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Who Or What Makes U.S. Foreign Policy
Andrew Bacevich has some good insights on U.S. foreign policy, but now I am a bit confused about two different reasons he gives for its dubious quality.
This from the August 15 Bill Moyers Journal:
Our foreign policy is something that is concocted in Washington D.C., but it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we want, we the people want. And what we want, by and large – I mean, one could point to many individual exceptions – but, what we want, by and large is, we want this continuing flow of very cheap consumer goods.
We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may happen to be, in order to be able to drive wherever we want to be able to drive. And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether or not the book’s balanced at the end of the month, or the end of the fiscal year. And therefore, we want this unending line of credit.
So the decisions made in DC somehow do reflect the general will of the people.
But in today’s LA Times oped Bacevich finds different culprits:
The very structure of American politics imposes its own constraints. For all the clout that presidents have accrued since World War II, their prerogatives remain limited. A President McCain will almost certainly face a Congress controlled by
a Democratic and therefore obstreperous majority. A President Obama,
even if his own party runs the Senate and House, won’t enjoy all that
much more latitude, especially when it comes to three areas in which the dead hand of the past weighs most heavily: defense policy, energy policy and the Arab-Israeli peace process. The military-industrial complex will inhibit efforts to curb the Pentagon’s penchant for waste. Detroit and Big Oil will conspire to prolong the age of gas guzzling. And the Israel lobby will oppose attempts to chart a new course in the Middle East. If the past provides any indication, advocates of the status quo will mount a tenacious defense.
Which is it: The peoples wants? The special groups? How do they connect?
George Monbiot with another view:
If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government’s interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be.
Monbiot is partisan: "crazy Christian" are not the only group that politicians accommodate. Guess what Obama will do when the "Save Darfur" crazies want accommodation. Monbiot also writes: to threaten with destruction "is of no concern to the current administration." It was never of concern for any administration.
But take those partisan remarks away, he seems to be right and he somewhat reconciles both varients Bacevich expresses.
What unites these view is that the U.S. domestic political system is configured in a way that U.S. foreign policy is not created from a well understood common interest of all U.S.citizens, but from the political influence and special interest of multiple small groups of constituents.
I am still not sure whether that is the right way to see it. How should foreign policy be made?
Perhaps some amerikan, preferably one of the shills for a dem prez who come in here advocating support for Barak Obama in the contest against John McCain, would care to ask his/her beloved dem organisation about their support for Hamid Karzai and his mafia government in light of this Independent story. Headed “Afghan president pardoned rapists” the article tells us that Hamid Karzai has quietly pardoned three men who committed a very public and very violent gang rape of a middle aged Afghani woman enquiring about her son’s disappearance.
The woman, Sara, and her family found out about the pardon only when they saw the rapists back in their village.
“Everyone was shocked,” said Sara’s husband, Dilawar, who like many Afghans uses only one name. “These were men who had been sentenced and found guilty by the Supreme Court, walking around freely.” . . .
. . . The most powerful local commander, Mawlawi Islam, was running for office despite being accused of scores of murders committed while he had been a mujahedeen commander in the 1980s and a Taliban governor in the 1990s, and since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Sara said one of his sub-commanders and body guards had been looking for young men to help in the election campaign.
“It was evening, around the time for the last prayer, when armed men came and took my son, Islamuddin, by force. I have eye-witness statements from nine people that he was there. From that night until now, my son has never been seen.”
Dilawar said his wife publicly harangued the commander twice about their missing son. After the second time, he said, they came for her. “The commander and three of his fighters came and took my wife out of our home and took her to their house about 200 metres away and, in front of these witnesses, raped her.”
Dilawar has a sheaf of legal papers, including a doctors’ report, which said she had a 17mm wound in her private parts cut with a bayonet. Sara was left to stumble home, bleeding and without her trousers. ”
Unless stories of what life is really like under the motley collection of gangsters and warlords given free rein over Afghanistan by the so-called “Coalition of the Willing”, does gain circulation in amerika, no one will question this beauty contest being held on the basis of “National Security” issues.
It is the amerikan election process where both sides adhere to a commonly shared unreality, which is one of the most effective tools for brainwashing amerikans about their empire’s true motives.
The coalition, in effect USuk and a few poorer nations living off the military aid which isn’t a gift, but a mortgage against their nations future independence, will fall apart if much more strain is put on it by the people of Afghanistan desperate for a chance of a life without gun-toting thugs terrorising them.
Every week we see more and more Afghanis say “I’m mad and I’m not gonna take it any more”. The ‘no-go’ areas where coalition or government forces are only welcome if they arrive tooled up to the max, get bigger and bigger.
Do people never ask “how is this happening? If we’re the good guys and the resistance are the thugs wanting to rule Afghanis with an iron fist, why do most ordinary Afghanis appear to support them not us?”
The Vietnam parallel has been dragged out too often particularly in Iraq where skillful divisions by amerika caused the different groups to fight each other rather than unite against the invader, but the label was first applied to Afghanistan when the USSR got bogged down there, the population is more homogeneous than Iraq’s, more like Vietnam’s determined nationalists. Every grouping seems to have suffered equally during a century and a half of attempted colonialism. Yet the people haven’t lost their will to resist. Actions such as Karzai’s empathy for sociopathic rapists seems to have made that easier. Still amerika and all the rest of the greedy imperialists so eager to squash Afghanis under the heel of their ‘superior technology’ would do well to remember Vietnam, and how a truly committed population of nationalists can destroy the biggest, most technologically advanced armies by using the weapons of patience and determination.
Like Vietnam where the west was told the resistance were first of all communists who wanted to subjugate themselves to USSR or China (Vietnam has trodden it’s own path independent of either in the decades since independence), amerikans are told that the Afghani resistance is comprised of looney Muslim fundamentalists fighting for foreign powers (in this case the probably dead and certainly irrelevant Osama Bin-Laden).
It is as if peeps have been convinced that Afghanis are from another planet that they aren’t motivated by the same basic urges that keep the rest of humanity ticking along. That would have to be the case if ordinary Afghanis were so eager to fight for some mysterious foreigner who allegedly boasts of his eagerness to oppress Afghanis further.
The truth – That the resistance is comprised of Afghanis from urban and rural areas, from educated and illiterate families, united by circumstance, who have witnessed or suffered under the injustices of Karzai’s gangster regime, is never discussed.
So over the next week when Obama-ites are out touting the Mutt and Jeff pairing of Obama and Biden consider that the new Veep won’t be trying to temper Barak’s blind stupidity on Afganistan with any realpolitik.
According to Biden Obama stole his his ideas on Afghanistan from him (Biden):
While their debate exchanges were mostly friendly during the race, Sen. Biden did draw attention to Sen. Obama’s limited foreign policy credentials, in comments which Republicans have been swift to repeat. Sen. Biden characterized the junior senator as a “Johnny-come-lately” on Afghanistan, praising him for having adopted Sen. Biden’s own ideas, including a troop surge in the country.
Worst of all if this false view of Afghanistan’s courageous freedom fighters is allowed to persist, and USuk finally bow to the Karzai government’s suggestion of a political settlement with selected members of the resistance, chiefly those who had been in the former Taliban regime but were too slow in hopping across to Karzai or who had been sold into orange suits by their political opponents and amerika’s “most wanted” list, it will have all been for nought.
Afghanistan will still be oppressive, incapable of supporting it’s population because too many greedheads are taking too much, and most of all there will be no peace.
The opportunists amongst the resistance (every movement has some), will have been separated from their more idealistic influences and the new government will be exactly like the old government, and that means the peace will be very short lived.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 24 2008 21:43 utc | 11
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