More Arrant Foreign Policy Nonsense

Caption: Artist's conception of me after seeing yet another debate between our "leaders" on foreign policy. Wake me up when they start to make sense.

Image credit: derbon/Flickr

Via Taylor Marsh, comes this little gem of a report describing how an enlightened democracy discusses foreign policy:

Senate Republicans signaled stiffening resistance Tuesday to the Obama administration's possible nomination of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of State.

GOP strategists said lawmakers would use such a nomination as an opening for an extended examination of how the administration handled the Sept. 11 militant attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador. Although the Senate rarely rejects a president's Cabinet picks, the strategists said, the process could be so painful and lengthy that Obama might come to regret his choice.

...

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, told reporters he considered Rice "tainted" by her role in the administration's handling of Benghazi, and recommended that the White House instead choose Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whom administration officials have also been considering for the diplomatic post.

GOP Senators Cool To Idea Of Susan Rice As Secretary of State

Don't get me wrong. Susan Rice was colossally wrong about what happened at Benghazi. Why she said all that, I don't know. Supposedly, that's what the CIA told her. But, that's the CIA that has been run until early this week by David Patraeus, whose long career of telling his bosses what they wanted to hear has led to two costly and useless "surges" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But that's the real point here. If being colossally wrong about foreign policy issues was a barrier to having authority over them, not only would Rice not have her job, but neither would most of the rest of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy team, nor Senator Kyl, nor John McCain or many of the members of his committee.

The debates conducted on foreign policy in DC these days usually would be justifiably subtitled “Which stupid nonsense do you want to believe?” Iran is a threat? Give me a break. Israel has the right to exist, and this means it can wall off and shell anyone it sees as a threat? Pretty obviously absurd, when you put it that way. But this is what we debate nowadays, as in “what should we do about the terrible danger posed by Iran?”, or “how awful are the Palestinians, and do they deserve to live?”

Meanwhile, in order, Europe, China, and India are likely to become bigger economies than ours in the foreseeable future. We don’t talk about the implications of these things, and what they mean to our security. We don’t talk much about climate change, and the obvious effect that is going to have.

Alright, I’m making myself depressed again. I’ll stop now.