Tag Archives: Project for a New American Century

CONSERVATIVES BEWARE

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smoking volcanoAfter the immediate success of the U.S.-led war in Iraq in 2003 turned into a worst-of-all-worlds counter-narrative, many keyboards were worn out in the ensuing years documenting what went wrong on many levels. There is no need, here, to go into what Thomas Ricks, the acclaimed Pentagon correspondent, aptly called a “fiasco,” in his book with that title.

Many analysts held neoconservative foreign policy thinkers responsible for it, and Donald Rumsfeld’s top neoconservative advisers – Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense), Richard Perle (assistant secretary of defense), and Douglas Feith (undersecretary of defense for policy) – began demurring when critics implicated them, big time, in the unfolding disaster. As well, a chill toward neoconservatism set in among Washington’s political elite.

Then in 2005 and 2006, President Bush began removing neoconservative advisors from his administration and filling the positions with those who could be trusted to shift America’s Middle East policy in a more realist direction. Right after the November 2006 midterm elections, Bush accepted Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation and appointed the well-experienced Roberts Gates, a foreign policy realist, as his secretary of defense. In 2006, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a neoconservative think tank, was shut down, and by 2008 most of the Bush administration’s many neoconservative advisors were out of government.

Although neoconservative ideology nose-dived, it would be a mistake to assume that its adherents crashed and burned. As in the 1990s, they busied themselves. Many leading neocon thinkers engaged in what critics have called a rewriting of their role in the Bush White House, trying to salvage their political philosophy. Claiming that they were merely getting the truth out, setting the record straight, their revisionist history typically has included identifying the State Department, the CIA, and many realists and idealists as having had an exaggerated the role of neoconservatism in the Bush White House. It also has included blaming CIA intelligence, the State Department, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and other high-level targets for the debacle that arose in Iraq.

Certainly there is enough finger-pointing to go around, but the neoconservatives go too far, accepting little if any responsibility for the fiasco – everyone else is at fault (see, e.g., Douglas Feith, War and Decision; Richard Perle, “Ambushed on the Potomac,” The National Interest online; and Nathan Guttman, “No Longer in Power, Free to Talk, Neocons Seek to Rewrite History,” The Jewish Daily Forward online). In my view, the neocons lack the humility to see that when you point a finger elsewhere, three more fingers point back at you.

The neoconservatives, however, still had many high-level admirers, such as Republican Senator John McCain. When he was running for the presidency against Barack Obama in 2008, McCain included leading neoconservatives on his team of foreign policy and national security advisors (he also received ad hoc advice from realists Henry Kissinger and Richard Armitage).

human eyeAlso around this time, formidable neoconservative thinkers such as the columnists Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol were getting regular bylines in Time magazine, and Kristol was writing for The New York Times. And both men became FOX News analysts. But also by this time, the word “neoconservative” wasn’t heard much in the mainstream media, and commentators such as Kristol and Krauthammer were doing their thing under the umbrella “conservative.”

That is, the mainstream media, not to mention talk radio, was now content to use the word “conservative” to test drive neoconservative ideas for U.S. policy in the Middle East. Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and denouncing President Obama’s diplomatic efforts toward Iran are part of that ride. Of course it is not only the neocons and some conservatives who push such ideas but liberal hawks as well.

Jacob Heilbrunn, a foreign policy realist who knows a thing or two about neoconservatism, writes that the neocons want to engage in regime change around the world, and because that’s not current U.S. foreign policy they are blaming President Obama, big time, and anyone else of consequence who does not believe what they believe. “What the neocons are offering,” Heilbrunn concludes, “is a message of power worship, one that is a recipe for a permanent revolution abroad that will further ensnare the United States in foreign predicaments that it cannot reasonably hope to resolve.” To much of the world, then, it seems as if all the United States has to offer it is “unremitting combat.”

Conclusion. Much of American foreign policy conservatism during the Cold War era saw the world through an “us vs. them” / “good vs. evil” lens. Communism was the enemy, and many of  conservatism’s staunchest foreign policy apologists followed William F. Buckley Jr., whose aggressive anti-communism was at odds with the bipartisan doctrine on “containment – the organizing principle of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union – because it was not consistent with his “good vs. evil” policy frame for U.S. – Soviet relations. Unlike the majority of Americans and U.S. presidents (liberals and conservatives) who supported containment, Buckley was not opposed to rolling back the spread of communism with the weapons of wars, and many conservative politicians followed his lead.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, these conservatives lost the foreign enemy over against which they had organized their foreign policy, and their Manichean frame of reference virtually dissolved, at least until the neoconservatives reconstituted it on September 11, 2001. Now intoxicated with power inside the George W. Bush administration, they used their considerable intellects to sway Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to restore America’s “us vs. them” / “good vs. evil” foreign policy militarism and point it not toward Eastern Europe but the Middle East.

Despite the fact that “neoconservatism” is little heard today, its militarism since 9/11 has been, and continues to be, a heady brew, and much of foreign policy conservatism in America today walks around in that stupor. If you are an American and consider yourself a conservative, pay attention to the language you’re hearing on talk radio and from conservative politicians about what ought to be U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Caveat emptor.

The previous three posts discuses the strange history of political neoconservatism.

Wisdom is better than weapons of war.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Rudolfo Araiza G. & Cesar R. respectively (permissions via Creative Commons)

THE PATIENT RISE TO POWER OF THE NEOCONSERVATIVES part 3 of 3

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Story continued from the previous post.

green sky at night (Adrian Kingsley-Hughes)Perhaps the boldest move by neoconservatives during the 1990s, when they were rethinking their political involvement in U.S. foreign policy, was their January 26, 1998 letter to President Clinton that called for regime change in Iraq. Written on Project for a New American Century stationery, the formal letter argued that “the aim of American foreign policy” should be “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.”

“We urge you to articulate this aim,” the letter concluded. “We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.” It was signed by Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and eleven other influential political allies.

Many analysts have concluded that Clinton ignored the PNAC letter. Maybe. Certainly he never made any attempt to remove Saddam Hussein from power. But regime change takes time. Consider what did take place quietly in the halls of power. In September 1998, just nine months after Clinton received the PNAC letter, a bill was introduced to both the House and the Senate under the cumbersome title: “To establish a program to support a transition to democracy in Iraq.” It sailed through Congress and was signed into law by President Clinton on October 31 as “The Iraq Liberation Act.”

The implication ought to give us pause. Conventional wisdom lays the decision to change the regime in Iraq squarely at the feet of President George W. Bush, who used the U.S. military to remove Saddam Hussein from power in early 2003, but the policy had in fact become official U.S. policy under Clinton, who, with Congressional sanction, got the ball rolling by signing the bill.

So we may never know just what occurred. As Al Gore once told Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, the public only knows one percent of what goes on at the White House (The Charlie Rose Show, PBS-TV, July 16, 2009).

2000-2004. For the neocon intellectuals and professional who were in place as high-level advisers to secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on America was their “Aha!” foreign policy moment. Several things converged in a short space of time to give them the opportunity they had been waiting for to showcase their militaristic foreign policy in real time.

The first thing was the terrorist attack itself. “In an instant,” writes Andrew Bacevich, “the world was once again divided into two opposing and irreconcilable camps” (Bacevich, American Empire: The Reality and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy). And this was going to be “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.

skyscraper at night (Jon Herbert)The neocons warmed to the president’s words. Voilà! Right before their very eyes, a replacement enemy to the collapsed Soviet threat had suddenly materialized – Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network – over against which they could seek to put the militarism of their worldview to test in real time.

Unknown to most people at the time, however, the neocons immediately pushed for invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein instead of going after al Qaeda, bin Laden, and the Taliban government  in Afghanistan. As investigative journalist Bob Woodward writes: “the Pentagon had been working for months on developing a military option for Iraq,” and Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfled’s deputy secretary of defense and a leading neoconservative thinker, was committed to a policy that “would make Iraq a principal target of the first round in the war on terrorism” (Woodward, Bush at War).

During the highest-level discussions at the White House and Camp David between September 12-15, on how best to respond to the terrorist attack, Wolfowitz and 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 (Bush at War; see also: Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq).

By the time bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Taliban had been driven from power in Afghanistan, there was widespread acceptance across the political spectrum in America and in Congress for removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – the primary reason, of course, being the continual circulation by the CIA and the American mainstream media “proving” a threat to the United States from Iraq’s WMD.

Story continued in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes & Jon Herbert respectively (permission via Creative Commons)

THE PATIENT RISE TO POWER OF THE NEOCONSERVATIVES part 2 of 3

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Story continued from the previous post.

Brandenburg Gate1970s-1980s. The neoconservatives now shift from the Democrat to the Republican Party. The move made some sense. For one thing, in 1975, President Gerald Ford, a Republican, had appointed Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a political neoconservative, as U.S. ambassador to the UN. Also, neoconservatives in general were not fans of the human rights foreign policy of U.S. President Jimmy Carter (1976-1980). And by 1980, as the Carter – Reagan presidential election loomed, most had become convinced that they would never become lieutenants of power in the Democrat Party. During the Carter – Reagan presidential campaign, many transferred “their hopes to Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, expecting that a conservative victory would bring them all the opportunities and rewards they had been denied by the Democrats” (John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism).

But that was not to be. The stars had yet to align. After Reagan won the presidency he did bring in the neoconservative intellectual Jeane Kirkpatrick as a foreign policy advisor and in 1981 named her U.S. ambassador to the UN. As with Gerald Ford, this gave neoconservatives at least one high-level access to the Reagan administration. But then in 1983, Reagan, during the Lebanese civil war, acted on reports from the Department of Defense and the NSA and withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon after a terrorist bombing in Beirut killed 241 American servicemen. Removing those troops did not set well with neoconservatives.

It became clear to the neoconservatives that President Reagan was never going to buy into their political philosophy. This was especially true regarding their foreign policy. Reagan may have gone so far as to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and promote the development of a bizarre “Star Wars” missile defense system against the Soviet threat, but he avoided neoconservative ideas for rolling back communism through military interventions.

In fact, Reagan was the U.S. president who, reached out skillfully diplomatically to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Over a several year period, and against great political pushback in both countries, they hammered out and signed nuclear arms control treaties. Further, Reagan and Gorbachev are key players for anyone wishing to understand the end of the Soviet Union.

Losing their perennial enemy. With Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (“restructuring”) and glasnost (“opening”), the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the formal dissolution in of the Soviet Union, or USSR, neoconservatism by the end of 1991 had lost the perennial communist enemy over against which much of its foreign policy had been organized. The net result, politically, was that whatever appeal neoconservatives may been accumulating during the Cold War decades as  dependable guides for U.S. foreign policy dwindled considerably.

engineers (Seattle Municial Archives)1990s. Clinton and the neoconservatives. Their political marginalization was ensured with the election of Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992. Clinton, a liberal internationalist and a Democrat, had no time for “the neocons.” But they had time for themselves, and they spent it rethinking their image. Although small in numbers compared to realist and idealist networks, neoconservatives are well-funded and resourceful. Garaged during Clinton’s two terms in office (1992-2000), they plied their time, re-engineering their basic political philosophy in a language and with policy proposals suited to what now occupied everyone’s mind in Washington: America’s changing role in the world – what would it be, now that the world was no longer divided into two opposing superpower camps?

Neoconservative thinkers addressed this by rolling out their views through the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a respected and influential right-wing think tank, and in National Interest, a foreign affairs journal founded in 1985 by Irving Kristol. Another outlet, The Weekly Standard, was founded in 1995 by William Kristol (son of Irving). These three outlets provided public platforms for a new generation of keen neoconservative intellects, including Elliot Abrahams, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Charles Krauthammer, to disseminate their views.

In 1997, several influential neoconservatives, led by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which promoted an aggressive U.S. foreign policy that they called neo-Reaganite. In America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy, former neoconservative thinker Francis Fukuyama writes that the 1990s, neoconservative intellectuals “proposed a foreign policy agenda involving concepts like regime change, benevolent hegemony, uni-polarity, preemption, and American exceptionalism.”

Perhaps their boldest move during these years of their marginalization and rethinking was when they sent a formal letter to President Clinton in 1998 arguing for regime change in Iraq. We’ll pick up the story here in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Werner Kunz & Seattle Municipal Archives respectively (permissions via Creative Commons)