Neo-Conspiracy Theories
Mini Teaser: There is much room for debate on the soundness of neoconservative policies. But a serious assessment of neocons and their role in the Bush Administration is a necessary starting point.
James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Penguin, 2004), 426 pp., $16.
Patrick Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004), 272 pp., $24.95.
Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, American Alone: The Neonconservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 382 pp., $28.
A few days before the U.S. presidential election, the BBC, a once renowned television network dedicated to the enlightenment of the uninformed around the world, aired a documentary called "The Power of Nightmares." The program's central thesis was that the notion of a global threat from Islamist terrorism was largely a chimera, dreamed up by the powers-that-be to scare people into supporting wars of oppression by America and its dwindling band of allies. This illusion, the documentary said, was the work of a tightly knit group of conspirators in Washington known by now to all as "the neoconservatives"--a group of warmongering fanatics morally equivalent to the Islamic fundamentalists they claim to be fighting. As the producers noted, both are organized groups of religious bigots who use deception and terror to engender fear in credulous peoples in the hope of furthering their own goals of global domination. What was most remarkable about this steadily ascending fantasy of calumnies was in the end how unremarkable it was. For the neocons, such allegations are now merely routine.
Few groups of otherwise inconspicuous individuals can have been more maligned, loathed, feared and ridiculed than America's neoconservatives. In academia, in the media and in the steadily growing piles of political polemics that stack bookstore shelves, they have been demonized as, at very best, na‹fs espousing a dangerously unrealistic fantasy of American foreign policy as a mission civilatrice--or at worst as neo-fascists, consumed by a Dr. Strangelove-like fixation on the transformative effect of American military power.
The standard critical narrative of the last four years runs as follows: An intellectually lightweight and suggestible president, unschooled in foreign affairs, was led by a highly motivated cabal of foreign policy advisors and mysteriously connected outsiders into an embrace of their controversial doctrines. These revolutionaries held a number of core beliefs way beyond the bounds of the mainstream of America's foreign policy debate. They are committed to an explicit policy of eliminating regimes they don't like, especially in the Middle East, and to their replacement with governments friendly to America and Israel. Their faith in America's moral superiority and military supremacy is so great that they see it as the country's responsibility to wage something like permanent war, both pre-emptively and unilaterally.
These views would obviously never pass muster with public opinion, so like all coups d'etat, this one was achieved through deception, opportunism and manipulation. The neocons exploited the September 11 attacks to leverage their narrow worldview into the official national security strategy of the United States. They lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq to justify their longed-for invasion of the country.
This immorality tale has come mostly from the Left, especially overseas. But many of the neocons' political enemies, especially those at home, are on the Right. Many who consider themselves true conservatives are, if anything, even more aghast at what they see as the usurpation of their governing philosophy for such nefarious ends. Patrick Buchanan, the paleoconservative polemicist, and Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, who describe themselves as firm believers in Reaganite foreign policy, are in this conservative vanguard in the struggle against the neocons. Their critiques of the neocons, though divergent in important respects, share many central allegations.
The main substantive objection is that the apparently one-dimensional neoconservative approach to foreign policy is deeply inadequate to the challenges of a complex world. They believe their adversaries are not only a radical departure from traditional conservative thinking, but knaves who have laid a false claim to the Reagan legacy.
Buchanan's charge comes from a now familiar populist-conservative perspective. He says neoconservatives are at odds with the finest traditions of American foreign policy. Developing themes he first outlined in another of his books, A Republic, Not An Empire, he says those traditions, from George Washington's valedictory address to Ronald Reagan's pullout of U.S. forces in Lebanon, are essentially isolationist. Buchanan does not repeat his earlier claim that U.S. involvement in World War II was both immoral and politically mistaken, but he decries foreign policy under George W. Bush as deeply misguided and redolent of the imperial overreach of past superpowers such as 19th-century Great Britain and 17th-century Spain. You do not have to look hard, however, to get the gist of Buchanan's populist drift. The United States, he says, should abandon neoconservative pipe dreams and, in addition to isolationism, should adopt policies that are openly protectionist, anti-immigrant and anti-Zionist.
Halper and Clarke, in a less lurid and more lucid but no less polemical account, argue that the neocons and the policies they have forced on the United States these past four years have been a terrible aberration that has caused only barely reparable damage to America at home and abroad. They trace the history of neoconservatism, and in doing so distinguish between the original neocons who helped guide American foreign policy in the Reagan years, for whom they have evident regard, and the current crowd, for whom they are seething with derision and contempt. They regard today's neocons as intellectually inferior, apparently lacking the cultural range and philosophical reach of their forefathers.
Halper and Clarke are not unsympathetic to the basic goals of the neocons, and they do not repeat the more fanciful critiques popular in the European press about the power lust of this shadowy group. As Reagan enthusiasts, they acknowledge the beneficial transformative power of U.S. foreign policy, and they do not disdain the value of a bit of American moral clarity in a dangerously relativistic world.
But they do assert that the neocons in and around the Bush Administration failed to learn the basic lessons of Ronald Reagan's successful Cold War approach: Know the limitations of direct U.S. action, and secure the support of allies in any endeavor to promote the ideals of freedom. Their simplistic assumptions about the universal appeal of democracy are as ill matched to the realities of politics as was their misplaced faith in the power of the U.S. military to effect and sustain regime change.
Given the evident intellectual shortcomings of the neocons in these accounts, how on earth did they manage to drive U.S. foreign policy in their direction in the Bush Administration? According to Halper and Clarke, the secret of the neocons' success was the use of the levers that all powerful Washington special interest groups control--access through influential think tanks to the key policymaking positions of the administration and above all control of the mass media. With the help of powerful friends and fellow-travelers in television and the press--Fox News, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page--the neocons were able to shift the terms of public debate in their direction.
There is a whiff of McCarthyism at times in some of this. But the question of how the neocons grabbed control of the reins of policy in the Bush term is worth focusing on in detail, because it highlights the weakness in all these accounts of the neocon ascendancy. Not a single senior member of the Bush Administration can be described as a member of the fraternity. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice are better thought of as assertive nationalists. They may share the neocons' faith in American power, but they are highly skeptical about using that power for the risky business of establishing democracies of questionable value to U.S. interests. How then did they come to embrace the principal neocon cause, the invasion of Iraq and the attempt to remake the political map of the Middle East?
The answer, which Buchanan ignores, and Halper and Clarke only allude to, is that the circumstances in which U.S. foreign policy was being made by 2001 had changed completely--not just in the obvious sense by the events of September 11, but more importantly by the transformed conditions of U.S. military and political strength in the world at the turn of the millennium. That transformation changed minds in a foreign policy field far broader than the neocon cabal.
Pinning down neoconservatism is not as easy as its detractors claim. Its roots are complex. Indeed, the notion that there is, as in Marxism, a single neoconservative philosophical approach is surely a myth.
Some early neocons hailed from mid-20th-century political philosophy departments in a few select universities. Men such as Leo Strauss, Albert Wohlstetter, Allan Bloom and Irving Kristol were dismayed by the grip of moral relativism on America's institutions of learning. Others, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, came at the subject from a more practical angle: disillusionment in the power of social and economic progressivism and egalitarianism in the 1960s. Still others, like Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA) gravitated to the cause as the Democratic party turned its back on America's Cold War challenges after Vietnam.
All of these men were marked by their opposition to the moral relativism of their age and by a moral approach to government, which they saw as a celebration of the defining value of American democracy. The "neo" prefix was a literal testimony to the recent nature of their conversion, such as that of the formerly Trotskyist Kristol, but it was also a symbol of their recasting of traditional conservative thought into a more dynamic and activist philosophy. "A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality", is Kristol's now familiar description.
As the Vietnam Syndrome took hold of America, conservative mistrust of the neocons was evident. Buchanan himself notes that the neocons have always been willing to reach accommodations with non-conservatives. In the 1970s their first choice for president was not the reliably Republican revolutionary Ronald Reagan, but Scoop Jackson. When Jackson declined to take up their banner, neocons flocked to Reagan, enhancing suspicion that they were Johnny-come-latelys to the conservative cause.
But with Reagan's victory in 1980, neocons began to translate their philosophical critiques into governing practice. People like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, and Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon were all associated with the hawkish strategy of the Reagan years towards the Soviet Union.
Buchanan and Halper and Clarke are quite correct in pointing out that today's neocons differ in important respects from the Reagan hawks. For one thing, the early Reagan version did not pursue an unstinting commitment to the universal application of democracy around the world. Indeed, Kirkpatrick first came to the attention of Ronald Reagan after he read her famous 1979 critique of Jimmy Carter in a Foreign Affairs article entitled, "Democracy and Double Standards." In it she castigated Carter for insisting on democratic reforms in countries that were allied to the United States in the Cold War. For the Reagan-era neocons, the emphasis was on defeating communism. If that required some temporary alliances with some unappealing dictators like the Shah of Iran, then so be it. This is strikingly different from today's neoconservative view that the United States can only be safe if democracy is encouraged everywhere, especially in the Middle East.
Foreign policy perceptions of America's proper role and capabilities evolved rapidly. The lessons most observers (not just those on the Right) drew from the Reagan years was the efficacy of military strength and the significance of America's steady ascendancy. That was reinforced in 1991, after the Gulf War, when the United States crushed Iraqi forces. It was also that war that frustrated many neoconservatives and others, including Britain's Margaret Thatcher, believing as they did that the United States should have completed the task and toppled Saddam Hussein then.
In the early 1990s, however, neocons could still speak convincingly of the unipolar moment. By the time the George W. Bush Administration took office, the neocons had high hopes of real influence. Even so, they could not count one of their number among the foreign policy principals in the administration--not Cheney nor Powell nor Rice nor Rumsfeld. At the secondary level of deputies, neocons did hold some influential positions: Wolfowitz at the Pentagon, Steve Hadley at the National Security Council, Lewis "Scooter" Libby in the Vice President's office. But there were few signs before September 11 that they were able to convert this influence into serious policy initiatives.
In those early months the neoconservatives were preoccupied principally with China and believed that a confrontation with Beijing was inevitable. But when a U.S. surveillance plane was brought down by unfriendly Chinese attention in April 2001, the administration backed off, leaving many neocons frustrated at what they saw as a U.S. humiliation.
Certainly there were some victories for the neocon belief in the right of the United States to act unilaterally. The Kyoto Protocol on global warming was rejected, and the United States withdrew its signature from the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court. But Halper and Clarke and Buchanan are surely not right in suggesting there was much evidence that the administration was moving towards the neocons' hard-line position on Iraq at that time.
After September 11, the entire stance of U.S. policy changed. An attack on Iraq was ruled out initially, but it was soon clear that it had only been deferred. But does this mean that the neocons had suddenly become ascendant in the uppermost counsels of the administration?
To answer that we need to look at the other players in the administration. Here, James Mann has written the one truly indispensable account of the construction of Bush foreign policy. His historical narrative of the major foreign policy figures in the Bush Administration: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, explains how the thinking of these very different political figures steadily converged over decades.
Mann argues that for Cheney and others--like Rumsfeld and even Powell, neither of whom could ever be described as neoconservatives--the Iraq War was consistent with their own belief in the efficacy of U.S. power. That belief had built steadily over three decades or more in policymaking. They came of political age in an era when the United States steadily restored its global ascendancy after the catastrophe of Vietnam, and grew in military power and self-confidence.
By the late 1990s much of what the neocons had been saying about the proper exercise and scope of U.S. power had already been accepted, even by the Clinton Administration, which went to war in the Balkans largely for moral and humanitarian reasons--and for which it was enthusiastically applauded by neoconservatives (though not most conservatives, including Buchanan). The Kosovo War, moreover, was fought without the United Nations' authorization that the neocons' critics seem to believe is essential.
Indeed, as Mann astutely points out, it was the often unhappy experiences with allies in these crises that created the steadily broadening consensus in the United States in favor of dissolving many of the bonds of multilateralism. Thus, when the United States dismissed aid from other nato countries (except Britain) for the Afghan campaign after September 11, it was the uniformed military--not hard-line, unilateralist neocon civilians--who declined the offer.
Clinton also initially rejected some other multilateral constraints, dismissing the International Criminal Court (although he would disingenuously sign the treaty a few weeks before leaving office, knowing it would never pass the Senate). He also pressed ahead with missile defense plans despite the obvious confrontation it would eventually provoke with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
In sum, by the time George W. Bush came to office, the steady accretion of U.S. military power and success, its political and economic reach, and the mirrored decline in other countries' power were established facts that gradually emboldened foreign policy thinkers of all persuasions to take a more skeptical view towards global political constraints on American action. It was Madeleine Albright, no less, Clinton's secretary of state, who famously asked Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "What's the point of having this great army of yours if you're never going to use it?" If you believed in the overwhelming virtue of U.S. power, as most people did by 2001, the case for action was persuasive. If you could topple hideous regimes like Saddam Hussein's and remove threats, even if they seemed remote, why wouldn't you?
Neocons did not reject multilateral activity for the sake of it, nor did they wholly reject any notion of seeking global legitimacy for U.S. action. They believed, on the contrary, that such legitimacy would be bestowed retrospectively, in the light of military and political success. This was the Field of Dreams approach to foreign policy: "If you build it, they will come." If the United States wielded its might successfully, in the end the world would see it was right and would want to associate with Washington.
The September 11 attacks added a new element to the mix. The United States had an overwhelming military advantage but had suddenly been humbled by 19 men with box cutters and one-way plane tickets. You didn't have to be bamboozled by neoconservative "deceptions" to accept the changed conditions that made broad U.S. action against perceived threats attractive.
This is not to say that the Bush Administration's approach to Iraq in late 2002 was accepted on all sides. But the circumstances of the previous 25 years meant that those who were skeptical about the wisdom of such action were up against the powerful examples of recent history: the Cold War, the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the easy U.S. hegemony these experiences seemed to point to.
The ascendancy of neoconservatives in the Bush Administration, then--if indeed it can be called that--was not some twisted, un-American aberration, as its critics contend. The neocon case was rooted in the major traditions of U.S. foreign policy: morally assertive, internationalist, forceful, and seen in a new, post-Cold War light. So the question now is not how to mend the damage from these years of neocon recklessness, but whether the assumptions on which U.S. policy has been based for several years now may be proved false by events in Iraq. Have the setbacks there so weakened the reality of U.S. power that U.S. self-confidence, which has been waxing steadily for a quarter of a century since Vietnam, may now be on the wane? Was the Bush Administration's decision to fight terrorism by focusing hard on its state sponsors and the broader political conditions that give rise to it, rather than on the narrower target of the terrorists themselves, misdirected? Is conventional U.S. military superiority of little use when confronting this new threat?
If the Bush Administration fails to pacify Iraq and faces growing terrorist threats from non-state actors elsewhere, the assumptions of the neocons and many other foreign policy specialists besides will need to be revisited. But the neocons were not primarily responsible for the conditions that gave rise to the judgments made by the Bush Administration's policymakers: The unchallenged assumption of U.S. supremacy was.
Essay Types: Book Review