The rise and decline of the
neo-cons By Jim Lobe and
Michael Flynn
Shortly after the September
11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States,
an influential, neo-conservative-led pressure
group called the Project for the New American
Century issued a letter to the president calling
for a dramatic reshaping of the Middle East as
part of the "war on terror".
Although many
of the items on the neo-conservatives' agenda,
including ousting Iraqi president Saddam Hussein,
were eventually adopted by George W Bush's
administration, the group's
remarkable string of successes
has gradually given way to a steady decline,
culminating most recently in the president's
decision after this month's mid-term elections to
replace defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, an
important erstwhile ally of the neo-conservatives,
with Robert Gates.
This essay examines the
rise and decline of the neo-conservatives and
their post-Cold War agenda. We conclude that
although the neo-conservatives and their allied
aggressive nationalists, such as Vice President
Dick Cheney, retain sufficient weight to hamper
efforts to push through major reversals in US
foreign policy, the increasing isolation of this
political faction coupled with recent political
events in the United States point to the potential
emergence of a more cautious, realist-inspired
agenda during the final two years of the Bush
presidency.
On September 20, 2001, a mere
nine days after the al-Qaeda attacks in the United
States, the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC), a then-obscure neo-conservative-led
think-tank in Washington, DC, located in the same
building as the better-known American Enterprise
Institute (AEI), published an open letter to Bush
advocating a number of steps the administration
should take in its newly proclaimed "war on
terrorism".
The letter, published in the
Washington Times and The Weekly Standard, urged
military action to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan
and to "capture or kill" Osama bin Laden, both
recommendations widely supported by virtually all
US political leaders.
But the group's
suggestions did not stop there - in fact, PNAC had
an ambitious number of additional targets in mind,
which had little or no connection to the actual
terrorist attacks. Most notoriously, the letter
called for regime change in Iraq, "even if
evidence does not link Iraq directly to the
attack". The letter also proposed taking
"appropriate measures of retaliation" against Iran
and Syria if they refused to comply with US
demands to cut off support for Lebanon's
Hezbollah; argued that Washington should cut off
aid to the Palestinian Authority unless it
immediately halted the ongoing intifada against
Israel's occupation; and called for a "large
increase" in defense spending to prosecute the
"war on terror".
Some of the letter's
signers - notably, former Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey and
editor-at-large of the neo-conservative Commentary
magazine Norman Podhoretz - were soon calling this
new war "World War IV". Supporting this
breathtaking agenda were nearly 40 other
influential policy elites and public figures. The
group consisted of mostly neo-conservatives, but
also included a leader of the Christian Right,
some aggressive right-wing nationalists and some
pro-Israel liberal interventionists associated
with the Democratic Party.
A little over
six months later, PNAC released a follow-up letter
on April 3, 2002. This second letter focused
largely on US policy on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. PNAC chairman William Kristol, Weekly
Standard editor and prominent neo-conservative
scion, collected the signatures of 34 like-minded
power players, including a good slice of the
membership of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld's
Defense Policy Board (DPB).
One notable
signatory was Richard Perle, who in addition to
being the DPB chairman, an AEI resident fellow and
the chief Washington sponsor of Ahmad Chalabi, is
one of the most powerful neo-conservatives of his
generation.
The letter urged Bush to sever
all ties with the Palestine Liberation
Organization's (PLO's) Yasser Arafat and to "lend
full support to Israel as it seeks to root out the
terrorist network that daily threatens the lives
of Israeli citizens". Said the letter: "Mr
President, it can no longer be the policy of the
United States to urge, much less to pressure,
Israel to continue negotiating with Arafat, any
more than we would be willing to be pressured to
negotiate with Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar." It
added: "Israel's fight against terrorism is our
fight. Israel's victory is an important part of
our victory." For good measure, the letter
reiterated PNAC's call "for removing Saddam
Hussein from power".
A little over a year
after the publication of these letters, PNAC's
agenda seemed to be rapidly advancing. Not only
had the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies been
ousted from Afghanistan by December 2001, but the
Bush administration had in June 2002 reversed
long-standing US policy and severed all contact
with the PLO's Arafat, declaring that Washington
would only deal with Palestinian leaders who were
"not compromised by terror". Washington, in
effect, was aligning itself fully behind the Likud
government in Israel led by prime minister Ariel
Sharon.
By early April 2003, the US
military had conquered Baghdad. On May 1, Bush
declared the end of major hostilities in Iraq in
his memorable "Mission Accomplished" speech.
Senior administration officials and their
neo-conservative associates at the DPB, AEI, PNAC
and elsewhere soon began publicly warning that
Syria and Iran were next on their list.
"The liberation of Iraq was the first
great battle for the future of the Middle East,"
wrote Kristol in the Standard in early May 2003.
"The next great battle - not, we hope, a military
battle - will be for Iran. We are already in a
death struggle with Iran over the future of Iraq."
Within two weeks, the administration had
spurned an unprecedented offer from Iran to
negotiate all outstanding differences between the
two nations, including its nuclear program and its
support for armed anti-Israel groups, in exchange
for security guarantees. The Bush administration
also broke off all diplomatic contacts with
Tehran, including until-then fruitful talks on
stabilizing Afghanistan, after accusing Iran of
harboring al-Qaeda militants allegedly linked to a
series of bombings in Saudi Arabia. The
neo-conservatives were euphoric; their agenda had
not only become policy, but their vision of a "new
American Century" seemed well on its way to
becoming reality.
The euphoria lasted
through most of that summer, until it became
increasingly clear that the administration's
optimistic assumptions about its lightning
military victory in Iraq and its consequences on
the rest of the Middle East - and on the rest of
the world - proved profoundly mistaken. In a book
released in late 2003, Perle and co-author David
Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, recognized that
the neo-conservative agenda had lost momentum and
was increasingly under threat.
But the
difficulties, in their view, were a result not so
much of the actions of foreign actors, such as the
effective and totally unanticipated Sunni
insurgency, but rather attempts by the "realists"
in the State Department and the CIA, and by senior
retired and active-duty military officers, to
change the approach in Iraq and elsewhere in the
region. Perle and Frum lamented: "We can feel the
will to win ebbing in Washington; we sense the
reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and
denial." [1]
Within a few short years, the
neo-conservatives, [2] a small group of
self-described "public intellectuals", and their
allies among aggressive nationalists and the
Christian Right had succeeded in setting a radical
new foreign policy agenda, inaugurating a new era
in US relations with the rest of the world. And
then they began to stumble.
From the
Gulf War to September 11 The ostensible
"success" of the PNAC agenda through mid-2003
represented a union of two distinct, though
mutually reinforcing, agendas that had been laid
out by the neo-conservatives and their various
supporters during the decade before the first
presidency of George W Bush.
Shortly after
the end of the Cold War, neo-conservatives began
developing a number of ideas aimed at keeping the
US militarily engaged and dominant in the world.
The emerging ideas supported a hegemonic global
strategy that had at its core two main elements:
ensuring global US preeminence, and radically
altering the Middle East to ensure a particular
vision of Israel security.
These ideas
were initially spelled out in two documents, one
drafted by senior Pentagon officials in the
aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, the other by a
small group of hardline neo-conservatives with
close ties to Israel's Likud Party. The first, a
draft of the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG),
which was leaked to the New York Times and
Washington Post in the spring of 1992, offered a
blueprint for maintaining US solo-superpower
status, prompting one Democratic critic, Senator
Joseph Biden, to criticize it as "literally a Pax
Americana".
The second, a 1996 report
entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm," was a short memorandum
prepared for incoming Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. It laid out an Israeli
strategy toward the Middle East that could
dramatically shift the regional balance of power
in Israel's favor, allowing it to "break away"
from the Oslo peace process and effectively impose
whatever terms it wished for a final settlement
with the Palestinians and its other Arab
neighbors. While much of the paper focused on the
destabilization of Syria, the first step in the
proposed strategy called for the ouster of Saddam
and his replacement by a pro-Western government.
These two strategies were ultimately
embraced by the same coalition of hawks
(neo-conservatives, aggressive nationalists and
the Christian Right) that later coalesced around
PNAC in the late-1990s. In turn, the strategies
helped to set the course of US foreign policy
immediately after September 11, when a US
president with virtually no international
experience or curiosity was grasping for an
appropriately dramatic - perhaps even messianic -
response to the trauma that had just befallen the
nation.
1992 Draft Defense Planning
Guidance The DPG is a regularly updated
classified Pentagon policy document that outlines
US military strategies and provides a framework
for developing the defense budget. After the Gulf
War, the task of developing the new DPG, the first
since the end of the Cold War, was given to
then-under secretary of defense for policy Paul
Wolfowitz and his chief aide, I Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, two of the few neo-conservatives who had
held posts in the administration of the elder
president Bush.
Their draft guidance
called for a post-Cold War world in which the US
would act as the ultimate guarantor of peace and
security and commit itself to "deterring potential
competitors from even aspiring to a larger
regional or global role". (Other contributors
included influential Pentagon officials Zalmay
Khalilzad, J D Crouch and Andrew Marshall, as well
as Perle and RAND Corporation founder Albert
Wohlstetter.)
The draft guidance called
for a global order in which US military
intervention would become a "constant fixture" and
Washington would rely on "ad hoc assemblies"
(later known as "coalitions of the willing") to
enforce its will, rather than on the UN Security
Council. (Despite having authorized US military
action in the first Gulf War, the Security Council
was not mentioned in the draft guidance.)
These ad hoc coalitions would be directed
above all at preempting - either through co-option
or confrontation - potential rivals from
challenging US hegemony and at preventing rogue
states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction
(WMD), particularly in "regions critical to the
security of the United States and its allies,
including Europe, East Asia, the Middle East and
Southwest Asia and the territory of the former
Soviet Union".
When the draft DPG was
leaked to the press, it provoked a storm of
controversy. Democrats charged that the strategy
would bankrupt the nation and transform it into a
"global policeman", involving it in wars without
end. Other top officials in the realist-dominated
administration of George H W Bush, endeavoring in
the wake of the Gulf War to reassure the world
that Washington would accept constraints on its
freedom of action, quickly disavowed its contents.
According to some reports, Wolfowitz and Libby
were nearly fired as a result of the controversy
but were rescued by their boss, then-secretary of
defense Dick Cheney, who agreed to substantially
tone down the document in its final form.
But the draft DPG and its core ideas did
not entirely disappear. Cheney himself was
impressed by the document, reportedly commending
Khalilzad, the draft's principal author, for
"discover[ing] a new rationale for our role in the
world". Washington Post columnist Charles
Krauthammer was also impressed. "What's the
alternative?" he asked. "The alternative is
Japanese carriers patrolling the Strait of Malacca
and a nuclear Germany dominating Europe."
For Krauthammer and other neo-conservative
cadre, the DPG's vision of a "unipolar" world not
only made sense, now that the Soviet Union was
history, but also constituted a strategic and
moral necessity - one that was elaborated several
years later by PNAC. The draft DPG would
ultimately come to serve as the broad framework
for forging a new consensus embraced by
neo-conservatives (like Libby and Perle),
aggressive nationalists (like Cheney, Rumsfeld and
John Bolton), as well as key allies among the
Christian Right, and even some liberal
interventionists within the Democratic Party.
An early reaffirmation of some of the
ideas contained in the draft DPG came in 1996,
when William Kristol and Robert Kagan published a
notable essay, entitled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite
Foreign Policy", in Foreign Affairs magazine.
Kristol and Kagan, both second-generation
neo-conservatives (William is the son of
neo-conservative founder Irving Kristol and Robert
the son of Donald Kagan), extolled a philosophy of
"national greatness" and called for the United
States to exercise nothing less than "benevolent
global hegemony".
US hegemony, the authors
boldly asserted, would be "based on the
understanding that [America's] moral goals and its
fundamental national interests are almost always
in harmony". The essay, which was aimed primarily
at countering a growing isolationist trend that
had developed in the Republican-led Congress,
called, among other things, for Washington to
pursue an overall strategy for "containing,
influencing and ultimately seeking to change the
regime in Beijing", reflecting both the chronic
neo-conservative need for an enemy against which
to mobilize public opinion and the growing
consensus among foreign policy hardliners that
China (not Japan or a German-dominated Europe)
represented the greatest threat to US hegemony in
the post-Cold War era.
In their call for
unabashed hegemony, the authors were clearly
inspired by the draft DPG, an inspiration which
was made explicit in the early publications of the
Project for the New American Century, founded by
the two authors the following year in an effort to
institutionalize the ideas espoused in their
essay.
PNAC was founded in 1997 with the
issuance of its "Statement of Principles", which
pledged "to make the case and rally support for
American global leadership". Highlighting what it
called "the essential elements of the Reagan
administration's success", namely "a strong
military" ready to meet "present and future
challenges", the statement declared: "A Reaganite
policy of military strength and moral clarity may
not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if
the United States is to build on the success of
this past century and ensure our security and
greatness in the next."
Among PNAC's 25
charter signatories were eight people who would
become senior members of the future administration
of President George W Bush, seven of whom -
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, Khalilzad,
Peter Rodman and Elliott Abrams - would play key
roles in fulfilling PNAC's agenda five years
later. Most of the others - notably Christian
Right leader Gary Bauer; former education
secretary William Bennett; DPB member Eliot Cohen;
and Center for Security Policy president Frank
Gaffney (as well as Kristol and Kagan)- would work
closely with these administration insiders in
making the public case for aggressive action,
first against the PLO's Arafat and Saddam, and
then against Syria and Iran. [3]
'A
Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the
Realm' Around the same time that Kristol
and Kagan were developing their ideas and creating
an institutional umbrella (PNAC) for like-minded
hawks, a task force of pro-Likud neo-conservatives
led by Perle at AEI and organized by the
Israel-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and
Political Studies was working on a strategy to
liberate Israel from the Oslo peace process and
the "land-for-peace" formula that had been US
policy since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
Drafted by David Wurmser with the support
of a coterie of neo-conservative consultants,
including Perle protege (and later under secretary
of defense for policy) Douglas Feith, the "Clean
Break" paper focused primarily on persuading
incoming Israeli premier Netanyahu to "destabilize
and roll back" the Ba'ath government in Syria as
the key to transforming the regional balance of
power. That goal would be more easily achieved,
the paper emphasized, if Saddam was replaced by a
pro-Western government: "Removing Saddam Hussein
from power in Iraq [is] an important Israeli
strategic objective in its own right." Wurmser,
who under Bush has held key posts in the Pentagon,
State Department and since late 2003 has served as
one of Cheney's main Middle East advisers, later
developed this theme at length in subsequent
publications.
PNAC effectively
incorporated the "Clean Break" group's Mideast
regional strategy into its early public
statements. In 1998, PNAC fired off two open
letters regarding Iraq: one to president Bill
Clinton in January, and several months later,
another to the Republican leadership of Congress.
The missives argued that the containment strategy
against Iraq was neither effective nor
sustainable. "The only way to protect the United
States and its allies from the threat of weapons
of mass destruction [is] to put in place policies
that would lead to the removal of Saddam and his
regime from power," argued the second letter.
Among the signatories to these letters
were Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rodman, Abrams,
Khalilzad, Bennett, Perle, Bolton, Woolsey and a
pair of realist-oriented foreign policy elites,
Richard Armitage and Robert Zoellick, who would
later come to regret their association with the
neo-conservatives. The two open letters on Iraq
became part of an intense neo-conservative-led
lobbying effort for change there - both Perle and
Wolfowitz played major roles in this endeavor -
which resulted in congressional passage later that
year of the Iraq Liberation Act, making "regime
change" in Iraq official US policy.
During
the years leading up to the election of George W
Bush, PNAC produced a number of other sign-on
letters and book-length publications on a wide
range of topics, including everything from the
defense of Taiwan to the need to overthrow
Slobodan Milosevic, which seem in part to have
served as tools for reaching out to other elements
of the US political landscape. Like PNAC's first
open letters, they were selectively supported by a
diverse collection of political elites. These
alliances helped legitimize PNAC's agenda-setting
activities and proved critical in drawing support
for the neo-conservative agenda in the wake of
September 11.
Bush and September 11 In the run-up to the 2000 election, PNAC
published "Rebuilding America's Defenses" and
Present Dangers, a paper and a book
designed to create a foreign policy platform for
the Republican presidential candidate. When George
W Bush won the Republican primary, however, PNAC
and its neo-conservative leaders were
disappointed: Bush had campaigned on the idea that
the US should be a "humble" global power. That
view was cultivated in candidate Bush by
Condoleezza Rice, a protege of former national
security adviser and arch-realist Brent Scowcroft.
In a 2000 article for Foreign Affairs,
Rice wrote: "The reality is that few big powers
can radically affect international peace,
stability, and prosperity." This perspective was
very much at odds with the neo-conservative
agenda. As William Kristol has said: "We didn't
have great hopes for Bush as a foreign policy
president."
But as Bush's early
appointments made clear, the neo-conservatives had
little reason to despair. His obvious deference to
Cheney gave the hawks an unusually influential
perch from which to operate, particularly after
Cheney chose Libby to be chief of an unusually
large national security staff. It was at Cheney's
suggestion that a second PNAC charter member,
Rumsfeld, was selected as secretary of defense.
Similarly, it was at Cheney's urging that
Wolfowitz - rather than secretary of state Colin
Powell's candidate, Armitage - was named deputy
secretary of defense. With strong lobbying by
Perle, Feith was given the Pentagon's policy brief
- an exceptionally influential post in the run-up
to the Iraq war - while Rodman was tapped to be
assistant secretary for international security
affairs.
As the first month of the new
presidency evolved, the key question was, whom
would Bush, a foreign policy novice, ultimately
listen to? The realists, presumably led by his
father's favorites, Rice and Powell, or the hawks,
Rumsfeld, Cheney and their mainly neo-conservative
advisers?
That there was a deep split
within the administration soon became abundantly
clear. This rift surfaced perhaps most starkly in
early March 2001 at the time of a visit from South
Korean president Kim Dae-jung, when Bush publicly
contradicted Powell's explicit support for Kim's
Sunshine Policy toward North Korea as well as for
Clinton's 1994 Agreed Framework.
The
division again emerged after the April 2001 Hainan
incident, a collision between a Chinese jet
fighter and a US spy plane that resulted in the
detention by Beijing of the US crew for 10 days on
Hainan Island. In response to Bush's statement of
regret to China for the death of the Chinese
pilot, whose craft crashed, and for the emergency
landing on Hainan, neo-conservatives loudly
berated the president for supposedly appeasing
Beijing.
Writing in the Weekly Standard,
Kristol and Kagan charged that the entire episode
was "a national humiliation" and that diplomatic
efforts to defuse the crisis led by Powell, whom
they singled out for blame, "represented a partial
capitulation, with real-world consequences".
Though Powell and the realists prevailed
in that crisis - as they generally have with
respect to relations with China since then -
September 11 would tilt the balance of power in
the administration definitively in favor of the
hawks. More than any other political faction in
the US, the neo-conservatives had prepared
themselves for just such an earth-shattering
event, allowing them to respond quickly in a way
that would suit their agenda.
As
previously discussed, just nine days after
September 11, PNAC issued its most provocative
letter, calling on the president to overthrow
Saddam "even if evidence does not link Iraq
directly to the attack".
But PNAC was not
alone in its idea that September 11 could be used
as a springboard to Mideast change. Indeed, within
hours of the attacks, Rumsfeld suggested to an
aide that September 11 could be used to justify
going after Saddam, according to declassified
notes. Yet the most vociferous proponent of going
after Iraq was Wolfowitz, who pressed the case
repeatedly at Camp David meetings during the first
critical week after the attacks.
Meanwhile, Perle convened the DPB for its
own meeting to recommend policy options.
Extraordinarily, he invited Iraqi exile Ahmed
Chalabi to take part in the highly classified
proceedings. It appears that after September 11,
the network of hawks and neo-conservatives that
had coalesced around PNAC's founding agenda had
mobilized in a highly coordinated way to fashion
the administration's response to the terrorist
attacks and rally the public behind their new
agenda.
Many of the initial steps made by
the administration on the global level during the
weeks after September 11 showed the hallmarks of
the draft DPG. Deployments of US forces were
remarkably widespread - to the Philippines,
Georgia and Djibouti - considering that the main
target of the "war on terror" was billed as
Afghanistan.
And although securing access
to military bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan
appeared substantially more relevant to routing
the Taliban from power and hunting down al-Qaeda
leaders, it also served the larger geopolitical
purpose of establishing a potentially permanent
military presence in the heart of Central Asia,
close to both China and Russia. Washington's
effective spurning of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and its declared preference for a
US-led "coalition of the willing" were both
recognizable features of the draft DPG.
Ideas from the draft guidance also made
their way into administration rhetoric shortly
after September 11, including the administration's
preoccupation with efforts by "rogue states" to
acquire WMD, which was repeated by Bush in his
January 2002 State of the Union address, when he
famously declared that Iraq, Iran and North Korea
were an "axis of evil".
Preemption also
crept into the speech; the president warned that
the United States would "not wait on events as
dangers gathered" or if other countries were
"timid in the face of terror". Just one year after
September 11, key concepts of the draft DPG became
official US policy with the publication of Bush's
first National Security Strategy in September
2002.
The hawks' regional-level plans also
began to get under way shortly after September 11,
as indicated by Rumsfeld's immediate reaction to
the attacks and Wolfowitz's exhortation during the
meetings at Camp David a few days later. Active
planning for an Iraq invasion began - at the
latest - in early 2002. Without an "off-the-shelf
military plan" about how to respond to an attack
like September 11, as reporter Bob Woodard put it
in his 2002 book Bush at War, the
administration was susceptible to ideas that
appeared to have little connection to September 11
- including ideas from "A Clean Break".
Writes journalist George Packer: "The idea
of realigning the Middle East by overthrowing
Saddam Hussein was first proposed by a group of
Jewish policy makers and intellectuals who were
close to the Likud. And when the second President
Bush looked around for a way to think about the
unchartered era that began on September 11, 2001,
there was one already available." [4]
Regime change in Iraq, if achieved in a
sufficiently dramatic and decisive fashion, would
not only transform the regional balance of power,
the thinking went, but would also assert US power
in the very heart of the Middle East,
demonstrating to both "rogue states" like Iran and
rivals like China that it could intervene
unilaterally in a resource-rich region on which
their own economies and military power depended.
While the neo-conservatives provided the
substantive policy agenda, they depended heavily
on Cheney and Rumsfeld - both aggressive
nationalists who had close and long-standing links
to the neo-conservatives going back to the Gerald
Ford administration - to manipulate the process by
which the agenda could be translated into policy.
That effort was greatly enhanced by Rice's
failure, as national security adviser, to ensure
the integrity of the traditional interagency
policymaking process, with the result that
decisions taken at meetings of the National
Security Council were often circumvented or simply
ignored, particularly by the Pentagon. As a
result, the State Department often found itself
marginalized by what Powell's chief of staff,
retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, later called a
"cabal" led by Cheney and Rumsfeld (who in turn
were supported and advised by key
neo-conservatives like Feith, Wolfowitz and
Libby).
The same network worked to
manipulate the intelligence process - both by
establishing offices to collect or review
selective raw intelligence that was sent unvetted
by professional analysts directly to the White
House and by harassing and pressuring the official
intelligence community, notably the CIA, to come
up with analyses that were consistent with the
PNAC agenda.
Meanwhile, administration
insiders and the DPB used sympathetic or credulous
media outlets - notably the Weekly Standard,
Washington Times, Fox News and the Wall Street
Journal editorial page - and reporters (such as
Judith Miller of the New York Times) to
selectively leak intelligence and threat
assessments to help rally the public behind the
war.
The rapid progress made in fulfilling
the PNAC agenda reflected the degree to which
hawks and their neo-conservative collaborators
effectively dominated US foreign policy
decision-making after September 11. Virtually
overnight, Powell and the realists had been
marginalized, while fence-sitters like Rice
gradually acquiesced or passively enabled the
process to be hijacked. By May 2003, shortly after
the invasion and just as the insurgency in Iraq
had begun to assert itself, the neo-conservatives
had reached the zenith of their power. It was
unclear, however, how long they could stay on top.
In decline? By mid-2003, it had
become clear, particularly to the military on the
ground in Iraq, that the Bush administration and
its neo-conservative allies had fundamentally
miscalculated the nature of the war that they had
pushed the country into. Instead of being seen as
the liberators of Iraq, the US military and its
allies quickly became perceived as an occupying
force that was challenged by a bitter and deeply
entrenched insurgency, fueled in part by the
de-Ba'athification program long advocated by
neo-conservatives and overseen by their key
partner, Chalabi.
The situation had so
deteriorated by autumn 2003 that Rice, whose lack
of resistance to the neo-conservative agenda
deeply disappointed Powell and other realists,
created the Iraq Stabilization Group (ISG),
centered in the National Security Council, which
aimed to reduce the Pentagon's control of key
aspects of Iraq policy. The establishment of the
ISG, which provoked a rare public tiff between
Rice and Rumsfeld, launched a process in which the
State Department and the uniformed military (as
opposed to the Pentagon's civilian leadership)
gradually assumed ever-greater control of Iraq
policy. The ISG's creation, in fact, marked not
only the beginning of the decline of the hawks'
unquestioned dominance, but also of the
neo-conservatives' influence, which continues to
fade.
The most significant reason for this
decline has clearly been the growing debacle in
Iraq, for which even Perle and other hardline
neo-conservatives now admit regret, although -
predictably - they blame administration realists
and erstwhile allies like Rumsfeld for botching
the war's implementation, rather than the original
decision to go to war. [5] By late 2004, it had
become crystal clear that the assumptions and
justifications they used to promote the war were
unfounded, if not fabricated. Not only did the
United States find no operational ties of any kind
between Saddam and al-Qaeda (let alone September
11), it also found no evidence that Saddam had
been developing WMD.
In addition, the
notion that Saddam's ouster would bring to power
moderate, pro-Western secularists was increasingly
discredited. Also debunked by reality were several
of the neo-conservatives' other pre-war
assurances, including the idea that winning in
Iraq would be a "cakewalk", as DPB member Ken
Adelman had put it; that Washington would be able
to rapidly draw down its troop strength to just
30,000 by the end of 2003; and that reconstruction
would be essentially self-financing through
projected increases in oil export earnings and the
end of UN sanctions.
Just as importantly,
the hawks' insistence that "shock and awe" in Iraq
would send a message to Iran and North Korea was
quickly undermined by the inability of US and
allied forces to defeat or even contain the
growing insurgency. US hegemony not only failed to
be "benevolent", it was also proving to be an
illusion, one that the rest of the world -
"rogues" included - did not fail to notice. As
stories about the growing violence in Iraq,
including on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the
siege of Fallujah, were broadcast,
anti-Americanism exploded throughout the Arab and
Islamic worlds. Even Israel's hawkish prime
minister, Ariel Sharon, sensing that the Iraq war
had failed to enhance his country's security as
promised by the neo-conservatives, committed
himself to ending Israel's nearly 40-year
occupation of Gaza, splitting his own Likud Party.
These failures produced debilitating
tensions - both within the hawks' coalition and
among neo-conservatives themselves - which
indirectly strengthened resurgent realists based
at the State Department. Indeed, Kristol, Kagan
and PNAC's secretariat began attacking Rumsfeld,
accusing him of being insufficiently committed to
serious "nation-building" efforts in Iraq and to
expanding the size of US land forces, especially
the army, commensurate with its growing global
responsibilities.
While the PNAC core
eventually demanded his firing, other hardline
neo-conservatives - like Perle and Gaffney -
defended the Pentagon chief. Iraq wasn't the only
issue that PNAC was dismayed over regarding the
administration.
On China, where the
realists had held a tenuous advantage since the
Hainan incident, hardliners were infuriated at
Bush's late 2003 public rebuke of Taiwanese
President Chen Shui-bian's call for a "defensive
referendum" demanding that China dismantle its
missiles aimed at the island. According to PNAC's
Kristol, Kagan and Gary Schmitt, the president was
guilty of "appeasement of a dictatorship".
Just as Sharon's disengagement plan split
the Likud Party, it also drove a wedge between the
PNAC-led coalition. Hardline neo-conservatives and
leaders of the Christian Right, who believed in a
Greater Israel, found themselves at odds with more
pragmatic neo-conservatives, like Kristol and
Kagan, as well as some of their aggressive
nationalist allies.
The split presaged a
later one that developed during 2005 and 2006
regarding the post hoc justification for the war -
democratization of the Middle East. As elections
in Iran and the Arab world - notably in Egypt,
Iraq and Palestine - confirmed the popularity of
Islamist and anti-American movements across the
region, a new debate eventually broke out between
those neo-conservatives who had championed the
democratization drive, and others, including Perle
- not to mention Sharon's government - who
believed that free and fair elections in a region
radicalized by the Iraq invasion would prove
detrimental to Israel's long-term security.
Although clearly in decline, the
neo-conservatives and other hawks were by no means
completely sidelined, particularly after Bush's
reelection in November 2004, which they regarded
as a public endorsement of the agenda they had so
successfully promoted after September 11. Also
seeming to augur well for the hawks was the
unceremonious exit of Powell immediately after the
election and his replacement by the more malleable
Rice, a trend that continued with the appointment
of Porter Goss as the new CIA director, which was
interpreted as part of an effort to overhaul an
agency that had long been at loggerheads with the
neo-conservatives and their allies.
Adding
to their confidence was Bush's soaring
pro-democracy rhetoric in his 2005 inaugural and
State of the Union addresses, both of which drew
heavily from Natan Sharansky's then recently
published book, The Case for Democracy.
Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident, was a key
right-wing leader in Sharon's Likud government and
a favorite of the neo-conservatives. Reports that
his book had become "required reading" at the
White House were lauded by neo-conservatives. "A
president who tells his advisers to go read
Sharansky is way ahead of his advisers," Perle
told an audience at the Hudson Institute.
Moreover, events in the Middle East seemed
to be going their way, at least during the first
few months of Bush's second term. The unexpectedly
smooth Iraqi elections in January 2005, the
outbreak of the "Cedar" revolution in Lebanon (and
other "color revolutions" in Georgia, Ukraine and
Kyrgyzstan), and the subsequent isolation of Syria
all were claimed by neo-conservatives as proof
that America's bold demonstration of force in the
Middle East was actually transforming the region,
if not the world.
But things were not as
rosy as they seemed. While still jubilant over
Powell's departure, the neo-conservatives suffered
a number of setbacks on the personnel front
shortly into Bush's second term. Within six months
of the inauguration, Wolfowitz had left for the
World Bank, while Feith, whose key roles in both
the manipulation of pre-war intelligence and
failures in post-war planning were by then
receiving growing attention in Congress and the
media, was bound for a teaching post at Georgetown
University.
By far the biggest blow to the
neo-conservatives, however, was the loss of Libby
as Cheney's chief of staff. Arguably the most
powerful neo-conservative in the administration,
Libby was indicted in October 2005 for lying to a
grand jury about his role in leaking the identity
of a covert CIA officer, whose husband had
publicly accused the administration of
manipulating pre-war intelligence about Iraq.
Describing the impact of Libby's departure, Bob
Woodward writes in his most recent book, State
of Denial: "Cheney was lost without Libby,
many of the vice president's close associates
felt. Libby had done so much of the preparation
for the vice president's meetings and events, and
so much of the hard work. He had been almost part
of Cheney's brain."
As secretary of state,
Rice was proving to be much more assertive than
neo-conservatives had anticipated. From the outset
of Bush's second term, she stressed that her main
concern was mending frayed alliances, particularly
with "Old Europe" - for which the
neo-conservatives had little but contempt - even
if that meant serious compromises on issues
ranging from Iran to North Korea. "This is the
time for diplomacy," she vowed in her confirmation
hearings. She soon put her rhetoric into action by
publicly committing the United States to the
European Union-3 in its negotiations with Iran. It
became clear that, unlike Powell, Rice had
influence with the president that was at least on
par with Cheney.
Rice's appointments also
indicated a return to her realist roots. Not only
did she resist Cheney in declining to appoint Eric
Edelman or Bolton (whose subsequent failure to
gain Senate confirmation as UN ambassador
highlighted the hawks' declining political
fortunes) as her deputy, but her selection of
Zoellick, a lifelong Atlanticist and former top
adviser to former secretary of state James Baker,
suggested that she resented the pressure put on
her by the hawks.
She also appointed
former NATO ambassador Nicholas Burns as under
secretary of state for policy and Philip Zelikow
as her counselor, both committed realists. Burns
in particular has proved to be a constant thorn in
the side of the hawks, who blame him for a number
of what they call "weak" policy moves, including
Rice's mid-2006 announcement that the US would be
willing to negotiate directly with Tehran if it
abandoned its uranium-enrichment program, spurring
howls of protest from neo-conservatives.
Another concern of the hawks, particularly
the neo-conservatives, was Bush's decision early
in his second term to appoint John Negroponte to
the new post of director of national intelligence,
with the assurance that he would replace the CIA
director as the daily intelligence briefer of the
president. A retired career foreign service
officer and former deputy national security
adviser under Powell, Negroponte was widely
regarded as a tough-minded realist and
bureaucratic operator who was not afraid to speak
his mind.
At the CIA, Goss was replaced
earlier this year by Negroponte's deputy, General
Michael Hayden, who quickly reinstated or promoted
a number of senior intelligence officers who had
been disillusioned with what they saw as Goss'
efforts to politicize the agency.
As a
result of personnel changes over the past two
years, the network of allied hawks and
neo-conservatives has degraded significantly, and
along with it their ability to control the various
processes - like intelligence vetting - involved
in foreign policy decision-making. Likewise, their
credibility among the uniformed military and
bureaucratic insiders has suffered a tremendous
blow due to incompetent and costly handling of the
Iraq war. Although some prominent
neo-conservatives have joined Democrats in
denouncing the administration's execution of Iraq
policy, their efforts to push the country into
war, as well as their role in promoting
disreputable personalities (like Chalabi) and
disastrous policies (like de-Ba'athification) are
unlikely to be forgotten any time soon.
Indeed, some former neo-con allies - such
as the well-known academic Francis Fukuyama (a
signatory of the September 20, 2001 PNAC letter),
Newsweek columnist George Will, and former
secretary of state Alexander Haig - now publicly
blame them for the misadventure in Iraq.
In spite of all those blows,
neo-conservatives over the past nearly two years
remained a factor in the power equation both in
and outside the administration, with Cheney
serving as their principal champion and protector.
John Hannah, who once served as a liaison between
the vice president's office and Chalabi, was
promoted to Cheney's national security adviser
after Libby's departure, while David Wurmser
remains his Mideast adviser. In the National
Security Council, meanwhile, Abrams heads the
Middle East desk from which, during the recent
Israel-Hezbollah conflict, he helped frustrate
Rice's efforts to persuade Bush to initiate
contact with Damascus and even reportedly
encouraged Israel to extend the conflict to Syria.
He has also led the charge within the
administration against EU and Arab League pleas to
take a more flexible position with respect to the
Hamas government in the Palestinian territories.
While their numbers in the senior ranks at
the Pentagon have been reduced, neo-conservatives
have retained an active presence there, too. In a
particularly ominous turn of events earlier this
year, the Defense Department established an
"Iranian Directorate", an office staffed and
overseen by the same individuals that ran the
Office of Special Plans (OSP), which
"cherry-picked" and "stove-piped" raw and
questionable intelligence about Saddam's supposed
ties to al-Qaeda and WMD programs.
There
is no doubt that the top foreign policy priority
for neo-conservatives in the final two years of
Bush's presidency will be to goad him into
attacking Iran's suspected nuclear facilities, if
ongoing diplomatic efforts to contain or roll back
Tehran's nuclear program stall or fail. Wrote
Joshua Muravchik, an AEI scholar, in the November
2006 issue of the influential magazine Foreign
Policy: "Make no mistake, President Bush will need
to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities before leaving
office."
Until recently, it appeared that
the remaining two years of Bush's presidency were
likely to conform to the pattern set by the
previous two. While the realists have made gradual
and incremental gains in pushing the
administration toward engagement and diplomacy
with US foes, the hawks have retained enough
strength to limit their room for maneuvering and
effectively prevent substantive changes in policy.
The State Department, for example,
persuaded Bush to offer enough in the six-party
talks to coax North Korea into the September 19,
2005, joint declaration on denuclearization, but
it was unable to get White House permission to
accept the North's invitation to send Assistant
Secretary of State Christopher Hill to Pyongyang
for informal talks last May.
In the Middle
East, the State Department recommended a more
forthcoming position on the provision of
humanitarian and other assistance to the
Palestinian Authority after Hamas' victory in last
January's elections, but was unable to prevail at
the White House. Similarly, State Department
officials reportedly favored a more flexible US
position on negotiating security agreements with
Iran, as urged by Washington's European partners,
if Tehran agreed to freeze its uranium-enrichment
activities, but hardliners succeeded in vetoing
that, too.
While continued internal
conflict appeared as the most likely prospect as
of the mid-term elections, the capture of both
houses of Congress by the Democrats, followed by
Rumsfeld's resignation and the nomination of
Robert Gates as his replacement, point to a
potential triumph of the realists in the two years
that remain in the Bush presidency.
While
the Democrats have yet to forge a unified position
on key policy issues, their leadership in the new
Congress appears poised to push hard for
engagement with North Korea and for "redeploying"
US troops out of Iraq as quickly as possible, even
if that means engaging Syria and Iran to expedite
that process. At the same time, Gates' background
in developing alternative policies regarding
hotspots like Iran and Iraq suggests that he and
other like-minded administration officials such as
Rice have an opportunity to forge a new consensus
between Republicans and Democrats that could sound
the death knell of neo-conservative influence on
the administration.
A favorite of both
George H W Bush and his national security adviser,
Scowcroft, Gates has shared their realist approach
to US foreign policy and shown little patience
with neo-conservatives. As recently as two years
ago, Gates co-chaired a task force sponsored by
the influential Council on Foreign Relations with
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national
security adviser and one of the Bush
administration's most trenchant critics, which
called for a policy of diplomatic and economic
engagement with Iran. The report was immediately
and loudly denounced by leading neo-conservatives.
Gates, who according to some sources
privately expressed strong reservations about the
Iraq war from the outset, was also, until his
nomination last week, a member of the bipartisan,
congressionally appointed Iraq Study Group, a task
force co-chaired by Baker that has emerged,
particularly since the elections, as the most
likely mechanism for devising an "exit strategy"
from Iraq.
A consummate realist and the
Bush family's longtime counselor who, unlike
Scowcroft, has retained good ties with the younger
Bush, Baker has already suggested that one of the
key recommendations likely to emerge from the
study group's work is US engagement with both Iran
and Syria - he has met with senior officials of
both governments - as part of any viable solution
in Iraq. "It's not appeasement to talk to your
enemies," he asserted in a popular Sunday
television news program in what appeared to be a
calculated rebuke of the hawks, particularly the
neo-conservatives. Many analysts, including some
neo-conservatives, believe it was Baker who helped
engineer Rumsfeld's replacement by Gates as part
of a larger strategy to tilt the balance of power
in the administration decisively in favor of the
realists. Indeed, without Rumsfeld, Cheney, the
neo-conservatives' main champion and protector
within the administration, now appears more
isolated than ever.
Notes [1] See Richard Perle and David Frum, An
End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror,
Random House, 2003. [2] For a description of
the history and worldview of the
neo-conservatives, see Jim Lobe, "What's a
Neo-Conservative Anyway?" Inter Press Service,
August 12, 2003. See also, Jim Lobe, "From
Holocaust to Hyperpower," Inter Press Service,
January 26, 2005. [3] Ironically, virtually
the only signatory who has not played a leading
role since the letter was released has been
Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who in 1997 apparently
looked to Kristol and Kagan as more presidential
than his brother George. [4] See Packer,
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2005).
[5] See David Rose, "Neo Culpa," Vanity Fair
online, November 3, 2006.
Jim Lobe
is the Washington, DC bureau chief of the
Inter Press Service; Michael Flynn is the
director of the Right Web program
(rightweb.irc-online.org) at the New Mexico-based
International Relations Center and a doctoral
candidate in international relations at the
Graduate Institute of International Studies,
Geneva. This paper was presented at the Institute
of American Studies of the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences in Beijing on November 17.
