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December 20, 2004 issue

Copyright ? 2004 The American Conservative

 

Realists Rebuffed

 

A vulgarized neoconservatism in the saddle

 

By Scott McConnell

 

How inscrutable the last remaining superpower must seem to the outside world! Only six months ago, informed Washington opinion held that neoconservatism was a spent force. New Republic senior editor Lawrence Kaplan, a shrewd observer of Capitol power flows and a neoconservative himself, announced a ?springtime for realism? and a twilight of the neocons. He quoted the once again voguish realist totems George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and John Mearsheimer on the futility of armed crusades for democracy and noted the creation of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy as a counterpoint to the already established neocon lobbies. Democrat presidential designee John Kerry was making clear that democracy promotion was less important than the quest for stability. Most troubling, in Kaplan?s view, were signs that the Bush administration itself was cooling on the neocons.

 

While the president ?still often channels [Woodrow] Wilson? (neocons frequently style themselves as muscular Wilsonians), Kaplan saw wobbling everywhere. The White House signed off on a raid on Ahmad Chalabi?s headquarters?the neocon favorite who turned out to be an Iranian agent?without first informing Doug Feith or Paul Wolfowitz. Condoleezza Rice formed the Iraq Stabilization Group inside the National Security Council without consulting the Pentagon. Robert Blackwill, a former Henry Kissinger aide, was suddenly wearing the big hat inside Rice?s NSC. The neocons on Dick Cheney?s staff were ?consumed? by the Valerie Plame investigation. Cheney himself was soliciting advice from Kissinger. Rice was talking to Brent Scowcroft, the most prominent Bush I official to oppose publicly the invasion of Iraq.

 

Kaplan was not alone in reading the tea leaves that way. A month before the election, the invariably well-informed Bob Novak forecast that Bush would withdraw from Iraq and ?end the neoconservative dream of building democracy in the Arab world.? Pat Buchanan in these pages claimed that the Iraq mess had tempered any Bush lust for further imperial adventures. George Will, probably the most influential conservative columnist of all, began advertising his own disenchantment with neoconservative foreign policy in every other column, mocking the idea that Iraq would be democratic anytime soon (?Iraq is just three people away from democratic success. Unfortunately, the three are George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.?) and skewering the notion that democracy could be imposed by force from without. The neoconservative democracy crusaders, Will observed dryly, ought to remember an elemental principle of moral reasoning: ?there can be no duty to do what cannot be done.?

 

That apparent right-around-the-corner return to realism heralded the restoration of a natural order. Around the country are thousands with lifetime Republican attachments who supported or even served in the administrations of Nixon, Reagan, and George Bush I for whom the neoconservative ascendancy was almost too bizarre to be believed. They thought that eventually reality would reassert itself. George W. Bush would talk to his father and mother or to Laura, and they would warn him that American foreign policy was running off the rails. Dick Cheney would understand. Donald Rumsfeld, who had begun to question whether we had a ?metric? to know whether we were actually winning the War on Terror, would finally see the light. Yes, the United States went through a trauma on 9/11, and yes, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith and David Wurmser happened to be right there to dust off and present a Mideast attack plan from a Benjamin Netanyahu/Project For the New American Century coven from the mid-1990s. While Washington was off guard, they saw their opportunity and took it. But Iraq had proved such a mess that the ship of state would right itself. Had to.

 

This was less wishful thinking than the natural human tendency to believe that the social patterns one has lived with for one?s entire adult life?those that one?s parents had lived with?would inevitably reassert themselves. It was a belief perhaps akin to the German Jewish bourgeoisie?s as they watched the rise of Hitler: No, things couldn?t get really bad, not in our Germany. In America, the phase is ?it can?t happen here.?

 

One must be clear what ?it? is. The Patriot Act is not a giant step towards domestic fascism, and we are not halfway to martial law. George W. Bush bears no hatred towards any minority group or even any domestic constituency.

 

For contemporary America, the ?it? is the setting in full motion of an aggressive, reckless, militarized foreign policy, viewed as lawless by much of the world?one whose almost inevitable outcome is nuclear war. While Pinochet and Franco and for most of his reign Stalin kept within their own borders, Bush has ambitions of global scope. Of course they are idealistic ambitions, beautiful ambitions. The spread of democracy?especially if it springs up from a country?s indigenous institutions and populace?is a very good thing. But the Bushites now see democracy?s spread as necessary for America?s own survival. The world, particularly the Muslim world, must become democratic now, or we will perish. The neoconservatives in the administration believe that democracy will spread only if the president commits more and more troops to Iraq and topples the regimes in Tehran and Damascus. As alarming as the neoconservatism of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Danielle Pletka, and John Bolton is, more alarming is the spirit that has spread in its wake?a kind of neoconservativism without a graduate degree.

 

You see it on certain blogs and hear it in the rants of some of the most widely listened to right-wing talk-radio hosts. If the Arabs don?t want to be democratic, we should nuke them. We have no choice but to nuke them for our own safety. It?s a vulgarized neoconservatism ?no one from the American Enterprise Institute speaks like this (in public). But this talk is around in the heartland and growing, and it is wind in the sails of the new administration.

 

At this writing, the staffing of a new foreign-policy apparatus is not complete. But the broad strokes are plain. At CIA, there is a new emphasis on loyalty to the president over readiness to provide objective analysis; Porter Goss will ensure that the agency provides information that the White House wants to hear. At the cabinet level, the direction is clear. Colin Powell is leaving, exhausted by his losing tussles with the Pentagon, semi-humiliated by the president. His crime was that he was right about war in Iraq, right that we needed allies and more forces for the invasion, right that postwar Iraq would be chaos and quagmire. His caution about the use of force ?the Pottery Barn rule?must have irked the president every time he saw him, so better to banish him. Promoted instead are those who were consistently wrong. Rumsfeld remains, though his neocon aides ?stovepiped? phony intelligence about Iraq?s WMD capacity, he botched the post invasion, and was responsible for the Abu Ghraib torture. Stephen Hadley, who ?forgot? to remove the false claims about Iraq?s yellowcake purchases from the president?s 2003 State of the Union speech, is the new National Security Adviser. Condi Rice, whose TV musings about ?mushroom clouds? helped frighten a nation into an unnecessary war, becomes the nation?s top diplomat.

 

What became of the realists? Like the neocons, they are only policy intellectuals and bureaucrats, dependent on the politicians who appoint them. Among educated Americans, they won the foreign-policy debate decisively. No one doubts it. There are scores of bright people from George Will to William F. Buckley to Kenneth Pollack who are born-again realists; no one has recently converted to neoconservatism. But the realists did not win the debate inside Bush?s brain?indeed, there is no sign at all that the president was aware that there was a foreign-policy debate going on. Instead a 51-48 percent victory, a pitiful margin for an incumbent during wartime, is treated as a landslide of Reaganesque proportions and a mandate for the president to promote those whose foreign-policy advice has proved egregiously wrong.

 

How has the country changed? Two years ago, when National Review editor Rich Lowry said that an appropriate response to a WMD attack on the United States might be to nuke Mecca, there was a fair amount of outrage. But Lowry, recall, was imagining how the United States might respond to a massive terrorist attack. Now the American airwaves and blogosphere are rife calls to nuke those whom military invasion couldn?t turn into democrats. ?Could it happen here?? the old question goes. In one sense it already has.

I think it's a very accurate and intelligent article about how this country has done wrong with Iraq.

 

I found this line especially troubling, even though I already knew it would happen:

"At CIA, there is a new emphasis on loyalty to the president over readiness to provide objective analysis; Porter Goss will ensure that the agency provides information that the White House wants to hear."

Neoconservativism is such an oxymoron. :plain

Lets talk about neocons, because some people here are mistaken on what a neocon is. I'm not arguing for any of thes eideologies just defining them. A conservative is for a hands off government. Laissez-faire economic policy, and military spending corresponds with the need for it, not excessive if it isnt necessary. Ideally a balanced budget is best. A belief in moral values, but MOST importantly that moral issues be left to the states, courts shouldnt decide and neither should the federal govt. Who are the neocons? Beacuse of the McGovern revolution the conservative wing of the democratic party defected. Because they agreed with most conservatives on how to deal with the Soviets and somewhat on moral issues they shifted to the reps. However, after the fall of the USSR the differences are now clear. Neocons are not for a hands off economy, they are for a regulated economy which includes some entitlements, heavy military spending, but most of all corporate welfare in the belief that it will promote capitalism (which conservatives hate). They like to expand bureaucracy not destroy it like conservatives. Socially they have taken the liberal belief of government hands on approach. But theyve taken this approach to moral values, to imposing morality through federal regulation. The neocons are in fact not ideologically conservative nor liberal, why? Because to the untrained and ignorant eye they seem conservative b/c of moral issues, their economic policy and there way of handling social issues is not conservative in the least. So if they have to be grouped theyre moderates. But the extremism of their beliefs does not do justice to the word moderate. They are similar to the Hitler fascists, with a leftist economic policy and a jingoist national social policy. Who are the neocons? People say Cheney, and looking at the problems he had with Reagan, he seems like a neocon but not a fullfledged one. Bush? Economically maybe, but not socially, whether people like it or not. bush has expanded bureaucracy and spending (very liberal) a lot of which is military spending (neocon), but has bitten the hand that fed him and will not pass the federal amendment on gay marriage, it will most likely be left up to the states (conservative). Bush is a moderate. (please no one try to rebutt anything i said by citing only Iraq, it of course if important but to rebutt a claim more than just that is needed)

*bump*, what people cant respond if its not about Iraq?

another characteristic of neocons is a near obsessive support of israel, sometimes (most of the time) even if it goes against american interests.

Im sure many of you will agree with me that whenever somehting substantive is posted no one will reply and the post will eventually vanish. Here is a good forum for us to talk about these neocons, who they are, what they do, and we cna clear up misconceptions about them. However, no one chooses to do so, and later on some uneducated or igorant person will post something stupid about neocons, and this will continue b/c many people on this board dont like relevant discussion that doesnt involve news articles or Iraq

sad but true

Lets talk about neocons, because some people here are mistaken on what a neocon is. I'm not arguing for any of thes eideologies just defining them. A conservative is for a hands off government. Laissez-faire economic policy, and military spending corresponds with the need for it, not excessive if it isnt necessary. Ideally a balanced budget is best.? A belief in moral values, but MOST importantly that moral issues be left to the states, courts shouldnt decide and neither should the federal govt. Who are the neocons? Beacuse of the McGovern revolution the conservative wing of the democratic party defected. Because they agreed with most conservatives on how to deal with the Soviets and somewhat on moral issues they shifted to the reps. However, after the fall of the USSR the differences are now clear. Neocons are not for a hands off economy, they are for a regulated economy which includes some entitlements, heavy military spending, but most of all corporate welfare in the belief that it will promote capitalism (which conservatives hate). They like to expand bureaucracy not destroy it like conservatives. Socially they have taken the liberal belief of government hands on approach. But theyve taken this approach to moral values, to imposing morality through federal regulation. The neocons are in fact not ideologically conservative nor liberal, why? Because to the untrained and ignorant eye they seem conservative b/c of moral issues, their economic policy and there way of handling social issues is not conservative in the least. So if they have to be grouped theyre moderates. But the extremism of their beliefs does not do justice to the word moderate. They are similar to the Hitler fascists, with a leftist economic policy and a jingoist national social policy. Who are the neocons? People say Cheney, and looking at the problems he had with Reagan, he seems like a neocon but not a fullfledged one. Bush? Economically maybe, but not socially, whether people like it or not. bush has expanded bureaucracy and spending (very liberal) a lot of which is military spending (neocon), but has bitten the hand that fed him and will not pass the federal amendment on gay marriage, it will most likely be left up to the states (conservative). Bush is a moderate. (please no one try to rebutt anything i said by citing only Iraq, it of course if important but to rebutt a claim more than just that is needed)

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The problem is you can characterize Bush as an individual being a moderate because he has pushed the gay amendment ban to the states. But most people who oppose Bush don't see that characterization. Various things like the FCC's recent actions and the fact that gay marriage was made an issue on the national level give the strong scent of Bush being a federal moral regulator and hence by the definition you provided, a neocon on that angle. Im sure if you ask Admin Flynt whether Bush is a federal moral regulator or not, he would say yes. Plus where are you getting that he wouldn't pass that amendment if it got to his desk?

 

And you mention it in your post but it is very important to remember the distinction between the modern definition of a liberal(as opposed to the traditional one) and a neocon on spending. Liberals like me would like to see social safety nets and programs that would lead to prosperity down the road(the FDR liberal) but both neocons and conservtives oppose this(the method, not the desire for prosperity). The neocon wants to see increased military spending but both liberals and conservatives want to see it done effeciently. The problem in the modern era is that your definition of the traditional conservative on military spending has largely blurred with the neocon view. IMO, the traditional conservative has been replaced by the neocon in conservative clothing. The Laissez-faire principles are much much much much more important than the check on bad military spending. Add to this the fact that you don't see much protesting from a conservative when the federal government regulates morality, and its pretty hard to see many differences at all in practice.

Im sure many of you will agree with me that whenever somehting substantive is posted no one will reply and the post will eventually vanish. Here is a good forum for us to talk about these neocons, who they are, what they do, and we cna clear up misconceptions about them. However, no one chooses to do so, and later on some uneducated or igorant person will post something stupid about neocons, and this will continue b/c many people on this board dont like relevant discussion that doesnt involve news articles or Iraq

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That happens all the time from both sides. Ive had numerous points on a lot of topic go unaddressed. These political board have been riddled with spam and stupid comments. Just last week a topic was interputed with someone posting that liberals needed to shut up and accept that they have lost.

 

Whats even more annoying is when someone takes a snippet of a post and steers the entire topic away from whats being discussed.