Fighting Nonexistent Threats

Some administrations will be more ideological and hostile to contradictory evidence than others, but the process itself seems to reward poor, unfounded ideas that are strongly held.

Steven Simon’s new book, Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East, tells a depressingly familiar story of U.S. arrogance and incompetence in that part of the world. As I have been reading it, there were some sections in the chapter on the Reagan administration that caught my attention. Simon discusses the Reagan administration’s approach to the Iran-Iraq war and how the administration feared that Iran might join forces with the USSR or that the Soviets would take advantage if Iran were defeated in the war:

From the earliest days of the new Iranian regime, the United States fretted about the potential for an alliance of convenience between the Soviet Union and Iran. Officials tortured themselves with visions of these two adversaries making common cause, either voluntarily or in a collaborative mode, or because Iran would fracture under the pressure of the ongoing war with Iraq and the Soviets would hasten to annex territory near its borders, or because the Iranian communist Tudeh Party would stage a coup d'état with secret Soviet support and joint the Soviet camp….

There was little if any evidence to suggest that any of these were taking shape, or even plausible, except in the most general, speculative sense. But evidence in the U.S. policymaking process is often superfluous in a system where preconceived notions and conceptual frameworks derived from ideological conviction are what really matter [bold mine-DL].¹

This is a good observation. As Simon suggests, this is a common failing in how our government conducts foreign policy and not just a product of certain administrations. Some administrations will be more ideological and hostile to contradictory evidence than others, but the process itself seems to reward poor, unfounded ideas that are strongly held. One of these ideas that keeps cropping up is the idea that U.S. adversaries have joined together or are likely to join forces with each other simply because of their shared antipathy to the United States and/or “the West.”