Holding the FP Community Accountable Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

Understandably, since that dubious op-ed by Pollack and O’Hanlon, holding the “foreign policy community” accountable has been a hot issue.  (See all the exchanges on our blog over the past day).  However, I will make one point. Not all of the “experts” were wrong on Iraq and it’s important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Rand Beers (my boss), Richard Clarke, Senator Bob Graham, Larry Korb, are just a few of a long list of “very serious people” who didn’t support the war.  Point is you have to find a way to distinguish.

So how do you hold these people accountable and distinguish?

In a perfect world we could just take a friend's suggestion and institute foreign policy malpractice suits.  When someone gives bad policy advice and people die they get sued.  All practitioners would have to get policy malpractice insurance and insurance companies set premiums based on the risk.  Eventually, if you give too much bad policy advice you won’t be able to get covered to advise the President.  Make more mistakes and you won’t be insured to testify in front of Congress.  Eventually you could lose your license to bloviate on national television, and finally the insurance companies will just take the pen and paper away and say enough!!  (According to this model going into Iraq was essentially the equivalent of accidentally slicing the aorta during cosmetic surgery.  The entire neocon Bush team is completely uninsurable)

In the real world that doesn’t work.  So, if you want to hold the foreign policy community accountable I’d suggest the Matt Yglesias approach (O’Hanlon primary).  Take a look at who is advising which Presidential campaign and do a little digging.  All these folks have published a great deal of material.  With a little work you can figure out where these guys stand and by extension who will have the most influence over the candidate’s foreign policy once they become President.  You may be pleasantly surprised.  I don not think they are all the same.  It's not just the fringe candidates who have teams of "very serious people" who didn’t support the war in 2002. 

Comments

[Don Bacon]

Your basic premise that one or more "expert" members of the FP community "have the most influence over the candidate’s foreign policy once they become President", if true, means that the U.S.A. is not a democracy, but an autocracy where the only citizen involvement is to educate ourselves on the stands of the "experts".

In fact, the US Constitution requires the Congress, representing citizens (in theory), and not the President, to "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". So we shouldn't talk about a president's foreign policy, should we. Bushco had (and has) a lot of congressional support for Iraq, in fact John 'The Real Deal' Kerry was still saying in August of 2004 that he supported the war.

[Anita Sharma]

Interestingly, and not surprisingly, a friend of mine who works at Brookings (the same institution as Pollack and O'Hanlon) tells me that their communications shop ONLY reports the good news stories about the dynamic duo. Sound familiar? Now I would imagine that O'Hanlon and Pollack peruse the blog o'sphere on occasion and are aware of the criticisms leveled at them in Salon, Think Progress or John Stewart for that matter. Or they may have spoken recently with the third man (and dissenting voice) from their Pentagon-sponsored trip, CSIS's Anthony Cordesman. But in the hallowed halls of Brookings, you might be forgiven for thinking their assessment was a "slam dunk." Let's start hearing from some new voices and progressive institutions!

[Tim]

"According to this model going into Iraq was essentially the equivalent of accidentally slicing the aorta during cosmetic surgery. The entire neocon Bush team is completely uninsurable."

Isn't slicing the aorta during cosmetic surgery very unlikely, and thus not to be expected; while being uninsurable means that it is expected that you would fail? I get the premise of your post, but your analogy is odd, and confusing me. Do you mean to say that screwing up and invading Iraq was an unforeseen problem, or that it was so obviously a problem that all neocons should no longer be allowed to provide their opinion on foreign policy debates? Restated again, do you think that the problems the US has had in Iraq were predictable, or unpredictable?
Personally, I didn't see such problems, but then again I didn't see problems with Afghanistan either and look how well that went.

[Adriana]

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