The Role Of Think-tanks In Washington D.C.

by Ugur Akinci, Ph.D.
For the last ten years I keep telling everyone I know the importance of establishing an independent Turkish-American think-tank in Washington D.C. I am not sure if I'll see that dream become a reality in my own lifetime.
Without such a think-tank Turkey cannot articulate its policy positions and air them on a respectable independent platform that cannot be elbowed aside as yet another PR campaign cooked up by hired lobbyists.
Without such a think-tank America also loses the opportunity to explain its positions to a Turkish audience through the eyes of Turkish-American analysts who know the intricacies of the American decision making mechanism the best.
That's why the absence of an independent Turkish-American think tank is such a "lose-lose" situation.
The extent to which the U.S. Administration policy is influenced by Washington think-tanks has been recently illustrated by "The Lie Factory," an investigative piece published in the January-February 2004 issue of Mother Jones magazine. In its analysis of the questionable intelligence that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the MJ essay by Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest documents the central role played by certain think-tanks in filtering and channeling information upwards to the White House.
In this chain of information flow the main U.S. intelligence agencies like CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency are of course involved, as expected. However, what's interesting is the active involvement of think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and Project for the New American Century (PNAC) through an interlocking pattern of friendships and mentorships in cascading the US intelligence data from the field, as well as the reports provided by Iraqi National Congress, up to the higher echelons of Pentagon. There are important names mentioned in this picture, according to Mother Jones, some of them well known to Turks, who are alleged to have steered intelligence data all the way up to the White House in a way that has justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
My main point here is not to criticize the Bush Administration's Iraq policy as such but to focus our attention on the importance of think-tanks in American policy formulation. Those readers who would like to savor the details of this complicated picture can do so through the MJ essay mentioned.
The father of American (and perhaps the world?) social-psychology George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) once said that “the definition of social reality is a part of that reality itself.” How true. And one of the most effective ways through which social and political realities are defined and positioned in Washington D.C. is through the agency of the think-tanks. The MJ article I've mentioned proves the point better than any other reference I've seen in a long while. It should be must reading for all Turks and Turkish-Americans who are wondering how we can open new effective channels of communication between the Turkish and American policy makers. That's how we can transform the current "lose-lose" situation into a "win-win" proposition.