A Citizen's Guide to American Foreign Policy

Tragic Choices and the Limits of Rationality

David Patrick Houghton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135015145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

American foreign policy often looks like a trail of man-made debris and disaster. Of course, the explanations for many poorly-made decisions are rather complex. In this brief and cogent analysis, Houghton shows us that understanding American foreign policy often comes down to recognizing the cognitive limitations of the decision-makers, which affects the foreign policy process. Then there is the nature of the decisions themselves. Quite a few decisions in American foreign policy involve 'tragic' choices, where leaders are effectively confronted with a series of progressively bad or uncomfortable options. And it is equally clear that some policies are not the product of any one individual's preferences, but emerge as a consequence of the way in which complex modern governments with large bureaucracies operate.

Written with the interested layperson in mind, as well as students of international affairs, this Citizen's Guide to American Foreign Policy asks questions like, "Why do presidents so often do things which seem to be directly against the national interests of the United States – not just in retrospect, but even at the time?" "Why do there seem to be so many fiascoes in US foreign policy?" "Why does Congress sometimes tie the hands of the president in foreign affairs?" "Why do presidents seem to respond more to opinion polls or to what's on CNN and Fox News than they do to the core interests of the United States?" Houghton's overview helps us see past the partisan in-fighting that too often obscures the central issues in foreign affairs. This is vital, required reading for all readers who wish to better understand America's involvement in the world.

1

THE FIASCO FACTORY

A Frank Drebin School of American Foreign Policy?

In the 1988 movie The Naked Gun, Detective Frank Drebin—played by the late, great comedy actor Leslie Nielsen—tries to uncover a plan to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II of England, who is on a state visit to the United States. In one scene, Drebin arrives at “Police Squad” headquarters. Getting out of his car, he forgets to put the hand brake on and the car collides with several other vehicles, creating various explosions and general mayhem. He is so distracted, though, that he does not realize what he has done, and even discharges his weapon at his own car. “Did anyone get the license plate?” he shouts at passers-by. He then absentmindedly wanders inside the building, apparently unaware of what he has done or of his own responsibility for the events he has set in train.

American foreign policy often resembles a similar trail of man-made debris and disaster. Indeed, it often seems as if Drebin himself is calling the shots, stumbling into one fiasco after another. In 1961, John F. Kennedy—who most people think of as one of our smarter presidents—gave the go-ahead for a half-baked plan to invade Cuba. “How could I have been so stupid?” he asked himself when the whole thing failed spectacularly. In 1965, his successor Lyndon Johnson escalated US involvement in a war we now know he did not want and which many of his generals predicted would take years to win, and this at a time when US military advisers were prone to give overoptimistic assessments of the future. In 1980, Jimmy Carter tried to engineer the release of US hostages being held in Iran by launching an incredibly difficult and complicated military plan which was supposed to bring about their rescue. Many of Carter’s advisers warned that the plan had a very low chance of succeeding, and yet Carter went ahead with it anyway. The plan failed spectacularly, so much so that comparisons to the Bay of Pigs disaster were rife; and when the hostages were finally released through diplomatic means the following year, many of them expressed relief that the military plan had failed at an early stage because had it succeeded, they would most likely have been killed. And in 2003, President George W. Bush responded to the tragic events of September 11, 2001 by invading Iraq, a country which, as many of his advisers warned him, had absolutely nothing to do with the attack on the United States. Iraqi exiles visiting the White House had to explain to Bush the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite Muslim, a distinction the president had apparently never heard of before.

Of course, the explanation for many poorly made decisions is far more complex than one of simple “stupidity.” One central problem is common to all foreign policy decision making, not just to American foreign policy: the cognitive limitations of human beings. As cognitive scientists often point out, the human brain is an exquisite organ which is capable of doing amazing things. Specialists in the field of artificial intelligence have not yet been able to create a computer or robot which can do even half the things the human brain can do. How do you program for intuition, for instance? How do you give a computer judgment? And how can we program for feeling and emotion? On the other hand, computers are generally better than we are at storing and retrieving information. Human memory is fallible, and we often make mistakes when we attempt to recall events (sometimes “remembering” events that did not even occur). Psychologists and neuroscientists have shown that we only attend to about 5% of the sensory data around us. We miscategorize people and events, putting them into the wrong boxes. We also frequently ignore information which ought to cause us to change our minds about something. In order to cope with the information with which we are bombarded, we frequently resort to the use of cognitive short cuts, such as historical analogies. Added to these individual psychological limitations are the effects that group pressure and membership in organizations can have on behavior. And the fact that some problems involve tragic choices in which there is no good solution and where virtually every option is costly.

This does not exhaust the list of factors which distort what we might think of as a rational foreign policymaking process. Domestic politics can intrude into that process, and often do in an advanced democracy like the United States. However, we’ll save that issue for chapters 4, 5, and 6, and focus here on how our own limitations and the impact of groups and organizations affect American foreign policy.

Putting People and Things into Mental Boxes

The cognitive limitations of the decision makers themselves affect the American foreign policy decision-making process, or at least have the capacity to. Take, for instance, the example of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the way that he was often misperceived by many Western leaders (and by the Western media) until the last days of 1979. As Bruce Riedel, who worked at the CIA at that time, has recalled, “our bosses couldn’t cope with the idea of an 80-year-old Ayatollah, [when] they didn’t even know what an Ayatollah was, who lived on garlic and onions and yoghurt, directing a revolution that was about to topple America’s most important ally.”¹ A CIA report at the end of November 1978 warned that Khomeini was highly xenophobic, virulently anti-American, and a threat to US interests in the region. He now represented a genuine threat to the Shah’s rule, and was determined to topple him. One “Alert Memorandum” warned that the actions of Khomeini would be “the single most important factor in determining what will happen within Iran.” But there were many who could not or did not wish to heed such dire predictions. Initially at least, the dominant view within the administration (and especially within the US State Department) was that Khomeini was a relatively benign figure with whom the United States could work.

The Western media descended on him in droves in late 1978, when the aging but charismatic cleric arrived in Paris. He had never been in the West before. Invited to stay at a villa just outside the city, Khomeini was for the first time accessible to the world’s media. A lot of people began to realize that this strange figure was actually playing a role in Iranian politics from afar, and there was a great deal of optimism around about what his intentions might be. Dorothy Gilliam, for instance, described Khomeini as “the man of the hour, a holy man in waiting.”² In early 1979, Time magazine wrote of “a sense of controlled optimism in Iran.” It expressed the view, which was commonplace at the time that “those who know [Khomeini] expect that eventually he will settle in the Shi’ite holy city of Qum and resume a life of teaching and prayer. It seems improbable that he would try to become a kind of Archbishop Makarios of Iran, directly holding the reins of power. Khomeini believes that Iran should become a parliamentary democracy, with several political parties.”³

Richard Falk, a noted Princeton University professor who had also visited Khomeini in France, wrote a glowing piece about the Iranian cleric in a February 1979 Op-Ed piece in The New York Times. “To suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini is dissembling seems almost beyond belief. Khomeini’s style is to express his real views defiantly and without apology, regardless of consequences. He has little incentive to suddenly become devious for the sake of American public opinion,” he argued. In a highly optimistic claim he would later come to regret, Falk added that “the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.… Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country.” Within the Carter administration, Andrew Young, who was US Ambassador to the United Nations, famously called Khomeini “some kind of saint,” suggesting that “it would be impossible to have a fundamentalist state in Iran” because Western influence was too great there.⁴ In a famous memorandum sent to Washington from Tehran in November 1978, the US Ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, compared Khomeini to Mahatma Gandhi—the man who had famously sought peace between Hindus and Muslims in India. Others within the State Department are said to have shared this view at the time.

After returning to Iran in early 1979, Khomeini presided over or sanctioned the murders of his political opponents, rejected democratic ideas, and founded an Islamic state based on his view that only Iran’s clerics were fit to rule over its people. He approved the taking of US hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran, and most of them would spend 444 terrifying days in captivity before the Carter administration was able to negotiate their release. Why, then, were so many people deceived by Khomeini to begin with? Were those who expected him to be another Gandhi or Martin Luther King stupid? Not at all: Cognitive science has shown us that errors like this commonly derive from the way in which the human mind works. We put people, places, and objects into categories in order to cope with the often bewildering amount of information with which we are bombarded every day. In implicitly comparing Khomeini to Martin Luther King, Andrew Young was simply doing what we all do; he was making sense of something novel and unprecedented by falling back on what he knew. As a young man, Young had been a close associate of Martin Luther King and had played a prominent role in the civil rights movement, a factor which doubtless contributed to Carter’s decision to make Young the first ever African-American US Ambassador to the United Nations. Unfamiliar as he undoubtedly was with Iranian politics, it must have been all too tempting to see Khomeini as another MLK, another religious figure who would promote all that was right and decent in the world.

It is likely that Jimmy Carter’s initial perceptions of Khomeini derived in part from stock Western images about the behavior of “holy men” in general. These tend to reinforce the notion that such figures largely confine themselves to spiritual rather than temporal matters; there is often widespread consternation in the United Kingdom when the Archbishop of Canterbury occasionally speaks out on what are seen as partisan issues, for instance, and there are role expectations in the West which tend to limit the political activism of religious figures. Probably more important than such stock characters in Carter’s case, however, were those religious/political figures who had spoken out on temporal matters and who had exerted an impact on Carter’s own political thinking, most notably King and Gandhi. King in particular had played a formative role in the formation of Carter’s own attitudes as a relatively progressive young legislator in Georgia, and the Carter family had espoused the cause of civil rights for black Americans at a time when such positions were deeply unpopular in the South. Both King and Gandhi evoked liberal cognitive scripts, in which a religious figure pushes hard for social justice and progress. The notion that a religious leader might advocate something other than the progress of mankind in a Western or liberal sense was simply outside of Carter’s experience, and indeed outside that of most Western leaders at the time. Moreover, many of Khomeini’s own countrymen were fooled by the aged cleric, not least because before 1979 there was no real tradition of clergy playing a role in politics.

Ignoring New Information

Classical economists have often assumed that decision makers are almost superhuman in the degree to which they think and act rationally. They have often assumed in their models—as have many political scientists—that people change their views and attitudes in response to the arrival of new information. Sadly, this is often not true of real human beings, especially when it comes to politics. Many of us are to some degree partisan, and we are loathe to change our beliefs about the world. Assume that you are a rock-solid, liberal Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in the last two presidential elections, and that you turn on the television one day. By chance it is tuned to the Fox News channel, and you spend five minutes watching Fox before changing to something else. You listen to one of the analysts accusing Obama of failing to revive the US economy. Are you likely to become a Republican now? Not at all. Or let’s assume that you have voted Republican for years and happen to tune in to Al Sharpton on MSNBC accusing your party of being completely out of synch with the electorate. Do you become a Democrat overnight as a result? Again, it’s very unlikely. The more probable result in both scenarios is that you will simply rationalize the information away, or else flat-out ignore it.

In many ways, there is nothing much wrong with this. Having beliefs is comforting, and it simplifies the world enormously. It tells us how to act, who to vote for, who to take seriously, and often what to watch and listen to. Beliefs tell us what kind of world we live in, and what that world is about. But sometimes we believe so strongly in something that our minds refuse to accept new information that ought to change our attitudes. Even information that is devastating to our beliefs can end up being entirely dismissed. The late social psychologist Leon Festinger argued that when we are confronted by a piece of information that is incompatible with our beliefs, it creates an uncomfortable state of psychological tension. Nobody likes feeling this way, so when it happens, we look for a way to get rid of it. Now the obvious thing to do when you realize that you’ve made a mistake is to change your beliefs, but this rarely happens. Instead, we usually simply find a way to disregard the new information or rationalize it away.⁵

The refusal of some members of the George W. Bush administration, as well as many ordinary Americans, to accept that Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq before 2003 presents us with a classic example. Hussein was known to have used such weapons against the Kurds within his own country during the 1980s, and against Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War. On the other hand, many years of sanctions and weapons inspections by the West were thought by some to have greatly depleted his ability to manufacture and stockpile these. But Saddam’s games of cat and mouse with the inspectors convinced many others that he had something to hide. Making the case for war, Vice President Dick Cheney was especially vociferous in his insistence that such weapons existed, as were other members of the administration such as National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice. On August 26, 2002, for instance, Cheney insisted that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” But once the war began, US troops searched in vain for the WMD, and after a year or two it became clear that the sanctions had actually worked and that Iraq actually possessed no stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons. However, Cheney in particular continued to suggest that weapons had been found, only admitting in 2006 that the intelligence on which the claim was based had been wrong. He hardly mentions this in his 2011 memoir In My Time, despite the fact that it formed such a central part of his own rationale for war. Others suggested that the WMD were still there waiting to be discovered or that they had been moved to another country such as Syria. As we shall see in the next chapter, opinion polls continue to show that many members of the US public still believe that WMDs were found in Iraq, and the degree to which individuals believe that is so also varies by ideology (Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to claim that the weapons were found, for instance. The new information had very little impact on their beliefs).

There is another example to be seen in the reaction of Western policymakers to the policies of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. In 1985 a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power. He portrayed himself as a reformer of both the political system (glasnost) and the economic one (perestroika). And, indeed, he turned out to be just that. Gorbachev was certainly no revolutionary. He did not seek to overturn the communist system, but rather to reform it just enough to keep it going. But not everyone trusted him. To his credit, however, President Ronald Reagan thought that Gorbachev was the real deal, and a surprisingly warm relationship developed between the two men. When Reagan came to office in 1981 he had famously described the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire,” but he had changed his mind by the time he left the presidency in early 1989. Others, though, were not convinced. President George H.W. Bush and CIA Director Robert Gates in particular remained suspicious of Soviet intentions, and Bush maintained a much colder approach to Gorbachev than had Reagan. Bush and Gates both doubted that the Soviet leader was genuinely different from previous Soviet leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev. Oddly enough, Reagan proved to have a better intuitive feel for the situation, although when he came into office he had often been seen as much more inflexible and ideological than Bush. But Bush’s response was much more typical of how most of us respond to a changed situation.

Living in the Present but Seeing the Past

We seem to be hard-wired to take the kind of cognitive shortcuts which often bedevil the decision-making process. For instance, some decisions draw upon historical analogies and metaphors which we take from prior experiences, but history never replicates itself in identical fashion. Mental short cuts also lead us astray at least as often as they guide and inform us.

Sometimes historical analogies can be a handy guide to the present and a useful predictor of the future, although those who have not lived through the event in question are apt to ignore the advice of those who have. When Cyrus Vance was serving as Secretary of State in the Carter administration, for instance, he and his colleagues were forced to confront the Iran hostage crisis mentioned earlier in this chapter. Militant Iranian students had stormed the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979, initially taking sixty-six American diplomats hostage and demanding the return by the United States of the Shah of Iran. Some of Carter’s advisers urged that he mount a military rescue mission, much like the one that the Israelis had used to free their own hostages at Entebbe airport in 1976. But Vance urged caution. For one thing, the US embassy in Tehran was obviously not an airport. It was in the middle of a major city teeming with people, and flying in a rescue team and extracting them (as well as the hostages) would be exceptionally difficult without getting everyone killed. Long-range helicopters would have to be used to get the rescuers in and out, and Vance knew from experience that helicopters can be notoriously temperamental in the heat of battle. He had seen a lot of operations involving their use go wrong during the Vietnam years, when he served as the Deputy Secretary of Defense under Ly...