If you want an administration to listen to you, you have to offer something.
This is precisely the notion that I'm challenging, Nadine. I disagree utterly.
If you're the head of something be it a country or a company or a family or whatever and you are contemplating monumental action, it is your responsibility to seek out the best advice from the right people, to test your theories, to do risk analysis, to consider all the implications. Your responsibility. You don't just contemplate your navel for a bit or the navels of a few like-thinking cronies and then take action, particularly an action as monumental as war. That is arrogant and reckless.
Based on your comment and a couple from Bill I'm getting the impression that when I talk about exclusion from the tent it is coming across as sympathy for those who are left out. No, that's not what I'm talking about. It's not about the people who are left out. It's about the monumental decision and the person responsible for making the decision.
What I'm talking about is the responsibility for making the best decisions possible, which means getting and really listening to different experts and different opinions and making sure you're not trapped in your own world view. It's not the responsibility of experts to seek you out, to get into your head, to put together a comprehensive and compelling package that will resonate with you all to save you from doing something precipitous. Particularly when they aren't even privy to what you're working on nor do they have the intel to come up with top proposals nor do they have reasonable expectation of access to you. When you are in charge, when you have responsibility to act on behalf of others, it is YOUR responsibility to reach out. Not to make people feel good that you've reached out to them, although that's not a bad idea, but to make sure your approach is the best it can be.
This notion that the onus is on people with expertise or insight in matters of national policy to come up with unsolicited proposals is absurd. People will do so when they want to sell you something or get some indulgence for their political constituency. There is no special constituency for foreign policy. War and peace is about all of us and the onus is on the President to scour the nation for insights and ideas and perspectives and make damned sure he's gotten it right. |
