With Iraq sliding off a cliff, and now tugging another 20,000 young Americans along as well, it’s worth wrestling with a larger question: Why are we so awful at foreign policy?
Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer who won the Nobel Peace Prize, dropped by the other day, and she made the same point with characteristic bluntness. “It amazes me that the U.S., with all its scientific accomplishments, is so shortsighted in its foreign policy,” she noted.
It is pathetic. We can go safely to the moon but not to Anbar Province. We can peer into the farthest reaches of the universe, but we fail to notice (until it’s too late) that many Iraqis loathe us. We produce movies that delight audiences all over the world, but we can’t devise a foreign policy that anybody likes.
And it’s not just right-wing Republicans who are the problem. President Bush has been particularly myopic, but Democrats mired us in Vietnam: shortsightedness is a bipartisan tradition in foreign policy. Historically, we are often our own worst enemy.
Iraq is the example of the moment. We invaded, thinking that we would get a pro-American bulwark, cheap oil, long-term military bases and the gratitude of liberated Iraqis. Instead, we fought Iraq, and Iran won.
Speaking of which, look at Iran. In 1953, we helped overthrow the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, to achieve a more pro-Western government. That created tensions that led to the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of mullahs with nuclear dreams. If it weren’t for our own policies, Iran might well now have a pro-American government.
So why do we act so often against our own long-term interests? There are at least two reasons.
The first is that great powers always lumber about, stepping on toes, provoking resentments, and solving problems militarily simply because they have that capability. One of the great passages of Thucydides records how some 2,400 years ago Athens decided to wipe out the city of Melos because it could.
Likewise, in 1955, when Britain was the dominant player in the Middle East, it formed the Baghdad Pact, a military arrangement intended to protect British interests in the Middle East. Instead, the arrangement inflamed Arab nationalists, strengthened anti-British feeling and contributed to the fall of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958 — and, eventually, to the rise of Saddam.
The second reason is particular to the U.S.: We don’t understand the world. The U.S. may owe its existence to prickly nationalist troublemakers like Sam Adams, but (partly because relatively few Americans have lived abroad) we are obtuse about the appeal of prickly nationalist troublemakers elsewhere. Like George III, we empower our enemies.
So what does all this have to do with the price of tea in Baghdad?
Once again the White House is seeking military solutions that are likely to rebound and hurt us. Sending more young Americans into that maelstrom may well have three consequences: inflaming Iraqi nationalism, bolstering Shiite and Sunni extremists alike, and killing more young Americans.
A U.S. military study in 1999, recently declassified and in the National Security Archive, concluded that even 400,000 American troops might not be able to stabilize a post-Saddam Iraq. The study emphasized the importance of diplomacy to engage Iraq’s neighbors.
But President Bush is moving in the opposite direction. Most worrying, he is hinting at engaging Syria and Iran not diplomatically but militarily. We are careering down a road that may ultimately lead to military strikes on Iran — a disaster.
What would a better strategy look like? A good bit like the one advocated by the Iraq Study Group. It would emphasize engaging neighbors, a big push for political compromises within Iraq, steps toward troop withdrawals and an intensive effort to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace. (Condi Rice is planning this last effort.)
Would this strategy work in Iraq? No one knows. But such a bipartisan plan might at least bring a bit of healing to the U.S.
Meanwhile, history comes around in other ways. The Rev. Bob Edgar, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches, recalls that as a young congressman in April 1975, he encountered a similar presidential request for a surge of troops. It was a demand by President Gerald Ford for more U.S. forces to stabilize Saigon.
A White House photo captures Ford conferring with two of the architects of that request: senior administration officials named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
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