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What is a neo-conservative
anyway?
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - With all the attention paid to
neo-conservatives in the international media nowadays,
one would think that there would be a standard
definition of the term. Yet, despite their now being
credited with a virtual takeover of US foreign policy
under President George W Bush, a common understanding of
the term remains elusive.
In this context, it
may be useful to offer some description of their basic
tenets and origin, if for no other reason than to
distinguish them from other parts of the ideological
coalition behind the administration's neo-imperialist
trajectory; namely, the traditional Republican
machtpolitikers (might makes right), such as Vice
President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld, and the Christian Rightists, such as
Attorney-General John Ashcroft, Gary Bauer and Pat
Robertson.
As neo-con godfather, Irving Kristol
once remarked, a neo-conservative is a "liberal who was
mugged by reality". True to that description,
neo-conservatives generally originated on the left side
of the political spectrum and some times from the far
left. Many neo-cons, such as Kristol himself, have
Trotskyite roots that are still reflected in their
polemical and organizational skills and ideological
zeal.
Although a number of prominent Catholics
are neo-conservatives, the movement remains
predominantly Jewish, and the monthly journal that
really defined neo-conservatism over the past 35 years,
Commentary, is published by the American Jewish
Committee. At the same time, however, neo-conservative
attitudes have reflected a minority position within the
US Jewish community as most Jews remain distinctly
liberal in their political and foreign policy views.
Neo-conservative foreign policy positions, which
have their origin in opposition to the "new left" of the
1960s, fears over a return to US isolationism during the
Vietnam War and the progressive international isolation
of Israel in the wake of wars with its Arab neighbors in
1967 and 1973, have been tactically very flexible over
the past 35 years, but their key principles have
remained the same.
They begin with the basic foreign
policy realism found in the pessimistic views of human
nature and international diplomacy of the English
political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, that neo-cons
share with most US practitioners: that "the condition of
man [in a state of nature] ... is a condition of war of
everyone against everyone." Or, as Machiavelli, another
favorite thinker of the neo-cons, wrote, "Men are more
ready for evil than for good."
But neo-cons take
"man's" capacity for evil particularly seriously, and
for understandable reasons. For neo-conservatives, the
Nazi Holocaust that killed some 6 million Jews during
World War II is the seminal experience of the 20th
century. Not only was it a genocide unparalleled in its
thoroughness, the Holocaust also wiped out family
members of hundreds of thousands of Jewish citizens in
the United States, including, for example, close
relatives of the parents of Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz.
For neo-conservatives, as for
most Jews, the Holocaust represents absolute evil, and
the factors which contributed to the rise of Adolf
Hitler in Germany and the subsequent extermination of
Jews must be fought at all costs.
"The defining
moment in our history was certainly the Holocaust,"
Richard Perle, a key neo-con and leading advocate of war
with Iraq, recently told BBC's Panorama. "It was the
destruction, the genocide of a whole people, and it was
the failure to respond in a timely fashion to a threat
that was clearly gathering. We don't want that to happen
again, and when we have the ability to stop totalitarian
regimes we should do so, because when we fail to do so,
the results are catastrophic," he said.
For
neo-conservatives, the 1938 Munich agreement, under
which Hitler was permitted by Britain and France to take
over Czechoslovakia, is the epitome of appeasement that
led directly to the Holocaust. As a result, Munich and
appeasement are constantly invoked in their rhetoric as
a way to summon up the will to resist and defeat the
enemy of the day. Hence, almost every conflict in which
the United States has been engaged since the late 1960s
- from Vietnam to Central America to Yugoslavia to the
"war on terror" in Iraq and against al-Qaeda - has been
portrayed as a new Munich in which the enemy represents
a threat virtually on a par with Hitler.
The
resulting worldview tends to Manichaeism - the notion
that the world consists of a permanent struggle between
the forces of good and evil, light and dark (an idea
which incidentally accords very well both with the
thinking of the Christian Right, not to mention of Bush
himself). As Michael Ledeen, a close collaborator of
Perle's at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) told
the same BBC program, "I know the struggle against evil
is going to go on forever."
Three major factors
are seen as having contributed to the Holocaust: the
failure of the liberal Weimar Republic in Germany to
prevent the Nazis' rise; "appeasement"; and US
isolationism that kept Washington from intervening in
World War II earlier.
Although neo-cons profess
devotion to liberal democracy, they have never hesitated
to assail "liberalism", or what they sometimes call with
their Christian Right allies "secular humanism", whose
relativism, in their view, can lead to "a culture of
appeasement", nihilism or worse. Thus, even while
supposedly defending "liberal" and democratic ideals,
their attitude is at best ambivalent.
Appeasement is prevented, in their view, by a
powerful military capable of defeating any foe, the
constant anticipation of new threats, and the
willingness to preempt them. Thus, neo-cons have
consistently favored big defense budgets, a stance
shared by the right-wing machtpolitikers with
whom they formed an alliance in the 1970s to end detente
with Moscow. In their view, peace is to be distrusted,
and peace processes are inherently suspect. "Peace
doesn't come from a 'process'," wrote Wall Street
Journal editorial writer Robert Pollock last year in a
column that denounced the 1990s as a "decade of
appeasement".
In this view, war is a natural
state, and peace is a Utopian dream which induces
softness, decadence and pacifism embodied by Bill
Clinton whose "corruption of the national mission,
combined with the myth that peace is normal, produces a
solvent strong enough to dissolve the strength of our
armed forces and the integrity of our political and
military leaders", Ledeen wrote in 2000.
Similarly, enemies cannot be negotiated with.
"Before the US can worry about rebuilding Iraq, it has
to win militarily, and decisively so," the Journal wrote
just before the war. "... Arab cultures despise weakness
in an adversary above all," a refrain familiar to past
neo-con descriptions of the Soviet Union, China, and
other geo-political foes.
Finally, US engagement
in world affairs is absolutely indispensable in
preventing catastrophe, according to neo-con ideology
which, in the words of another Perle intimate, Ken
Adelman, sees "isolationism [as] the default option" in
US foreign policy. Indeed, many neo-cons, fearing that
the Cold War's end would revive isolationism, spent most
of the 1990s hawking policies designed to maintain
Washington's international engagement, even if that
meant supporting Clinton when he deployed troops abroad.
Why? If evil is embodied by Hitler and similar
threats, the United States comes as close to moral
goodness as can be found in the world today, according
to the neo-cons. "Since America's emergence as a world
power roughly a century ago," Elliott Abrams, another
prominent neo-con who currently serves as the top Middle
East policymaker on Bush's National Security Council,
wrote in a Commentary colloquium in 2000, "we have made
many errors, but we have been the greatest force for
good among the nations of the Earth. A diminution of
American power or influence bodes ill for our country,
our friends, and our principles''.
Thus, US
intervention abroad, as in Iraq, is seen in the best
possible light. Michael Kelly, a Washington Post
columnist who died in an accident during the Iraq
campaign, assured his readers last October that, "what
President Bush aspires to now, is not exactly
imperialism. It is something more like armed
evangelism".
The moral goodness of the US is
beyond question and justifies - indeed requires - a
unilateralist policy lest, by subjecting its will to the
wishes or agreements of other countries or international
institutions, the US would actually prevent itself from
fulfilling its moral mission.
This notion - that
Washington would taint itself morally by working through
multilateral institutions or tying itself to alliances
with lesser countries - is certainly not unique to
neo-conservatives. It has been around since George
Washington warned the country in his Farewell Address
against "entangling alliances" with European powers.
But the neo-conservatives have tried hard to
reinforce this idea. Thus, in an attack on the UN
Security Council this year, Perle argued, "This is a
dangerously wrong idea that leads inexorably to handing
great moral and even existential politico-military
decisions, to the likes of Syria, Cameroon, Angola,
Russia, China, and France." It echoes a refrain
delivered by Post columnist Charles Krauthammer 15 years
ago about the UN, "Let it sink," he wrote. "It is
corrupting."
This sense of US moral superiority
applies especially to what is now called "Old Europe",
much as it was in US foreign policy until Washington's
entry into World War II. Thus, Kelly, again writing
about US imperial altruism: "Unlike the European powers,
the United States has never sought to own the world. In
its peculiarly American fashion, it has sought to make
the world behave better, indeed be better."
Similarly, during much of 2002, countless
neo-con columns and editorials in the Post, the Wall
Street Journal and the neo-con The Weekly Standard
(edited by Irving Kristol's son, William) cited a wave
of attacks against Jewish targets across Europe, almost
all of them carried out by Muslim immigrants or their
children, as evidence of a resurgent anti-Semitism
distinctly reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s. "The
whole of Europe is sick," wrote Paul Johnson, an English
neo-con, in the Journal, while, in one of his milder
remarks, Perle accused Europe of losing its "moral
compass" over Iraq. Robert Kagan's much-celebrated
depiction of Europeans being from Venus and Americans
from Mars is an even milder version of the same basic
worldview: compared to forthright, masculine Americans,
Europeans are passive, decadent and unwilling to stand
up for what is right.
Washington's moral
superiority, however, combined with the possibly
"catastrophic" results of failing to confront
Munich-type threats, also justifies a range of
extraordinary responses which, under other
circumstances, might be morally questionable, according
to the neo-con view. In particular, temporary alliances
with other countries or movements whose own ideologies
or practices may be morally reprehensible can be
defended if they are used to fight a greater evil.
"In World War II, we were allied for three years
and eight months with history's greatest murderer -
Joseph Stalin - because we had a more immediate problem,
Adolf Hitler," said former Central Intelligence Agency
head James Woolsey, at an AEI briefing, in defending
tactical flexibility. Similarly, neo-cons were unabashed
about their support for "authoritarian" governments
during the Cold War in the face of the greater
"totalitarian" threat of Soviet communism, described by
long-time Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz in 1976 as
nothing less than "the most determined, ferocious and
barbarous [enemy] ever to have appeared on the Earth".
The readiness to make tactical alliances has
extended even to anti-Semitic governments and movements,
such as the neo-Nazi military junta in Argentina. The
regime was strongly defended by the elder Kristol, while
neo-cons in the Ronald Reagan administration, such as
Abrams and then-UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, worked
to reverse the regime's diplomatic isolation and restore
US and multilateral aid that had been cut off by
previous president Jimmy Carter. The embrace was
motivated primarily by the desire for Argentine
cooperation in Central America, as was the neo-cons'
strong support for then-Nicaraguan Archbishop Miguel
Obando y Bravo despite his public stated beliefs that
the Jews were punished for killing Jesus Christ.
If anti-Semitism can be tolerated under some
circumstances, however, the security of Israel remains a
fundamental tenet of neo-conservatives who traditionally
supported whatever Israeli government was in power but,
since 1993 and the Oslo peace accords, became much more
closely identified with the views of the right-wing
Likud Party, which opposed the agreement. The
neo-conservative identification with Israel can be
explained in part by its predominantly Jewish
membership, but Christian neo-conservatives very much
share the sense that a strategic alliance with Israel
constitutes a moral imperative in the post-Holocaust
era. As Catholic neo-con William Bennett wrote in a
recent book, "America's fate and Israel's fate are one
and the same."
This commitment to Israel also
explains the willingness of Jewish neo-cons to overlook
the anti-Semitism of their Christian Right allies, whose
own identification with Israel is based on a "Christian
Zionist" reading of Biblical scripture that recognizes a
God-given right of the Jews to what both religions
consider the "Holy Land", at least until the Apocalypse
and the Second Coming of Christ. Kristol and other
leading neo-cons have long argued that other Jews should
not be offended by this alliance. "Why would it be a
problem for us?" he wrote some years ago. "It is their
theology; but it is our Israel."
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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