Election Cycle Makes Long Term Planning Difficult
Armies have fought wars over small strips of land for centuries in the Middle East. Battles seem to break out in an instance while lasting peace agreements take years to develop. Iraq won’t become a stable democracy any time soon. The civil war of the 1980’s in Lebanon continued for over ten years. The United States has a limited ability to determine the final outcome in Iraq at this point.
The entire world now knows that we did not have an effective long term plan for establishing a stable, representative government in Iraq. Our leaders expected to get in and out within a few hundred days. But we’ve always done nation building in the past, why would anyone expect Iraq to be any different?
Given the longstanding animosity between political factions in the region, a more prudent pre-War plan would have included laying the groundwork for 20 years of intense political negotiations. We should have prepared our diplomatic corps for an extraordinarily challenging assignment and set aside enough money for the job. But we didn’t do any of that.
The US election cycle doesn’t lend itself to long term planning. Newly elected presidents know that they have only eight years at the most to make an impression. So they sometimes pursue a highly ambitious agenda and end up leaving behind a mess for the next administration to clean up.
Responsibility for the Vietnam conflict passed between three presidents. Now the quagmire in Iraq will get transferred to a new commander in chief as well.
Our country would be better off if we could vote for the agenda rather than the person tasked with carrying out the agenda. Then we could hand each new president a written mandate. Instead we have chief executives making it up as they go along.
election cycle, President, chief executive, Iraq, Vietnam, quagmire, Middle East, pre-War planning, diplomacy, civil war
November 21st, 2007 at 7:37 pm
[...] changes dramatically. Some programs get dropped or lose their funding. There’s no continuity. Long term strategies have no chance in this environment. Popular initiatives are no cure all. Voter enacted regulations [...]
November 27th, 2007 at 4:42 am
[...] independence by now as well, but our politics won’t allow it. We’re lousy at implementing long term solutions. Our presidents have a tendency to cast aside programs initiated by previous administrations and [...]