Sometimes a sweater is just a sweater

William Arkin was off for a long weekend.  And I've been curious to see what his take on the current Middle East situation is.  Today he's back blogging again.  I'm not sure I'm glad I saw what he thinks about it:  Bush's Sweter Diplomacy Washington Post 07/18/06.

When President Bush thanked Prime Minister Blair for the gift of a "sweater" yesterday, it was code. Bush was expressing appreciation for London's help in planning imminent secret operations to overthrow Bashar Assad in Syria, and eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Their conversation didn't make these operations explicit, but other intelligence indicates that the U.S. and Britain have long been cooperating militarily. Given Israel's clever diversion in attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon, the timing may be just right for a double strike.

Of course, the sweater for which George thanked Tony WAS just a sweater.

But the private conversation in which the sweater was discussed tells a story about a way of looking at the world, a way that seems to be getting us nowhere.

Yikes!  This sounds like we're about to go nowhere even faster.  Fortunately, Arkin is making a joke here, although in this case I wound up having to read the whole article to get that clear.  He's talking about ways that leaders often take fragmentary pieces of intelligence on other foreign leaders and interpret them based on false or inadequate assumptions.

Arkin is highly skeptical about what seems to be the official version of events, in which Hamas and Hizbollah are mainly acting as proxies for Syria and Iran.  (Those items in my previous post are already looking more relevant.)

And he hasn't accomodated himself yet to the Republican-postmodern approach to foreign policy, where you just make stuff up and then act on it:

I'm not saying there aren't hidden hands in world events, or that things are always what they seem.  Iran and Syria are only too happy to see Israel attacked and to see a Western-friendly Lebanon damaged.  As long as North Korea doesn't start a war, China is only too happy to see its own power increase as a broker.

But by assuming that Iran or Syria or China are all-powerful and thus evil for NOT taking action, we make two mistakes. First, we absolve ourselves - the United States - of responsibility for what unfolds in the world, suggesting in turn that we are neutered and that we should not hold our leaders accountable when conflict erupts.

Second though, we misread the dynamics of what happens in the halls of power, thus robbing ourselves of an understanding of the way the world works, and thus any say in the future.

But he does have some insight into the dynamics that can create an eccentric understanding of events by national leaders.  And this phenomenon is not dependent on the leader taking a Republican-postmodern view of realtiy:

The transcript of the otherwise private conversation got me thinking about how government leaders shape their views of world events: Profoundly isolated and perched at the top of their systems, leaders naturally are prone to seeing everything through a personal lens.  It is Kofi and Angela and Vladimir and whatever that Syrian guy's name is.

Bush sees his counterparts, just as he sees himself, as individuals with the capacity to make decisions that can change the course of history.  In the U.S. system, the kind of personal diplomacy that follows and the success of "negotiations" between these leaders is highly dependent on the kind of detail about their interlocutors' thinking and predilections that only intercepts and human spying can provide.  Speak to any high-level official who has served in government and they will tell you the president and his closest aides voraciously consume the snippets of conversations that the NSA intercepts between world leaders and their closest aides in order to conduct their business.

In this world, what Kofi likes to eat or do in his spare time is as important as diplomatic history.   If Putin is hording dollars in a Swiss Bank, it is far more useful information than the negotiating position of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

This approach can also be a way to dodge reponsibility:

It is just easier to see hidden hands in the making of conflict than it is to have some of our own failure imprinted upon a breakdown of diplomacy and effort.