The Open Village

For quite some time now, I have often found myself asking the question “Why does the greatest country in the world keep making stupid political blunders in terms of foreign policy?”. The evidence of this myopic and sometimes disastrous political miscalculations are broad and varied: from starting local wars in the Far East to supporting brutal dictators in Africa; encouraging corruption in Latin America to sponsoring terrorist organizations and “freedom fighters” in the Middle East and Asia to bankrolling repressive regimes in the West Indies. Our foreign policy has encouraged assassinations and assassination attempts of foreign leaders; we have encouraged illegal drug trade in Asia and Latin America or turned a blind eye in most cases. We have spawned separatist movements and provided weapons to opposing sides in national conflicts. The list goes on and on. The people responsible for this disaster of a foreign policy are the so-called experts who make up the political intelligentsia in the United States of America.

In a world where most Americans see nothing wrong with knowing next to nothing about the world outside their living room window, the American intellectual class has ridden roughshod over our sense of what is just and what is in the national interest. These self-professed gurus of nothing have over the years claimed to be experts and most are indeed in institutions of higher learning as research fellows, directors of institutes of international studies, policy analysts, etc. But a careful analysis of their writings makes you wonder just where their heads are. For example, take this statement from a leading “scholar”:

“Today’s attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government in Lebanon is bankrolled by Iran. Hezbollah is a wholly-owned Iranian subsidiary. Its chief has the official title of the “representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader” in Lebanon. Iran paid for the 27,000 rockets Hezbollah has aimed at Israel”

Notice the clever refusal to mention who bankrolls the attempts by Israel to wipe out the Palestinians, or who paid for and supplied the cluster bombs used by Israel that are still killing and maiming Lebanese men, women and children today.

Going through the so-called “Think-Tanks” this myopic and infantile reductionist theory is pervasive. These are the people who iron out foreign policy positions like the “Bush Doctrine”, write speeches that include terms like the “Axis of Evil”, push out policy papers espousing the “need to show our support” to errant regimes and self-delusional foreign leaders and are quick to point to “national security” as being the reason why the U.S. government is invading other countries, encouraging subversion of foreign governments, selling weapons to armed bandits disguising themselves as “freedom fighters”, embracing torture and engaging in the outsourcing of torture to third-party countries through the practice of what the intellectual class cleverly named “rendition”. The damage done to American foreign policy by the intellectual class in the current dispensation is mind-boggling to say the least. The greatest evidence of this is the war in Iraq. As was recently revealed by CNN, almost all the “experts” who appeared on the network in the period leading up to the war were paid to lie to the American public by cooking up theories and postulations that were meant to “sell the war”. May the souls of the almost 5,000 dead American soldiers haunt these war-mongers to their graves.

To be continued.