On the issue of Iraq, the gloves are off.

But as we watch George, Donald, Dick et al. flailing their arms at podiums across the country to drum up popular support for this projected war, we wonder: Where do these folks find the time to step back and consider the broad trajectory of US policy, and how have US decision-makers arrived at their perception of the threat confronting American national interests by the Iraqi regime?

I would like to disabuse those in the region who extrapolate from their own political culture of the notion that the American government’s roadmap for action is devised by a handful of men in Washington.

So what drives US policy?

I called the office of the State Department’s Director of Policy and Planning and put the question to an assistant there. I got two words: Think tanks.

Think tanks, a distinctively American phenomenon, proliferate in Washington, from the Council on Foreign Relations (established in 1921) to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (1953), and from the Hudson Institute (1961) to the Cato Institute (1977). Today, more than 1,200 think tanks dot the American political landscape.

Some, like the Institute for Near East Policy and the Middle East Institute, focus, as their names suggest, on area studies. Some, like the Brookings, accept little or no official funding, while others, like Rand, receive most of their income from “contract work” commissioned by the government.

But all these institutions, with budgets ranging from $3 million to $30 million, and staffs that range from 35 to 200, and representing views that span the entire ideological spectrum, generate what is known as “new thinking” among US decision-makers.

What is uniquely American about this phenomenon is that experts in area studies and other fields, from outside the government, are invited to generate practical and independent concepts (unlike the arcane theoretical ones often found in academic debate) for senior officials, a role that is now considered critical in the American political system. Other “advanced democracies” (in the words of our friendly spokesman at State) rely, I was reminded, on the “continuity provided by a large professional civil service.”

Consider, as an example, the case of Rand (1948), which for several years has issued papers on terrorism as a worldwide threat and, in recent months, on homeland security as a national priority. And consider the Middle East Institute (1947), funded for the most part by government endowments, which has published countless papers by resident scholars, convened elites at annual conferences, and invited speakers to lecture on the subject at its unassuming, late-Victorian townhouse on N. Street in Washington, thereby enriching America’s broader civic culture by educating citizens not only about the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict but also about the various histories, cultures and societies of the Arab world. (A measure of how far the MEI will go to sponsor a diversity of sensitive dialogue was that it extended an invitation to a fastidious Palestinian like me a couple of years back, when I slammed America’s misguided Middle East policy. Never mind that I was not invited back.)

While think tanks have begun to appear everywhere in recent years, American think tanks are different, by tradition and function, in that they are able to participate directly in policy-making, and in the readiness of policy-makers to turn to them for advice.

In that regard, let me ask: Whom, as an example, do Palestinian leaders listen to when they go about determining the destiny of Palestine — what experts’ papers did they consult (or experts did they have at their side) when they went to Oslo in 1993? Whose advice did they solicit before, during and after their attendance at the Camp David conference? And whose insights were they known to have sought, outside the small, closed orbit of the Palestinian Authority, when they went to London recently to discuss the question of “Palestinian reform”?

If the answer is no one, it is perhaps because those intellectuals who could have creatively influenced the Palestinian leadership’s policy choices had long been chased out of town, as it were, and made to lift anchor and put out to sea — across the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, to work in European or American think tanks and universities, representing the brain drain for the people of Palestine. (You recall how the innocuous books of Edward Said, the prominent Palestinian-American scholar, were banned in the territories in 1996 because the authorities there disapproved of the author’s political views!)

Love it or hate it, the United States is a great power, and a zestful culture, because the free flow of ideas in it — ideas diffused with magnificent dash and spontaneity of insight — is considered central to the health of the body politic and to the social contract between ruler and ruled.

disinherited@yahoo.com