“The best laid schemes o’ mice and men/Often go awry.” These lines from Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse” are famous for their influence on American writer John Steinbeck, who used them to title “Of Mice and Men.” The novel is one that shocked my eighth grade consciousness. Even though Steinbeck wrote “Of Mice and Men” in 1937, the idea behind his title is one the American public psyche has yet to learn. Americans need to reflect on how they interact with the world and how the rest of the world interacts with them. Many of America’s foreign policy machinations are failing — however, a large portion of the American public refuses to accept the reality that all-powerful America can fail, and as a result, the public discourse on our past and present problems suffers, contributing to more failures.
Our existing methods of projecting power abroad to achieve the policy results we want — international sanctions, military intervention when in our interests and advocacy of democratic capitalism — are failing. Though countless instances of American failures abound — Somalia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Bosnia (where evidence points to the fact that we helped spark the war), Yemen, Pakistan, Cuba, Israel/Palestine, Venezuela and others — the public discourse has failed to promote an active discussion of why we have failed and how we can do better.
The problem appears in discourse about wars — which should only be analyzed once war has ended, and can then be judged as successes or failures. The American public moves from one crisis to another, which leaves little time for self-reflection on our efforts and their individual successes and failures. The result is a pileup of problems because similar ideas are repeated across crises.
An example of this is the comparisons drawn between our involvement in Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan. For each of these three countries we have had different approaches with varying degrees of success. In Pakistan we have focused on funneling resources into the military establishment to “persuade” them to orient the focus of their military intelligence services and bureaucracy to a very pro-American and anti-fundamentalist Islam policy direction. In Yemen the focus has been on small-scale strikes and drone action to stop fundamentalists. Finally, in Afghanistan, direct military and political action was required to prop up the government and supposedly equip them to defeat anti-government forces.
However, Yemen is now in a civil war involving our Saudi Allies and mushrooming of what is now considered the most dangerous branch of Al Qaeda, the Taliban is resurgent despite our best efforts in Afghanistan and there are rumors that Pakistani officials in a government we supported knew about Bin Laden’s location for a while. Even the most generous observer would say we have failed at least partially in terms of the effectiveness of the time and money spent to achieve our goals. Surprisingly, the debate about the effectiveness of our policies and money we are spending is absent. Furthermore, alarmingly, these are policies with continued public support and prevalence in the public discourse (e.g., Iran and Syria).
There is a lack of accountability among Republicans and Democrats — even about an issue as clear cut as the lack of WMDs and the lack of effective democracy established in the Iraq War. The denial of failure is bad for our national discourse because our ideas cannot be adequately challenged if no one admits they failed in the first place. Candidates are standing up in front of the American public and arguing for actions such as invading Iran, boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria and continued support for Israel — actions that have previously failed to achieve our policy goals.
The only way to fix America’s foreign policy problems is for the public to recognize they exist. Thirty-seven percent of Americans see the Iraq War as a success and 26 percent of Americans think the United States is winning the war on terror. As a result, we are destined to pursue the same disastrous policies over and over while expecting a different result — the very definition of being mad.
Sawan Patel is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at s.patel@cavalierdaily.com.
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