Pandyora, I think that what seems to be missing is that Glenn's conception of a Foreign Policy Community isn't just about listing people who objectively could be termed to be "experts", etc., and finding out what they say.

There's another variable in there, and that is which of these "experts" are called upon by those in power to formulate policies, to promote policies, and which are embraced as experts with high levels of emphasis and repetition in the News Producer Community.

For example, it wouldn't matter if a survey of 10,000 foreign policy "experts" of various backgrounds revealed that 9,990 of them had signed protests against the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, while 10 of them had been called to the White House, had consulted on policy development, and had been featured repeatedly on all major news networks.

So the selecting variable you are missing is which of the individuals or agencies you list are actually selected by the small and close knit community of power.

You can actually measure and codify that, too.

The ability to consider the use of military force keeps coming up as yet another measure of Seriousness.

Here are two situations which would have more than surpassed typical FPC standards for justified use of force, but had any great power used force to intervene in these situations, the FPC would likely have recommended total and nuclear war to oppose them.

(1) When the fascist toadie and U.S. client tyrant Augusto Pinochet deposed the elected government of Chile on 9/11/1973 and began slaughtering the political opposition and human rights related personnel, surely France or the Soviet Union or China would have been fully justified in using military force to overthrow the illegal Pinochet regime to restore a legitimate, UN-recognized government and to stop the slaughter of civilians, as well as in freezing or blockading the US' covert supply of funds and equipment to the tyrants' forces.

(2) When in 1981-1982 the US-backed, supplied, and directed Guatemalan dictatorship began hunting down and killing their Mayan Indian hill-dwelling population in an actual genocide, surely again some world superpower such as the USSR or Great Britain should have been fully justified in attacking and destroying the Guatemalan government, as well as the US' regional CIA offices and stations to stop their supply and support of the genocidalists.

Now, here are two situations in which the use of force to stop a tyrant and to end an immediate threat to civilians would clearly be justified on a simplistic level.

Yet not even the UnSerious Left recommended bombing Santiago or Guatemala City, because they knew it would make life even worse for the local populations, and they didn't recommend a superpower attack on the US' CIA stations which were assisting & directing these murderous and genocidal tyrants, since they knew it would lead straight to a Western-civilization ending nuclear war.

So, it's not that FPC types are somehow 'mature' enough to consider the use of force as necessary; they are simply those 'experts' who are disciplined enough to urge the use of force by the US whenever it suits the desires of US power elites.

So, so long I've listened to fools and knaves telling me that international idiocies and tyrannical violence and smiling broken contracts are all in my "interest".

Oh, you see, the supposed sophisticates say, states are violent, and they go on, as if I haven't read the same philosophers and sociologists and political scientists they have, and, you see, this is in Our State's best interest, and it's as if I haven't seen them all defending the idiotic and harmful policies of their betters in state leadership.

Yet strangely I see that even Our State is led by mere mortals, humans if you will; I don't see mere ghostly and godly abstracts with principles of 'when violence is required' descending from the heavens.

I see a state led by humans, humans with often exceedingly weak arguments, with rationalizations which children could see through, which tear like old, wet newspaper whenever they are subjected to the slightest pressure -- which an entire loose, shifting network of people and institutions are dedicated to ensuring that such pressures are never brought to bear.

Why, it is in Our Interest to back these thugs and tyrants throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, and we will say we are doing it Because of the Soviets. And of course, this is Best for All of Us.

Why, it is in Our Interest to hire entire armies of murderers, criminals, lunatic religious fundamentalists, drug traffickers, terrorists, and warlords to attack the secular government of Afghanistan! It's Best for All of Us!

It is in Our Interest to advise the weak and fledgling Russia to pursue policies which will truly harm it, and which profit an incredibly tiny minority over the whole bedraggled population, even if some of those Brilliant Advisers at Harvard's Brilliant Institution are later shown to criminally benefit Their Interest over Our Interest.

I seem to be confused. It so often seems that Our Interest doesn't help us at all, at least, not anyone I know, and not our country, and not our economy, and not our neighbors.

I beg of you sophisticates: please make sure that you've got a good argument for what your interests are before you're so sure that they're My Interests, because so far you've mostly had a pretty awful record, and the times you've been right have mostly been where there have been few other options.