Davidson: Privatizing Foreign Policy: The Road to Iran
Lawrence Davidson writes in a guest op-ed for IC:
Americans' penchant for paying little attention to their nation's foreign policies has powerful and disastrous effects on national politics and policy-making. Here are two important implications:
1. Popular disinterest in foreign affairs means that the vast majority of Americans abrogate their say in foreign policy formulation to a small number of citizens who do care about specific foreign policies and, constituting themselves as lobbies, are organized to make their influence felt. This can be seen clearly in the case of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The war was planned and launched by small groups of Americans with specific, ideologically based, perceptions of the world. These ideologically motivated lobbies, whether ethnically oriented or neoconservative in nature, have little connection to the local concerns of the majority of Americans. Yet the consequences of their actions have impacted all of us.
2. Because most Americans pay little attention to foreign affairs they lack the knowledge necessary to accurately contextualize the situation when foreign events do seem to intrude upon their lives. The assertion that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction that were to be used on American targets was an example of such a situation. Having no objective knowledge to assess this claim, Americans had to rely on the information given to them by others, most of the time government spokesmen and media “pundits.” The average citizen had no way of knowing if these alleged experts did or did not know what they were talking about, and if they had reasons to present a biased picture of events. However, the consistent supplying of what turned out to be less than objective information to millions of citizens who were otherwise ignorant, created a “thought collective” capable of moving the entire national population to war. Millions of lives have been lost or ruined as a consequence. This story is not a unique one. It has happened before and could soon happen again with the alleged threatening nation now being Iran.
Iran is a nation that has never invaded another country in modern times. Its civilian nuclear research activities are legal under international law and the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency has reported no evidence of nuclear weapons development. Yet, the same lobbies and politicians who led the United States into Iraq now insist that Iran is also worthy of sanctions and attack. Once again, the vast majority of Americans have no major sources of information on this issue apart from those which have already failed them in the case of Iraq. Nor are our elected officials behaving in ways that might prevent a compounding of the disaster of Iraq with another disaster in Iran. Why is this so?
Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America's National Interest by Lawrence Davidson explains in detail the dangers of localism, ignorance, special interests, and misinformation when it comes to formulating the nation's foreign policies.
posted by Juan Cole @ 8/20/2008 12:34:00 AM
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7 Comments:
This can be seen clearly in the case of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The war was planned and launched by small groups of Americans with specific, ideologically based, perceptions of the world. These ideologically motivated lobbies, whether ethnically oriented or neoconservative in nature, have little connection to the local concerns of the majority of Americans. Yet the consequences of their actions have impacted all of us
Come on.. even Alan Greenspan of the US federal reserve said frankly that the US had invaded Iraq in order to controll the oil supply. This of course was in the interest of oil firms, but since energy is the key to the US american way of life and to its power, it's difficult to say that only a small group of interest bear the responsibility of the illegal invasion. All the American bear the responsibility for infringing the UN chart and for the killing and the destruction caused to millions of Iraqi. It is a little easy to put the fault on small groups of particular interest, like Chalabi or Israel supporters. If the US hadn't had any interest in it, it won't have invaded Iraq. It's wrong to represent the US government as a powerless entity which can easily be manipulated.
Lawrence Davidson is describing a much more general phenomenon than foreign policy.
1. Popular disinterest in governmental affairs means that the vast majority of Americans abrogate their say in government policy formulation to a small number of citizens who do care about specific governmental policies and, constituting themselves as lobbies, are organized to make their influence felt.... These economically motivated lobbies have little connection to the local concerns of the majority of Americans. Yet the consequences of their actions have impacted all of us.
2. Because most Americans pay little attention to governmental affairs they lack the knowledge necessary to accurately contextualize the situation when governmental actions precipitate events which do intrude upon their lives.
It is government of, by, and for economic interests, both corporate and plutocratic. Unless and until we take the money out politics we will never regain control of our representative government.
Obama has raised $390,000,000. So far. Do you think he owes anyone anything?
He owes Wall Street, the AIPAC, Big Oil, Big War... every lobby, everything!
It is apparent at this stage "of the game" that we need now to take back our direct legislative powers in order to fix our indirect, representative government.
The prospect of having a national initiative so that we may continually directly define our nation's policies for our representatives to follow, after we've beaten the monkey off their backs, will be the rainbow after the storm we'll have weathered in its passage.
Knee-jerk hatred of lobbies and lobbyists is probably incorrigible, but it cannot make things worse to attempt correction from time to time. Here goes:
Evaluated without preconceived hostility, lobbying shows that political power in the United States is still located where the Federal Constitution located it. There cannot possibly be any sinister Rosicrucian-cum-Bilderberg-cum-C. Wright Mills Power Élite running our holy Homeland from behind the scenes, because if there were, who would waste all that time and energy pestering Congresscritters? The odious L-word people keep on steadily doing their thing, so it MUST be a thing that pays off for them fairly often.
Furthermore, the anti-lobby lobby itself would presumably quiet down eventually if it ever became quite unmistakably plain that Lobbying Does Not Pay. Perhaps the practice would remain as detestable as ever in theory, but if it never actually worked, the Hate-Lobby folks would move on to some other good cause where they might make a detectable practical difference.
(Actually, the H-L gentry themselves always complain as if lobbying worked only TOO well, do they not?)
Happy days.
Millions demonstrated across the world. Is this an indicator of leaving foreign policy to small special interest groups? Those who relied on our checks and balances only to discover they don't work, did they leave it to small special interest groups? Maybe it's a better premise to stick with the idea that our country was coopted by war criminals, and those war criminals need to be brought to justice.
I would only add that the Bush administration and the media insist on presenting the Iran issue as a false dilemma according to which our only choices in dealing with Iran is to either bomb them or sanctions them, or else they'll possess nuclear weapons -- thus totally ignoring other options.
This "concern" about the Iranian nuclear "threat" is entirely trumped up and pretexual. Iran not only suspended enrichment for 2 years but has repeatedly offered to place additional voluntary restrictions on its nuclear program that go well beyond its legal obligations -- such as opening the nuclear program to multinational participation -- which would address any REAL concern about weapons proliferation.
International experts have endorsed Iran's gracious offers too, and yet the Bush administration has instead totally ignored them and instead consistently raised the bar and made increasingly ridiculous demands on Iran that are specificaly intended to prevent a peaceful resolution of the issue.
One could easily substitute most major social and technical problems requiring American voter input for "foreign affairs". The underlying issue is the disengagement by Americans from their system of self government, which is not surprising given the propensity of major political and economic blocs to confuse and obfuscate, rather than elluciate and clarify. Americans are too busy, too interested in the next distraction or purchase, too overwhelmed by the clash between the desire to "relax" and the ever increasing demands of rapidly advancing technological society, including the moral conundrums brought by that advance. When American history is finally written (that is, by someone other than an American) the probability is high and growing that the single sentence that will describe America will be: They just weren't up to controlling the technology they invented, and the social and environmental problems resulting from that technology.
America has absolutely no Plan B in reserve if Plan A fails. Furthermore, the current administration is busily destroying or disempowering all rational alternative mechanisms to Plan A, in order to preserve and further enhance its own power. America's final mythology is not likely to be the one Americans enjoy and recite to themselves.
Good article. Very useful.
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