Last week, along with several Senate colleagues, Sen. Harry Reid visited Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Ukraine, the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and France. In Israel, Reid met Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. In Iraq, he spoke with the troops, walked the streets, and found himself surprised at the number of civilians toting firearms, as they are wont to do following the disbanding of armies and the looting of munitions dumps. It is, of course, a hoary cliché to say that congressional junkets of this type are a complete waste of money. It would, in fact, be less of a cliché to proclaim that they are nothing less than Democracy in Action, and that these fact-finders on their fact-finding missions really do find facts. When Harry Reid meets with, say, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, he learns things that could not have possibly been learned any other way, and he votes and deliberates more wisely because of it. Doesn't he?
As anyone who has ever set foot in a foreign country knows, alien lands really are alien. Things really do get lost in translation, context really is necessary, and a good number of the villages you see really are of the Potemkin variety. If you aren't deeply versed in the culture and politics of the land, you're liable to look in the eyes of Vladimir Putin and see a soul.
But for precisely this reason it can be quite healthy that Harry Reid and his fellow foreign policy day-trippers get an up-close glimpse of the wider world; they just might see practical possibilities where the expert sees only problems. These practical possibilities might, upon closer examination, turn out to be utter nonsense, but they can also provide leavening to the conversation among specialists—a conversation so learned that it readily hardens into cynicism or existential despair. To change the metaphor: Inexpert assessments can serve as a de-clotting agent for the opinions of experts.
Take, for instance, the case of Putin, a muscular man who clings with bulldoggish stubbornness to the notion that the answer to any public problem is the transfer of more power into his own hands. An expert might say that we as Americans ought to keep close and constant watch on this fellow from the corner of our eye, that the road on which he has placed his country does not lead to democracy, that, if we are not complete hypocrites in our human- rights rhetoric, we ought to express to him our concerns.
In saying this, an expert would be largely correct. The problem is that George W. Bush was also correct when he said that he had looked into Putin's baby blues and seen a man he could work with. Putin is, in his prickliness, his stubbornness, his pleasure in power, his suspicion of criticism, and his determination not simply to defeat but to crush utterly the adherents of terrorism, nothing if not Bush's soul mate. And the fact is, we have to work with Putin. We don't have to shine his boots, but we'll profit from judicious engagement with the man who walks in them. So long as an amateur is briefed well enough not to get completely hoodwinked, his open mind can be quite helpful in greasing the wheels of short-term international relations.
Which brings us back to Harry Reid. Reid, of course, is no longer just the Senator from Searchlight; he is the most powerful Democrat in the upper house. What he thinks matters—what he feels matters. Isn't it better that our representative gets a taste of a world in which his actions will have consequences?
The answer depends on how much Reid reads. To say a fresh outlook is helpful is not to call ignorance bliss. This country once sent a foreign policy neophyte named Joseph Davies to be our ambassador to Stalin, and he wound up falling like a carnival mark for the show trials of the 1930s. Around the same time, Charles Lindbergh went to Germany and found in Hitler a model of rectitude. But there have been others, the Scoop Jacksons and Sam Nunns, who mastered their subjects and knew that an open mind is worse than useless unless accompanied by a jaundiced eye. Here's hoping our Harry, in his role on the world stage, brings not only something new to the conversation, but something wise.