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Ron Paul See other Ron Paul Articles Title: This is not a democracy: Behind the Deep State that Obama, Hillary or Trump couldn’t control Foreign policy never really changes regardless of who holds the White House. This is why exceptionalism always wins There are two ways to consider the White House’s announcement last week that, no, American troops will no longer withdraw from Afghanistan as previously planned. You can look back over President Obama’s record in such matters or you can face forward and think about what this decision means, or implies, or suggests —or maybe all three—about the next president’s conduct of foreign policy. I do not like what I see in either direction. What anyone who looks carefully and consciously can discern in Obama’s seven years in office are limits. These are imposed in part by inherited circumstances, but let us set these aside for now, appalling as they are. My concern is with the limits imposed by the entrenched power of our permanent government, otherwise known as the “deep state.” With the first Democratic debate in Las Vegas last week, the serious party joins the unserious party in articulating a vision of America’s proper conduct abroad. The question Obama’s two terms force upon us is how much any of what we hear from the Democratic candidates will matter even if we assume one of them succeeds him. The Obama administration’s accumulated inventory on the foreign side is a mixed bag to put the point mildly, and one has to count it heavily net-negative at this point. The big accomplishments, of course, are the accord governing the Iran nuclear program and the resumption of diplomatic ties with Cuba. While both represent hard-fought political victories, there was considerable backing for these undertakings in the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, the State Department bureaucracy and the corporate sector. Hang on to this distinction. Against the successes stands a long list of failures, reversals and something else that does not make such punchy headlines but is just as important as the policies that do: I refer to the president’s unwillingness or inability to counter what we can call policy momentum. Time and again, Obama has allowed State, Defense and the intelligence apparatus to proceed with programs and strategies not remotely in keeping with his evident tilt toward a less militarized, interventionist and confrontational foreign policy. I put this down to two realities. One is Obama’s ambivalent thinking. Many, many people misread what this man stood for and against when he was elected seven autumns ago, and we are now able to separate the one from the other. More on this in a minute. Two is the “power elite” C. Wright Mills told us about in the book of this name he published many decades ago. “They are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society,” Mills wrote. “They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives.” They are, in short, the deep state. Mills’ book came out in 1956, when the phenomenon he described was newly emergent. Having ignored this elite’s accumulating influence in the 59 years since, we get the questions Obama’s experience raises: Does it matter who we put in the White House? Is there any prospect at all of changing this nation’s conduct and direction? Are our policy-setting institutions any longer capable of self-correction? The best that can be said now is that the power elite/permanent government/deep state, take your pick, is greatly more visible. At least we know enough, some of us, to ask the questions. * Where to begin? Well, Obama came to office promising to end the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and will leave having ended neither. With the new decision to keep 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan, it is plain that (1) he has no serious exit strategy in either case and (2) no one at the Pentagon is especially concerned with developing one. Closing the prison at Guantánamo was one of Obama’s signature commitments when he was elected, and now look: His own defense secretary, the worrisomely unintelligent Ashton Carter, stands in open defiance by refusing to sign release papers for 52 detainees cleared to leave. Just as astonishing, the president can apparently do nothing about it. As to Syria, the president has taken to blaming others for the ever-worsening debacle on the argument he was not behind this interventionist program from the start. Unseemly is the very kindest word here. There is no reason to doubt Obama’s word, but he begs a question almost too large to contemplate: If you opposed the policy, Mr. President, why are we there and why is your name on it? By way of the Iran agreement, it appeared that Obama had a serious chance to alter Washington’s profoundly distorted engagement with Israel. But this, clearly, was never the story. The story all along has been to preserve Israel’s nuclear-weapons monopoly in the Middle East while keeping neighbors either onside or off balance. Hence the obsession with removing the Assad government in Syria. Hence Washington’s explicit green light a matter of hours prior to the coup deposing President Morsi in Egypt two year ago. Other matters. The wholly unnecessary confrontation with Russia will stand as the worst and most consequential blot on the Obama administration’s foreign policy legacy, in my view. Who runs this policy and why? Tension in Sino-American relations is less charged but not less stupid. And as the evidently ongoing program to destabilize the Maduro government in Venezuela suggests, the subversion machines at the CIA and State continue firing on all eight. This is the backward glance. What does this splattered, pockmarked record tell us as we look forward and wonder what the policies of Obama’s successor will look like? It is time to consider this question carefully. Now that Democrats join Republicans in advancing their thinking—is this the word?—as to America’s conduct abroad, what are we hearing? * The foreign policy of any Republican candidate now in the race, with the exception of the rapidly vanishing Rand Paul, is a no-brainer, and I mean this literally. We find among them a seamless unity behind reactionary policies that lie between unworkable and dangerous. In this respect, the most worrisome G.O.P. aspirants are Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, the two who purport to have operational agendas. I do not find anyone in the right-wing lineup electable, but I will stay short of any prediction. It is not my point. However little sense they make, they are a very influential presence in the national political conversation, and no one can afford to miss this. Two reasons. One, the Republicans’ argument for militarized, often-perilous assertions of American prerogative abroad are perfectly congruent with the ideology that sustains the deep state. In effect, the G.O.P. is the agency through which the exceptionalist consciousness that drives the deep state remains a political imperative for anyone seeking high office. One may find the Republican leadership—in Congress as well as on the stump— primitive nostalgists lost in a half-imagined version of the past. But these people exist among us because we decline to dismiss them as frivolous—which they are and which we should. This is partly the fault of our “political-media ecosystem,” as Paul Krugman put it very cogently in a recent New York Times column. “The modern Republican Party is a post-policy enterprise, which doesn’t do real solutions to real problems,” he wrote. “And the news media really, really don’t want to face up to that awkward reality.” Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Ada (#0)
He gets it half-right, but he's still wrong.
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken
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