The Powell Doctrine and US Foreign Policy by Middup Luke

Author:Middup, Luke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Clear Objectives and the Rest of the Powell Doctrine

We will now move on to look at how the insistence on clear objectives relates to the rest of the intellectual climate leading to the Powell Doctrine, in particular how it relates to Chapter 5, the need for an “exit strategy,” and Chapter 3, the need for public support.

The linkage between the need for clear objectives and the need to build public support should be clear enough. It is hard to build public support around ideas that you cannot succinctly and clearly define. The public are more likely to support action where the aims of the US are easily understood and Congress is more likely to vote to fund operations that they can see have some clear purpose. The drawback to this is that the need for clarity may tempt the President to paint the mission of US forces in overly stark terms in order to make it easy for the public to understand why US forces are involved in a particular situation. In other words, just because a President can put things across in simple and clear terms, it is not the same as them being simple and clear to the Military on the ground, and a search for clarity can easily turn into gross oversimplification of complex and evolving situations.

The need for public support and the need to state the mission to US forces clearly—both of these elements of the intellectual climate leading to the Powell Doctrine can be used to help define a third element: the idea that US military intervention should be in the national interest. If the national interest cannot be objectively defined, then perhaps the closest any Administration can come is to gain public support for an honest and clear plan of their intentions. The decision to send the Marines to Beirut clearly did not follow this logic. The Reagan Administration was never able to accurately and coherently explain what their purpose was. The reason it was never able to explain to the public the purpose of the Marines’ presence was that the Administration itself was divided on what that purpose was or should be.

The intellectual climate leading to the Powell Doctrine also calls for US forces not to be deployed overseas without a clear “exit strategy” being defined. The need for clear objectives can be seen as a prerequisite to this. If you do not know clearly what it is that you wish to achieve, how can you ever say that you have been successful or, indeed, how can you ever say you have failed. Thus policy makers have no point of reference to decide when it is time for American forces to leave. The second MNF is a classic example of this logic breaking down. Because the Reagan Administration did not really know what the Marines wanted to achieve in Beirut there was no way of putting any kind of time scale on their presence. There was not even a set of criteria under which the Marines could be said to have succeeded in their mission.

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