But I'm afraid they are as clever as we, and that they are behaving rationally and with foresight. Their problem is vice, not stupidity.
I admit that the process of policy formation involves a certain vector analysis of various elite interests (and lobbies). Government under capitalism may indeed be an executive committee of the bourgeoisie - in that it seeks the interests of the whole class even when they seem to contradict those of a particular group (e.g., perhaps BP now). But to say that the process by which those various elite interests coalesce is complex (and surely not mechanical) is not to deny that it comes to conclusions and seeks to implement them - such as that the US means to have a principal say over the disposal of the unevenly distributed hydrocarbon reserves of the world.
The State Department may have said it 60 years ago, but that in itself doesn't make it less true that Mideast energy resources are "the world's greatest material prize," and that US foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East has been primarily about securing that prize - by alliance, military domination, or even destruction.
I encountered at an impressionable age Shoup & Minter's "Imperial Brain Trust," one of the only studies of the Council of Foreign Relations and its policy planning from before Pearl Harbor; I had an uncle who was a protege of Edward Murrow in the media and then at the USIA in the Kennedy administration, when it was much involved with policy planning; and I've kicked around various universities where "political realism" gave an intellectual tincture to what was simply imperial planning by scholars commuting between Washington and the academy. Although there's a tide in the affairs of government-men in the modern US, every now and then individual figures surface to boast that they are au courant with the deeper currents running in the US Permanent Government - George Kennan as Director of Policy Planning immediately after WWII; Henry Kissinger of course (whose government seminar my friends and I attended and laughed at before he achieved his object all sublime); and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has an unclubbable way of not knowing when he's not supposed to say things.
Every now and then someone blurts out the truth, which has to be quickly covered up. At the top of the list is John Mitchell, Nixon AG: "Watch what we do, not what we say." But in the current and specific matter of the AfPak war, we have a recent secretary-general of Nato (Jaap de Hoop Scheffer) and a German president (Horst Koehler) who point out the economic and geopolitical necessity of controlling AfPak in order to complete the circle around the Persian Gulf.
Both left their jobs shortly after their untoward remarks. As Orwell pointed out, they are certain things "...it wouldn't do to say." And one of them is that the USG pursues rational goals over time in its murder and mayhem.
Regards, Carl
On 6/25/10 2:24 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Maybe Carrol and Carl are right and there is some grand strategy behind all
> this. But it could be that after 9/11 Bush "had" to get revenge (if you
> believe OBL & AQ were based in Afg, etc. - if you think Dick Cheney did it,
> stop reading now). And once there, the U.S. couldn't leave without damaging
> its "credibility." Then Obama campaigned on escalating Afg because it was a
> way to make him look tougher than Bush, and now that he's done it, he's
> stuck. Grand strategy or no, both this war and the one in Iraq have done a
> lot of damage to the U.S. - trillions in debt and less foreign regard for
> both U.S. soft and hard power - with no visible gains. I don't know, but
> maybe it's to give the ruling class too much credit to assume there's a big
> picture behind everything they do.
>
> Doug