Hopefully, somebody else’s experience. Bob Woodward has a column in the Washington Post on “10 Take Aways From the Bush Years”, what the incoming president can learn from his predecessor’s experience. So, for example, here’s #8:
8. Righteous motives are not enough for effective policy.
“I believe we have a duty to free people,” Bush told me in late 2003. I believe he truly wanted to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq. In preparing his second inaugural address in 2005, for example, Bush told his chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, “The future of America and the security of America depends on the spread of liberty.” That got the idealistic Gerson so pumped that he set out to produce the foreign policy equivalent to Albert Einstein’s unified field theory of the universe — a 17-minute inaugural address in which the president said his goal was nothing less than “the ending of tyranny in our world.”
But this high purpose often blinded Bush and his aides to the consequences of this mad dash to democracy. In 2005, for example, Bush and his war cabinet spent much of their time promoting free elections in Iraq — which wound up highlighting the isolation of the minority Sunnis and setting the stage for the raging sectarian violence of 2006.
About half of his “take aways” can be summarized with a single bit of advice: the president needs to be a strong manager.
I’ve got three of my own. Such as
1. Don’t set a policy of excluding experts and people who can actually speak the language of the country you are invading because you suspect they don’t have “sufficient dedication to the cause of creating democracy in [blank]”.
2. Remember that foreigners frequently watch things like CNN, and the like, and a number of major foreign newspapers cover American politics. DO NOT assume that you can say one thing to your constituents back home on camera, and another to international counterparts on camera, and hope that you won’t be caught out on it. I add this because it particularly irked a Canadian I corresponded with.
3. Remember that it is much easier to lose friends in the international realm than to gain them, particularly in an age of instant visual media over all of the globe.