Dropping Their Pens and Waving Guns

Chase Madar, a journalist, is the author of "The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower.'' He is on Twitter.

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 17, 2013, 3:20 PM

Whether led by State or Defense, the militarization of U.S. foreign policy has been a disaster. From Iraq to Vietnam and Cambodia, from Libya to Kosovo – where the 78-day bombing of Belgrade intensified the displacement from Kosovo of more than 200,000 Serbs, Roma and other ethnic groups – the optimistic application of military violence to resolve diplomatic impasses has resulted more often than not in humanitarian disaster and military failure.

Yet efforts to use diplomatic negotiation to resolve the latest crisis, the Syrian civil war, are once again condemned as “a Munich moment” and not just by AM radio bloviators but by Secretary of State John Kerry himself.

Embracing military action, on claims of humanitarianism, is the surest way for the foreign policy elite to advance in Washington.

All this is of a piece with the general atrophy of diplomatic techniques in Washington and the disciplined habits they require: recognition that American power has limits, an ability to compromise over non-essential interests, and an emphasis on the long view instead of instant gratification.

It’s a nasty paradox that civilians in the State Department (without getting into the laptop bombardiers in the news media) are increasingly among the most aggressive voices for war, by whichever euphemism they choose to call it.

Madeleine Albright, when serving as President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, askedColin Powell, “What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?”– surely one of the worst reasons for the resort to force in recorded history.

Today, no one has been more eager to launch humanitarian missiles at Syria than Secretary of State Kerry, with an apparently bewildered Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel struggling to keep up.

Most remarkably, Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, has made a career out of the weaponization of human rights. The book that made her name, “A Problem from Hell,” is a passionate speculation about military force’s potential to prevent genocide, with no corresponding thoughts on how farsighted, preventive diplomacy might accomplish the same ends. (The book also fails to mention the multiple postwar genocides that the U.S. government armed or abetted, with the exception of a single sentence about East Timor.)

Why the compulsive preference for military force among foreign policy elites, despite its lackluster and often horrific results? George Kenney, a U.S. foreign service officer who resigned from the State Department in 1992 to protest U.S. policy toward the crisis in Yugoslavia, told me recently that the full-throated embrace of military violence is the fastest, surest way for the best and brightest to get ahead in Washington, and that their delusive faith in military violence as a humanitarian salve cannot be disentangled from their cynical careerism.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/09/16/foggy-bottom-and-the-fog-of-war/diplomats-have-been-dropping-their-pens-and-waving-guns