Other Than Wishful Thinking, Do Right Wing Republicans Have a Foreign Policy?

The outing of Valerie Plame is a symptom of a Republican leadership that thinks it knows best. George W. Bush's mantra for five years has been, "Trust me." Valerie Plame was working on WMD issues before she was outed and her specific area of concern at the time was apparently Iran. Outing Valerie Plame was a White House political stunt designed to cover up a deliberate attempt to mislead America into war in Iraq. But it was yet another blunder we could ill afford.

But let's set aside the politics for a moment. Just what is Bush's method of coming to a decision? What facts does the White House use to analyze what is happening in the world? How do Cheney and Rumsfeld arrive at their policies? No one really knows. And the White House has chosen not to let the American people know. And Republicans in Congress have chosen to largely ignore holding hearings on the issues. What is known is that administration policies are failing the American people.

There was a time not long ago when Democrats and Republicans worked together to make sure our leaders had the information they needed to make wise decisions. We weathered the Cold War rather well with that system. But over the years, right wing Republicans have been dismantling the system that enables us to be informed. Does anyone believe at this point that Bush is informed? In fact, the signs are that Bush is continuing to dismantle an apparatus that kept us out of trouble and kept us out of bizarre foreign policy adventures.

Now I won't say that Democrats have been wise in some of this; too often, Democrats have turned their backs on foreign policy and the consequence is that Washington is dominated by right wing think tanks with ideas about foreign policy that clearly run against our own principles. There are, however, Democrats thinking about these things. Lorelei Kelly of Democracy Arsenal is one of them. In a post, she points out some of the key mistakes Newt Gingrich, Jesse Helms and other Republicans have made in recent years:

The fact that the Bush administration is even mentioning nuclear options in dealing with Iran is only partly the last stand of the Neo-Cons. Likewise, it is caused by something more than a president whose political base is buckling up for their apocolyptic joyride. No, our predicament is deeper than that. It is a product of a conservative philosophy that has purposefully broken our open and fact based democratic government. Today’s bad dream of policy options toward Iran is not an accident, but an outcome.

In a democracy that works well, government cares for the institutional memory of big, important public interest issues—like the dangers of nuclear weapons. And long serving bureaucrats provide the steady ballast that keeps the government moving toward objective common goods—like reducing such dangers. That way, government weathers the storm of deviant Executives and keeps the public interest intact. The conservatives in power today are of a breed that does not believe in government virtue nor common goods. Katrina-style government is the result of our failure to maintain a dedicated federal staff for community disaster relief. The Bush Administration’s ability to threaten the nuclear option with little articulate resistance is at least partly because--for decades--conservatives have marginalized or destroyed our government’s ability to pursue arms control.

Kelly goes on to give three examples of right wing meddling. The examples are illuminating. Given all that we know about Newt Gingrich, for example, it's amazing he is considering a run for president and that the press still takes him seriously.

I don't know what it's going to take to restore common sense and credibility to our foreign policy, but it will have to begin by restoring diplomatic dialogue, which has died under George W. Bush. Bush doesn't talk much to the Chinese. He doesn't talk much to the Russians. He doesn't talk much to the Europeans. And he has refused for four years to open any real dialogue with Iran. If you study war, you learn that 90% of the time, diplomacy and real dialogue, which are to be distinguished from public relations stunts and spinning, are cost effective. That is a lesson our MBA president has not learned.