Fooling Us, Fooling Ourselves

From a memo the British ambassador to the United States prepared for the Prime Minister.

I draw two main conclusions. First that the State Department does not alone determine, nor even always accurately reflects, the administration’s attitude in respect of particular issues; and secondly that for this reason it is essential for my staff to continue to keep in touch with agencies other than the State Department in the field of foreign relations…The absorption of the United States with terrorism and means of combating it enhances the neglect of the diplomatic aspect in favour of other aspects of foreign policy.

Actually, I changed one word in that memo. I changed ‘Communism’ to ‘terrorism’. This memo was written by UK ambassador Sir Roger Makins, to Prime Minister Anthony Eden, on March 17, 1955. Makins went on.

The United States Government is not really interested in the maintenence of relations as such with the governments of the Satellites, and perhaps not always with that of the Soviet Union; it has declined to recognize the Peking regime. American policy towards the Communists is rather a mixture of research, propaganda and intelligence operations in which non-governmental assistance is widely sought and used…

I have transcribed portions of this memo to make the point that the United States has suffered some of the same blind spots in foreign policy for over fifty years. Back in the 1950’s is was a fever about communism that overtook our foreign policy establishment and led to terrible blunders as well as some seriously cold-hearted and brutal operations and interventions. We built communism into something so monolithic that we were unable to distinguish between Stalin and Khrushchev, Tito and Walter Ulbricht, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. We didn’t understand tensions between the Soviet Union and China, or China and Vietnam. We couldn’t distinguish Iran’s Tudeh Party from the Politburo. We gave little or no heed to nationalist impulses that drove resistance to American power in the guise or mask of international communism. And we paid dearly for this.

We neglected diplomacy and dialogue, did not gather factual and useful intelligence, and made enemies where we might have made friends.

We see the same thing today. We seem to treat every Muslim resistance group the same and as under one umbrella of Islamofascism. We don’t seem to know the difference between Hamas and Hizbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda. We don’t understand the role of nationalism in the Iraqi insurgency. We don’t understand the internal politics and rivalries of the Shi’a seminaries. And, just as we did in the Cold War, we dismiss any criticism arising from our enemies as groundless and deny that we could be the cause of any of the resistance we encounter. Islamic resistance is no more legitimate than Communist resistance.

It’s a trick that the Washington elite plays on the American people. Eventually, they believe their own propaganda and trick themselves.

In the eyes of posterity it will inevitably seem that, in safeguarding our freedom, we destroyed it. The vast clandestine apparatus we built up to prove our enemies’ resources and intentions only served in the end to confuse our own purposes; that practice of deceiving others for the good of the state led infallibly to our deceiving ourselves; and that vast army of clandestine personnel built up to execute these purposes were soon caught up in the web of their own sick fantasies, with disastrous consequences for them and us. – Malcolm Muggeridge, May 1966

Author: BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.