by Mark Weisbrot, MrZine
Americans are famous for not paying much attention to the rest of the world, and it is often said that foreign wars are the way that we learn geography. But most often it is not the people who have little direct experience outside their own country that are the problem, but rather the experts.
The latest polling data is making this clear once again, as a majority of Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan, but the Obama Administration is escalating the war and his military commanders are asking for even more troops than the increase to 68,000 that the Administration is planning by the end of this year.
This gap between the average American and the foreign policy elite has been around since the Vietnam War and long before. The gap is also large between Democratic voters, three-quarters of whom oppose the war in Afghanistan, and the politicians and think tanks that represent them in the political arena. A few decades ago there was a real voting base of “Cold War” liberals — people who were progressive on social and economic issues but right wing on foreign policy. That base has largely disappeared. Yet amazingly, the foreign policy establishment — including most of the media — has managed to maintain this political tendency as a very influential force.
The gap between the public and the foreign policy elite is not due to the ignorance of the masses, as the elite would have it, but primarily to a different set of interests and values. Very few foreign policy decision-makers — just a handful of Members of Congress, for example — have sons or daughters who actually fight in the wars that they decide are “wars of necessity.” The tax burden for these wars is more affordable for most foreign policy experts than it is for an American with median earnings. And perhaps most importantly, the average American doesn’t have the same interest in trying to have the U.S. rule the world.
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