It occured to me, while watching the ongoing civil war among Bush administration alumni over Iraq and foreign policy in general, that a great factor in what's transpired over the last few years is the overall lack of real political conflict on foreign policy.
Note that when I say "political conflict" I don't mean conflict among politicians, I mean actual dialogue involving multiple viewpoints and engaged citizens. To a decent extent that is now, finally, happening, probably because of the high costs, in lives and money, of the pandora's box we've opened in Iraq. But why didn't we have a more open discussion of the options in our political process before?
Besides the mendacious nature of the Bush Administration, the Democratic party has been a non-factor in international relations over the last few decades. The Democrats, after suffering from the blunders of JFK/Johnson & Carter, failed to develop coherent, strong, loud foreign policy initiatives. The Clinton years weren't disasters on that front, although there were substantial problems, but in the overall narative of the last few decades, they appeared to do little in the short term to create a base of Democratic foreign policy specialists who would wield continuing influence and power on the national scene.
Instead, we've been faced with a foreign policy establishment that is dominated by a tendency to identify with the Republican party. The problem this has created is that it has taken foreign policy, on almost every level, and made it almost exclusively a backroom issue. There are general political identifications on foreign policy (Republican=strong, war; Democratic=weak, diplomacy), but mostly the political dimension of almost any foreign policy debate in a partisan campaign is strictly adversarial. One person opposes the position of their opponent and comes up with a reason as justification primarily to draw contrast.
We can see this in countless conflicts where, over the last 15 years, the parties have continually flip flopped over intervention or disengagement with various conflict sites around the world. Some Republicans, for instance, would oppose a Clinton intervention tooth and nail, but back a Bush intervention in similar circumstances, regardless of the wisdom of each mission.
This is one reason why a moderate electorate managed to elect a group of leaders which shifted the nation's foreign policy dangerously to the right. Debates over the nature and wisdom of major foreign policy issues were argued over behind closed doors and then presented, somewhat disengenously, as fait accompli to the public, even though internal dissention on the matters was high in both civilian and military circles.
While reading Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command, a major pattern that stuck out to me was the number of sources who were willing to speak to Hersh about their problems, but could never step outside of their own existence as a cog in the Political Foreign Policy aparatus. Many of them could be career diplomats, espionage operatives, military officers, etc., but they felt they could not provide more vocal dissent once decisions were made.
As things have played out in Iraq, we've seen how there should have been a more open political debate, and how there should have been more skepticism towards the claims made by the Bush Administration to justify their intentions to invade Iraq. Yet it was all subsumed because there was no real external political dialogue of substantial volume going on. There was no "opposition" base for skeptics of the war to move to and vocally express problems with the policies.
Part of this problem lies in the media for not allowing the dialogue to occur in public, but alot of it seems to be related to the concept of the foreign policy establishment as a one-party system. The Realists and the Neocons debate behind closed doors, and decide what we'll do, but who were we electing in 2000, and in 2004? Our two-party political system may be stiffling public discourse on major decisions like war due to this. If our representative democracy is going to actually function, this has got to change.
