US Foreign Policy and The Cult Of ‘Expertise’

Americans want our rulers to mind their own business abroad – and good luck with that!

By Justin Raimondo,
December 07, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War

The news that Americans want the U.S. government to mind its own business when it comes to foreign affairs has our Washington elite in a panic. The explanatory notes accompanying a new Pew poll [.pdf] describe the "rise in isolationist sentiment" that started during George W. Bush’s second term and continues in the age of Obama. The agonized hand-wringing is all too apparent in the use of the "isolationist" epithet and even in the way the question was asked: should the U.S. "mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own"? Forty-nine percent – the highest proportion "in nearly half a century of polling" – answered yes. And that’s not all: a gob-smacking 76 percent agreed the U.S. should "concentrate more on our own national problems and building up our strength and prosperity here at home," as opposed to "think[ing] in international terms."

The poll took samples from two groups: common, ordinary, everyday people (i.e., you and me) and members of the Council on Foreign Relations, an elite group of foreign policy-oriented intellectuals, policy wonks, and high muckamucks. The elite group disagreed sharply with the general public’s view on virtually every important question: for example, none of the CFR members thought we should mind our own business – a policy that would go against the group’s history and orientation, which has always been pronouncedly interventionist.

Founded by disciples of Cecil Rhodes, who sought to reestablish the fading glory of the British empire by using the U.S. as Britain’s cat’s-paw, the CFR doesn’t just represent the views of the American Establishment – it is the Establishment. And that Establishment is committed irrevocably to the idea that America’s destiny is to inherit the mantle of world leadership: in the CFR’s view, the question is not whether we ought to police the world, but rather how to go about it. The American public, on the other hand, is sick to death of endless war – the inevitable result of assuming "world leadership" – and is increasingly diverging from elite opinion when it comes to the pressing foreign policy issues of the day.

For example, as this poll shows, when it comes to Afghanistan, the latest theater in which the interventionist drama is being played out, the gulf between the elites and the public is wide, and getting deeper: 50 percent of the CFR group support Obama’s Afghan "surge," while among the hoi polloi the number drops to 32 percent. Asked if the United States should be the "most assertive" world leader, only 19 percent of the general public agrees, but when it comes to the CFR, the numbers turn around: 62 percent want the "most assertive" role for the U.S.

None of this is really all that new. If I recall correctly, the last time this poll was taken, back in 2005, a "rising isolationism" was similarly conjured by the chattering classes, who took the opportunity to deride the "turning inward" of the American people – who were depicted as basking in their uninformed parochialism and refusing to take up their "duty" to police the world (and, yes, I wrote about it at the time). The dreaded "isolationist" wave, it seems, is always about to crash down on the heads of our busybody elites, whose penchant for interventionism has brought us such a painful harvest of bankruptcy and blowback. The elites are always looking over their shoulders and worrying that, one day, peasants with pitchforks will storm the castle, demanding their heads – and, if the Pew poll numbers are correct, it looks like that day may not be far off.

How do we account for the huge gap between the people and those who make policy in their name?

To begin with, we have an entire class of people whose jobs, social prestige, and livelihoods are directly tied to our foreign policy of global intervention. These people are naturally inclined to favor militarism and meddling in the affairs of other nations. This group, while small in numbers, wields an outsized influence when it comes to such matters, and it can successfully defy popular opinion for quite a long time.

It manages to hornswoggle the public with a number of scams, notably the cult of expertise, which Americans have traditionally been suckers for, and never more so than today, when confusion over the sheer complexity of some of the foreign policy issues being raised makes people particularly vulnerable to the argument from authority.

Will our intervention in Pakistan shore up the faltering government or quicken the destabilization already taking place? Does Iran have the technological capacity to make nuclear weapons? What about the alleged threat posed by a "resurgent" Russia? Ordinary human beings throw up their hands in despair when confronted with such heady topics, but if you’re a member of the Council on Foreign Relations you likely already have a well-honed position on these and other equally weighty matters – one that is probably counterintuitive to the ordinary American. Oh, but that supposedly just proves how uninformed we plebeians are, and how wise our interventionist betters.

The cult of expertise is being used to maximum effect by the Obamaites as they prepare to bog us down in the Afghan quagmire for the next five to 10 years: that’s why it supposedly took 92 days for the One to reach a decision on the Afghan escalation issue, as he conducted an extended foreign policy seminar-and-debating-society at the highest reaches of his administration. The whole charade – as if withdrawal was ever an option! – fits in with the self-described "pragmatism" of the Obama administration, which abjures general principles and affects a brisk "just the facts" get-the-job-done air – a method and style that neatly evades the question of whether the job should be done at all.

Another trick that allows the foreign policy elite to get away with pursuing a course so out of sync with the general population is elite control of the political system. As we never cease reminding the rest of the world, America is a democracy, and the people get to vote for – or vote out – their leaders. However, when both candidates – and there are usually only two major applicants for the job – advocate variations on the same interventionist themes, then the "choice" presented to voters is strictly limited, and in fact nearly meaningless.

Remember that President Obama was supported by a great number of people who mistakenly thought he embodied an alternative to the belligerent militarism of the Bush years. Now they are confronted with a "war president" who, in escalating a conflict begun by his predecessor, says he’s determined to "finish the job."

A third method used to get around the common sense "isolationism" of the American people is interventionist control of the "mainstream" media – which can be counted on to act as a megaphone for government officials and the interests that back them. While the tendency of Americans to want to stay out of foreign entanglements might apply in most cases, in some instances people are ready to make an exception if specific grounds can be found ("weapons of mass destruction," the presence of al-Qaeda, or perhaps both of these together) to make an exception.

This is why, in the case of Iran, when asked in the Pew poll if that country posed a threat to the U.S., the non-elites were more willing to use force than the elites. The War Party has already expended a lot of time, energy, and money on demonizing the Iranians and presenting Tehran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program as a threat to the U.S. and its allies. When it comes to Pakistan, however, it is the non-elites who are more skeptical of U.S. intervention in case that country’s nukes should prove insecure, and it is the CFR types who most want to crack down on the alleged threat emanating from Islamabad. Given enough time, and a shift of focus, however, the media will construct as fearsome a narrative regarding Pakistan as any concocted in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq.

The portrait painted by the Pew poll is of an increasingly isolated – and anxious – elite whose foreign policy views are nearly the opposite of the overwhelming majority of Americans. Our Brahmins face a crisis of confidence, one that could very well be followed by a crisis of legitimacy – and that is what they fear most of all.

This crisis is exacerbated not only by the increasing failure of our foreign policy to do what it is supposed to do – that is, protect Americans from harm – but by a number of relatively recent developments that undermine their methods of suppressing majority "isolationist" sentiment.

The first and most obvious is the Internet, which has not only bypassed the "mainstream" media and, indeed, driven it into near-bankruptcy, but which has also delivered a body blow to the cult of the "experts." After all, who is an "expert," and why are they so called? Well, because they generally have credentials and, therefore, are given a platform by the media to expound on matters they supposedly know everything about. Yet with the advent of the Internet, the significance of this "mainstream" platform is radically reduced. Add to this the wide availability of previously obscure knowledge – thanks be to the gods of Google! – and credentialism is thrown out the window. Today, an unknown writer can take to the Internet, set up a blog, and – perhaps – become the go-to source for this or that specialized branch of knowledge. An alternative crop of experts has arisen, which rivals the old crowd and indeed seems to be fast surpassing them, at least so far as influence over the public is concerned.

Yet the elite stranglehold on our foreign policy continues, in large part due to the iron grip of the interventionists on the two-party system. Our present conundrum – a president elected to office largely on the strength of his "antiwar" stance, who is now taking us into a wider and more difficult war than his warlike predecessor ever conceived – is an eloquent testament to this cruel fact.

If the leadership of both major parties sees Afghanistan as a "war of necessity," then the War Party can relax – because the restive public will have no one to turn to even as it rejects the policies put forward by the elites. This is why the policymakers can continue to ignore the rising rebellion against interventionism roiling the American street and continue talking only to themselves.

In their view, ordinary Americans don’t matter: only politicians, lobbyists, and other policy wonks matter. But this Marie Antoinette attitude can only take them so far before they run the risk of revolution.

Read more by Justin Raimondo

• The Lap Bomber Mystery – December 27th, 2009
• The Awards! – December 22nd, 2009
• The Rising Tide – December 20th, 2009
• Calling Dr. Pangloss – December 17th, 2009
• The War Democrats – December 15th, 2009

The Sovereignty Of Muslim Nations

A Casualty of U.S. Foreign Policy

By LIAQUAT ALI KHAN
Weekend Edition
December 18-20, 2009
Courtesy Of Counter Punch

The United States has adopted an invasive foreign policy that violates the sovereignty of many Muslim nations. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter promulgates: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” Territorial integrity and political independence are the principles of national sovereignty -- key principles of the U. N. Charter and post-colonial international law – which empower nations to freely determine their political, social, economic, and religious institutions, without external coercion, diplomatic pressure, war threats, and economic sanctions. Philosophically, these principles respect human diversity and presume that no system, including liberal democracy, can be the singular model for all nations. The principles caution against any mindless importation of legal and political systems successful in other nations. Accordingly, the peoples of the world are free to institute political systems of their choice, including constitutional monarchies, presidential systems, secular or religious forms of government.

Contrary to the U.N. Charter, and in blatant violation of the principles of territorial integrity and political independence, the U. S. is determined to forcibly shape the Muslim world in its own image. Part of this determination mirrors the American mindset that Muslim nations would indeed be better off if they simply borrow secular institutions of the United States. This evangelical mindset presumes that Islam is a reactionary religion that impedes material prosperity and social justice. Part of this determination reflects the dark side of American self-pride and super-power exceptionalism, which sees most other nations as the lesser children of God in need of American guidance. Undoubtedly, the U.S. foreign policy is also geared toward obtaining key natural resources (such as oil) and maintaining strategic military dominance in various Muslim regions of the world.

For most part of the twentieth century, Muslim nations, some emerging from the colonial yoke, approached the U. S. for economic assistance, development, and even protection against regional and global enemies. For example, the U.S. played a supportive role in the independence of Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation. The fear of the Soviet Union, which had occupied Central Asian Muslim nations and later invaded Afghanistan, drove many other Muslim nations to seek U.S. patronage. For a variety of reasons, the U.S. succeeded in constructing strategic alliances with key Muslim nations, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran under the Shah.

The relations with the Muslim world, however, began to fracture as the U.S. foreign policy favored Israel in the Middle East conflict. The 1979 Iranian revolution painted the U.S. as the Great Satan, and highlighted the immorality of U.S. foreign policy that subsidizes cruel and inhuman occupation of Palestine and institutes puppet governments in Muslim countries. A few years later, the Al Qaeda, an international militant organization, launched asymmetrical warfare against U.S. targets to draw attention to the occupation of Muslim lands. In countering terrorist attacks, the U.S. bombed Tripoli and Khartoum, the capitals of Libya and Sudan, ratcheting up the conflict with Muslim nations.

The 9/11 attacks and subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have further fractured relations with the Muslim world. The U.S. homeland security and the associated legal rhetoric of self-defense and the war on terror have been invoked to establish a new justificatory paradigm for violating territorial integrity and political independence of Muslim nations. The phraseology of “Islamic fascism” and “Islamic terrorism” paints Muslim militants as inherently violent individuals who kill to please God and to go to heaven. Almost every Muslim nation, foe or friend, is under intense U.S. diplomatic pressure to launch attacks on national militants even if such attacks kill innocent civilians.

The U.S. logic of homeland security is weighing heavily on Afghanistan, where the war machine has killed thousands of civilians in pursuing the dubious goal of defeating the Taliban. Even Pakistan, a subservient ally, has been subjected to drone attacks while Pakistan’s democratically elected government and its armed forces are helpless in protecting the nation’s territorial integrity and political independence.

In addition to military attacks, the U.S. foreign policy employs subversive modus operandi. The 2006 Iran Freedom Support Act allocates millions of dollars authorizing U.S. intelligence agencies to support groups opposed to the Iranian government. This law is fashioned after the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, a law that paved the way for invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The threats of attacking Iran are in the air. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence agencies enjoy the legal mandate to destabilize the Iranian government and possibly reverse the Islamic revolution by sowing seeds of confusion and anarchy.

Unfortunately, these massive violations of the U.N. Charter, specifically of the principles of territorial integrity and political independence, go unnoticed. The U.N. officials are silent over these violations as if Article 2(4) does not exist. The U.S. foreign policy remains the same under President Obama, who promised to mend relations with Muslim nations. Meanwhile, U.S. policymakers continue to talk about winning hearts and minds of Muslim populations. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, Palestine, Iran, with so many Muslim countries on the U.S. hit-list, it is unclear how a foreign policy of territorial aggression, invasion, and subversion can generate goodwill that the U.S. seeks in the Muslim world.

Ali Khan is professor of law at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, Kansas and the author of A Theory of universal Democracy (2006).

The Perils Of Plan Mexico

Going Beyond Security to Strengthen US-Mexico Relations

By LAURA CARLSEN
November 24, 2009
Courtesy Of CounterPunch

I have been a political analyst and writer in Mexico for the past two decades. I'm also a mother faced with the challenge of raising children there. As a human rights advocate and a mother, today I speak to you, frankly, with a great sense of urgency.

Mexico is the United States' closest Latin American neighbor and yet most U.S. citizens receive little reliable information about what is happening within the country. Instead, Mexico and Mexicans are often demonized in the U.S. press. The single biggest reason for this is the way that the entire binational relationship has been recast in terms of security over the past few years.

From a neighbor and a trade partner, Mexico has been portrayed as a threat to U.S. national security. Immigrants are no longer immigrants, but criminals, "removable aliens," and even potential terrorists. Latinos, mostly Mexicans, are now the largest group of victims of hate crimes in the United States.

Although Mexico-bashing has been a favorite sport of the right for years, this terrible conversion of Mexico, from an ally to a "failed state" and narco-haven in the media and policy circles, began in earnest under the Bush administration and has only intensified since then. The Merida Initiative and the militarization of Mexico are the direct outgrowth of the national security framework imposed on bilateral relations.

There is a misconception that the Merida Initiative, named after a meeting between Presidents Calderon and Bush in the city of Merida, originated when Calderon requested assistance in the drug war from the U.S. government. The U.S. government, this story goes, agreed to comply. When the U.S. government cited its share of responsibility in the transnational drug trade as the world's largest market, pundits heralded the admission as unprecedented and a new step in binational cooperation.

This is largely myth. In fact, Plan Mexico—as it was first called—has its roots in the Security and Prosperity Partnership that grew out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. When the regional trade agreement was expanded into a security agreement, the Bush administration sought a means to extend its national security doctrine to its regional trade partners. This meant that both Canada and Mexico were to assume counter-terrorism activities (despite the absence of international terrorism threats in those nations), border security (in Mexico's case, to control Central American migrants), and protection of strategic resources and investments. Assistant Secretary of State Tom Shannon called it "arming NAFTA."

The Bush announcement of the three-year Merida Initiative in October of 2007 extended U.S. military intervention in Mexico from this base. The plan is dubbed a "counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, and border security initiative" although it's the war on drugs that has received the most attention. Although U.S. troops cannot operate by law in Mexican territory, the plan significantly increases the presence of U.S. agents and intelligence services, now estimated at 1,400, and of U.S. private security companies throughout Mexico.

The terms of the Merida Initiative sends the full $1.3 billion appropriated so far to U.S. defense, security, information technology and other private-sector firms, and the U.S. government. One hundred percent of the money stays in the United States since the plan prohibits cash payments to Mexico.

In other words, what it does is ensure an expanding market for defense and security contracts, in an undeclared war that has no exit strategy in sight.

Does this sound familiar?

It's important to note that despite obvious threats to Mexican sovereignty, the Calderon government lobbied actively for the Merida Initiative, balking only at certain human rights conditions. There is a reason for Calderon's enthusiasm, which has to do with this particular moment in Mexico's fragile democracy.

Recall that Felipe Calderon took office after courts proclaimed he had won the elections by half a percentage point. The courts blocked a demand for a full recount, despite evidence of irregularities and the narrow margin. The elections decision enraged an already divided populace and failed to resolve accusations of fraud.

The military had enabled Calderon to take office by physically escorting him into a Congress occupied by protestors and placing the presidential banner over his shoulder. The country was in the throes of massive protests involving at least half the populace.

Once in office, Calderon launched the war on drugs. This strategy allowed a weak president with little popular legitimacy to cement his power, based on building an alliance with the armed forces under a militarized counternarcotics model.

The war on drugs model created an external enemy to distract from the internal protests and division. With its focus on interdiction and supply-side enforcement, the model was originally developed by President Richard Nixon in the 70s to increase presidential power, by taking counternarcotics efforts out of the hands of communities, where it was treated largely as a community health issue, and placing it in the hands of the executive, where it was treated as a security issue.

Applied in Mexico, the immediate effect was to send more than 45,000 army troops into Mexican communities. The presence of the army in all aspects of public security is now the major cause of the grave increase in human rights violations and drug-related violence in Mexico.

The militarization of Mexico has led to a steep increase in homicides related to the drug war. It has led to rape and abuse of women by soldiers in communities throughout the country. Human rights complaints against the armed forces have increased six-fold.

Even these stark figures do not reflect the seriousness of what is happening in Mexican society. Many abuses are not reported at all for the simple reason that there is no assurance that justice will be done. The Mexican Armed Forces are not subject to civilian justice systems, but to their own military tribunals. These very rarely terminate in convictions. Of scores of reported torture cases, for example, not a single case has been prosecuted by the army in recent years.

The situation with the police and civilian court system is not much better. Corruption is rampant due to the immense economic power of the drug cartels. Local and state police, the political system, and the justice system are so highly infiltrated and controlled by the cartels that in most cases it is impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

The militarization of Mexico has also led to what rights groups call "the criminalization of protest." Peasant and indigenous leaders have been framed under drug charges and communities harassed by the military with the pretext of the drug war. In Operation Chihuahua, one of the first military operations to replace local police forces and occupy whole towns, among the first people picked up were grassroots leaders—not on drug charges but on three-year old warrants for leading anti-NAFTA protests. Recently, grassroots organizations opposing transnational mining operations in the Sierra Madre cited a sharp increase in militarization that they link to the Merida Initiative and the NAFTA-SPP aimed at opening up natural resources to transnational investment.

All this—the human rights abuses, impunity, corruption, criminalization of the opposition—would be grave cause for concern under any conditions. What is truly incomprehensible is that in addition to generating these costs to Mexican society, the war on drugs doesn't work to achieve its own stated objectives.

We know this not only from the relatively recent Mexican experience, but from other places— especially Colombia and the Andean region. As Plan Colombia goes into its tenth year, the cost of drugs on U.S. streets has gone down and regional production has risen. In Mexico, interdictions dropped between 2007 and 2008. The number of arrests went up but seems to have little effect on the hydra-headed cartels. Actual indictment and prosecution rates following arrests are suspiciously not reported. Illegal drug flows to the U.S. market appear to be unaffected overall.

The U.S. Role

To understand the U.S. role in this mess, it's necessary to step back a moment. There is no question that the power of organized crime in Mexico is real. There is also no question that the current approach to combating it is a disaster in its effects on human rights and democracy, and a quagmire in strategic terms.

In this context, the question is why, particularly now that George Bush is out of office, would the U.S. government continue to concentrate its aid to Mexico in a way that demonstrably empowers corrupt security forces, violates Mexican human rights, and leads to an increase in violence? This is a huge mistake with extremely high costs.

At a time when Mexico faces one of its worst economic crises in history, U.S. foreign policy toward our neighbor to the south reduces one of our most important and complex bilateral relations to miscast and failed security cooperation under a discredited war on drugs model. We know that there are powerful economic and political interests behind creating a war front in Mexico. But we also know that we too can have a powerful voice. The question is how?

Many U.S. citizen groups have been grappling with that issue. The effort to place human rights conditions on the military-police aid package to Mexico turned out to be counterproductive. The original conditions withheld 15% of some Merida Initiative aid pending progress on the prohibition against torture—a common practice by Mexican security forces to punish community leaders and extract confessions, consultation with human rights groups, transparency, and committing the army to civilian courts where permitted under law. None of that happened in a real way.

Nevertheless, the State Department recently sent a human rights report to Congress showing that the Mexican government had not made significant progress on conditions, while asking Congress to release the funds on the basis of good intentions. Congress promptly complied.

For this reason, our organization and many other U.S. and Mexican groups are calling for a halt to Plan Mexico as the three-year cycle closes. The Obama administration has pledged to continue military funding to Mexico and Central America under the plan, but we believe that a thorough analysis of the results and consequences will demonstrate the need for a more integral and effective aid strategy and help us chart a binational relationship focused on peaceful cooperation and community-building.

We are not alone in demanding that the war on drugs model be replaced.

In Mexico, recent polls show that the majority of the population has lost faith in the drug war model. Last May, 52 Mexican human rights organizations called for an end to military aid to their government under the Merida Initiative. Their letter reads:

"We respectfully request that the U.S. Congress and Department of State, in both the Merida Initiative as in other programs to support public security in Mexico, does not allocate funds or direct programs to the armed forces …

"We urge the United States to consider ways to support a holistic response to security problems; based on tackling the root causes of violence and ensuring the full respect of human rights; not on the logic of combat."

In the United States, the AFL-CIO has come out against the Merida Initiative, in part as a protest against the violation of labor rights particularly in the case of the mining union but also as a rejection of the drug war model. U.S. labor took this position even before Calderon used the army last week to wipe out Mexico's oldest union and throw 45,000 unionized workers out of jobs overnight. The drug war facilitated the use of the army to take over the state-owned company's installations.

The 1.7 million-person Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, non-governmental organizations including CIP Americas Program and Global Exchange, religious organizations including Witness for Peace, the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, and Tikkun, and grassroots activist organizations like the Latin America Solidarity Coalition, Alliance for Democracy, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and Friends of Brad Will have all called for U.S. citizens to oppose the plan and redirect aid to Mexico to health and development programs.

The immediate change needed is relatively simple, although the situation is not. The U.S. government should:

1) Understand shared responsibility in the transnational drug war not as intervention into Mexican security issues but as assuming its own responsibilities in reducing demand, increasing health services, and attacking corruption within its borders. Much public funding and political commitment is needed here, as well as a serious search for models to replace the failed drug war.

2) The U.S. government must rechannel harmful security aid to Mexico into development and anti-crisis aid that will address the root factors that have led to the expansion of drug consumption and trafficking in Mexico. Proposals for this type of aid have already been presented before Congress.

Militarization is not the way to deal with Mexico's political crisis and infusing government money into industries based on blood is not the way to deal with the U.S. economic crisis.

Mexico should be a U.S. priority. But providing exclusively security-focused equipment and training to Mexico is like pouring gas on a fire.

Citizens in both countries stand to lose by viewing the complex binational relationship through the reductionist lens of national security. Critical issues have fallen from the agenda or receive merely lip service. Among them: trans-border livelihoods in the world's most integrated borderlands, immigration, regional environmental threats, trade, and a sustainable energy future.

We must return the U.S.-Mexico relationship to the simple equation that a healthy neighbor equals better trade, security, and cultural relations.

A strong and mutually beneficial relationship must cover the full range of issues between the two nations. The Obama administration and Congress must reorient the militarized relationship with Mexico. A new approach must go to the roots of the illegal drug trade by addressing inequality, poverty, employment, and the high costs of prohibitionist policies. Instead of seeking to bolster the Calderon administration, and police and military forces characterized by corruption, we must stand by human rights, democratic institutions, and a strong role for civil society.

Laura Carlsen is director of the Americas Policy Program in Mexico City. She can be reached at: (lcarlsen(a)ciponline.org).

This text is a speech presented to the Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Oct. 22, 2009.