Foreign policy lessons nobody likes

Note: My weekend op-ed.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

The Gods of the Copybook Headings – Rudyard Kipling

Just to remind everybody, when President Obama was running for office the Surge wasn’t working, the troops were going to be out of Iraq in 18 months, the USA Patriot Act was an affront to civil liberties, the prison at Guantanamo Bay was the ruination of our international reputation, and terrorists were criminals who came under the same constitutional protections as American citizens.

Now in case you hadn’t noticed, the troops in Iraq aren’t packing their bags, the administration has quietly renewed the Patriot Act with minor modifications, Guantanamo is not closing any time soon, and plans to try terrorists in civilian courts on the mainland are being scrapped.

The current administration seems to have adopted the Bush anti-terror policy whole, with two exceptions. The use of silly euphemisms begun in the Bush administration (like “War on Terror”) has extended to the point of banning terms like “Islamic extremism” from official documents. And Predator drone attacks to kill terrorist leaders in the remote borderlands of Afghanistan have almost quadrupled, without being too finicky about family and bystanders.

One American citizen has just been added to the bomb-on-sight list too.

We’ve reverted to the ancient, reliable policy of, “It’s dangerous to be our enemy. It’s dangerous to be related to our enemy. It’s dangerous to stand next to our enemy.”

Both American and European media are remarkably silent about all this. Except for the occasional kvetch from the Right that George Bush would have been crucified for this, and from the pacifist Left that Obama has sold them out.

Well, yes. So what happened and what does it mean?

Could it be that foreign policy is largely event driven, and less a matter of choice than we proud citizens of the mightiest nation on earth would like to believe it is?

In an interconnected world with a lot of really scary, heavily-armed people who don’t like us much, maybe we don’t really have a wide range of available options that might produce anything good.

If you’ll give a moments thought to your own life, you’ll realize there are always more ways to screw up than to do something right. It’s just the way things work.

When you’re running for high office, you can be holy all you like. But once you get there, you start getting those intelligence briefings the rest of us don’t get to see, unless someone carefully leaks them to journalists like Yours Truly.

That’s when you learn the scary stuff about the world. Worse, that’s when you learn what we don’t know – and that’s really, really scary.

And if you’re paying attention, that’s when you realize the value of consistency of policy. Having a policy that’s consistent over time may be more important than having one that actually makes perfect sense. Because both our friends and our enemies need to know what to expect from us, lest the former get nervous and the latter get bold.

And secondly, a lot of political preference is far more personality-driven than issue-driven. We like or loathe our presidents depending on how sympatico we find them personally. If we like them, we’ll excuse almost anything they do. If we loathe them, nothing they do will get any more than a grudging acknowledgment, if that.

Notice nobody on the Right side of the aisle is saying, “Mr. President, we’ll fight you tooth and nail on the domestic agenda, but we’re behind you 100 percent on fighting the war on terrorism now that you’ve seen the light.”

Nobody on the Left side ever said to Bush, “Hey you’re a warmonger but that was a bold move on that first stimulus, thanks for the idea.”

The world is still an arena of warring tribes, and our loyalties are still more tribal than we like to admit.

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