Lunch at the Labs

Foreign Policy Immaculately Conceived

In response to the article Foreign Policy Immaculately Conceived by Adam Garfinkle in Policy Review, I sent the following letter to the editor.

Letter to the Editor Policy Review,

In his article Foreign Policy Immaculately Conceived in the August & September 2003 issue of Policy Review, Adam Garfinkle attributes the immaculate conception theory of U.S. foreign policy to the wrong group of people. It is not, as he puts it, the fault of "a talented but untutored journalistic mind", but the politicians who espouse and practice it.

Consider the three "immaculate conception" premises put forth in his second paragraph:

1. foreign policy decisions always involve one and only one major interest or principle at a time.
2. it is always possible to know the direct and peripheral impact of crisis-driven decisions several months or years into the future.
3. U.S. foreign policy decisions are always taken with all principals in agreement and are implemented ... as those principals intend.

These are the positions taken by the current administration, including Mr. Powell in speeches some of which were presumably written by Mr. Garfinkle. The Bush administration is given high marks for staying on point; namely we went to war with Iraq because they were supporting terrorists and had WMD. Forget for the moment that both of these appear to be false, in the official explanations there is never any mention of things like and "to secure our supply of oil" or "to make up for not having ousted Saddam in the first Gulf War". It is the politicians and not the journalists who have a simplistic one track mind. They are the ones who never have any doubt that their policies are correct and never even hint that there may be some undesirable consequences. When did the current administration ever give the slightest inkling that their policy makers were not in complete agreement about going to war with Iraq?

Toward the end of the article Mr. Garfinkle timidly suggests that George Bush might be following an "immaculate conception" policy, but then he states than an administration has a right "to put some distance between that rhetoric and its actual conduct" (i.e., to lie). So on the one hand it is fine for politicians (and their speech writers) to rewrite history but not for journalists to report about that rewritten history. It all seems a bit hypocritical to me, but then again I am not a speechwriter for Mr. Powell.