Somewhat like Bill Clinton’s recent Reliving History lowlight, another institutional malefactor has now crawled out from his spider-hole, hopeful that entropy has dulled the American collective memory enough for him to tell us what to do, without being laughed out of the room.
Richard Armitage, if you recall, was the Foggy Bottom apparatchik who actually leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to Robert Novak. Novak, to protect his credibility, refused to identify the leaker for years, during which time Democrats rabidly looked for, and found, every imaginable piece of “evidence” that the Plame leak was a Rove-inspired smear, rather than the Armitage “oopsie” it was. Armitage, even though he was Joseph Wilson’s friend, apparently never told Wilson about it.
Wilson was and is a rabid partisan, but he also had a documented history of national service and courage under coercion. Thanks to his decades of paranoid experience perceiving and predicting political shadowboxing where others saw nothing inordinary, Wilson perceived in Novak’s leak a thinly veiled warning to bureaucratic guerrillas who were fighting Bush policy since at least 2004 (if not earlier). His subsequent counterattack became a left-wing cause celebre. But even as one of Novak’s own sources (Armitage) had inadvertently triggered the most misplaced outburst of rage in Beltway history, Novak had to at least give a decent time lag between his source’s leak and his own admission, in order to protect his credibility as DC’s number one broker of “inside” information.
Finally, in 2005, Armitage confessed that he was the source of the leak. The fact that he took two years to go public meant that Armitage had allowed his friend Wilson to inadvertently trash his own credibility. The DC establishment gave one final theatrical ode to Plame/Wilson, but by then their offensive had lost credibility, mostly thanks to Armitage.
Now Armitage is back, fast on the heels of the intel establishment’s latest attempt at shadowboxing with the Bush Administration. In the time-honored tradition of recommending everything and taking responsibility for nothing, two consummate bureaucrats offer another pile of platitudinous pontifications which the Beltway elite is trying to use to frame the national policy discourse.
Just as “WMD” were a now-discredited tactical marketing vehicle substituting for complex explanations beyond the American attention span (viz. war w/ Iraq), and, in the guise of an “Iranian atomic bomb,” were on course to do the same in Iran, so was l’affaire Plame a tactic by which the bureaucracy counterattacked in the elite court of public opinion management. But the credentials backing the spurious WMD argument were all there; so the argument wasn’t questioned. Then the elitist ingenuity unraveled, and the American people were left puzzled and stupefied. A ridiculously high quotient of the subsequent recriminations focused on WMD, when WMD were never the issue in the first place.
As I have variously carped at “Serious” policy prescriptions, be they monetary, geopolitical, fiscal or whatever, I have noticed something they all share. American policy debates are a battle of credentials, not logic, in which truth, transparency and honesty are mere second-rate tactics. The self-evidently destructive “DC consensus” approach to the real estate/financial crisis, epitomized by Larry Summers, was rightly trashed by sentient expert opinion outside of the United States. Within the US itself, however, Summers’ credentials are apparently enough to sideline dissenting opinions, judging by the obsequiously optimistic American coverage of the Paulson SuperSiv and subprime “plans.”
Similarly, well-credentialed political hounds like Richard Armitage and Anthony Zinni are able to advocate idiotic policy prescriptions which have already failed; people without like institutional credentials are simply ignored, despite the fact that the Institutionally Credentialed Approaches are demonstrably illogical and moronic when they haven’t been falsified by recent events. For example: (apologies for formatting errors)
¿ We should reinvigorate the alliances, partnerships and institutions that allow us to address numerous hazards at once without having to build a consensus from scratch to respond to every new challenge.
My comment: classically utterly meaningless political-speak.
¿ We should create a Cabinet-level voice for global development to help Washington develop a more unified and integrated aid program that aligns U.S. interests with the aspirations of people worldwide, starting with global health.
My comment: Is this Dennis Kucinich’s Department of Peace? Seriously, this is “more spending on foreign aid” in Beltway language. Ironically, buried elsewhere in the article’s ####pile of platitudes, Armitage and Nye cited the American earthquake assistance in 2005-06 (which brought Pakistani approval of America to about 50 percent), and subsequent deflation of that bubble, as evidence that we should do more of that. Are you kidding me? Now Musharraf and Kayani are back in the same tribal badlands trying to kill the same people whom we saved in 05-06. Familiarity by charity breeds contempt.
To the hoi polloi, it sounds pleasantly vague and agreeable. Who, besides Eric Cartman of course, could possibly oppose “more unified and integrated” “alignment” of “aspirations of people worldwide” for anything?
¿ We should reinvest in public diplomacy within the government and establish a nonprofit institution outside of it to build people-to-people ties, including doubling the annual appropriation to the Fulbright program.
My comment: Tripe. The notion that this will have a macro impact is laughable. There is an entire constellation of such organizations already, not even counting financial aid to foreign students.
¿ We should sustain our engagement with the global economy by negotiating a “free trade core” of countries in the World Trade Organization willing to move directly to free trade on a global basis, and expand the benefits of free trade to include those left behind at home and abroad.
My comment: The WTO IS a (politically constrained) free trade zone. “Free trade core” sounds awfully like Beltway code for slicing and dicing free trade agreements between “core” rich countries and poorer manufacturing exporters–subliminally undermining the meaning of free trade. A typically Orwellian sabotage of meaning.
¿ We should take the lead in addressing climate change and energy insecurity by investing more in technology and innovation.
My comment: Along with Anthony Zinni’s “climate security imperative,” this represents another attempt at subliminally grafting the faith-based initiative of anthropocentric global warming onto the “national security” heuristic. Energy insecurity is a direct byproduct of the environmental movement, and if the United States actually freed its own coal, shale-oil and offshore oil reserves, we wouldn’t need a Mideast-centric war machine for anything.
Oh, well. It is already bipartisan Beltway policy, rich America’s moral superiority, and poor America’s doleful reality. It shouldn’t be taken seriously on its own merits, let alone Armitage’s track record.
But it is. I really should learn to whine less.
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