It’s a theme I discuss in my chapter in the forthcoming book I’ve co-edited with Jeff Sparrow, Left Turn.
Foreign Policy’s Steve Walt addresses it:
I gave a lecture last night at the… Cape Ann Forum,… on the topic of America’s changing position in the world and what it might (should) mean for U.S. grand strategy. My hosts were gracious and the crowd asked plenty of good questions, which is what I’ve come to expect when I speak to non-academic groups. Indeed, I’m often impressed by how sensible many “ordinary” Americans are about international affairs in general and U.S. foreign policy in particular. And so it was last night.
One of the attendees was iconoclastic journalist… Christopher Lydon,… who’s been a friend for some years now. Chris asked a great question: Why is there so little accountability in contemporary U.S. policy-making, and especially regarding foreign policy? To be more specific: He wanted to know why some of the same people who got us into the Iraq debacle, mismanaged the Afghanistan war, and now clamor for war with Iran are still treated as respected experts, welcomed as pundits, and recruited to advise Presidential campaigns?
I didn’t have a particularly good answer for him, but I thought about it more as I drove home. I’m not sure why there seems to be so little accountability in the American establishment these days (though it is true that… if you lose $2 billion dollars,… it does affect your job security), but here are a few thoughts.
Part of the problem is institutionalized amnesia. The United States is busy all around the world, and if the short-term results of some action look okay then we tend to move on and forget about what we’ve left behind. We fought a proxy war in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and it was a controversial issue at the time, with 40,000 or so Nicaraguan perishing as a result. But eventually the war ended, and we moved on with nary a backward glance. We intervened in the Bosnian civil war, patched together a Rube Goldberg-like structure to govern the place, gave ourselves high-fives, and spend the next fifteen years telling ourselves what a success it was.… Except that it wasn’t.… Really.… Last year we helped topple the Gaddafi regime in Libya, rejoiced at the fall of a despised and brutal dictator, and then moved on again, even as Libya… descends… into… chaos. But it’s not our problem anymore, unless a… contraband MANPAD… eventually finds its way to some unfortunate civilian airline somewhere. And if that airliner doesn’t have Americans on board, we won’t worry about it very much.
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A second reason is the incestuous clubbiness of the foreign policy establishment. Mainstream foreign policy organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations thrive by being inclusive: It’s not clear what a member in good standing would have to do in order… not… to be welcome there. This is actually a smart principle up to a point: Because none of us is infallible, you wouldn’t want to live in a society where being wrong rendered anyone a pariah for life. But neither does one want a system where conceiving and selling a disastrous war has no consequences at all.
Third, the incestuous relationship between mainstream journalists, policy wonks, and politicos reinforces this problem. All three groups live in a symbiotic relationship with each other, and you wouldn’t expect to see many people in this world donning their brass knuckles and saying what they really think about other members of the club. And because their livelihoods and well-being aren’t directly affected by catastrophes that happen Far Away, why should they worry about holding people accountable and conducting their relations in a more adversarial fashion? Bad for business, man….