Over at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison riffs on a column by Dan Drezner, who claims that we shouldn’t worry about foreign policy statements like those recently dished out by Hillary Clinton that seem more interested in striking poses than solving problems. Says Drezner, “The most important fact about American foreign policy and public opinion is that Americans just don’t care all that much about the rest of the world. Sure, they’ll express less interventionist preferences when asked, but most of the time they don’t think about it. It’s precisely this lack of interest that gives presidents and foreign policymakers such leeway in crafting foreign policy.”
Drezner follows this with a conclusion that’s something of a non sequitur: “Statements about how one would do things better on the foreign policy front are among the best examples of cheap talk you’ll find in Washington. Why? Because the world will look different in January 2017 than it does today. So of course these proto-candidates can say they’d do things differently. No one will hold them to these claims if they’re elected, because the problems will have evolved.”
But if the people just don’t listen on those rare occasions when candidates do talk about foreign policy (and frequently they don’t), how likely is it that they’ll be aware of the “problems” at all, must less how they’ve “evolved”?
The real problem with foreign policy rhetoric is that the public doesn’t pay attention, but the multisided foreign policy “iron polygon”—consisting of foreign policy professionals in and out of government, the military, military contractors, and the intelligence “community” (also rife with contractors), along with “influential” foreign nations like Saudi Arabia and Israel—does pay attention, and, to a large extent, these people want to be told that they will have careers. During the Clinton years, the general public cared little for Iraq, but the Clinton Administration pursued an “anti-Hussein” policy that affirmed all the fraudulent claims of the Right—that, among other things, “weapons of mass destruction” were actually weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein was an “existential” threat to someone other than his own people. Clinton could have changed that policy, but, since the public didn’t care, he didn’t care. The last thing he wanted was a fight with guys wearing gold braid. Just let sleeping dogs lie, dude! Let ’em lie!
Sadly, sleeping dogs, when they waken, have a tendency to bite you on the ass. After 9/11, the Bush Administration dusted off all the anti-Hussein clichés that the Clinton Administration had left unrefuted and turned them into a casus belli that the American people swallowed with barely a tremor. Once Bush started beating the war drums, it was too late to point out that Saddam’s chemical weapons, though morally repulsive, had proved less than decisive in the Iran-Iraq war that Hussein in fact lost, that Hussein had not dared use chemical weapons in the first U.S.-Iraqi war, that Hussein had never given them to terrorist groups, that no Mid-Eastern terrorist group had ever used chemical weapons, etc., etc., etc. It was too late for logic, not after a decade of deliberate dissimulation, disinformation, and deceit. Lies unrefuted live a life of their own.
Update
Now both President Obama and SecDef Hagel have publicly denounced ISIL as the “worst since Hitler” de jour, a meme that the Dick Cheney wing of the Republican Party must surely regard as manna from heaven. And the military is saying that if we want to take out ISIS, well, we’ve got to go into Syria—something that, obviously, they’ve been itching to do for a long time. Because if one invasion doesn’t work out, try another!
Obviously, ISIL is pretty awful, but they aren’t nearly as dangerous as the Soviet Bloc, which we managed to co-exist with for decades. Our friends the Saudis engage in beheading on a regular basis, which somehow rarely gets in the press. According to Amnesty International, “On Monday 19 August, four men – two sets of brothers Hadi bin Saleh Abdullah al-Mutlaq and Awad bin Saleh Abdullah al-Mutlaq along with Mufrih bin Jaber Zayd al-Yami and Ali bin Jaber Zayd al-Yami – were beheaded.” The men were convicted on the basis of false confessions extracted by means of torture, according to Amnesty International. But since the Saudis sell us oil at reasonable prices, we somehow don’t find this behavior all that outrageous.
