TRB FROM WASHINGTON

Reyes to the Bottom
by Peter Beinart
Post date: 12.14.06
Issue date: 12.25.06

Thank goodness for Jeff Stein. Stein is the Congressional Quarterly editor who has taken to asking top government officials basic facts about the Middle East. Earlier this year, he asked Willie Hulon, head of the FBI's national security branch, whether Iran and Hezbollah were mostly Sunni or Shia. "Sunni" came the reply. Last week, incoming House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes told him that Al Qaeda was composed of Shia. When Stein went on to ask the religious identity of Hezbollah, Reyes stammered and then said, "Why do you ask me these questions at five o'clock?" 

And you wonder why the United States is failing in the Middle East. I'm sure Hulon and Reyes are decent, intelligent men, but they are symptoms of a disastrous American tendency to see knowledge of foreign societies as superfluous to foreign policy. According to the Iraq Study Group, the 1,000-person U.S. Embassy in Baghdad boasts only six employees fluent in Arabic. And the Study Group isn't exactly an intellectual powerhouse itself: Of its ten members, only five have significant international experience, and none is a genuine expert on Iraq or the Middle East. 

Why do we think this is OK? Part of the answer, I suspect, is populism--a deep-seated American distrust of experts and faith in the wisdom of the common woman and man. In 1999, for instance, after George W. Bush couldn't name the leaders of India, Pakistan, and Chechnya in an interview with a Boston reporter, spokeswoman Karen Hughes huffed that "99 percent of most Americans" couldn't either, as if that made it all right. But it's not elitist to expect politicians to know more about the rest of the world than average Americans. In fact, true populists should insist on it, since, at its best, populism abhors undeserved power--the kind that allows people with no particular expertise or ability to enjoy privileges that ordinary people don't. 

When it comes to foreign policy, suspicion of experts is particularly strong on the right, where it is nourished by stylized memories of the cold war. In the conservative memory, the United States reached its foreign policy nadir under Jimmy Carter, a technocrat whose mastery of detail concealed an appalling absence of strategic vision. The United States gloriously rebounded under Ronald Reagan, who got individual facts wrong but big ideas right. From the beginning, George W. Bush has marketed himself as Reagan's heir: another guy who doesn't let minutiae interfere with his grasp of the big picture. 

This actually does a disservice to Reagan, whose knowledge of the Soviet Union dwarfed Bush's knowledge of the Middle East. (Between 1976 and 1980, for instance, Reagan personally wrote dozens of radio commentaries--including six in a row summarizing neocon academic Eugene Rostow's critique of salt II.) But, more generally, it misreads the broader lesson of the cold war, which is that cultural knowledge is critical to foreign policy success. One reason the Truman administration fashioned such wise policies toward the Soviet Union was the influence of men like George Kennan, Averell Harriman, and Chip Bohlen, all of whom had served in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. By contrast, as David Halberstam notes in The Best and the Brightest, the United States stumbled into Vietnam "with virtually no input from anyone who had any experience on the recent history of that part of the world." By the 1960s, the McCarthyite campaign against officials supposedly complicit in the communist takeover of China had cleansed the State Department of its best Asia hands. And, as a result, most of the men (and they were all men) making Vietnam policy saw Southeast Asia as a blank canvas onto which the United States could transpose containment policies developed in Europe. 

In much the same way, the Bush administration has treated the Middle East as intellectually derivative--a repository for theories of rogue-state rollback derived in Europe and Asia during World War II and the cold war. History can be a source of inspiration and guidance, but only when carefully adapted to present realities. And, from the beginning, the Bush administration proved hostile to the very Mideast experts (concentrated at the State Department and CIA) most aware of those realities. To head up the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the White House initially chose Jay Garner, who, when advised to contact Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani--the most powerful man in the country--responded, "Why? Who is this person?" Garner's successor, L. Paul Bremer--according to Larry Diamond's book Squandered Victory--knew who Sistani was but considered him politically insignificant until January 2004, when Sistani sent tens of thousands of Shia into the streets to protest Bremer's plan for a caucus system to choose Iraq's constituent assembly. It took U.N. diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, an Algerian who had spent almost his entire career in the Middle East, to convince Sistani--in Arabic--to accept a compromise. Again and again, as Diamond and others have detailed, the knowledge gap between U.N. officials and their American counterparts in post-Saddam Iraq was not merely large; it was downright embarrassing. 

Foreign policy is not only about opinions; it is also about facts. And it is time Americans begin to demand that policymakers exhibit a minimum factual competence before we take their opinions seriously. It wouldn't be hard. Whenever government officials show up on television, interviewers should throw in a Stein question or two. For instance, who is the supreme leader of Iran? Who was Mohammed Mossadeq? What is Bashar Assad's religion? Which European country colonized Lebanon? Can you name an Iraqi ethnic group besides Arabs and Kurds? For most politicos, passing up an appearance on "Meet the Press" or "Larry King" is inconceivable, and so they'll do what Reyes is hopefully doing now: study. 

Of course, being able to answer a pop quiz is a far cry from deep cultural knowledge. But it's better than nothing. After all, if you don't even know that Iran is predominantly Shia, how can you possibly make a judgment about the regional consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq? And, if TV hosts want to quiz pundits, too, all the better. (My Mideast literacy certainly wouldn't win any awards.) The Stein test isn't only about improving knowledge; it's also about inculcating humility. And, if there's one thing we've learned from the catastrophe in Iraq, it's that the people making U.S. foreign policy need a lot more of both.

Peter Beinart is editor-at-large at The New Republic and the author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals--and Only Liberals--Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (HarperCollins).