BoatBanter.com - I'm voting republican because...

BAR wrote:
Ray Fischer wrote:
Curly Surmudgeon wrote:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:50:25 -0700, hot-ham-and-cheese wrote:

Squirrely doesn't or at least says he won't be paying any under
Obama. Cite?

You know neocons - they like to make up facts to justify their
irrational agenda.

Can you define "neocon?"

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February 19, 2006

After Neoconservatism

By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems
very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the
ideas animating it kindly. 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. There are clear
benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's
dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and
Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves
justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the
project to this point.

The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's
first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places,
in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in
the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic
preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with
weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and
that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term
solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the
ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was
not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as
never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the
administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the
process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.

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. The administration's second-term efforts to
push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring
rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic
fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's
parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of
elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote
led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on
the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in
June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian
election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to
the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that
"America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the
charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration
made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would
have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the
Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has
been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like
Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.

The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy may
not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian
conservatives - red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are fighting
and dying in the Middle East - supported the Iraq war because they believed
that their children were fighting to defend the United States against
nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't want to abandon the
president in the middle of a vicious war, but down the road the perceived
failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to favor a more isolationist
foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. A
recent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism; the
percentage of Americans saying that the United States "should mind its own
business" has never been higher since the end of the Vietnam War.

More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and
outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the
broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the
decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their
idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most
directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage,
following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because
American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an
open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with
neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as
apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to
accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a
narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic
Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.

The Neoconservative Legacy

How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they
risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration's first-term
foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier
generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives, since
those views were themselves complex and subject to differing
interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran through much of this
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
American 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 thereby undermines its own ends.

The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision.
The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering - which in earlier
years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action,
busing and welfare - suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world
and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated
consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on
the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure
of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the
transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social
engineering.

In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of
neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals
who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930's
and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving
Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of
this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a
documentary film by Joseph Dorman called "Arguing the World." The most
important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in
social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense
anti-Communism.

It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as
Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his
supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and
brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to
the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic
aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to
realize that "real existing socialism" had become a monstrosity of
unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it
espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives,
the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would
underlie the life work of many members of this group.

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). A major theme
running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea
that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying
problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on
shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like
subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.

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.

Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and
in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and
for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to
"tear down this wall." His assistant secretary of defense for international
security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the "prince of darkness"
for this uncompromising, hard-line position; his proposal for a double-zero
in the intermediate-range nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the complete
elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of
touch by the bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the
Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt
that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually
winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war.

And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91.
Gorbachev accepted not only the double zero but also deep cuts in
conventional forces, and then failed to stop the Polish, Hungarian and East
German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within a couple of
years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with
regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact
threat to the West evaporated.

The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq
war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert
Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all
totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small
push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once
the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing
joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000
book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to
promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism.
But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in
declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light
of the record of the past three decades."

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the
Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the
insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to
think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies
reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather
than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now
assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq
would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to
George Packer's recent book on Iraq, "The Assassins' Gate," the Pentagon
planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of
the summer following the invasion.

By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual
streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political theorist
Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by
people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of
philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or
policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the "crisis of modernity"
brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact
that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the
nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of
the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert
Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard
Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul
Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people.
Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear
proliferation and the way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left
loopholes, in its support for "peaceful" nuclear energy, large enough for
countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through.

I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the
neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom,
who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand
and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two
occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The End
of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that
argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in
all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we
are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor
of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of
History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially
universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to
live in a modern - that is, technologically advanced and prosperous -
society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political
participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this
modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in
the course of historical time.

"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument
for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that
terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of
the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people
like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that
history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will.
Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as
farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a
political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no
longer support.

The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony

The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply
underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes
in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react
to the use of American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with
instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich calls
American maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy
and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war
period, the structural situation of world politics changed in ways that made
this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes of even
close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative
authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested
that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of
"benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue
states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came
up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this
posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded,
"It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an
unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to
fear from its otherwise daunting power." (Italics added.)

It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global
reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a
frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that the United States is a hegemon
more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning signs
that things had changed in America's relationship to the world long before
the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had
grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world in every dimension
of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense spending nearly equal
to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during the Clinton years,
American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to an
American-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close
democratic allies who thought the United States was seeking to impose its
antistatist social model on them.

There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American
benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American
exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where
others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. 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.

Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp
limits to the American people's attention to foreign affairs and willingness
to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American
interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular
support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense
spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most
Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding
Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public
appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an
imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly,
and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are
reasonably content with their own lives and society.

Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well
intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq
intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case
that the United States was not getting authorization from the United Nations
Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate
case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was doing
in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite
prescient.

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. The misjudgment was based in
part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to
correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But the
intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the
terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of this
threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the
centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of
measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to
domestic eavesdropping.

What to Do

Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United
States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental
ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been
calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy
instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need
to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since
wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings.
Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose
core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and
minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and
Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.

The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions of
the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world
today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy
on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance
the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary
task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of
political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to
create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective
in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate
mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.

The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while
useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United
Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with
serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global
body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a
"multi-multilateral world" of overlapping and occasionally competing
international institutions that are organized on regional or functional
lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the
Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply
shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.

The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most
contested in the coming months and years, is the place of democracy
promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy that could come from
the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp
turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United
States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not
just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is
critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to
dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy
that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right,
but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the
thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its
neoconservative allies.

We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and
modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of
jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem
worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing
Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself,
arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a
modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists,
from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van
Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and
intimately familiar with all of democracy's blessings. More democracy will
mean more alienation, radicalization and - yes, unfortunately - terrorism.

But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to
occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical
Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim
communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly
authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability
indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and
Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable
Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate
Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority.
Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a
formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the
realities of governing.

If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our
focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those
institutions of the United States government that actually promote
democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations
like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy
and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping
along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in
1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in
1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the
overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States
does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition,
outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand
for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore
a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening
of political and economic conditions to be effective.

The Bush administration has been walking - indeed, sprinting - away from the
legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral approach
it has taken toward the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea.
Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about "transformational
diplomacy" and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of the
foreign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document is
being rewritten. All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the
Bush first-term foreign policy and its neoconservative supporters has been
so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about
how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming
years. The reaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy
itself, and such a reaction is an indulgence we cannot afford, given the
critical moment we have arrived at in global politics.

Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated
with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American
hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor
realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world - ideas that
retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but
without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to
bring these ends about.

Francis Fukuyama teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at
Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from his book "America at
the Crossroads," which will be published this month by Yale University
Press.

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John R. Carroll
www.machiningsolution.com