HISTORY AND SPREADING DEMOCRACY: A DEBATE PART II

This post represents Part II of my initial post in the debate with CKR of Whirledview. Her first post can be found here. Now to continue the debate:

Part II: History and Contemporary Foreign Policy

To recap from the introduction, the Bush administration is redefining and reinvigorating the policy of Democracy promotion in the GWOT and while their reliance on history as a guide to policy leaves much to be desired, they are also well ahead of previous administrations in that regard. History could be be used a great deal more than it is in the American national security decision making process but that would require a considerable shift in the general philosophy of personnel selection that have prevailed in recent decades.

Much has been written about the influence of certain scholars on the Bush administration, notably that of Bernard Lewis, Donald Kagan and the late Leo Strauss. The extent of their influence on Bush administration policy has often been greatly exaggerated by the Left – not unlike conservatives once did with economists John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith – but their influence was, in my view, quite real in helping to frame a worldview in which administration figures dealt with strategic policy questions. Lewis, one of the world’s premier Arabist scholars and the bete noire of Edward Said, was brought in to brief key administration figures prior to the Iraq War.

That admittedly represents an unprecedented amount of influence for historians* compared to recent administrations in forming foreign policy but in the final analysis, still not very much influence and not nearly enough at the operational level when the rubber hit the road in Iraq. None of the scholars actually held official positions in the Bush administration ( Strauss, of course, is dead) and those they deemed to have most influenced, like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, were second tier or lower level policy makers – Perle’s position was part-time and only advisory. At the top tier, only Condi Rice can make some claim to historical training, though her academic specialty is Area Studies for the former USSR, a field that makes her closer to being a political scientist by methdological outlook than a historian.

The occupation of Iraq went astray primarily because field commanders and CPA administrators did not have a linguistic, cultural or historical grasp of either the Iraqi state or Arab Muslims. A criticism that Colonel Thomas X. Hammes makes as a primary call to reform the training of the officer corps in his The Sling and the Stone, arguing that history and languages must become the bedrock of academic preparation for commanders. In he field in Iraq, in response to the insurgency Colonel H.R. McMaster began an Arabic language and culture training course for his troops engaged in counterinsurgency and civil affairs operations. This is remediation though and not proper planning using readily available historical knowledge.

Nor is this at all unusual for American administrations. You can reach the top tier of the State Department, CIA, NSC, or Pentagon simply by an ad hoc, learn as you go, approach to regions of the world that your desk or command have responsibility for overseeing. During WWII, the United States had few experts on Japanese language and culture outside of Joseph Grew, who had to fight to make his views heard in official Washington. It was somewhat better on the German side but not much – the OSS psychological profile of Adolf Hitler owed far more to Freud than it did to any body of experts on German history and culture.

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