The Referendum on Neoconservatism (It's already over, and the neocons won)

RARELY HAVE THE HOLDERS of any set of political views and policy preferences been so thoroughly caricatured as the "neoconservatives" of the Bush years. To critics, this group of policymakers (preeminently, in the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President), along with their allies on the outside (preeminently, in the pages of THE WEEKLY STANDARD), is responsible for a kind of hijacking of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. Intoxicated by American power and blinded by a utopian vision, the neoconservatives (in the critics' telling) set the country on a disastrous and unnecessary attempt to remake the world in the image of the United States.

And for this, come November 2004, the neoconservatives must pay. The defeat of George W. Bush by his Democratic opponent--and for purposes of the critics' argument, any Democratic opponent would do--would mean a repudiation of this neoconservative view of the world. Many Bush critics saw in Iraq a comprehensive discrediting of neoconservative policy prescriptions, including the doctrine of preemptive or preventive war, belief in the efficacy of military power in general, faith in democratization, and unilateralism. It merely remained for voters to administer the coup de grâce at the polls and the neoconservatives would be discredited once and for all.

Neocon-bashing runs the gamut from right to left and from vaguely ill-informed well-meaners to the lunatic fringe. Let it be said that there is certainly an intellectually responsible critique of neoconservative policy positions to be made, and that some have offered measured criticisms from the left (broadly speaking, from a "neoliberal" internationalist position) and from the right (broadly speaking, from the "neorealist" perspective). But what's more striking is an overwhelming continuity of tone and in many cases substance between, say, the Lyndon LaRouche websites and the George Soros empire or the anonymous sources Seymour Hersh relies on in his New Yorker articles.

This continuity begins with a sense of "neoconservatism" as a doctrine offering comprehensive policy guidance to which all "neoconservatives" adhere. The next element is the imputation to neoconservatives of a kind of cabalism, according to which they surround their true doctrine with a bodyguard of lies designed to conceal it. From this point, it is but a short step to the view that the neoconservatives are monsters, both menacing and incorrigible. And, of course, the only thing to do with a monster is to destroy it or lock it up before it destroys you.

I won't waste the time of readers of this publication with a genealogy of this nonsense or a rebuttal. I will, however, offer fellow neoconservatives a suggestion that contains a criticism. One not uncommon neoconservative response to such demonization has been to suggest that neoconservatives are not really as influential as all that: Who, me? This won't do. In point of fact, neoconservatives have sought influence for their views and have obtained it.

Partly as a result, American security strategy has undergone two major changes since the Clinton years. The first was the Bush administration's initial adoption of a sort of unilateralism that led the administration to spurn, somewhat flamboyantly, the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto accords, and the ABM treaty, among other things. This species of American self-assertiveness, which Charles Krauthammer dubbed the "Bush Doctrine" in these pages months before 9/11, was in part the product of an emerging post-Cold War consciousness of the global power position and security responsibilities of the United States. Though a doctrine of unilateralism does not follow from this understanding--other approaches are possible, and even this administration's unilateralist impulses have diminished--the underlying insight was correct and transformational. And neoconservatives certainly had a hand in its emergence, beginning a decade before (but hardly ending) with the notorious leaked study of U.S. hegemony Paul Wolfowitz produced from his Pentagon office at the end of the first Bush administration.

The second turn came after 9/11. Culminating in the promulgation of the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, it built on previous insights--many, as noted, from neoconservatives--into the scale of U.S. power and responsibility and outlined measures the United States would take to preserve its position and counter threats of the sort suggested by the 9/11 attack. Once again, neoconservatives were at the forefront of the new thinking. They shouldn't shrink from this fact. They should be proud of it.

In the National Security Strategy and in a series of presidential speeches that historians will study for their insight long after George W. Bush and the rest of us are dead, this administration, with a little help from its friends, outlined a new strategic doctrine that is going to guide national security policy for the next 50 years, regardless of who wins the 2004 election.

More or less at a stroke, the United States made several things clear: (1) It intends to do what is necessary to remain the world's foremost military power by an order of magnitude sufficient to discourage all other states from attempting to compete militarily, thereby encouraging the peaceful resolution of disputes between states. (2) The United States will hold governments responsible for what takes place with their consent within their borders: The proposition that state support for terrorists with global reach may have regime-ending consequences will discourage states from allowing terrorists to operate. (3) The nexus of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction is so dangerous that in certain instances, the United States will act preemptively or preventively against states rather than allowing threats to gather; this, in turn, will discourage some (though, alas, not necessarily all) states from the pursuit of such weapons. (4) The best way to secure the peace is through freedom and democracy, because free, democratic states want to live in peace with each other; the United States should therefore be at the forefront of the promotion of freedom and democracy.

Now, there is no getting around the fact that Iraq illustrates the complexity and difficulty of this reorientation of U.S. strategic doctrine. Would that the task before us were easier. Iraq--so, too, Afghanistan--has offered innumerable lessons, some of them quite painful. And it would surely have been possible for the Democratic candidate for president in 2004 to set up the election as a referendum on the "neoconservatives"--I revert to quotation marks because I am once again speaking of the monsters of the febrile imagination of their critics.

All that would have been necessary was for the Democratic nominee to: (1) repudiate America's position of power in the world in favor of multipolarity, encouraging others to rise by reducing American military capacity and withdrawing from existing security commitments; (2) encourage Americans to come to terms with future acts of terrorism on our soil and against our interests abroad, rather than overreacting in such a way that we cause more of what we are trying to mitigate; (3) forswear all preemptive or preventive war options as violations of international law and instead warn of consequences that will follow an attack on us, assuming we can figure out who is responsible and what their address is; (4) advocate a return to the doctrine of noninterference in the internal affairs of other states, which would entail the abandonment of any effort to promote democracy in Iraq in favor of immediate withdrawal, as well as a posture of indifference toward genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the like.

And yet for some reason John Kerry has not chosen to run on such a platform. Rather, he says he wants America to be "respected" but before that, "strong." He proposes to increase the size of the military. He says he wants a more effective war against al Qaeda. He has insisted that he holds preventive military action in reserve. He insists that in using the term "global test," he was surely not suggesting that anyone abroad would have a veto over his actions as president in defense of U.S. security. He clearly favors working with our democratic allies not just because they are allies but because they are democratic and have a valuable contribution to make to our mutual deliberations. And he is open to support for humanitarian intervention in Darfur.

George W. Bush, meanwhile, can hardly be said to have run away from his National Security Strategy, or from his support for freedom and democracy, even in the face of an extreme test in Iraq. On the contrary, he has forcefully reaffirmed its central tenets, and points to Afghanistan's first election in its history as a success. At the same time, he does not seem to be in any great hurry to topple additional governments. Prudential considerations weigh heavily.

What we have here, I submit, is not a referendum on neoconservative strategic doctrine but a question of who will best implement that doctrine going forward. The case Kerry states is against neoconservative national security policy not in principle, but as executed.

No doubt appearances can be deceiving. If Kerry wins, there is every reason to expect within his administration a protracted clash between the neorealist elements and the neoliberals. But even the neorealists aren't as neo-real as they used to be. They may favor maintaining a norm of nonintervention (what kind of neorealist wouldn't?), but they will allow for sufficient exceptions on humanitarian and, yes, preventive grounds to satisfy the interventionist impulses of the neoliberals. Equally clearly, Kerry would be every bit as multilateralist at the beginning as the Bush administration was unilateralist--until, as seems likely, he runs up against the limits of his preferred ism, as Bush did before him.

My point is not that there are no foreign policy stakes in the outcome of this election. I don't much care for John Kerry's strategic instincts as revealed over his three-and-a-half decades in public life, and I don't relish living through the learning curve his administration will have to experience.

A second Bush administration will take office having had ample opportunity to learn from mistakes. But not only from mistakes. Also from its largely successful reorientation of security strategy to deal with a very serious new threat. George W. Bush may or may not win the election. If he does, it seems unlikely in the extreme that his critics, especially the most vociferous critics of the neoconservatives, will declare that they erred and that Bush's reelection constitutes vindication for the neoconservative position. They are too in love with their fear of monsters. But win or lose, the vindication of neoconservatism has already taken place, in that the Democratic candidate in 2004 has found it impossible to run for the Oval Office on a platform of its repudiation, but rather has embraced its central strategic insights.

Contributing editor Tod Lindberg is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor of Policy Review.

The people of the southern U.S. states chose to join a nation in which slavery was legal -- a nation, by the way, that was born out of an armed separatist movement.

Slavery is an affront to the unalienable rights of some and to the freedom of all.

The southern separatists were no less legitimate than the colonial revolutionaries who overthrew the British government.

The colonial separatists fought for a higher degree of freedom. The southern separatists did not. You can't have a higher degree of freedom when one of the primary things you are fighting for is to protect slavery.

You bet the colonial separatists were more legitimate.

The Neoconservative Persuasion
From the August 25, 2003 issue of the Weekly Standard: What it was, and what it is.
by Irving Kristol (Excerpts)

Even I, frequently referred to as the "godfather" of all those neocons, have had my moments of wonderment. A few years ago I said (and, alas, wrote) that neoconservatism had had its own distinctive qualities in its early years, but by now had been absorbed into the mainstream of American conservatism. I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that, ever since its origin among disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s, what we call neoconservatism has been one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently. It is not a "movement," as the conspiratorial critics would have it. Neoconservatism is what the late historian of Jacksonian America, Marvin Meyers, called a "persuasion," one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.

Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the "American grain." It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked.

But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on "the road to serfdom." Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable.

People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today's America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not. Though they find much to be critical about, they tend to seek intellectual guidance in the democratic wisdom of Tocqueville, rather than in the Tory nostalgia of, say, Russell Kirk.

Although neoconservatism and traditional conservatism overlap in many areas, the above quotes make it clear that there is a profound difference between the two.

For another perspective, with which I agree, see Victor Davie Hanson:

By any historical standard, the Bush doctrine is working. In just over three years, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein have been eradicated. Consensual societies are starting to emerge in their place. Syria and Iran are jittery, fearing new global scrutiny over their longstanding, but heretofore excused, terrorist sympathies. Libya and Pakistan have flipped, renouncing much of their past villainy. Saudi Arabia and the other autocracies of the Gulf region feel the new pressure of American idealism. For all their vocal resentment, strategically critical sheikdoms are inching toward political reform and terrorist-hunting

Before you point out the evident inconsistencies in these positions, let me hasten to observe that the "threat" of effecting regime change in Iran or North Korea, for example, is no longer very credible, even if Bush wins and this come from the historical fluke of finding no WMDs and the shameful politicization of the war by the libs. See Hanson again:

BUSH'S PROBLEMS

Bush's popularity problems, however, are threefold, and explain the present divisions in this country over the war. First, this is an election year in the postmodern age. Two- and three-minute media streams from the battlefield are delivered with amateurish editorializing in real time to American living rooms, and are then recycled as political soundbites. Given both the wealth and security of American society, and the spectacular ability of our military to defeat enemies at minimal costs, Americans have come to claim as their birthright automatic victory without casualties. To a country that lost hundreds an hour at the Bulge and Iwo Jima, 1,000 fatalities in three years to liberate 50 million people 7,000 miles away might seem an amazing achievement; but 60 years later, voters of a far richer society, inundated with political commercials showing the missing limbs or flag-draped coffins of a few, are told that any sacrifice is tantamount to failure. We have forgotten that in war there are always setbacks like looting, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, or the rise of a Zarqawi — but that the key is determining to what degree such reversals impair the overall success of the war. So far in Iraq, they simply do not, despite the media sensationalism.

Third, after the meteoric rise of Howard Dean's boutique antiwar campaign in the Democratic primary season, both John Kerry and John Edwards retracted their prior Trumanesque bipartisan support of the war. Instead they sensed political capital in equating daily images of Americans killed with everything from alleged Halliburton profiteering to tax cuts for the wealthy. Their efforts have been energized by millions of dollars in third-party contributions, and sensationalized by the American elite in the arts, universities, and media, who are as culturally influential as they are politically weak and envious.

http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson102604.html

Slavery is an affront to the unalienable rights of some and to the freedom of all.

If this were the reason why the Union wanted to outlaw slavery, then you'd have a point. And if this statement were true, then the Union had no business allowing it in the first place. Abraham Lincoln even stated that the basis of Civil War was the preservation of the Union, not the elimination of slavery.

For all intents and purposes, the United States as the colonial separatists envisioned it no longer existed by the time 1860 rolled around. I have often made the case that the United States really only lasted a few years -- until the events that culminated in the Whiskey Rebellion in the early 1790s made it clear that the U.S. government was really not all that much different than the British crown.

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