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The Scowcroft commission on strategic forces had a harder task. change had to devise nuclear strategy, an area of constant change not given to final, static compromises. It also had to take into account the moves and countermoves of an unpredictable adversary. (Social Security, a purely domestic problem, brought together players who could all be made to sit at the table and behave.) Then came the thought: If a commission could mute the ran corous debate on the MX, why not Central America? Why not indeed? Enter the Kissinger commission, charged with solving the Rubik's Cube of Central America. The game here is not a two-sided affair where missiles are shuffled and traded; it is a multisided affair with seven independent countries and innumerable factions at odds, sometimes at war, with each other. Un like Social Security or nuclear policy, Central America is a living, moving, changing target. A week after the commission's report is delivered, events on the ground may very well have rendered it obsolete.
This is not to say that the Kissinger commission is bound to fail, only that commissions are not the wisest way for a country to make foreign policy. Commissions are at best an expedient. They may be fine in the breach, but, with the collapse of an organic center, our politics is becoming all breach.
What is wrong with government-by-commission? First, finding solutions is only half the job. The other half is building support for them. Centrist politics requires not only that one locate common ground, but that one then encourage people to settle there. Commissions, unfortunately, are designed to issue findings, not create consensus. That is the task of a political party. But at the center there is none, which is why the Scowcroft compromise is so shaky and the Kissinger commission so criticized months before it has pronounced its first official word.
Second, even the most distinguished commission must fold its tent. Kissinger's reports in January, and then what? A new Kissinger commission for the next hot spot? What will the next Democratic President do? Call a Brzezinski commission? No problem, says Thomas J. Watson Jr.. former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union. We can improve upon "palliatives such as the Scowcroft and Kissinger commissions," he writes. How? With "a permanent blue-ribbon commission to deal with the central issues and to take our nation's survival out of politics-as-usual." His "National Security Commission" will enjoy more than permanence. It will be given "built-in independence" and "take up only watershed issues of U.S.-Soviet relations, including nuclear weapons." Presumably the rest—fishing rights?—will be left to the President and Congress.