Why Was the Dalai Lama Hanging Out with the Right-Wing American Enterprise Institute? [View all]

[steve2470]

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/02/dalai-lama-american-enterprise-institute



For a moment, when I read Danielle Pletka’s e-mail, I wondered if it might be a joke. Pletka, vice president of the conservative Washington, D.C., think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, was writing to inquire whether “Vanity Fair would like to spend some quality time with His Holiness the Dalai Lama”. He, she went on, was going to be at A.E.I. for two days as its guest. He would be speaking there at a conference on “happiness, free enterprise, and human flourishing” at a private lunch and at several invitation-only discussion panels. I would be welcome to attend all of it, and could also expect an exclusive interview with him.

I had first met Pletka 12 years ago, when A.E.I., seen then as the intellectual command post of the neoconservative campaign for regime change in Iraq, welcomed another visitor from the East: Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, the purveyor of “intelligence” about Saddam Hussein that would later turn out to be bogus. The shift in emphasis seemed marked. It was always apparent that fulfilling Chalabi’s ambitions was likely to require a war. The maroon robes of His Holiness, Tibetan Buddhism’s spiritual leader and a lifelong advocate of nonviolence, are cut from very different cloth.

However, perhaps the most surprising thing about the Dalai Lama’s sojourn at the A.E.I., which took place at its downtown 17th Street headquarters on February 19 and 20, was that the relationship between spiritual leader and think tank began at his behest, not A.E.I.’s. In the very days last autumn, as Congressional Republicans were charging down the political blind alley of the government shutdown, Pletka and A.E.I.’s president, Arthur Brooks, were meditating with His Holiness at his base in Dharmsala, India, in the Himalayas. They were there at his invitation, which had been conveyed through mutual contacts at Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-government-funded broadcaster.

There was something, it seemed, about the A.E.I.’s message under Brooks’s leadership that had prompted the Dalai Lama to reach out. Part of it, I later learned, was Brooks’s assertion that the ultimate goal of public policy should be to maximize human happiness, not material wealth. Indeed, the title of one of Brooks’s books, published in 2008, is Gross National Happiness—a phrase that is also employed as the official metric of prosperity espoused by the rulers of the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan.