http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg22apr22,0,3219634.column
From the Los Angeles Times
How neo are the neocons ?
Promoting democracy throughout the world has been a driving force in U.S.
politics since the
country's earliest days.
Jonah Goldberg
April 22, 2008
In the play "Embedded," Tim Robbins' 2003 satire about the Iraq invasion,
a thinly veiled
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz shout with Nazi-like gusto, "Hail Leo
Strauss!" and get
***ually aroused at the prospect of international conquest. During the
post-9/11 age of
neo-phobia, when an irrational fear of anything that might be called
"neoconservative" gripped
the nation, such critiques passed as intelligently nuanced.
Neocons have been attacked as secret Trotskyites, open imperialists and
perfidious double
agents for Israel. Some think the neocons are something like Jesuits (or
perhaps Jewsuits) in
the service of their dark anti-pope Strauss, a long-dead, German-Jewish
political philosopher
who emigrated to the U.S. to escape Hitler.
In a hopeful sign that it's once again safe to discuss the topic sanely,
Robert Kagan of the
Carnegie Endowment has offered a renewed defense of neoconservative
foreign policy in the
latest issue of World Affairs Journal.
"The first thing that could be said about this neoconservative worldview
is that there is
nothing very conservative about it," Kagan writes. "But a more im****tant
question is, how 'neo'
is it?" His answer: not very.
From our earliest days, Americans have sup****ted the promotion of
democracy around the world,
often by force and without undue heed to international institutions.
William Henry Seward, a
founder of the Republican Party and Lincoln's secretary of State, argued
that it was America's
mission to lead the way "to the universal restoration of power to the
governed." A generation
earlier, statesman Henry Clay championed the idea that America had the
"duty to share with the
rest of mankind this most precious gift" of liberty. Both world wars,
Korea and Vietnam would
be inconceivable without accounting for America's dedication to the
promotion and defense of
democracy.
Kagan traces such sentiments to the dawn of the republic. The founders, he
writes, saw the U.S.
as a " 'Hercules in a cradle' ... because its beliefs, which liberated
human potential and made
possible a transcendent greatness, would capture the imagination and the
following of all
humanity."
Even amid the 15-month riot of Bush-ba****ng during the Democratic Party's
fratricidal
primaries, both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama conceded the core
neoconservative
principle of the Bush doctrine. "There's absolutely a connection between a
democratic regime
and heightened security for the United States," Clinton said, responding
to events in Pakistan.
And Obama would not only unilaterally attack Al Qaeda in Pakistan without
Pakistan's permission
if necessary, but he also argues that anti-Americanism in the Middle East
is a direct
consequence of the lack of democracy.
Obviously, sup****ting the spread of democracy hardly requires you to
sup****t the Iraq war. But
it works the other way around as well. Sup****t for the Iraq war doesn't
qualify you as a
neoconservative. Douglas J. Feith, who was an undersecretary of Defense
after 9/11, argues in
his new memoir, "War and Decision," that democratization didn't rank very
high among the Bush
administration's early priorities. Moreover, the Bush administration's
mistakes in Iraq --
perhaps including the war itself -- have less relation****p to ideology
than many think. "It is
possible," as Kagan notes, "to be prudent or imprudent, capable or clumsy,
wise or foolish,
hurried or cautious in pursuit of any doctrine."
America's forcible promotion of democracy has been both successful
(Germany, Japan) and
unsuccessful (Vietnam). Where Iraq falls in the win-loss columns is
unknowable right now. But
the idea that the "Iraq project" is some bizarre and otherworldly
enterprise will seem
laughable to historians a century from now, even if it is viewed as a
disaster.
I largely agree with Kagan on all of these points. But I have a problem
too. Kagan embraces and
celebrates the definition of neoconservatism as a doctrine of democracy
promotion abroad,
moralism in foreign policy and unilateralism toward these ends when
necessary. But the original
neoconservatism of the late '60s and early '70s wasn't about any of these
things.
It was about domestic affairs, primarily the dangers of overreach. Less an
ideology than a
branch of skepticism about the ability of government to achieve anything
like utopian goals,
neoconservatism was the school for former liberals -- they'd famously been
"mugged by reality,"
in Irving Kristol's words.
Kagan and Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol (son of Irving) actually
rejected the label
"neoconservative" when describing their ideal foreign policy in a now
famous 1994 Foreign
Affairs essay, "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." Yet, since then,
their neo-Reaganism
has simply been called "neoconservatism."
Hence the irony: The best cure for today's neoconservatism is a big dose
of the neoconservatism
of old.
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