America's Dumbest Department: Its State Department

The public doesn't hear much regarding its State Department other than pronouncements by its head; namely, John Kerry.  Let me lift the veil a bit.  The President has his attributes; namely, he's a darn good compaigner.  But, clearly, he lacked the necessary experience when he entered the Oval Office.  As for Kerry, he's a man whose overall score at Yale was even lower than that of George W. Bush.

So how do these individuals make decisions on America's foreign policy.  First, of course, they turn to what they know best; namely, politics -- what will play best in the next election.  But, that gets you only so far.  For more information and advice they turn to their "experts" -- the U.S. Dept. of State.

The Dept. of State is where we presumably find the smartest foreign affairs people in Washington.  And, yet, these brilliant people seem unaware that, overseas, among peoples who have never gotten far beyond an authoritarian form of government, democracy, as we know it, isn't something that comes within days, or months, or even years.  All such people know is who their buddies are, who's in their extended family, and who shares their religious beliefs.  And, it's there that they turn in uncertain times.

And, we have examples of that; a prime one being Yugoslavia.  Through brutal means, a dictator, Tito, tied it together and presented it as a single country.  But, when Tito died, it all came apart.  Croatia went its way,  Serbia, its way, and Bosnia, its way.  It took brutal fighting -- virtually genocidal -- to make it abundantly clear that these peoples would never work together as a single nation.

Czechoslovakia did it much better.  The Czechs and the Slovaks decided it would be best if each went its own way.  Was that the best thing for the people of the former Czechoslovakia?  Who knows?  But, that's what they wanted.  And they did it in a fairly peaceful way.

Had our State Department learned nothing from seeing how people of different ethnicities relate to one another?  What possessed them to think that a nation could be cobbled together from Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis?  Yes, Saddam Hussein, a man more brutal than Tito -- if you can imagine that -- did manage to force these people into a single nation, just as Tito had done with Yugoslavia.  But, when he died, it all came apart, just as happened in Yugoslavia.

Had these people -- the Kurds, the Shiites, and the Sunnis -- been allowed to  form their own countries, it is unlikely that we would have seen the emergence of ISIS.  Stupidity has a price, and now, in Iraq, we will have to pay for it.