Sometimes, reading the headlines, you get the impression that the people leading US foreign policy are nitwits. This is usually not true. They often say inane things in public because they think the political situation requires it, but when we eventually get access to their private memos it turns out they knew all along that their public statements were probably wrong. A good example is the notes Henry Kissinger wrote after a trip to Vietnam in 1965, in which he was scornful of all claims of US success and dubious about any eventual victory.
So it's interesting to read about the memos the Bush administration's National Security Council left for the incoming Obama team in 2009. (NY Times) From what has been made public, these seem to have been genuinely thoughtful and intelligent attempts to sum up the problems the new administration would face.
Most interesting to me are the strenuous warnings about Russian ambitions in Ukraine:
The memo on Russia concludes that Mr. Bush’s “strategy of personal diplomacy met with early success” but acknowledged that ties had soured, especially after Russia’s invasion of the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 2008. The memo presciently warned about Russia’s future ambitions.
“Russia attempts to challenge the territorial integrity of Ukraine, particularly in Crimea, which is 59 percent ethnically Russian and is home to the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet, must be prevented,” the memo warned five years before Russian forces would seize Crimea and 13 years before they would invade the rest of the country. The memo added that “Russia will exploit Europe’s dependence on Russian energy” and use political means “to drive wedges between the United States and Europe.”
On Iraq:
Iraq was central to the Bush administration’s foreign policy and still a festering problem as he was leaving office, but his surge of additional troops and a change in strategy in 2006 had helped bring down civilian deaths by nearly 90 percent. Those moves also paved the way for agreements that Mr. Bush sealed with Iraq to withdraw all American troops by the end of 2011, a time frame that Mr. Obama essentially adopted.
The Iraq memo, written by Brett McGurk, who went on to work for Mr. Obama, President Donald J. Trump and President Biden, offered no recapitulation of how the war was initiated on false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, but it did acknowledge how badly the war had gone until the surge.
“The surge strategy reset negative trends and set the conditions for longer-term stability,” the memo said. “The coming 18 months, however, may be the most strategically significant in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein,” it added, putting that in boldface. Referring to Al Qaeda of Iraq, it said, “AQI is down but not out and a series of elections will define Iraq’s future.”
The memo warned the Obama team that the situation could still unravel again: “There is no magic formula in Iraq. While our policy is now on a more stable and sustainable course, we should expect shocks to the system that will require a flexible and pragmatic approach at least through government formation in the first quarter of 2010.”
On Afghanistan:
The Bush team drew similar conclusions about Afghanistan. “Rarely, if ever, were the resources accorded to Afghanistan commensurate with the goals espoused,” Ms. O’Sullivan and two colleagues wrote in a postscript for that memo. “Policymakers overestimated the ability of the United States to produce an outcome” and “underestimated the impact of variables beyond U.S. control.”
This makes me wonder: people like me are always asking for honesty from politicians, with the feeling that the voters can handle the truth. And even if they can't in some situations, honesty from leaders will lead to a healthier democracy in the long run.
But is that true? I realize that I am setting myself against people who know a whole lot more about both foreign policy and domestic politics than I ever will. Is there a case to be made for predicting success even when you expect failure, so as to keep up morale among people executing the policy?
No comments:
Post a Comment