Neoconservatism
In the councils of power
You don’t hear neoconservatives complaining. In fact, they were in a rare position on September 11, 2001. Not only were they geared for war with Iraq, they held positions of the highest level of influence in the Bush White House. And now, voilà, a replacement enemy had materialized over against which to justify their militant foreign policy. “In an instant,” writes professor of international relations Andrew Bacevich, “the world was once again divided into two opposing and irreconcilable camps.” And it was “the world’s fight,” President Bush told Congress and the nation on September 20. “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” Bush warned. (Bacevich, American Empire: The Reality and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy, 2002, p. 225-226.)
The president’s words resonated with the neoconservatives, who, just days after the attack, and now firing on all cylinders, successfully lobbied the president to elevate the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network into a clear and present danger from Saddam Hussein. In fact, the option to invade Iraq instead of going after al Qaeda in Afghanistan was debated in the White House immediately after the attacks on 9/11.between September 12-15, Wolfowitz and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld suggested striking Iraq
According to acclaimed investigative journalist Bob Woodward, “the pentagon had been working for months on developing a military option for Iraq,” and Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, was committed to a policy that “would make Iraq a principal target of the first round in the war on terrorism.” During the highest-level discussions at the White House and Camp David between September 12-15, Wolfowitz and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld suggested striking Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell voiced his opposition, and President Bush nixed the idea for the time being, saying that the American people “want us to do something about al Qaeda” in Afghanistan. (Woodward, Bush at War, 2002, p. 49. See also: Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006), pp. 30-32. See also: “The Downing Street Memo,” written by Matthew Rycroft, a Downing Street foreign policy aide, dated 23 July, 2002. Released to The Sunday Times on May 12, 2005, the memo notes that, at a Prime Minister’s meeting about Iraq on July 23, 2002, there had been “a perceptible shift in attitude” in Washington. “Military action was now seen as inevitable…. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the time was not yet decided.”)
By the time the Taliban and al Qaeda had been driven from power in Afghanistan – the primary agency for that stunningly quick success being the CIA – there was widespread acceptance across the political spectrum in Washington and America for removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – the primary reason being the continual circulation of CIA intelligence “proving” a threat to the United States from Iraq’s dangerous stockpiling of WMD – and President Bush found it easy sailing to get Congress to sign off on the invasion.
Washington’s reliance on neoconservative political philosophy for its Middle East policy during the first term of the Bush presidency can also be attributed, I believe, to the weakened appeal of realism and idealism by then. Simply put, there was no other foreign policy ideology that could gainsay neoconservative policy for the Middle East. The two perennial -isms were still being questioned for being unable to predict the epochal event known as the collapse of the Soviet Union, and neither had been able either to wow the popular imagination or to unify the foreign policy community around a post–Cold War strategy for the United States.
Further, there was no expecting the new President Bush to be able to mount credible arguments against the well-thought-out views of his Vice-President and Secretary of Defense and in favor of another policy. Together, Cheney and Rumsfeld had fifty-plus years of experience in Washington, many of those years spent serving in former presidents in high-level advisory posts, and they now listened to the neoconservative advisors they had appointed.
Quite unlike his father, George W. Bush had very little foreign policy experience before entering the White House. During his campaign in 2000 for president, Bush asked Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s best friend, to join his team of foreign policy advisors. Although Armitage accepted, he later told Bob Woodward, for State of Denial, that Bush had a dreadful lack of experience. “The big problem, Armitage thought, was that he was not sure Bush filled the suit required of a president…. Armitage told his wife and Powell that he was not sure Governor Bush understood the implications of the United States as world power.” (Woodward, State of Denial: Bush at War, 2006, p. 9.)
Out of the councils of power
But neoconservatism’s popularity waned again. After the immediate success of Saddam Hussein’s removal turned into the counter-narrative of a worst-of-all-worlds situation, neoconservatives began to demur when critics implicated them in the incompetent planning for postwar contingencies. (See, e.g., James Fallows, Blind into Baghdad: America’s War in Iraq, 2006), cpt. 2.) But coolness toward neoconservatism among Washington’s political elite set in as the horrific violence in Iraq increased. Right after the November 2006 midterm elections, President Bush, now in his second term, accepted Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation and began removing neoconservative advisors from the administration, replacing them with those who could be trusted to shift U.S. Middle East policy in a more realist direction. The appointment of Roberts Gates as Secretary of Defense was the most prominent move in that direction.President Bush, now in his second term, accepted Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation and began removing neoconservative advisors from the administration
In 2006, PNAC was shut down, and by 2008 most the administration’s neoconservative advisors were out of government. Many had moved beyond demurring to what critics now called a rewriting of the role they had played in the Bush White House, to salvage what they could of their political philosophy. In response, the neoconservatives claimed they were merely getting the truth out, setting the record straight. Typically, they identified the State Department, the CIA, or many realists and idealists as having exaggerated the role of neoconservatism in the Bush White House in order to use neoconservatism (in the press and the media) as a scapegoat for the disastrously mismanaged years in Iraq following the ouster of Saddam Hussein. (See, e.g., Douglas Feith, War and Decision; Richard Perle, “Ambushed on the Potomac,” The National Interest Online, Jan. 21, 2009; Nathan Guttman, “No Longer in Power, Free to Talk, Neocons Seek to Rewrite History,” Forward.com, Dec. 24, 2008.)
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that neoconservatism crashed and burned. When running for the presidency against Barack Obama in 2008, Senator John McCain included leading neoconservatives on his team of foreign policy and national security advisors, though he also received ad hoc advice from realists Henry Kissinger and Richard Armitage. Krauthammer and William Kristol are still going strong, though you will not see the bylines of either in Time anymore. The Weekly Standard, National Interest, AEI, the Hudson Institute, and other well-established avenues remain available for test driving neoconservative ideas for U.S. policy in the Middle East. And neoconservatives support bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, an option that President Obama has not as yet taken off the table.
The conceptual core of neoconservatism
Historically, neoconservatism as a political ideology has included adherents whose views are complex and diverse, and that has become more so as key figures rethink the ideology in light of the Iraq war, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and the knotty problem of Iran’s nuclear program. Yet despite the conceptual flux, Fukuyama has summarized what he calls the “four common principles or threads” that ran through neoconservative thought up through the end of the Cold War: “a concern with democracy, human rights, and more generally the internal politics of states; a belief that U.S. power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and often undermines its own ends.” (Fukuyama, Crossroads, pp. 4-5.)
There is a whiff of realist and idealist interests in this. Idealism is enthusiastic about democracy promotion, human rights initiatives, and it focuses more on a state’s internal politics than realism assumes is necessary. Realism is skeptical about international law and institutions. And both emphasize, in their own ways, moral use of power. It is not enough, however, merely to acknowledge outer similarities of the three political -isms. At issue is the way in which neoconservatives think about the ideas, for that determines the creation and direction of their policies.
It should be noted that, although neoconservative ideas lit the Bush administration’s Middle East policy universe, it cannot be concluded from this that President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld were neoconservatives in principle. None ever accepted the label, and it seems unlikely that any of them will ever claim it. What can be concluded is that all three, especially Cheney and Rumsfeld, had strong neoconservative leanings and that all three abetted neoconservative foreign policy ideas for the Middle East after 9/11, at the expense of realist and idealist approaches.
This is understood from the so-called Bush Doctrine, which both supporters and critics have cobbled together from recurring points in a number of Bush administration speeches, documents, and policy statements, most prominently the president’s State of the Union address in January 2002, his speeches at West Point and the American Enterprise Institute (June 2002 and February 2003), and the administration’s controversial National Security Strategy of the United States, or NSS (released September 2002). “These official pronouncements,” writes Fukuyama, “are consistent with what neoconservatives outside the administration were arguing; indeed, in the case of Bush’s second inaugural, some outsiders provided ideas directly. Given this record, it is not surprising that many observers saw the Bush administration as being decisively shaped by neoconservatives.” (Ibid., p. 3.)
Their future council?
With the conceptual unrest now faced by neoconservatives and the cooled reception of their ideas in Washington, it is hard to say what the future holds for them. We may see the emergence of a third generation of neoconservatives as well as offshoot of the ideology, as neorealism and neoliberalism emerged from perceived inadequacies of their ideological roots.
In early-2009, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and others launched the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), which, according to its website, promotes: a continued U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military engagement in the world; robust support for America’s democratic allies and opposition to rogue regimes that threaten American interests; the human rights of those oppressed by their governments; U.S. leadership in spreading political and economic freedom; a strong military ready to confront the threats of the twenty-first century; and international economic engagement as a key element of U.S. foreign policy.
Neoconservatism is a political ideology that owes a good deal of its existence to capitalizing on large pieces of the international relations puzzle that realists and idealists emphasize, such as the state, balance of power, and national interests. But neoconservatives bring a much different understanding of these pieces to their analyses and policy prescriptions than do realists and idealists, and therefore a much different motivation. (This may go some way in explaining why neoconservatives at times prefer to be known as democratic globalists or American internationalists.)
