Truer words have seldom been spoken than Michael Tomasky’s in this morning’s Grauniad, on the way the talking heads provided the impetus for the illegal invasion and how they continue to drive the Iraq war along, despite all the evidence that it’s lost:
[…]
Cynosure though he will be today, Petraeus in fact has only a limited role to play in seeing to it that the US continue its mad engagement. The stars of that dispiriting drama will be the phalanx of foreign policy experts based in Washington, who will, in the wake of the general’s testimony, fan out across the cable channels and op-ed pages, arguing that giving the surge one more chance is the only “serious” option.
These, you see, are the “serious” foreign policy people. It’s good work if you can get it. You may be thinking that you become a serious foreign policy person by often being right about foreign policy. But this just shows how little you know about how these things work.
No – you become a serious foreign-policy person in Washington by dint of meeting two criteria. First, you should adopt the most hawkish position you can plausibly adopt, so that you come across as appropriately “tough-minded”. Second, you must note what all the other serious foreign policy people are saying and take care to ensure that your position is sufficiently indistinguishable from theirs for you to be lumped in with them when the time comes for the Washington Post to write a group profile of Washington’s serious tough-minded foreign policy people.
At the moment the tv talking heads’re nominally Republican: give it a couple of years and they’ll be equally nominal Democrats. The new pundit cohort is practicing its on-air persona already (Ezra, Matt Y. et al – yes, I’m looking at you).
Either way, nominal Republicans or nominal Dems, they’re paid pundits first and foremost and they don’t want that to change. Why throttle the goose that lays such golden eggs?
For skilled practitioners of the art, this tends to work out marvellously, career-wise. Take Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon, the two emblematic seriousistas of the Bush age. Both are scholars at the Brookings Institution, a centre-left thinktank, and both are nominal Democrats. Both were also early fans of the Iraq war. Pollack achieved special notoriety with his book The Threatening Storm, which persuaded many a liberal who might otherwise have looked askance at a war undertaken by the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney war to support it.
Here in America, we’re taught that in the realm of ideas, no less than of products of commerce, the free market sorts everything out – it rewards the good ideas and punishes the bad ones, and at the end of the day fairness will obtain.
Excuse me while I splutter with laughter.
Well, the famous invisible hand seems to have left the world of foreign policy seriousness untouched, because Pollack and O’Hanlon, far from paying any price for their errors, are just as celebrated as ever. They published a major op-ed piece in the New York Times in late July touting the progress being made in Iraq, and O’Hanlon’s byline appeared again on the page a mere five weeks later. This week, cable bookers will be calling them so often that they might as well set up cots in the studios.
Of course, all this hasn’t worked out too well for the country or the world. But that’s tolerable in Washington, because the important thing here is that the status quo should not be disrupted.
Well done Mr Tomasky, but how long has it taken you bloody journalists and pundits to come to this point of view?
Do a word search on this blog and look for ‘status quo’ and you’ll see that “the status quo should not be disrupted” is what I and many, many others have for years been saying is the driver of US domestic and foreign policy, regardless of individual party affiliation.
Do keep up – if only you and your media colleagues had noticed this and spoken out like this 5 years or so ago we might not be in this godawful mess. now
