Arsenal of Hypocrisy
No matter where you look in the world, American words don't match American deeds.
BY JOHN ARQUILLA
In his ode to free thinking, "Self-Reliance," Ralph Waldo Emerson had it right when he affirmed that "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen." He understood the need for nuance, in daily life as well as world affairs. But Emerson was careful to note that not all consistency is foolish, and the flip side of his aphorism might well be that hypocrisy is the dark spirit toward which too many great leaders are drawn. The term of art used to rationalize the more questionable aspects of statecraft is realpolitik; the operative adjective is "Machiavellian." Both words, when heard in the public discourse, should set warning flags snapping in the wind. That's because a little wiggle room in your positions is a perfectly good thing. Radically veering from one position to the next is a recipe for something awful.
This is particularly true in the matter of U.S. foreign policy today. It's hard to find a point on the map where America isn't acting in a hypocritical, utterly inconsistent way. Take Afghanistan, where the United States practices its most serious hypocrisy. We say we're spreading democracy in Afghanistan -- part of the hard but brittle core of American grand strategy toward the world. But it's difficult to square with a dozen years of military intervention, at a cost of a trillion dollars, during which the democratic nation-building enterprise has been fatally undermined by American complicity in repeated election fraud and other corrupt governance. Then there's Egypt. President Obama has averted his gaze from the military overthrow -- let's be honest and call it a coup -- of an elected government, and the killing that has followed in its wake. Sure, he called off an annual war game with the Egyptians. But if we stand for democracy, calling off a joint military exercise is hardly a strong response reflective of our values.
Another terrible inconsistency has to do with the manner in which the intervention in Iraq concluded. President Obama is fond of saying that the war there is over. Well, we left, but the war is not over, people are being killed daily and the country is aflame. Having been the ones to overthrow all that country's central governing institutions a decade ago, we bear some responsibility for Iraqi suffering today. And it does not suffice to say that the Iraqis are at fault for failing to negotiate an acceptable status-of-forces agreement with us. We had a scrap of paper that authorized our presence there during the years of the counterinsurgency campaign. That same paper could have been used to sustain a small presence that would have deterred the kind of violence that is now growing so uncontrollably.
The American approach to the conflict in Syria -- or rather the reluctance, to date, to intervene -- reflects yet another troubling contradiction. It stems from repeated calls by President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad -- but without there being any willingness to act in support of the rebels. Thus the United States has stood by while over 100,000 have been killed in the fighting. It is extremely odd that a great power would remain unmoved, and unmoving, in the face of such carnage, while at the same time threatening to intervene militarily if chemical weapons are used.
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/26/arsenal_of_hypocrisy_united_states_foreign_policy