Our War-Loving Foreign Policy Community Hasn't Gone Anywhere

by Glenn Greenwald

Recently by Glenn Greenwald:
The Looming Political War Over Afghanistan

Advocates of escalation in Afghanistan chose Bob Woodward to "reprise his role as warmonger hagiographer" by publishing Gen. Stanley McChrystal's "confidential" memo to the President arguing for increased troops.  As Digby notes, the vague case for continuing to occupy that country is virtually identical to every instance where America's war-loving Foreign Policy Community advocates the need for new and continued wars.  It's nothing more than America's standard, generic "war-is-necessary" rationale.  That is not at all surprising, given that, as Foreign Policy's Marc Lynch notes:

The "strategic review" brought together a dozen smart (mostly) think-tankers with little expertise in Afghanistan but a general track record of supporting calls for more troops and a new counter-insurgency strategy.  They set up shop in Afghanistan for a month working in close coordination with Gen. McChrystal, and emerged with a well-written, closely argued warning that the situation is dire and a call for more troops and a new counter-insurgency strategy. Shocking.

The link he provides is to this list of think tank "experts" who worked on McChrystal's review, including the standard group of America's war-justifying theorists:  the Kagans, a Brookings representative, Anthony Cordesman, someone from Rand, etc. etc.  What would a group of people like that ever recommend other than continued and escalated war?  It's what they do.  You wind them up and they spout theories to justify war.  That's the function of America's Foreign Policy Community.  As one of their leading members – Leslie Gelb, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations – recently wrote in re-examining the causes of his enthusiastic support for the attack on Iraq:

Coming from Gelb, of all people, that observation speaks volumes.  As I wrote in 2007:

The Foreign Policy Community – a term which excludes those in primarily academic positions – is not some apolitical pool of dispassionate experts examining objective evidence and engaging in academic debates. Rather, it is a highly ideological and politicized establishment, and its dominant bipartisan ideology is defined by extreme hawkishness, the casual use of military force as a foreign policy tool, the belief that war is justified not only in self-defense but for any "good result," and most of all, the view that the U.S. is inherently good and therefore ought to rule the world through superior military force.

That "experts" from the "Foreign Policy Community" endorse more war is about as surprising – and as relevant – as former CIA Directors banding together to decide that they oppose the prosecution of CIA agents.  The only event that would be news is if a group of people drawn from that "community" ever did anything other than endorse more war and in the few instances where one hears war hesitation from them, it's always on strategic grounds ("we may not be able to achieve our mission") and never on legal, moral or humanitarian grounds ("it's really not morally or legally justifiable to slaughter enormous numbers of innocent human beings under these circumstances, or to bomb, invade and occupy a country that isn't attacking us or even able to attack us").

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