{"id":2693,"date":"2011-04-13T11:03:48","date_gmt":"2011-04-13T16:03:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=2693"},"modified":"2011-04-13T11:36:14","modified_gmt":"2011-04-13T16:36:14","slug":"absurdity-of-trusting-foreign-policymakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/13\/absurdity-of-trusting-foreign-policymakers\/","title":{"rendered":"Absurdity of Trusting Foreign Policymakers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>sent out this morn by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fff.org\/comment\/com1104h.asp\"><strong>Future of Freedom Foundation<\/strong>&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Absurdity of Trusting Foreign-Policy Makers<\/strong><br \/>\nby James Bovard, April 13, 2011<\/p>\n<p>The United States is attacking Libya on the basis of vague hopes that peace will triumph after the Allied bombing ceases. There are plenty of reasons to doubt whether a few hundred cruise missiles will beget harmony in the Libyan desert. But one of the biggest mistakes would be to assume that U.S. government policymakers understand what they are doing. <\/p>\n<p>The American media have already uncorked \u201csurprises,\u201d such as the facts that the Libyan opposition is more of a ragtag mob than an army and that Qaddafi\u2019s opponents include some organizations officially labeled as terrorists by the U.S. government. One gets the impression that the Obama administration\u2019s masterminds did not notice those details prior to charging into this civil war. <\/p>\n<p>The latest follies are part of a long bipartisan tradition. In the decades since John F. Kennedy\u2019s inauguration, foreign-policy makers have become Washington\u2019s leading con men. Even though Whiz Kids and Dream Teams have dragged America into one debacle after another, the media and politicians still defer to the latest batch of \u201cBest and Brightest\u201d professors and appointees. <\/p>\n<p>The U.S. invasion of Iraq was based on little more than a few phrases backed up by almost boundless ignorance. Paul Bremer, the 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 Georgetown University professor Derek Leebaert observed in his new book, Magic and Mayhem. Adam Garfinkle, who worked as a speechwriter for both Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, said in 2007, \u201cNo one in a senior position in this administration seems to have the vaguest notion of modern Middle Eastern history.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>The Pentagon\u2019s recent record is not much better. The U.S. military floundered in Iraq and Afghanistan because, as Leebaert notes, \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<p>Cluelessness is a constant in U.S. foreign-policy making. In 1967, the Pentagon ordered top experts to analyze where the Vietnam War had gone wrong. The resulting study consisted of 47 volumes of material exposing the intellectual and political 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, by whom 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 <\/p>\n<p>U.S. foreign-policy makers perennially talk as if the world is a clean sheet that they can mark up as they please. Shortly before Obama\u2019s televised speech on March 28 on Libya, Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough told reporters, \u201cWe don\u2019t get very hung up on this question of precedent. We don\u2019t make decisions about questions like intervention based on consistency or precedent.\u201d Rather than being a high-minded resolve, that attitude practically guarantees that the U.S. government will repeat the same mistakes in perpetuity. <\/p>\n<p>Foreign policy has been a long series of blunders, in part because the American media tolerate deceits by high-ranking government officials. \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\u2019s lying about the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba; to Lyndon Johnson\u2019s lying about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution; to Richard Nixon\u2019s lying about the secret bombing of Cambodia; to Jimmy Carter\u2019s lying about the shah of Iran\u2019s being a progressive, enlightened ruler; to Ronald Reagan\u2019s lying about terrorism and Iran-Contra; to George H.W. Bush\u2019s 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<p>WikiLeaks has revealed that U.S. foreign policy is far more deceptive than the Beltway portrays it. From Hillary Clinton\u2019s machinations to heist the credit card numbers of foreign diplomats, to the U.S. government\u2019s prodding Ethiopia to invade Somalia, to the covert supply of arms to the Yemen government, charades have come fast and furious. Much of the American political establishment has reacted as if WikiLeaks violated government\u2019s divine right to delude the governed. <\/p>\n<p>Governments routinely bury information that undermines their power grabs and war is the biggest power grab of them all. We cannot expect the Obama administration to be more prudent on Libya than the Bush administration was on Iraq, or the Clinton administration was on Kosovo, or the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon administrations were on Vietnam. Americans cannot afford to assume that this war is smarter than it seems. <\/p>\n<p>James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>sent out this morn by the Future of Freedom Foundation&#8230; The Absurdity of Trusting Foreign-Policy Makers by James Bovard, April 13, 2011 The United States is attacking Libya on the basis of vague hopes that peace will triumph after the Allied bombing ceases. There are plenty of reasons to doubt whether a few hundred cruise [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[22,659,17,662,669,38,41,31],"class_list":{"0":"post-2693","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"tag-attention-deficit-democracy","8":"tag-elective-dictatorship","9":"tag-lying","10":"tag-obama","12":"tag-war-crimes","13":"tag-wool"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Absurdity of Trusting Foreign Policymakers - 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\/2011\/04\/13\/absurdity-of-trusting-foreign-policymakers\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Absurdity of Trusting Foreign Policymakers - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"sent out this morn by the Future of Freedom Foundation&#8230; The Absurdity of Trusting Foreign-Policy Makers by James Bovard, April 13, 2011 The United States is attacking Libya on the basis of vague hopes that peace will triumph after the Allied bombing ceases. 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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 &amp; 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. 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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 &amp; 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. 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