Monday, May 24, 2004
Split Decision
by Reihan Salam
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 05.20.04
Long before all hell broke loose, when regime change in Baghdad was just an idle think-tanker's dream, there were already cleavages among conservatives over Iraq. And as the going gets tough, the cleavages have deepened, from waif-like to zaftig-like. In an April 19 story in The New York Times, David Kirkpatrick (he of the "conservative beat") noted "growing skepticism" concerning the Iraqi occupation. Kirkpatrick cited the usual suspects, who had always been skeptical. First there was notorious isolationist Patrick Buchanan, who established The American Conservative as part of a long-term struggle against his sinister neocon foes, and the movement libertarians at the Cato Institute, with the mantra "war is the health of the state" always implicit. Then he mentioned, interestingly, that National Review had started to raise hackles over "Wilsonianism," which had long been a conservative bete noire--since before the cold war and the intellectual ascendancy of the neoconservatives. (Since Wilson, some might say.) Today, with Iraq seemingly plunged into chaos, despair has seeped into the conservative mainstream.
One way of looking at the split is through the Bush I vs. Bush II lens, with the Scowcrofts and James Bakers standing with George H.W. in the "wouldn't be prudent" camp (their get-with-the-program public statements notwithstanding). But this overlooks the fact that Cheney and Wolfowitz, widely considered the architects of the administration's Iraq policy, both loyally served Bush the Elder. Could it be traditional conservatives v. "neoconservatives," or national-greatness conservatives? That misses many, many shades of opinion. To clear up the confusion, TNR Online presents its Guide to the Right on Iraq Gone Wrong.
The Neo-Paleos: We Shoulda Known
George Will and Tucker Carlson are the telegenic and even more telegenic faces, respectively, of old school, unreconstructed right-wing crankiness. The argument from democratization never had much appeal for the old fogies, both of whom were on record against stopping the bloodletting in Rwanda and the Balkans--the greatest hits of humanitarian calamities of the past quarter century--as long as American interests, narrowly conceived, weren't at stake. That was "foreign policy as social work," to use Michael Mandelbaum's tough-minded phrase, and it was a fool's errand. Before the war, both Will and Carlson, who share more than a penchant for bow ties and undergraduate degrees from Trinity College, found the threat of real, smoking gun WMDs to be the compelling reason to invade, not dreams of democracy among the Arabs.
Will argued that the burden of proof rested on those who didn't think Saddam had them in light of his duplicitous path, but he hadn't abandoned his distaste for frou-frous adventurism. He took what looked to be the tough-minded stance in light of Colin Powell's revelations in February 2003:
In estimating the impact of Colin Powell's U.N. presentation on persons who believe that there is no justification for a military response to Iraq's behavior, remember the human capacity for willful suspension of disbelief. Remember this: People determined to believe that a vast conspiracy assassinated President Kennedy believe that the absence of evidence of the conspiracy proves the vastness and cleverness of the conspiracy.
In retrospect, of course, the "absence of evidence" turned out to be on Will's side of the argument. Understandably, he feels burned, and he's more recently been taking it out on the Bush administration. After dissecting President Bush's claim that those who doubt Iraq's prospects for self-government are racist, he laid into Bush and the "neoconservatives":
This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts. Thinking is not the reiteration of bromides about how "all people yearn to live in freedom" (McClellan). And about how it is "cultural condescension" to doubt that some cultures have the requisite aptitudes for democracy (Bush). And about how it is a "myth" that "our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture" because "ours are not Western values; they are the universal values of the human spirit" (Tony Blair).
Speaking of culture, as neoconservative nation-builders would be well-advised to avoid doing, Pat Moynihan said: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." Here we reach the real issue about Iraq, as distinct from unpleasant musings about who believes what about skin color.
The issue is the second half of Moynihan's formulation--our ability to wield political power to produce the requisite cultural change in a place such as Iraq. Time was, this question would have separated conservatives from liberals. Nowadays it separates conservatives from neoconservatives.
The gauntlet has been thrown down. George Will's second thoughts are all about affirming his stance as an quagmire-shy conservative traditionalist, the type who doesn't believe that we should go abroad "in search of monsters to destroy." It's as though he feels vaguely embarrassed of having drank the regime change Kool-Aid.
The always affable Tucker Carlson has been more straightforward in his postwar reaction. In last week's New York Observer, Carlson told TV columnist Joe Hagan that he'd had a change of heart:
"I think it's a total nightmare and disaster, and I'm ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it," he said. "It's something I'll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who's smarter than I am, and I shouldn't have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I'm enraged by it, actually."
Carlson then proceeded, worryingly, to defend Pat Buchanan. Could it be that Tucker Carlson, with his floppy hair and boyish looks, will become the acceptable face of paleoconservatism? Only time will tell.
The 'Neoconservatives': Wha Happen?
Back to the Kirkpatrick piece. The article was framed as a rejection of the neoconservative approach, one that had become closely identified with the Bush administration ("Mr. Bush appears to be sticking to the neoconservative view," wrote Kirkpatrick). What was the neoconservative view? To topple and conquer every government in the Middle East? In August 2001, card-carrying neoconservatives Jeffrey Gedmin and Gary Schmitt, both affiliated with the Project for the New American Century, the alleged neocon Politburo, wrote a Times' op-ed which argued that Bush was undermining the Atlantic alliance, and that we ought to keep it in good repair.
The Project's 2000 report on "Rebuilding America's Defenses," seen by many dovish conspiracy-mongers as the Bush administration's secret post-9/11 blueprint, called for such Council on Foreign Relations-ish proposals as a permanent constabulary force oriented exclusively towards post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction, a far cry from George Bush's election year pooh-poohing of nation-building. This idea of spending more and doing more militarily, to beef up (and acknowledge) America's role as the globocop, was as much a neocon idea as was invading Iraq. Somehow, an invasion on the cheap--without adequate troop strength, without substantial international burden-sharing, and without the postwar planning necessary to restore order--was the only thing left standing when the decision was made to invade.
The Neo-Neocons: Operation Chalabihorse
This is not to say that an invasion on the cheap wasn't a neocon approach--it most certainly was, but it wasn't the neoconservative approach. That said, it was the particular neocon approach embraced by the administration. Champions of this approach included, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, David Frum, and others who had made a point of attacking the State Department and the CIA at every turn.
Since the war, they've engaged in non-stop Bremer-bashing and Chalabi-boosting, as if Bremer were responsible for the paucity of troops on the ground and Chalabi, who now seems to have waged a campaign of deception against the U.S. government for years, has demonstrated his trustworthiness and ought to be rewarded the mantle of leadership. David Frum has been among the most forceful advocates of this view. On May 6, he wrote in National Review Online:
Those who rage at Chalabi seem to believe that he somehow lured the United States into a war that it would otherwise not have had to fight. But that's just silly. Chalabi became important in the mid-1990s precisely because so many people in both American parties had come to accept that Saddam's rule represented an intolerable threat to the peace and security of the Middle East and the world - and were looking for an alternative that was not theocratic, not dictatorial, and would not require direct support from the United States.
Isn't it also clear that Chalabi was a crucial source of the intelligence that so alarmed people in both American parties? Frum then goes on to argue both that Chalabi was a beacon of hope for Iraqi democracy, and that "one rather gets the impression that they," Chalabi's detractors, "are offended that the hope was ever entertained at all."
And certainly as I listen to the list of Chalabi's supposed offenses-- corruption, authoritarianism, double-dealing with the Iranians - I find myself wondering what those detractors imagine they are going to get from the ex-Baathist Sunni generals now jockeying to replace him. Will they be uncorrupt, unauthoritarian, and sternly anti-Iranian? Or will those issues cease to matter once a regime acceptable to the State Department and Saudi Arabia has taken control? I fear that the second outcome is much the more likely.
So it's Chalabi or the Baathists? Frum made a similar move on May 4, in a diary entry titled "The Chalabi Smear":
ITEM: Up until now we were supposed to believe that the INC produced no useful intelligence--that it dealt only in fantasies and lies. Now suddenly the INC is accused of being in possession of accurate and valuable sensitive information. How did Chalabi go from know-nothing to valuable intelligence asset overnight?
Isn't it possible that Chalabi dealt in fantasies and lies until the United States defeated the Baathist regime, at which point the U.S. acquired valuable information that they could then pass on to Chalabi, who could then, arguendo, hand it over to the Iranians? It would certainly be easier for his men to gather information, as well it should be. Overall, the Panglossian view of Chalabi seems bizarre.
Michael Rubin, an expert on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute and a TNR contributor, has provided much of the intellectual firepower for this view. In a May 3 piece on National Review Online, he argued that the State Department sabotaged Pentagon efforts to plan for the postwar period, which is how he describes efforts to hand over sovereignty to a government comprised of exiles and "internals" backed by a Free Iraqi Force, also drawn from the exile community. Rubin argues that this would have facilitated stabilization as the FIF could have helped co-opt the regular Iraqi Army. Whether or not this is true, it's not clear that it would have been an adequate substitute for a larger coalition invasion force.
The Standard Neocons: Dude, Where's My Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy? William Kristol and Robert Kagan of The Weekly Standard, despite longstanding ill will towards Colin Powell and impatience with the CIA's assessment of the Iraq threat, advocated a different approach. From early on, they fretted over troop levels, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Their criticism was searing only in stretches, and usually confined to caveats. The thinking behind their reticence, one can only assume, was that full-blown harangues would end up marginalizing the Standard, while constructive engagement could move the Bushies in their direction. Suffice to say, constructive engagement has worked about as well in this case as it has with Red China.
They framed their arguments in such a way as to suggest that President Bush, if only he followed his true instincts, would agree with them on the central importance of doing the job right. More recently, as the crisis in Iraq has escalated, they've grown more insistent. Both Kristol and Kagan continue to believe, as the title of one lead editorial had it, that the Iraq war was "The Right War for the Right Reasons," and they make a compelling case. They have since argued, again, that there are "Too Few Troops," and more recently that the timetable for elections must be moved up.
In short, Kristol and Kagan seem to have recognized that the crap has hit the fan, and that the time for pulling out all the stops has long since arrived. In this respect, they have something in common with pragmatic Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden who've staked out a more hawkish stance. Whether their McCainite leanings will pull them even further away from the Bush administration remains to be seen.
Kagan has gone farther in this regard. In his May 2 Washington Post column, Kagan wrote that, "All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters"--a category from which he necessarily excludes himself--"can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now." Worse yet, Kagan fears that the Bush administration is losing its will to fight:
The administration is increasingly reluctant to fight the people it defines as the bad guys in Iraq. This reluctance is perfectly understandable. No one wants more American casualties. And no one doubts that more violence in Iraq may alienate more of the Iraqi population. But this reluctance can also appear both to Iraqis and to the American public as a sign of declining will.
When observers call for stability, they fail to reckon with the facts:
[T]he alternatives are no easier to carry out and no less costly in money and lives than the present attempt to create some form of democracy in Iraq. The real alternative to the present course is not stability at all but to abandon Iraq to whatever horrible fate awaits it: chaos, civil war, brutal tyranny, terrorism or more likely a combination of all of these--with all that entails for Iraqis, the Middle East and American interests.
Which is why the Bush policy is a mystery for Kagan. Bush seems sincerely committed to staying the course and doing the right thing, but "he continues to tolerate policymakers, military advisers and a dysfunctional policymaking apparatus that are making the achievement of his goals less and less likely." Where the path will end is unclear to Kagan, and the rest of us.
The Neo-Imperialist: Bush Gets the Boot from Boot
Max Boot (my former boss) is perhaps best known for his full-throated defense of liberal imperialism. In The Savage Wars of Peace, he persuasively argued that the United States had a long history of using its armed forces to undertake what would today be called peacekeeping and nation-building missions with great success, and that fighting lawlessness and terrorism on a global scale remains essential to American national security. Inevitably, critics focused on his unapologetic embrace of the "e" word--"empire"--to dismiss his expensive and unpopular calls for a more expensive military oriented towards such unglamorous tasks as providing viable governance in the Kosovos and Sierra Leones of the world.
Boot was also a staunch advocate of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. In a December 2002 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Boot had this to say about neoconservatives, among whom he counted himself, and Iraq:
If we are to avoid another 9/11, they argue, we need to liberalize the Middle East--a massive undertaking, to be sure, but better than the unspeakable alternative. And if this requires occupying Iraq for an extended period, so be it; we did it with Germany, Japan and Italy, and we can do it again.
It was a widely held view among liberal hawks and conservatives alike. In the immediate aftermath of the Baathist defeat, Boot argued in the May 5, 2003 Weekly Standard that the United States "will have to commit sufficient force to make this a reality. This probably will not require the 200,000 troops suggested by Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki, but it will require a long-term commitment of at least 60,000 to 75,000 soldiers, the number estimated by Joint Staff planners."
In hindsight, this looks like a very optimistic assessment indeed. Fortunately, Boot's assessment soon changed. As the postwar situation in Iraq grew parlous, Boot embraced any number of heresies, at one point advocating a leading role by the United Nations. By late April, he called upon John Kerry to outhawk Bush by calling for a steep increase in the regular Army's troop strength in the Los Angeles Times. Though normally a down-the-line conservative, Boot had harsh words for the administration:
After stubbornly denying that more troops are needed, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, implicitly conceded the point by allowing the army temporarily to add 30,000 personnel over the next few years, mainly by delaying the discharge of existing soldiers. He is also trying to move soldiers from desk jobs to frontline units. But these are sticking--plaster solutions for the serious wounds Mr Bush's policies have inflicted on the armed forces.
More recently, Boot has joined the small handful of conservatives to call for Rumsfeld's head on a pike (not in so many words) in a May 13 Los AngelesTimes op-ed:
Rumsfeld has done many laudable things, but he has also miscalculated badly about many aspects of the Iraq occupation, and he has alienated much of the military. It is farfetched to claim that the war on terrorism would falter without him.
Will Max Boot, former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board who had been known (unfairly) as the one-man extremist wing of the neocons, become a key member of Kerry's kitchen cabinet? It's pretty unlikely--Boot is a committed conservative, his disappointment with the Bush administration notwithstanding--but stranger things have happened.
The Cheerleaders: Denial Ain't Just A River in Egypt
Where to begin? Not all conservatives are hemming and hawing, or engaging in searching self-examination. There are those, believe it or not, who really think that things in Iraq are going just fine, and that the media is to blame. Just as Rush Limbaugh saw the abuses at Abu Ghraib as little more than frat boy antics, and the nation's shock and horror at the images of abuse as so much hysterics, the Bush administration, and Donald Rumsfeld--as much a lightning rod for critical hawks as for doves at this point--still have a cheering section, one that, as you might imagine, is increasingly out of touch with reality. (Even the Neo-Neocons think something went wrong, namely that we let Foggy Bottom run roughshod over the peerless masterminds in Douglas Feith's office, or something like that.)
The always thought-provoking Wall Street Journal editorial page has, unfortunately, taken a maximalist turn in the cheerleading direction. When a leaked Red Cross report revealed the extent of prison abuse in Iraq, the WSJ didn't blame the Pentagon. It blamed, in classic contrarian fashion, the Red Cross. For being overly political. When calls for Rumsfeld's resignation reached a fever pitch, the Journal noted that most voters considered prisoner abuse "no big deal," and that only a small minority wanted Rumsfeld to resign. When it comes to open markets and open borders, the Journal usually doesn't let poll numbers do the arguing, but the May 12 "Review & Outlook" left it at pretty much at that. They did, however, add the following:
The war's domestic opponents are too obviously eager to expand the misdeeds of a few into a general repudiation of the war and all involved in it. For example, we are now reading that Geneva Convention status should be accorded to illegal combatants such as those at Guantanamo. We suspect the U.S. public understands that terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who wear no uniforms so as to more easily murder innocent civilians, do not deserve the same status accorded legitimate prisoners of war.
In doing so, they impugned the motives of hawks enraged by incompetence in Iraq and managed to change the subject from prisoner abuse in Iraq, where the prisoners in question are not KSM and his cronies, to a quite separate, broader question.
But the folks at the Journal are positively Quisling-esque when compared with that lion of the Iraq war, Tony Blankley of The Washington Times. Blankley spent his most recent column, on May 19, explaining that he predicted everything that's happened in Iraq with deadly accuracy in a column that ran in August of 2002. Marvel at the prescience for yourselves:
I addressed this reality in a column I published on Aug. 14, 2002--a full half year before the war started--which I titled "A period of 'measureless peril' could be in the offing." Its central analysis bears repeating today: "On Monday of this week [August 12, 2002], Henry Kissinger endorsed the president's pre-emptive war strategy In perhaps his most incisive assertion, he justifies 'bringing matters to a head with Iraq' for what he calls a generally unstated reason--While long-range American strategy must try to overcome legitimate causes of Islamic resentments, immediate policy must demonstrate that a terrorist challenge produces catastrophic consequences for the perpetrators, as well as their supporters, tacit or explicit.' In other words, we must break the will and pride of all those in the Islamic world who would dare to terrorize us and the international system."
One can only wonder why Blankley has not been named Undersecretary of Defense for Advanced Premonitory Wargaming. Of course Blankley declined to reprint such dazzling predictions as this, from April, 2003:
But, it seems as if the rolling start to the war will be mirrored by a rolling end the birth of a new government emerging , blade by blade, from the decaying corpse of the old. I suspect there may be genius in this plan. The absence of apparent historic discontinuities minimizes the psychological opportunities for resistance. Iraqis just keep going to bed and getting up as, seamlessly, democracy emerges.
He goes on to argue "even the president's opponents are not our greatest peril at the moment." Blankley is presumably referring to Bush's domestic political opponents, and conservatives with the temerity to question the continuing drift of Bush's Iraq policy. No, " the greatest immediate potential danger is a slackening of presidential resolve." Whether Blankley is mistaking stubbornness, indecision, and panic as "presidential resolve" is an open question. If so, he can rest assured that there's been no slackening in sight.
by Reihan Salam
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 05.20.04
Long before all hell broke loose, when regime change in Baghdad was just an idle think-tanker's dream, there were already cleavages among conservatives over Iraq. And as the going gets tough, the cleavages have deepened, from waif-like to zaftig-like. In an April 19 story in The New York Times, David Kirkpatrick (he of the "conservative beat") noted "growing skepticism" concerning the Iraqi occupation. Kirkpatrick cited the usual suspects, who had always been skeptical. First there was notorious isolationist Patrick Buchanan, who established The American Conservative as part of a long-term struggle against his sinister neocon foes, and the movement libertarians at the Cato Institute, with the mantra "war is the health of the state" always implicit. Then he mentioned, interestingly, that National Review had started to raise hackles over "Wilsonianism," which had long been a conservative bete noire--since before the cold war and the intellectual ascendancy of the neoconservatives. (Since Wilson, some might say.) Today, with Iraq seemingly plunged into chaos, despair has seeped into the conservative mainstream.
One way of looking at the split is through the Bush I vs. Bush II lens, with the Scowcrofts and James Bakers standing with George H.W. in the "wouldn't be prudent" camp (their get-with-the-program public statements notwithstanding). But this overlooks the fact that Cheney and Wolfowitz, widely considered the architects of the administration's Iraq policy, both loyally served Bush the Elder. Could it be traditional conservatives v. "neoconservatives," or national-greatness conservatives? That misses many, many shades of opinion. To clear up the confusion, TNR Online presents its Guide to the Right on Iraq Gone Wrong.
The Neo-Paleos: We Shoulda Known
George Will and Tucker Carlson are the telegenic and even more telegenic faces, respectively, of old school, unreconstructed right-wing crankiness. The argument from democratization never had much appeal for the old fogies, both of whom were on record against stopping the bloodletting in Rwanda and the Balkans--the greatest hits of humanitarian calamities of the past quarter century--as long as American interests, narrowly conceived, weren't at stake. That was "foreign policy as social work," to use Michael Mandelbaum's tough-minded phrase, and it was a fool's errand. Before the war, both Will and Carlson, who share more than a penchant for bow ties and undergraduate degrees from Trinity College, found the threat of real, smoking gun WMDs to be the compelling reason to invade, not dreams of democracy among the Arabs.
Will argued that the burden of proof rested on those who didn't think Saddam had them in light of his duplicitous path, but he hadn't abandoned his distaste for frou-frous adventurism. He took what looked to be the tough-minded stance in light of Colin Powell's revelations in February 2003:
In estimating the impact of Colin Powell's U.N. presentation on persons who believe that there is no justification for a military response to Iraq's behavior, remember the human capacity for willful suspension of disbelief. Remember this: People determined to believe that a vast conspiracy assassinated President Kennedy believe that the absence of evidence of the conspiracy proves the vastness and cleverness of the conspiracy.
In retrospect, of course, the "absence of evidence" turned out to be on Will's side of the argument. Understandably, he feels burned, and he's more recently been taking it out on the Bush administration. After dissecting President Bush's claim that those who doubt Iraq's prospects for self-government are racist, he laid into Bush and the "neoconservatives":
This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts. Thinking is not the reiteration of bromides about how "all people yearn to live in freedom" (McClellan). And about how it is "cultural condescension" to doubt that some cultures have the requisite aptitudes for democracy (Bush). And about how it is a "myth" that "our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture" because "ours are not Western values; they are the universal values of the human spirit" (Tony Blair).
Speaking of culture, as neoconservative nation-builders would be well-advised to avoid doing, Pat Moynihan said: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." Here we reach the real issue about Iraq, as distinct from unpleasant musings about who believes what about skin color.
The issue is the second half of Moynihan's formulation--our ability to wield political power to produce the requisite cultural change in a place such as Iraq. Time was, this question would have separated conservatives from liberals. Nowadays it separates conservatives from neoconservatives.
The gauntlet has been thrown down. George Will's second thoughts are all about affirming his stance as an quagmire-shy conservative traditionalist, the type who doesn't believe that we should go abroad "in search of monsters to destroy." It's as though he feels vaguely embarrassed of having drank the regime change Kool-Aid.
The always affable Tucker Carlson has been more straightforward in his postwar reaction. In last week's New York Observer, Carlson told TV columnist Joe Hagan that he'd had a change of heart:
"I think it's a total nightmare and disaster, and I'm ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it," he said. "It's something I'll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who's smarter than I am, and I shouldn't have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I'm enraged by it, actually."
Carlson then proceeded, worryingly, to defend Pat Buchanan. Could it be that Tucker Carlson, with his floppy hair and boyish looks, will become the acceptable face of paleoconservatism? Only time will tell.
The 'Neoconservatives': Wha Happen?
Back to the Kirkpatrick piece. The article was framed as a rejection of the neoconservative approach, one that had become closely identified with the Bush administration ("Mr. Bush appears to be sticking to the neoconservative view," wrote Kirkpatrick). What was the neoconservative view? To topple and conquer every government in the Middle East? In August 2001, card-carrying neoconservatives Jeffrey Gedmin and Gary Schmitt, both affiliated with the Project for the New American Century, the alleged neocon Politburo, wrote a Times' op-ed which argued that Bush was undermining the Atlantic alliance, and that we ought to keep it in good repair.
The Project's 2000 report on "Rebuilding America's Defenses," seen by many dovish conspiracy-mongers as the Bush administration's secret post-9/11 blueprint, called for such Council on Foreign Relations-ish proposals as a permanent constabulary force oriented exclusively towards post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction, a far cry from George Bush's election year pooh-poohing of nation-building. This idea of spending more and doing more militarily, to beef up (and acknowledge) America's role as the globocop, was as much a neocon idea as was invading Iraq. Somehow, an invasion on the cheap--without adequate troop strength, without substantial international burden-sharing, and without the postwar planning necessary to restore order--was the only thing left standing when the decision was made to invade.
The Neo-Neocons: Operation Chalabihorse
This is not to say that an invasion on the cheap wasn't a neocon approach--it most certainly was, but it wasn't the neoconservative approach. That said, it was the particular neocon approach embraced by the administration. Champions of this approach included, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, David Frum, and others who had made a point of attacking the State Department and the CIA at every turn.
Since the war, they've engaged in non-stop Bremer-bashing and Chalabi-boosting, as if Bremer were responsible for the paucity of troops on the ground and Chalabi, who now seems to have waged a campaign of deception against the U.S. government for years, has demonstrated his trustworthiness and ought to be rewarded the mantle of leadership. David Frum has been among the most forceful advocates of this view. On May 6, he wrote in National Review Online:
Those who rage at Chalabi seem to believe that he somehow lured the United States into a war that it would otherwise not have had to fight. But that's just silly. Chalabi became important in the mid-1990s precisely because so many people in both American parties had come to accept that Saddam's rule represented an intolerable threat to the peace and security of the Middle East and the world - and were looking for an alternative that was not theocratic, not dictatorial, and would not require direct support from the United States.
Isn't it also clear that Chalabi was a crucial source of the intelligence that so alarmed people in both American parties? Frum then goes on to argue both that Chalabi was a beacon of hope for Iraqi democracy, and that "one rather gets the impression that they," Chalabi's detractors, "are offended that the hope was ever entertained at all."
And certainly as I listen to the list of Chalabi's supposed offenses-- corruption, authoritarianism, double-dealing with the Iranians - I find myself wondering what those detractors imagine they are going to get from the ex-Baathist Sunni generals now jockeying to replace him. Will they be uncorrupt, unauthoritarian, and sternly anti-Iranian? Or will those issues cease to matter once a regime acceptable to the State Department and Saudi Arabia has taken control? I fear that the second outcome is much the more likely.
So it's Chalabi or the Baathists? Frum made a similar move on May 4, in a diary entry titled "The Chalabi Smear":
ITEM: Up until now we were supposed to believe that the INC produced no useful intelligence--that it dealt only in fantasies and lies. Now suddenly the INC is accused of being in possession of accurate and valuable sensitive information. How did Chalabi go from know-nothing to valuable intelligence asset overnight?
Isn't it possible that Chalabi dealt in fantasies and lies until the United States defeated the Baathist regime, at which point the U.S. acquired valuable information that they could then pass on to Chalabi, who could then, arguendo, hand it over to the Iranians? It would certainly be easier for his men to gather information, as well it should be. Overall, the Panglossian view of Chalabi seems bizarre.
Michael Rubin, an expert on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute and a TNR contributor, has provided much of the intellectual firepower for this view. In a May 3 piece on National Review Online, he argued that the State Department sabotaged Pentagon efforts to plan for the postwar period, which is how he describes efforts to hand over sovereignty to a government comprised of exiles and "internals" backed by a Free Iraqi Force, also drawn from the exile community. Rubin argues that this would have facilitated stabilization as the FIF could have helped co-opt the regular Iraqi Army. Whether or not this is true, it's not clear that it would have been an adequate substitute for a larger coalition invasion force.
The Standard Neocons: Dude, Where's My Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy? William Kristol and Robert Kagan of The Weekly Standard, despite longstanding ill will towards Colin Powell and impatience with the CIA's assessment of the Iraq threat, advocated a different approach. From early on, they fretted over troop levels, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Their criticism was searing only in stretches, and usually confined to caveats. The thinking behind their reticence, one can only assume, was that full-blown harangues would end up marginalizing the Standard, while constructive engagement could move the Bushies in their direction. Suffice to say, constructive engagement has worked about as well in this case as it has with Red China.
They framed their arguments in such a way as to suggest that President Bush, if only he followed his true instincts, would agree with them on the central importance of doing the job right. More recently, as the crisis in Iraq has escalated, they've grown more insistent. Both Kristol and Kagan continue to believe, as the title of one lead editorial had it, that the Iraq war was "The Right War for the Right Reasons," and they make a compelling case. They have since argued, again, that there are "Too Few Troops," and more recently that the timetable for elections must be moved up.
In short, Kristol and Kagan seem to have recognized that the crap has hit the fan, and that the time for pulling out all the stops has long since arrived. In this respect, they have something in common with pragmatic Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden who've staked out a more hawkish stance. Whether their McCainite leanings will pull them even further away from the Bush administration remains to be seen.
Kagan has gone farther in this regard. In his May 2 Washington Post column, Kagan wrote that, "All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters"--a category from which he necessarily excludes himself--"can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now." Worse yet, Kagan fears that the Bush administration is losing its will to fight:
The administration is increasingly reluctant to fight the people it defines as the bad guys in Iraq. This reluctance is perfectly understandable. No one wants more American casualties. And no one doubts that more violence in Iraq may alienate more of the Iraqi population. But this reluctance can also appear both to Iraqis and to the American public as a sign of declining will.
When observers call for stability, they fail to reckon with the facts:
[T]he alternatives are no easier to carry out and no less costly in money and lives than the present attempt to create some form of democracy in Iraq. The real alternative to the present course is not stability at all but to abandon Iraq to whatever horrible fate awaits it: chaos, civil war, brutal tyranny, terrorism or more likely a combination of all of these--with all that entails for Iraqis, the Middle East and American interests.
Which is why the Bush policy is a mystery for Kagan. Bush seems sincerely committed to staying the course and doing the right thing, but "he continues to tolerate policymakers, military advisers and a dysfunctional policymaking apparatus that are making the achievement of his goals less and less likely." Where the path will end is unclear to Kagan, and the rest of us.
The Neo-Imperialist: Bush Gets the Boot from Boot
Max Boot (my former boss) is perhaps best known for his full-throated defense of liberal imperialism. In The Savage Wars of Peace, he persuasively argued that the United States had a long history of using its armed forces to undertake what would today be called peacekeeping and nation-building missions with great success, and that fighting lawlessness and terrorism on a global scale remains essential to American national security. Inevitably, critics focused on his unapologetic embrace of the "e" word--"empire"--to dismiss his expensive and unpopular calls for a more expensive military oriented towards such unglamorous tasks as providing viable governance in the Kosovos and Sierra Leones of the world.
Boot was also a staunch advocate of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. In a December 2002 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Boot had this to say about neoconservatives, among whom he counted himself, and Iraq:
If we are to avoid another 9/11, they argue, we need to liberalize the Middle East--a massive undertaking, to be sure, but better than the unspeakable alternative. And if this requires occupying Iraq for an extended period, so be it; we did it with Germany, Japan and Italy, and we can do it again.
It was a widely held view among liberal hawks and conservatives alike. In the immediate aftermath of the Baathist defeat, Boot argued in the May 5, 2003 Weekly Standard that the United States "will have to commit sufficient force to make this a reality. This probably will not require the 200,000 troops suggested by Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki, but it will require a long-term commitment of at least 60,000 to 75,000 soldiers, the number estimated by Joint Staff planners."
In hindsight, this looks like a very optimistic assessment indeed. Fortunately, Boot's assessment soon changed. As the postwar situation in Iraq grew parlous, Boot embraced any number of heresies, at one point advocating a leading role by the United Nations. By late April, he called upon John Kerry to outhawk Bush by calling for a steep increase in the regular Army's troop strength in the Los Angeles Times. Though normally a down-the-line conservative, Boot had harsh words for the administration:
After stubbornly denying that more troops are needed, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, implicitly conceded the point by allowing the army temporarily to add 30,000 personnel over the next few years, mainly by delaying the discharge of existing soldiers. He is also trying to move soldiers from desk jobs to frontline units. But these are sticking--plaster solutions for the serious wounds Mr Bush's policies have inflicted on the armed forces.
More recently, Boot has joined the small handful of conservatives to call for Rumsfeld's head on a pike (not in so many words) in a May 13 Los AngelesTimes op-ed:
Rumsfeld has done many laudable things, but he has also miscalculated badly about many aspects of the Iraq occupation, and he has alienated much of the military. It is farfetched to claim that the war on terrorism would falter without him.
Will Max Boot, former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board who had been known (unfairly) as the one-man extremist wing of the neocons, become a key member of Kerry's kitchen cabinet? It's pretty unlikely--Boot is a committed conservative, his disappointment with the Bush administration notwithstanding--but stranger things have happened.
The Cheerleaders: Denial Ain't Just A River in Egypt
Where to begin? Not all conservatives are hemming and hawing, or engaging in searching self-examination. There are those, believe it or not, who really think that things in Iraq are going just fine, and that the media is to blame. Just as Rush Limbaugh saw the abuses at Abu Ghraib as little more than frat boy antics, and the nation's shock and horror at the images of abuse as so much hysterics, the Bush administration, and Donald Rumsfeld--as much a lightning rod for critical hawks as for doves at this point--still have a cheering section, one that, as you might imagine, is increasingly out of touch with reality. (Even the Neo-Neocons think something went wrong, namely that we let Foggy Bottom run roughshod over the peerless masterminds in Douglas Feith's office, or something like that.)
The always thought-provoking Wall Street Journal editorial page has, unfortunately, taken a maximalist turn in the cheerleading direction. When a leaked Red Cross report revealed the extent of prison abuse in Iraq, the WSJ didn't blame the Pentagon. It blamed, in classic contrarian fashion, the Red Cross. For being overly political. When calls for Rumsfeld's resignation reached a fever pitch, the Journal noted that most voters considered prisoner abuse "no big deal," and that only a small minority wanted Rumsfeld to resign. When it comes to open markets and open borders, the Journal usually doesn't let poll numbers do the arguing, but the May 12 "Review & Outlook" left it at pretty much at that. They did, however, add the following:
The war's domestic opponents are too obviously eager to expand the misdeeds of a few into a general repudiation of the war and all involved in it. For example, we are now reading that Geneva Convention status should be accorded to illegal combatants such as those at Guantanamo. We suspect the U.S. public understands that terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who wear no uniforms so as to more easily murder innocent civilians, do not deserve the same status accorded legitimate prisoners of war.
In doing so, they impugned the motives of hawks enraged by incompetence in Iraq and managed to change the subject from prisoner abuse in Iraq, where the prisoners in question are not KSM and his cronies, to a quite separate, broader question.
But the folks at the Journal are positively Quisling-esque when compared with that lion of the Iraq war, Tony Blankley of The Washington Times. Blankley spent his most recent column, on May 19, explaining that he predicted everything that's happened in Iraq with deadly accuracy in a column that ran in August of 2002. Marvel at the prescience for yourselves:
I addressed this reality in a column I published on Aug. 14, 2002--a full half year before the war started--which I titled "A period of 'measureless peril' could be in the offing." Its central analysis bears repeating today: "On Monday of this week [August 12, 2002], Henry Kissinger endorsed the president's pre-emptive war strategy In perhaps his most incisive assertion, he justifies 'bringing matters to a head with Iraq' for what he calls a generally unstated reason--While long-range American strategy must try to overcome legitimate causes of Islamic resentments, immediate policy must demonstrate that a terrorist challenge produces catastrophic consequences for the perpetrators, as well as their supporters, tacit or explicit.' In other words, we must break the will and pride of all those in the Islamic world who would dare to terrorize us and the international system."
One can only wonder why Blankley has not been named Undersecretary of Defense for Advanced Premonitory Wargaming. Of course Blankley declined to reprint such dazzling predictions as this, from April, 2003:
But, it seems as if the rolling start to the war will be mirrored by a rolling end the birth of a new government emerging , blade by blade, from the decaying corpse of the old. I suspect there may be genius in this plan. The absence of apparent historic discontinuities minimizes the psychological opportunities for resistance. Iraqis just keep going to bed and getting up as, seamlessly, democracy emerges.
He goes on to argue "even the president's opponents are not our greatest peril at the moment." Blankley is presumably referring to Bush's domestic political opponents, and conservatives with the temerity to question the continuing drift of Bush's Iraq policy. No, " the greatest immediate potential danger is a slackening of presidential resolve." Whether Blankley is mistaking stubbornness, indecision, and panic as "presidential resolve" is an open question. If so, he can rest assured that there's been no slackening in sight.
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