American hero Daniel Ellsberg once drafted a memo for Henry Kissinger to use at the latter’s first National Security Council meeting with the newly inaugurated Richard Nixon. Ellsberg sketched out a number of options in Vietnam, not one of which involved the United States winning. When Kissinger objected, Ellsberg informed him that he didn’t think there was a win scenario. In 2009, Ellsberg recounted what he said next:
Henry, you’re about to get a lot of clearances higher than Top Secret, that you did not know existed. That’s going to have a sequence of effects on you. First, a great exhilaration, that you’re getting all this amazing information that you didn’t know even existed. And the next phase is, you’ll feel like a fool for not having known of any of this, but that won’t last long. Fairly soon, you’ll come to think that everyone else is foolish. What would this expert be telling me if he knew what I knew? So in the end, you stop listening to them.
Ellsberg, a man in a position to know, was warning against the close-mindedness that all too often comes with high office. Given enough time in the bubble of government service, and enough of the background hum of ego stroking that goes hand-in-hand with dealing in secrets, even people who ought to know better can become convinced of the inherent superiority of their opinions and biases. It’s a recipe for closed loop thinking, and it’s still going on today. How else to explain the Obama Administration’s recent overtures to Nouri al-Maliki about the indescribably lunatic idea of extending the stay of American forces in Iraq?:
Vice President Joe Biden, who has the Iraq portfolio at the White House, called Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Thursday, apparently to pressure him to extend the US troop presence. The Status of Forces Agreement agreed to by the Iraqi parliament and the Bush administration in fall, 2008, stipulates that all US troops should depart the country by the end of 2011, but allows the Iraqis to request an extension.
[…]
The Biden phone call was followed by a visit from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, during which he offered to extend the troop presence but pointed to the short time window within which the request would have to be made.
Outside expert Juan Cole is highly skeptical of any extension actually occurring for the simple reason that the Iraqis would have to agree to it, and there is no reason to think they would. What’s so disturbing about the attempt is not that it is likely to succeed (though that would be disastrous), it’s the way it strongly indicates that there is no resisting the war fever that has settled into the swamp on the Potomac.
If ever there was an issue and an office holder who should be able to avoid succumbing to that pestilence, it should be Obama on Iraq. He gave a speech opposing the Iraq War before it began, maintained that opposition his entire tenure in the Senate, hung his bid for the Democratic nomination on it, and has spoken about it enough, both off the cuff and off the teleprompter, that we know he has a reasonably decent understanding of it. His credentials opposing the Iraq War couldn’t be more believable if he made out with Sean Penn and publicly slapped Donald Rumsfeld.*
And yet . . . there was the Secretary of Defense and the Vice-President squeezing Maliki to say that American troops could stay beyond the end of the year. Apparently, they even had the balls to imply that such a thing wouldn’t require the approval of the Iraqi Parliament. There’s a fraternal, if not quite identical, resemblance to the authoritarian politesse of Bush the Younger’s insistence on an official “thank you” from Iraq for fucking up their country.
With that much power, and that many head spinning trappings of power, is it simply impossible for anyone to see past their own limited goals and narrow perspective, or even take outside counsel? It’s a disheartening thing if true, but since reducing the power of the war racket is vital to the future of the United States, better to know it going forward than not. One way or another, we’ll get an answer about Iraq in less than nine months. May sanity prevail.
*And no, the fact that he didn’t immediately withdraw all forces upon taking office shouldn’t count too heavily against him. The case for a faster withdrawal, before the Iraqi election, before the 31 December 2011 deadline, was a lot shakier than the case against any withdrawal. He made a choice, and if we’re out by the end of the year it will have been vindicated.
