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2 Inside the neo-con echo
chamber By Eli Clifton
With the United States bogged down in an
increasingly ugly war in Iraq, tensions rising
between Tehran and Washington, and public
sentiment - which has turned en masse against
deeper US commitment in the Middle East - often
seeming a non-factor in White House
decision-making, it is hard to believe that in the
past few months some pundits and politicos have
been optimistically predicting a dramatic shift in
US foreign policy that could, like a deus ex
machina, resolve the country's overseas
debacles.
The Iraq Study Group (ISG),
co-chaired by inside-the-Beltway
heavyweights James Baker and
former congressman Lee Hamilton, seemed to
represent the "adult supervision" so desperately
lacking in the blind idealism - or, as others see
it, fervid ideology - behind the Bush
administration's misadventures in the Middle East.
While President George W Bush reportedly
called the ISG report a "flaming turd", some
observers have held on to the hope that at the
very least one cornerstone of the current
political scene, the neo-conservatives, at long
last are being pushed out the door, and along with
them their radical ideas about reshaping the
Middle East.
"Like Bush, [the
neo-conservatives] look to the long span of
history for vindication. It will indeed be eons
before anyone trusts them again," wrote Financial
Times columnist Jacob Weisberg in March, after
recounting his disappointment at the lack of
contrition or regret expressed by
neo-conservatives for the bungled war in Iraq.
Although many of the core Bush neo-cons,
including Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, have
been pushed out of the administration, and recent
weeks have witnessed the emergence of a more
conciliatory posture toward America's "enemies"
that is the antithesis of neo-conservative policy
proposals, neo-conservatism remains a force to
contend with. This fact is highlighted by the
influence of American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
ideologues in shaping the "surge" plan announced
by Bush in January.
So how do they do
it? One partial answer to this puzzle is
the continued strength of neo-conservatism and its
standard-bearers in the US media, a point made
recently by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times.
Wrote Rachman: "The neo-cons stand accused of many
errors: imperialism, Leninism, Trotskyism (New
York school), militarism. Some believe that the
real problem is that so many of them are Jewish -
this is an alarmingly popular theme, to judge by
my e-mails. But the problem with the neo-cons is
not that so many of them are Jews. The problem is
that so many of them are journalists."
Calling neo-conservative media pundits
"journalists" is a stretch - the fact is, most
don't report, they spin - but Rachman's point is a
good one. From top to bottom, from tabloid TV like
Fox News to powerhouse newspapers like the New
York Times and Washington Post, neo-conservatives
have an extraordinary presence in the US media.
And Washington always seems to be listening.
A case in point has been the fate of the
ISG. Even before the release of the ISG Report,
the neo-conservative media outlets and pundits
began a campaign of discrediting the
Baker-Hamilton group and describing its policy
recommendations as a blueprint for defeat in Iraq
and the "war on terror".
In a
late-November Weekly Standard editorial, one week
before the ISG report was to be released, former
Republican House Speaker and AEI fellow Newt
Gingrich warned that any proposal to ask Iran and
Syria for assistance in stabilizing Iraq was a
sign of "defeat" and "appeasement".
Three
days later, in a Washington Post editorial, Iraq
war hawk Charles Krauthammer ridiculed the ISG's
suggestion that engaging regional actors in the
Middle East might help to secure stability in
Iraq. He opined: "Perhaps in some long-term future
they will want a stable Iraq as a tame client
state of the Syria-Iran axis. For now they want
chaos. What in God's name will a negotiation with
them yield?"
Several days after the
release of the ISG Report, perhaps even further
emboldened by the Bush administration's
declaration that it was not prepared to follow the
ISG advice to engage with Syria and Iran, Robert
Kagan and William Kristol wrote: "The Iraq Study
Group, aided by supportive American media, has
successfully conveyed the impression to everyone
at home and abroad that the United States is about
to withdraw from Iraq."
The ISG Report was
quickly sidelined and in its place the nation was
presented with a new plan for "victory", one
apparently inspired in part by the AEI and
vociferously promoted by the entire neo-con media
infrastructure. Bush announced his surge plan on
national television, in front of an audience that,
in large part, wanted nothing to do with it. Part
of the success of the surge push no doubt lies
with Bush and his own ideas. But there is little
doubt that the neo-con promotion machine weighed
heavily.
To understand the media network
of the neo-conservatives, it is helpful to examine
the origins of the movement and how the packaging
- and repackaging - of neo-conservative ideas has
evolved over the past several decades.
Irving Kristol, widely regarded as a
founder of neo-conservatism and a self-described
"liberal who was mugged by reality", made his
early mark largely in the areas of journalism and
publishing in the 1950s and 1960s. But the early
intellectualism of his various journals such as
Commentary gave short shrift to such things as
policy implementation. Rather, under Kristol's
stewardship, early neo-conservatism tended to the
philosophical, debate, and thoughtful - if
increasingly ideological - critiques of the
trajectory of the US and its domestic and foreign
policies.
Together with the likes of
Norman Podhoretz, who took over Commentary after
Kristol departed, and a host of like-minded
"public intellectuals", early neo-conservatism was
more an intellectual conversation among a small
"band of brothers" - as conservative author George
Weigel once put it - than a Washington political
faction. Kristol also founded the culture journal
Public Interest in 1965, and in 1985 the
foreign-affairs journal National Interest.
Both Interests have had overlapping
contributors; they were also both bully pulpits
for neo-conservative heavyweights such as Francis
Fukuyama, Richard Pipes and Krauthammer. The
origins of the neo-conservatives' stances on
social security, the "culture wars", Generation X,
crime and punishment and post-Cold War thought can
be traced back to articles published in these
journals.
Irving Kristol played an
important role in creating the space for sharing
ideas and ideology crucial to the evolution of the
neo-conservative vision. His publications were
widely read among academic and intellectual
sympathizers of the movement; however, their
distribution and reach were not comparable to
mainstream periodicals'.
But even at this
early stage in its development, there were signs
of what neo-conservatism would evolve into by the
1990s. Not long after Podhoretz took over the
editorship of Commentary in 1960, the style of the
magazine turned sharply bellicose, in line with
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