Washington Post columnist David Ignatius waxes mysterious today, speculating about what kind of cool, secret stuff Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski might be doing if they were installed in the White House instead of President Obama's current team of boring national-security advisers.Ignatius lauds some of the big, secret accomplishments of the two men but somehow fails to note Kissinger's complicity in secretly supporting Augusto Pinochet's violent, lawless regime and, somewhat unbelievably, his advocacy for an illegal -- and initially secret -- attack on Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Even without listing these marquee blunders, Ignatius does note that some of the other plans had ugly consequences, from Kissinger's support for Syrian intervention in Lebanon to Brzezinkski's work crafting the initial stages of our Afghanistan entanglement.
It's easy to look back and judge these policies in hindsight, but in general this fascination with the glamorous aspects of foreign policy almost always results in disaster -- and comes back to haunt us. What if Kissinger, instead of concocting increasingly byzantine schemes in Vietnam, had simply counseled the president to withdraw from a war that could not be won? Brzezinski comes in for less criticism, since the real failure in Afghanistan was failing to continue U.S. engagement there after the USSR withdrew. More often than not, the secretive aspects of our foreign policy are the most damaging -- a more recent example is the national embarrassment of torture that grew from this secrecy complex during the Bush administration.
