Clown Show: Three Inept Foreign Policy Initiatives
Taking a look at a few less known blunders by the American foreign policy blob.
May 7, 2021|
12:01 am
Ted Galen Carpenter
Washington has made an abundance of major, well-known foreign policy blunders over the decades, most notably the disastrous wars in Vietnam and Iraq. However, there have been numerous less prominent initiatives that seemed to defy basic logic and common sense. Although the negative consequences of those follies were less severe than the Vietnam and Iraq debacles (or the policies that have provoked a needless cold war with post-communist Russia), they still illustrate the arrogance and ineptitude of America’s foreign policy mandarins. Three especially ill-advised schemes stand out—two with respect to Mexico and one involving Syria.
In 2009, Barack Obama’s administration initiated a sting operation that entailed a flow of firearms to Mexican drug cartels. That initiative, Operation Fast and Furious, was similar to a more limited measure, Operation Wide Receiver, which George W. Bush’s administration had approved in 2006 and 2007 to track suspicious weapons moving from Arizona gun stores into Mexico. Instead of intercepting such firearms, U.S. authorities allowed the shipments to proceed, with the expectation that they could be traced to their final destinations. With Fast and Furious, the Obama administration adopted the same “gun walking” approach on a larger scale and supplied some of the guns directly. Both programs were run out of the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).
The goal was to infiltrate and undermine the drug cartels by following the trail of traceable guns to identify and neutralize those organizations and the kingpins who ran them. But Operation Fast and Furious backfired badly. ATF personnel assigned to maintain the traces lost track of where the weapons ultimately ended up. The cartels received more than 1,700 additional weapons, many at the expense of U.S. taxpayers. Not surprisingly, the Obama administration stonewalled and sought to conceal both the nature and the extent of the fiasco. Invoking “executive privilege,” Attorney General Eric Holder even defied a congressional subpoena and refused to testify before a House committee investigating the Fast and Furious debacle. Indeed, the administration’s principal response was to harass journalists, especially CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who had dared to expose the scheme and its failures.
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https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/clown-show-three-of-washingtons-most-inept-foreign-policy-initiatives/
