Neo-con ideology, not Big Oil, pushed for
war By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
Why did the administration of President George W Bush
push to invade Iraq? Most left-wing critics - epitomized
perhaps by Michael Moore's blockbuster documentary,
Fahrenheit 9/11 - have rather reflexively argued
that the economic factor, particularly the interests of
Big Oil or "the ruling class", must have been decisive.
But many right-wing critics, who know the ruling
class from the inside, lean to a different explanation,
in part by pointing out that Big Oil, to the extent it
took any position at all on the war, opposed it. As
evidence, they cite the unusually public opposition to a
unilateral invasion voiced quite publicly by such
eminent oil and ruling class-related influentials as
former president George H W Bush's national security
adviser Brent Scowcroft and secretary of state James
Baker.
While they do not deny that some economic
interests - construction giants, such as Halliburton and
Bechtel, and high-tech arms companies - may have given
the push to war some momentum, the decisive factor in
their view was ideological, and the ideology,
"neo-conservative".
Powered by both Jewish and
non-Jewish neo-conservatives centered in the offices of
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick
Cheney and by White House deference to the solidly
pro-Zionist Christian Right, the neo-conservative world
view - dedicated to the security of Israel and the
primacy of military power in a world of good and evil -
emerged after September 11, 2001, as the driving force
in President Bush's foreign policy, as well as the
dominant narrative in a cowed and complacent mass media.
Neo-conservatives - their world view, history,
networks, strategic alliances, and their role in moving
the United States to war in Iraq as well as the
dangerous consequences of their policy prescriptions -
are the subject of America Alone: The
Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge
University Press), by far the best study of the
neo-conservative movement and its relevance to Bush's
"war on terror" in the flood of critical books that have
poured forth in the aftermath of the Iraq war.
The two authors, Stefan Halper, a teacher at
Cambridge and US policymaker under past Republican
administrations, and Clarke, a retired British diplomat
currently based at the Cato Institute, a libertarian
think-tank in Washington, describe their political
perspective as "center-right". The fortuitous
combination of their nationalities and politics helps
make their critique particularly compelling in light of
the neo-conservatives' exaltation of the special
"Anglo-American" alliance as the great redemptive force
in the world, as it was under British prime minister
Winston Churchill and president Franklin Delano
Roosevelt in World War II.
"We set out to
demystify the neo-conservatives," the authors write at
the outset of the book. And over the following 369
pages, including some 1,300 footnotes, they largely
succeed. Their motivation is clear from the outset:
while consistently measured and reasoned in their tone,
Halper and Clarke are clearly outraged that the
neo-conservative foreign policy pursued by the Bush
administration has put Washington's greatest strategic
asset - its "moral authority" - at risk.
The
book includes well-told, if somewhat familiar, accounts
of how the neo-conservatives used their many
institutional bases, such as the American Enterprise
Institute and the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board; their
formidable political savvy in Congress; their
bureaucratic skills within the administration; their
ties to the mainstream media, particularly those outlets
- such as Rupert Murdoch's media empire led by Fox News
and the Weekly Standard, right-wing radio talk shows and
the Wall Street Journal editorial page - that eagerly
recycled their ideas; and their longstanding alliance
with the Christian Right to create an "echo chamber"
that succeeded in moving public debate after the
September 11 attacks toward the threats allegedly posed
by Iraq and the necessity of war against it.
Where the book breaks new ground, however, is in
its efforts to describe the origins of the
neo-conservative movement, its ups and downs over the
course of the past 40 years, its core beliefs, and why
it poses serious threats to both US interests as
traditionally defined by conservatives and to the health
of US democracy itself.
To Halper and Clarke,
the neo-conservative world view revolves around three
basic themes: that "the human condition is defined as a
choice between good and evil"; that military power and
the willingness to use it are the fundamental
determinants in relations between states; and that the
Middle East and "global Islam" should be the primary
focus in US foreign policy.
These core beliefs
create certain predispositions: analyzing foreign policy
in terms of "black-and-white, absolute moral
categories"; espousing the "unipolar" power of the
United States and disdaining conventional diplomacy,
multilateral institutions or international law; seeing
international criticism as evidence of "American
virtue"; regarding the use of military power as the
first, rather than last, resort in dealing with the
enemy, particularly when anything less might be
considered "appeasement"; and harking back to the Ronald
Reagan administration (1981-89) as the exemplar of
"moral clarity" in foreign policy.
This last
tendency is particularly galling to the authors, not
only because it ignores the fact that neo-conservatives
expressed bitter and well-documented disenchantment with
the Great Communicator over his distancing the United
States from Israel after the Lebanon invasion in the
early 1980s and his eager grasp after 1985 of the
outstretched hand of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev,
but also because they see Reagan as a fundamentally
optimistic leader who, in the words of his secretary of
state, George Shultz, "appealed to people's best hopes,
not their fears".
By contrast, according to
Halper and Clarke, "the neo-conservative vision is one
of fear centered around [Thomas] Hobbes' doomsday vision
of man in his primitive state" and "extreme pessimism"
reflected in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss,
whose thought exercised a strong influence on the
movement through its godfather, Irving Kristol, and
assorted disciples, some of whom have risen to
prominence within and around the Bush administration,
particularly in the national security arena.
Indeed, the authors join a number of other
critics, particularly on the right, in rejecting the
notion that neo-conservatives can really be considered
"conservative" at all. Not only are they reckless in
favoring the use of military power, but their advocacy
of "nation-building" or "transforming the Middle East"
belies an arrogance that is entirely foreign to the core
conservative conviction that free or democratic
societies are the product of centuries of organic
development, the basis for which can neither be imposed
from outside nor built overnight.
Similarly, and
consistent with their view of the world as a moral
battleground, neo-conservatives pay little attention to
such notions as "stability" and "normalcy", or even, the
"economic implications of their policies". This should
be of particular concern to US corporations, a
traditional conservative political constituency, the
authors argue, because the "US business world -
multipolar, multilateral, cooperative, interdependent,
consumer-driven, and rule-based ... is as different from
the neo-conservative world as night from day."
As for neo-conservative claims to be "idealists"
and driven by the desire to spread democracy and freedom
to the countries - claims far too readily accepted as
genuine in mainstream foreign-policy circles - the
authors dismiss them as "little more than
window-dressing" designed to rally public support behind
them and put their foes on the defensive.
Their
early history - as arch foes of the anti-Vietnam War
faction of the Democratic Party and later of president
Jimmy Carter's human-rights policies, as well as their
selective indignation with regard to the human-rights
performance of allies and enemies in the "war on
terrorism" - makes a mockery of their democratic
pretensions.
So why did neo-conservatives want
to take the United States to war in Iraq?
On
this question, the authors tend to be frustratingly
elusive (despite an early promise "not ... to pull any
punches"), at one point suggesting an "unspoken agenda"
focused on "the Middle East and military power, most of
all military power in the Middle East", related to both
Israel's security and access to the region's energy
resources.
While it is difficult to argue with
these two answers, one wishes that the authors had been
more direct about which factor they believed was more
important in the neo-conservative world view and the
drive to war, particularly in light of the abundant
evidence they adduce throughout their narrative -
especially in relation to neo-conservative ties to the
Christian Zionists and the focus of their own networks
of think-tanks and foundations - that Israel's fate has
been the central passion of all those who identify
themselves as "neo-conservative".
In that
respect, the authors did indeed pull their punches in
order no doubt to avoid being labeled "anti-Semitic", a
common neo-conservative tactic against their critics,
and to avoid fueling stereotypes that are both incorrect
and dangerously anti-Semitic, such as the notion that
"Jews" control the media, if not the world. While
predominantly Jewish, the neo-conservative movement is
by no means exclusively so, and most American Jews, it
is important to point out, are not neo-conservatives. As
the authors themselves write, "Today, it should not be
considered legitimate to imply that any criticism of
neo-conservatism is necessarily tainted by
anti-Semitism."
That said, the horrific
experience of European Jewry in the 20th century,
culminating as it did with the Nazi Holocaust, is
critical to understanding the neo-conservative mind set.
It is that experience - and the failure of the
"international community" to do anything about it - that
helps explain the good-and-evil moral categories, the
obsession with military force, the disdain for
multilateral institutions and international law and,
ultimately, the necessity for the United States to be
permanently engaged against foreign enemies lest it
withdraw into isolationism that, like appeasement,
helped pave the way for Hitler and the Holocaust that
make up the neo-conservative world view.
