Dylan Ratigan: It's Complicated

Dylan Ratigan’s really good “rant” should make us all think.  How is it that the entire foreign policy of the most powerful country in the history of civilization is directed around the actions of a small and scattered group of people tucked into the mountains and deserts in the Middle East? You want the short answer or the long answer?

 

The hard truth is that American foreign policy is often a complicated multilayered landscape wrought with nuance, and it’s because of these facts that it’s nearly impossible to distill into anything remotely comprehendible within a traditional American political campaign.  One former Secretary of State responded to the oft repeated analogy that foreign policy is similar to chess by choosing instead to compare it to billiards; chess is static and the pieces can only move in very specific manners while in billiards the position of the balls is constantly changing after each shot.  Not only do you have to develop a strategy that remains as fluid as the movement of the balls, ultimately if you can’t execute the shot your strategy serves little purpose.  Imagine a pool shark who can call out all the shots he needs to win but can’t make any of them.  If this analogy makes the most sense why is America playing chess in the Middle East when it should be playing billiards?  That too requires a complicated answer.   

 For the same reason it’s nearly impossible to explain to a third party the events that transpired in a game of billiards the American people remain mostly ignorant of even the broadest nuances of foreign policy.  If George W. Bush and Sarah Palin are evidence of anything it’s that this same phenomenon is creeping into our leadership.  Thus what you get is the distillation of a complicated world that warns of the Chinese taking our jobs and plotting our destruction, the looming threat of a Russian invasion, and the unique universal threat posed by the Muslims world.  In some ways chess is easier than billiards.

 The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the world that emerged after were overwhelmed with distinctions, degrees of gradation, and subtle nuance.  Luckily the modern American political tradition, built for distillation, was able to reduce what happened to such effect that less than 1 ½ years later the U.S. was invading Iraq with the backing of about 70% of Americans.  The United States would later discover that the very distillation of 9/11 that led the U.S. into Iraq served little purpose as the situation there quickly became very multilayered and wrought with nuance.   In fact America’s entire policy response to 9/11 in many ways appears predicated upon broad brushing the people involved and much of the Middle East.  Without getting to deep into the woods, suffice to say the U.S. strategy is in many ways being revealed as increasingly unsustainable if somewhat ineffective and inefficient, as was demonstrated in Iraq and is now being debated in regards to Afghanistan.  If a terror attack were to occur in the future would America respond by invading yet another country, making no distinction between who the perpetrators actually were and where they came from?  This is Dylan Ratigan’s point.  The failure to make these distinctions places the U.S., as he puts it, in very real danger of getting mired in a scale of conflict it hadn’t anticipated.  The Iraq war again serves as example #1.  So if Ratigan is on to something, and he is, how should America respond to the potential threat of terrorism caused by a very small number of people?  Does America want a short answer or the long answer?   

Everything Dylan Ratigan says about the Saudi's etc...is factually correct.