserve to know.<\/span><\/p>\n

None of the governments involved in this conflict are trustworthy – not the Russians, not the Ukrainians, and not the American government.<\/p>\n

Here’s a 2011 review I wrote for American Conservative review<\/a> <\/strong>of Derek Leebaert\u2019s Magic and Mayhem that captures my view on the foreign policy “experts” who may be dragging America into another war.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Worst and Brightest<\/strong>
\nReview of Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy From Korea to Afghanista<\/em>n, Derek Leebaert, Simon & Schuster, 336 pages<\/p>\n

By James Bovard<\/p>\n

In the decades since John F. Kennedy\u2019s inauguration, foreign-policy experts have become Washington\u2019s leading con men<\/strong>. Even though Wiz Kids and Dream Teams have dragged America into one bloodbath and debacle after another, politicians and the media still kowtow to the \u201cBest and Brightest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Derek Leebaert\u2019s Magic and Mayhem seeks to explain how such experts get power and why their influence is so pernicious. Leebaert, a Georgetown University professor, derides the influence of \u201cmagical thinking\u201d in foreign policy: \u201cShrewd, levelheaded people are so frequently bewitched into substituting passion, sloganeering, and haste for reflection, homework, and reasonable objectives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regardless of policymakers\u2019 Ivy League pedigrees, U.S. foreign and defense policy routinely operates on a village-idiot level of information<\/strong>. Leebaert notes that \u201cFDR remarked that most of what he knew about the world came from his stamp collection.\u201d<\/strong> (Perhaps some charming old Russian stamps filled Roosevelt with affection for Uncle Joe.) Similarly, Leebaert observes, Paul Bremer, chief of Iraq\u2019s Coalition Provisional Authority, admitted in his memoirs \u201cthat he didn\u2019t know anything about Iraq when stepping down from Kissinger Associates to become America\u2019s proconsul.\u201d Adam Garfinkle, who worked as a speechwriter for Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, said in 2007, \u201cNo one in a senior position in t<\/strong>his administration seems to have the vaguest notion of modern Middle Eastern history.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Pentagon matches the White House and State Department bonehead for bonehead. The U.S. military floundered in Iraq and Afghanistan because, as Leebaert writes, \u201cthe Army not only forgot everything it had been bloodily taught about counterinsurgency in Vietnam, but in Vietnam, it had forgotten everything it had learned about counterinsurgency in Korea as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cluelessness is perhaps the greatest constant in our foreign policy.<\/strong> In 1967, the Pentagon ordered top experts to analyze where the Vietnam War had gone wrong. The resulting study contained 47 volumes of material exposing the follies that had at that point already left tens of thousands of Americans dead. After the study was finished, it was distributed to the key Johnson administration players and federal agencies, where it was completely ignored, if not forgotten. New York Times editor Tom Wicker commented that \u201cthe people who read these documents in the Times [in 1971] were the first to study them.\u201d Daniel Ellsberg, who wrote a portion of the papers and leaked them to the newspaper, noted that the documents reveal \u201ca general failure to study history or to analyze or even to record operational experience, especially mistakes. Above all, effective pressures for optimistically false reporting at every level, for describing \u2018progress\u2019 rather than problems or failure, concealed the very need for change in approach or for learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

The political system routinely buries information that undermines power-grabs\u2014and war is the biggest power-grab of them all.<\/strong> Neoconservatives who had Bush\u2019s ear encouraged the president to believe he was making his decisions \u201cby gut.\u201d But, as Leebaert says, \u201cTo be a \u2018gut player,\u2019 as he called himself, rarely enables one to digest information that gives stomachaches.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leebaert deftly demolishes Henry Kissinger\u2019s record and reputation. Kissinger, like other \u201cEmergency Men,\u201d sometimes showed boundless condescension towards the American public. He warned Nixon that \u201cwithdrawal of U.S. troops [from Vietnam] will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded.\u201d Indeed, Kissinger was even colder than he appears in Leebaert\u2019s discussion. According to a December 21, 1970 entry in the diary of Nixon chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, Kissinger \u201ctold me he does not favor [Nixon\u2019s peace plan]. He thinks that any pullout next year would be a serious mistake because the adverse reaction to it could set in well before the \u201972 elections. He favors instead a continued winding down and then a pullout right at the fall of \u201972 so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election.\u201d<\/p>\n

Magic and Mayhem\u2019s discussion of the Korean War is one of the book\u2019s strongest suits. The Pentagon had plenty of warning that the Chinese would intervene if the U.S. Army pushed too close to the Chinese border. But the euphoria that erupted after MacArthur\u2019s Inchon landing blew away all common sense and drowned out the military voices who warned of a catastrophe. Though the Chinese attack resulted in the longest retreat in the history of America\u2019s armed forces, and though the Korean War was more unpopular than the Vietnam War ever was, intellectuals and foreign-policy experts succeeded in redefining the Korean conflict as an American victory. Leebaert notes, \u201cA magician\u2019s wand has swept away the extent that the war turned out to be a hideously taxing minimization of disaster\u2026 . It took almost two years to establish our lines securely where they had been a month after Inchon.\u201d \u201cSpinning\u201d the Korean War paved the way for escalation in Vietnam.<\/p>\n

Leebaert is at no risk of receiving one of the Agency Seal Medals that the CIA bestows on people\u2014especially congressmen\u2014who serve the agency\u2019s interests. The CIA \u201chas long embodied the insular, turf-obsessed office culture of a savings bank in Buffalo,\u201d he writes. \u201cThe CIA has been excellent at keeping all accountability at arm\u2019s length, which virtually guarantees poor thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spy agency has failed America more often than politicians or CIA-fed journalists admit. Prior to 9\/11, the CIA\u2019s Map Library possessed \u201cmaps of the caves, tunnels and dugouts that Bin Laden had helped to engineer at Tora Bora long before, passed on fifteen years earlier by the Afghan guerillas America was then backing.\u201d But by the time the U.S. began its own Afghan campaign in 2001, agency staffers had forgotten they possessed this key to al-Qaeda\u2019s hideouts.<\/p>\n

The torture scandals of the Bush years resulted in part from the CIA\u2019s reliance on self-proclaimed experts who knew almost nothing of interrogation. Magic and Mayhem urges the appointment of a \u201ctruth commission\u201d to get to the bottom of the post-9\/11 torture regime. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has chosen to put its muscle on keeping the lid on the outrages. Naturally, the foreign-policy wise men cheer his cover-up decision. But as Churchill declared, \u201cThe purpose of recriminating about the past is to enforce action in the future.\u201d Obama is helping to create a war crimes \u201cget out of jail free\u201d card he might need himself one day.<\/p>\n

Leebaert actually understates the U.S. debacle rate abroad. He hails the American-led NATO bombing of Serbia: \u201cThe 1999 eleven weeks\u2019 war over Kosovo was undertaken by a coalition of Western governments, preceded by two months of negotiation that legitimized and clarified its objectives, then followed by a UN peacekeeping mission. The presence of overwhelming backup forces nearby as well as American military leadership resting on political good sense and seasoned diplomacy further increased the chances of success.\u201d<\/p>\n

What success? After NATO planes killed hundreds if not thousands of Serb and ethnic Albanian civilians, Bill Clinton could pirouette as a savior. Once the bombing ended, many of the Serbs remaining in Kosovo were slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground. NATO\u2019s \u201cpeace\u201d produced a quarter-million Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy refugees. At least the Serbs were not murdering people for their body parts, as the Council of Europe recently accused the Kosovo Liberation Army of doing to Serb prisoners in recent years. (\u201cWhen the transplant surgeons were confirmed to be in position and ready to operate, the [Serbian] captives were \u2026 summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic,\u201d where their kidneys were harvested for sale.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps even worse, Clinton\u2019s unprovoked attack on Serbia set a precedent for \u201chumanitarian\u201d warring that was invoked by supporters of Bush\u2019s unprovoked attack on Iraq.<\/p>\n

Leebaert regrets the American \u201cpenchant for dreaming up conspiracies\u201d and the \u201csteadily mounting overall mistrust of government since the late 1960s.\u201d But the notion that rulers are owed trust is the most expensive entitlement program of them all. Blind trust in government has resulted in far more carnage than has distrust of government<\/p>\n

Magic and Mayhem scants the role of brazen deceit in U.S. foreign policy. The phrase \u201cdamn rascal\u201d does not appear once in the book.<\/strong> \u201cPresidents have lied so much to us about foreign policy that they\u2019ve established almost a common-law right to do so,\u201d George Washington University history professor Leo Ribuffo observed in 1998. From John F. Kennedy lying about the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba; to Johnson lying about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution; to Richard Nixon lying about the secret bombing of Cambodia; to Jimmy Carter lying about the Shah of Iran being a progressive, enlightened ruler; to Ronald Reagan lying about terrorism and Iran-Contra; to George H.W. Bush lying about the justifications for the first Gulf War, entire generations have come of age since the ancient time when a president\u2019s power was constrained by a duty of candor to the public.<\/p>\n

The standards for decorum in discussing foreign policy practically guarantee that brazen liars will receive a pass, regardless of how many people perish as a result of their perfidy.<\/strong> Kissinger is now a columnist for the Washington Post editorial page\u2014one of the few non-Fox venues that denies George W. Bush deceived the nation into the Iraq War. It is nonsense to presume good faith in experts who continually make declarations that any 12-year-old with a DSL line could disprove in two minutes.<\/p>\n

WikiLeaks has revealed that U.S. foreign policy is far more venal and dishonest than the Beltway portrays it as being.<\/strong> From Hillary Clinton\u2019s machinations to steal the credit-card numbers of foreign diplomats to the U.S. government\u2019s spurring Ethiopia\u2019s invasion of Somalia and covertly providing arms to boost attacks in Yemen, as well as twisting arms and pulling strings across Europe to block investigations of U.S. torture, the scams have come fast and furious. Most of the American establishment has been indignant about the leaks\u2014as if they violated government\u2019s divine right to delude the governed.<\/p>\n

Instead of relying on purported foreign-policy masterminds, Americans should remember Emerson\u2019s maxim that \u201ccharacter is higher than intellect.\u201d Washington is full of intellectuals more devoted to power than to truth. Professors hungry for influence are no more trustworthy than a second-term Arkansas congressman seeking a seat on the House Appropriations Committee.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But even if Americans properly discount the pretensions of the next deluge of foreign policy sages, it is unlikely that the government will begin learning from its mistakes. The only surefire way to avoid past follies is to reduce vastly U.S. interventions abroad. The second best solution is somehow to assure that it will be the pro-war experts, congressmen, and political appointees whose blood is shed in the conflicts they start.<\/strong><\/p>\n

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, Freedom in Chains, Lost Rights, and six other books<\/p>\n

NOTE: I would use a more recent photograph from the current conflict but all the photos I saw from a Google search were licensed and copyright-restricted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Biden administration appears to be blundering ever close to a war with Russia. People can condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the killing of civilians without fantasizing that the U.S. military has a magic wand to stop that war.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the American media and a herd of pundits is pushing for military intervention such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[145,2012,3191,36,27,3192,923,1107,121],"class_list":["post-17177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-best-and-brightest","tag-derek-leebaert","tag-foreign-policy-experts","tag-iraq","tag-lying","tag-no-fly-zone","tag-russia","tag-ukraine","tag-vietnam"],"yoast_head":"\nWashington Foreign Policy Experts Could Get Us All Killed - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/07\/washington-foreign-policy-experts-could-get-us-all-killed\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Washington Foreign Policy Experts Could Get Us All Killed - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Biden administration appears to be blundering ever close to a war with Russia. 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Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.\",\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/www.jimbovard.com\",\"https:\\\/\\\/www.facebook.com\\\/jim.bovard\",\"https:\\\/\\\/x.com\\\/jimbovard\"],\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/jimbovard.com\\\/blog\\\/author\\\/admin\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Washington Foreign Policy Experts Could Get Us All Killed - James Bovard","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/07\/washington-foreign-policy-experts-could-get-us-all-killed\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Washington Foreign Policy Experts Could Get Us All Killed - James Bovard","og_description":"The Biden administration appears to be blundering ever close to a war with Russia. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17177"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17180,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17177\/revisions\/17180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}