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Power

The polarising effects of the Bush administration have been assessed many times, both by ideologues on the left, and on the right. Pragmatic centrists such as myself, have also considered them, and found that it’s idealism that separates the two camps.

The Bush of 2000 was of course, we now know, and have always suspected, a puppet. A simple, affable, front for a conglomerate of interests that sought to use political influence to address its causes. This is not some left-wing conspiracy theory (as it is oft dismissed), but a hard-headed acceptance of the realities of the current incumbents of the White House. The less than photogenic Dick Cheney was never going to win over the electorate, not after the saxophone playing Clinton and the movie star Reagan.

Bush was plucked by Karl Rove from his Texan fiefdom and modelled into an all-American poster boy for the Compassionate Conservatism that would carry Cheney’s team to power. Bush was a blank sheet, with a good name, and a knack for down-to-earth oratory that made the audience feel they were being addressed personally. It was a recipe that, with a little intervention from a Republican Supreme Court, delivered victory over a capable and proven Democratic candidate. With power in their hands, Bush was dispatched early to bed, given a copy of Natan Sharanski’s biography to send him to sleep.

We all know what comes next: September 11th thrust an ineffectual, golf-loving, listless baby-boomer into the limelight. America needed a leader, and there was only one on the shelf. It would be cruel and wrong, to suggest that Bush has not grown and developed into a statesman. The difference between his two inaugural speeches show how the bewildered Bush of 2000, had matured into an assured and confidant leader in four tumultuous years. One could argue that Bush is no longer a proxy for Cheney, and has grown into the role; there is clearly some truth in this.

If Bush has one great virtue, it is his ability to appear ‘straight’ to the American people, a simple black and white kind of guy. To the right, and many in the centre he is the determined leader needed in this time of difficulty. To the left he is a simplistic hate figure, and an easy target for visceral, often absurd, loathing. It is this smokescreen of ignorance that so magically masks, the deep intellectual basis for what we now call the neoconservative movement.

The Republican Party of Grover Norquest, Dick Cheney, and Tom Delay, is no loose group of representatives but a well-drilled animal, which has cemented its control over every facet of federal power. With brilliant manipulation of the collective American consciousness, it has painted the Democrats as a ramshackle group of flip-flopping opportunists, who fail to take American security seriously. To secure its other flanks against criticism, the Republicans have also successfully portrayed the American media as a liberal elite, which finds the post 9/11-world utterly incomprehensible in the face of international terrorism. But behind this brilliant Machiavellian machine lies real intellectual idealism, with utopianism at its heart.

The Neoconservatives

The neoconservatives, led by Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Perle, are supported by an active intellectual foundation supplied by key figures such as William Kristol, Robert Kagen, Paul Wolfowitz, and Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama argued fervently in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man that the endgame for human political progress was a trans-national liberal democracy. It was this Trotskyist idealism that powered the activism of the Bush administration.

It is therefore the most damning illustration of the White House’s operational mismanagement of the neoconservative project, that Fukuyama, probably its most intellectually accomplished and celebrated supporter, has abandoned it.

Writing in the New York Times, in anticipation of the publication of his new book, Fukuyama delivers what could only be described as a stunning criticism of the Bush administration, the Iraq debacle, and forceful interventionism in general.

Titled After Neoconservatism the essay’s first paragraph conveys what most observers have believed for the past two to three years: -

By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran.

With fellow neoconservatives at the Weekly Standard still arguing that the war is succeeding and worthy, this dismissal must be a stinging rebuke. The Bush Doctrine is dismissed as a “shambles” and the post-9/11 National Security Strategy of pre-emptive war is attacked.

The admission that the Bush Doctrine has failed to bring liberal democracy to the Middle East is one shared by fellow neoconservatives, as they realise the prevalence and compulsion of political Islam. This week the Weekly Standard itself runs a story on the conundrum of Egyptian democracy, timed for Condoleezza Rice’s visit to the country. It is clear that if Hosni Mubarak allowed ‘free and fair’ elections, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood would probably sweep to power. Fukuyama at least, seems to have accepted this reality.

Fukuyama also accepts that the handling of the Iraq War has empowered those in American politics, chiefly among the State Department, who advocate a Realpolitik approach to foreign policy: -

But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy “realists” in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America’s naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world.

Simply citing Kissinger is likely to bring bile to the throat of Cheney and Rumsfeld. The former Secretary of State and Nobel Prize Winner is loathed within the Bush administration. But should it really surprise a noted intellectual, that Kissingers’ realpolitik approach, is the best route for American foreign policy? Even the simplistic, non-utopian, approach of engagement and containment is the product of intellectual endeavour, and more importantly, experience.

I don’t accept the fundamental foundations of the neoconservative movement are wrong. I agree that the Liberal Democracy is the political system best equipped to deliver economic prosperity, individual freedom, political representation, and social cohesion. And it would be a benevolent endeavour to remove a tyrannical dictator and replace him with a functioning democracy. This does not mean, however, that such an undertaking is justified or recommended. Europe still has its colonial albatross securely around its neck, and has taken pleasure in watching America get bogged down in its own imperial adventure. But as Fukuyama’s rightly points out, Europe was not against removing Saddam in principle, nor hung up on issues of legality, but unconvinced that case had been made to intervene. Europe knows all about the pitfalls and unintended consequences of interfering in sovereign states. When the neocons, drunk on ideology, ignored the voices of experience, one can surely forgive the continental’s their righteous grin at American folly.

America has also lost standing and moral superiority with the very practice of unilateralism, the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’ operated with clear contempt and disregard for international institutions. The obvious institution that was sidelined was, of course, the United Nations, but I would argue it was the US decision to act without NATO support that was the biggest affront to the Europeans. Rumsfeld’s characteristic slight, that ‘Old Europe’ was increasingly out of step and irrelevant is hardly a lesson in how to make friends and influence people. Fukuyama concentrates on the clear hypocrisy in the Iraq invasion: -

The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.

It is this self-analysis from a recognised neoconservative that is so refreshing to those who have become confounded with the current American foreign policy. Watchers of international affairs have become perplexed by the operational ineptitude in Iraq. The decision to dissolve the Iraqi police, and the remaining remnants of the army, was one taken against the advice of British allies. Equally the obduracy in maintaining the Rumsfeld doctrine of ‘Warlite’ has left American commanders unable to secure hard-won territory from the insurgency.

Fukuyama addresses these errors by highlighting the neoconservative belief that “democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred.” With 20/20 hindsight we can pour scorn on this presupposition, but the Neocons in 2003 could point to the flowering of democracy across the former Soviet Union (in Europe) as proof that when totalitarianism collapses, it is democracy that will satiate the political vacuum. What the neoconservatives did not appreciate was that Arab culture and religion is not European. While the caliphates enjoyed practical Greek texts on philosophy and medicine, they did not adopt democracy as a political model. The cradle of European political thought lies in Athens, and the Euro-centric mindset of the Neocon’s cannot comprehend that their ardor for democracy is not shared.

Governmental failure

On reading Fukuyama’s essay, blogger Andrew Sullivan pointed to the inanity of the neocon project in relying on government to deliver results: -

I think [Fukuyama] gets his analysis almost perfectly right. In retrospect, neoconservatives (and I fully include myself) made three huge errors in the last few years. The first was to over-estimate the competence of government, especially in extremely delicate areas like WMD intelligence.

In the essay Fukuyama is frustrated that the intellectuals behind neoconservatism (in which he must include himself) could have such faith, in what is little more than social engineering by force: -

If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare).
[…]
How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the “root cause” of terrorism lay in the Middle East’s lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.

Again this sentiment is shared by neoliberal econmist Johan Norburg: -

I think we can (and should) have both the attitude that we should try to introduce democracy in all cultures all over the world, and that we shouldn´t be too optimistic about how successfully that gigantic task can be performed by governments that can´t fix our health care and schools.

Remedy

Rather like an alcoholic, Fukuyama has his moment of clarity just in time (to see Iraq descend into civil war?), realising the vacuous actuality of the so-called War on Terror. Intellectuals on the left have always pointed to the fundamental truth behind Bush’s manipulation of the threat of terrorism: That by sowing the seeds of fear in the American people, he could bolster support for interventionism and buttress his position as a strong president. Fukuyama also concludes that the deliberate blurring of the lines between rogue states and radical Islamism have damaged the cause: -

The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally.

Fukuyama’s recommendations are based in a renewed strengthening of America’s internationalist institutions, such as the marginalised State Department; pointing to their previous successes in helping instill democracy across the world. This is again, of course, an echo of the rancor the left has been making since the invasion.

In conclusion the essay must be welcomed. A prominent neoconservative intellectual has, in effect, conceded the argument to the realists. Imperialism concealed under the veil of moral righteousness has been defeated, and shown to be both impractical, undeliverable, and wrong. Hopefully future U.S. administrations will work with its traditional allies, and not listen to hawkish whispers promising quick and easy wars.

“Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.” ~ Winston Churchill

George W. Bush stated in his latest State of the Union Address that “Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer — so we will act boldly in freedom’s cause.” So imagine my surprise when I read this story in today’s Seattle Times: -

In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval.

The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States.

So should we assume that Bush’s commitment to support dissident networks, is indeed, meaningless rhetoric?