Category Archives: Middle East

Yves here. As much as I consider myself to be reasonably jaded, I was nevertheless gobsmacked to read Andrew Bacevich’s list of “Washington assumptions” that underlie US policy-making in the Middle East. They aren’t just detached from reality, they are so wildly at odds with reality as to look deranged. I’d really like to believe that Bacevich is simply describing the all-too-common syndrome of coming to believe your own PR. But as he tells it, these “Washington assumptions” aren’t simply the undergirding talking points for key domestic and foreign constituencies; they really are policy drivers.

This thinking underlying these “Washington assumptions” is not just arrogant but has a rigidity that is almost religious in nature. The neocon vision, that the US has the right to remake the world, combined with how confidence in US virtue and exceptionalism seems to be rising even as our policy initiatives looks more and more mendacious and destructive even to our close allies (well, save the UK).

You can see another set of Washington assumptions at work in the TransPacific Partnership negotiations: that no prospective treaty member will ever question the benefits of free trade (as in they’ll never look at the fine print of what the deal is really about), that they will also want to ally themselves with the US as the better hegemon than China (if nothing else, the US is willing to act as the consumer of the last resort, a role China is not keen to assume, since that is tantamount to exporting jobs).

So this post also serves to demonstrate why Kissinger in his recent public pronouncements looks vastly more responsible than the crew in charge of our foreign affairs. As much as the deservedly-derided doctor was far too willing to team up with unsavory types to achieve what he considered to be American ends, his notion of “realpolitik” explicitly took morality out of the picture. Watching the US manage to devise even worse policies out of a warped, ideologically-driven notion of virtue is both perverse and chilling, like watching someone with a mental illness play out their delusions. And although mad leaders are sadly common in history, it’s another matter completely to see a technocratic class taking that role.

Yves here. This post, which discusses the barmy US idea that we can create an effective Iraq army having failed in two previous efforts, fails to use a key word: mercenaries. Normally, if you aren’t willing or able to have your own citizens act as soldiers, the next best solution was to hire mercenaries. History shows that does not generally work very well, even though it probably does beat doing nothing. Here, the idea of training locals to do our dirty work, out of allegiance to “Iraq,” a made-up country consisting largely of tribal and ethnic groups that don’t play well together in times of upheaval, is questionable on its face, independent of our poor history with this experiment. But the US seems to be in “if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem will be defined to be a nail” mode.