http://www.thenational.ae/
Recent foreign policy blunders are seriously raising the question of whether the American political system is capable of learning from its mistakes. The George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations committed the same basic error by ignoring the advice of their own experts in favour of politicised judgments that proved disastrous.
The Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was obviously a dreadful mistake at the time, and the magnitude of the fiasco has only become increasingly evident. It’s a good candidate for the biggest blunder in American foreign policy history. Both Iraqis and Americans will count the costs for many years to come.
Yet the overwhelming consensus of professionals within the American government – in the military, intelligence community and foreign service – knew and warned that the invasion itself was a mistake and that the mishandling of the occupation was a staggering tragicomedy. Almost all serious planning was systematically disregarded.
The faction that demanded the invasion, and then so badly flubbed the occupation, was an ideological clique centred in the defence department and the vice president’s office. Almost none of them knew anything about Iraq or had any experience of war. Nor did they agree on the exact purpose of the war. They had wanted an invasion of Iraq for years and seized on the entirely unrelated September 11 terrorist attacks to push that agenda. They prevailed mainly because they, alone, had a specific plan, and something usually – though not always – beats nothing.
Experts were against it but were overruled for political and ideological reasons. As with all wars, the invasion was initially popular, but the occupation went bad, very quickly. Combined with an almost equally bitter experience in Afghanistan, it prompted the American public to turn against the notion of Middle Eastern conflicts in an irrational and all-encompassing manner.
Sins of omission can be almost as dangerous as sins of commission. The Obama administration was faced with a serious conundrum in Syria in 2012. A solid consensus urged the administration to begin arming and funding rebel groups to help shape the nature and character of the conflict so that the US could influence its outcome.
For both ideological and domestic political reasons, Mr Obama and some of his key advisers – and again it was those who knew nothing about Syria or the Middle East – decided to do nothing. Even when Bashar Al Assad crossed the American “red line” by using chemical weapons, he became the beneficiary of an agreement that only enhanced his political and diplomatic standing.
It’s probably true that avoiding any engagement whatsoever in Syria, with the recent exception of a decidedly half-hearted and profoundly ineffective campaign against ISIL, has been popular with a public soured on conflict. But the former senior American officials tasked with Syria policy say that when Mr Obama announced that Mr Al Assad must go, they considered it their “duty” to make it happen. Yet they received no policy support from their superiors. This time nothing has beaten something, with similarly lamentable results, although the costs may be less immediately evident to the public.
Still, the US finds itself totally outmanoeuvred by Russia and Iran, and in an apparent self-inflicted eclipse from influence in the Middle East without any objective correlative that can explain it beyond a completely irrational policy paralysis. Because the administration refuses to identify a preferred outcome in Syria within the realm of the possible, it finds itself unable to adopt, much less implement, a coherent policy in support of that outcome. All plausible outcomes are deemed unacceptable, and all acceptable outcomes are deemed unattainable.
Thus the world’s sole superpower finds itself at the mercy of not only second-rate global powers like Russia but even mere regional bullies like Iran, simply because they know what they want while Washington cannot, or rather will not, choose.
Most recent American presidents who get reelected experience a major scandal in their second term.
For Mr Bush and Mr Obama, these scandals were, respectively, the wild overreach in Iraq followed by the massive overcorrection in Syria.
In both cases these elementary blunders could have been avoided, or at least significantly mitigated, by listening to the considered opinion of the professionals and experts employed, in many cases in their hundreds, by the government precisely to guide the politicians and their advisers on complicated matters which they may not fully comprehend. Regarding the Arab world, misunderstandings by both the American politicos and the public appear to be chronic.
No one would seriously advocate a government of technocrats in a mature republic. But surely two disastrous blunders in a row, against the strong objections of the policy professionals, ought to strongly recuperate the standing of the judgments of those who are fundamentally informed.
The least we can expect is that future American presidents will pay more attention to what their own military, intelligence and diplomatic professionals have to say about the biggest decisions regarding the Middle East.