America’s neocons, masters of chaos, instigating geopolitical confrontations in the Middle East, protected by the usual crowd of “Israel uber alles” chatterers and the Aipac paid flack in the US Conga Line

Jacob Heilbrunn

October 27, 2014 

NATIONAL INTEREST

HAT TIP: Quirk

Springtime for Neocons

Perhaps no one has inadvertently done more to revive the fortunes of the neocons and liberal hawks than President Obama.

IN MAY 1968, Richard Hofstadter published an essay about the Vietnam War in the New York Times Magazine. It was called “Uncle Sam Has Cried ‘Uncle!’ Before.” Hofstadter had earned fame for works such as The American Political Tradition and Anti-Intellectualism In American Life that upended traditional interpretations of American history. The two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian was also a colleague and close friend of Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun and Daniel Bell at Columbia University. It was a moment when the voice of the New York intellectuals carried, even as the paladins of the New Left assaulted everything that they cherished.

In the Times, Hofstadter now offered a characteristically revisionist (and insightful) reflection about American foreign policy:

The American people, like their leaders, have very little familiarity with losing national enterprises. Although they have been uncommonly uneasy about the war in Vietnam almost from the beginning, they are equally uneasy with the idea of national failure, and an American “defeat” seems to many of them unthinkable and absurd.

But it wasn’t. Contrary to popular mythology, Hofstadter argued, the United States had never enjoyed a smooth rise to global dominance. Instead, pretty much like any other nation, it had experienced periodic setbacks and defeats.

Hofstadter thus pointed out that in 1794 George Washington had signed the deeply unpopular Jay’s Treaty, which preserved the peace between Great Britain and the United States at the cost of numerous concessions. The United States also paid ransom to the Barbary states (in 1795 alone it handed over almost one million dollars to the dey of Algiers to rescue 115 sailors). Then there was the War of 1812. American bungling throughout the conflict was overshadowed by Andrew Jackson’s spectacular victory at New Orleans, which created the impression of overwhelming U.S. military power even though it wasn’t even necessary to fight (slow communications meant that neither the British nor Americans knew that a peace deal had already been reached). Battling Mexico and Native Americans, Hofstadter wrote, further fostered a complacent belief in American invincibility. So did World War I, which the United States entered late in the day. World War II propelled the United States to global power, but the Korean War proved an unpopular and intractable conflict that Dwight Eisenhower pledged to end upon entering the Oval Office. Now Hofstadter said that prolonging the Vietnam War would, in the words of his biographer David S. Brown, “almost certainly bring about a reaction from the Right” to avenge the failure of liberal elites in Southeast Asia.

What Hofstadter did not anticipate, however, is that perhaps the most fervent response to defeat in Vietnam would come from a militant faction within the liberal movement, the one that came to be known as neoconservatism. It was a neologism coined as a term of derision by Michael Harrington, but it would ultimately be embraced by its adherents. The desire to restore a perceived American dominance—to repudiate the “Vietnam syndrome”—helped lead to the birth of the neocons. Former critics of the war, such as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, came to champion it retrospectively as an essential crusade against Soviet aggression. This remarkable turnabout prompted Theodore Draper to warn presciently in the New Republic in March 1982 that Podhoretz’s self-serving tract Why We Were In Vietnam “represents a trend of selective moralistic zealotry which, if permitted to spread, will give both anti-Communism and neoconservatism a bad name.” But spread it did—so virulently that many neocons, including Podhoretz, assailed a succession of presidents ranging from Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter to even Ronald Reagan for failing to take a harder line against the Kremlin. With blind bellicosity serving as their personal index of patriotism, no president could live up to the standards that the neocons wished to impose.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, however, came a course reversal, at least when it came to Reagan. Now the once-saturnine neocons were jubilant, and claimed all the credit for the demise of the Warsaw Pact. But triumphalism required more triumphs, and by 2003, when the neocons and liberal hawks championed the Iraq War as the final blow to the Vietnam syndrome, they were unable to produce them. Instead, it was back to the future: Iraq, like Vietnam, turned into a debacle for the euphoric promoters of democracy and liberty in a distant land.

OR SO it seemed. Today, the neocons and liberal hawks are once more on the march. Writing in Politico, for example, Michael Hirsh observed that former vice president Dick Cheney’s “advice is actively solicited by many Republicans in Congress, perhaps more than it has been in years.” Perhaps no one has inadvertently done more to revive the fortunes of the neocons and liberal hawks than President Obama.

To listen to Obama’s critics—and with his poll numbers reaching subterranean lows, who isn’t one?—the trouble with his foreign policy is that it has represented an inexorable process of retrenchment. Smitten by his own lofty rhetoric about the end of great-power conflict and a new era of peace, Obama has steadily pulled back from the Middle East, Asia and Europe, at once alienating our allies and emboldening our foes. It began with his maladroit attempts to foist a peace process upon Israel that quickly descended into open warfare between him and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then came his tour of the Middle East, where he delivered a major speech in Cairo in June 2009 called “A New Beginning,” which proved to be none at all. In Iraq and Afghanistan, he accepted arbitrary timelines for withdrawal rather than seeing both missions through to completion. And in Ukraine, his negligent approach prompted Russian president Vladimir Putin to embark upon revanchism.

So, at any rate, goes the indictment from neoconservatives and liberal hawks. They’re certainly right to complain about his overall performance, but their specific allegations miss the mark. The real problem with Obama’s foreign policy is not that he has been intervening abroad too little. It is that he has too often intervened in an inconsistent and ineffective manner.

The belief that Obama has presided over an era of retrenchment presumes that he has had a coherent foreign policy. But in Syria as well as Asia, he engaged in empty talk about U.S. red lines. Asked about America’s commitment to defend the Senkaku Islands, for example, he gave what New York Times columnist Roger Cohen generously called an “evasive” response: “The implication of the question, I think, . . . is that each and every time a country violates one of these norms, the United States should go to war or stand prepared to engage militarily, and if it doesn’t, then somehow we’re not serious about these norms. Well, that’s not the case.” Actually, it is. U.S. policy in Asia and elsewhere is supposed to be based on a credible deterrent, not on the whims of a president who airily decides when he does, and does not, choose to back up solemn commitments.

Nor is this all. For all the complaints about Obama retreating from the world stage, the truth is that he has in fact been quite ready to employ military force abroad. In 2009, Obama backed a “surge” of troops in Afghanistan that merely postponed the inevitable. In 2011, Obama, together with European allies, attacked Libya to avert a slaughter in Benghazi and ended up driving Muammar el-Qaddafi from power, thereby exceeding the UN mandate and convincing Russia that Washington had used the pretext of humanitarian intervention as a convenient smokescreen to install a regime more to its liking. In reality, Obama quickly washed his hands of Tripoli.

What’s more, his original intervention merely helped set the stage for a conflict in Mali and an even bigger civil war in Syria, as Libyan militants and weapons poured out into the neighborhood. Unlike in Libya, however, Obama threatened to intervene but then retreated as Congress rebelled against the prospect of a new Middle East war. But with the collapse of Iraq and the rise of the Islamic State, the mood has palpably begun to change. Obama, in his recent national address on the Islamic State, adopted a more crusading credo in Iraq and Syria: “Our own safety, our own security, depends upon our willingness to do what it takes to defend this nation and uphold the values that we stand for—timeless ideals that will endure long after those who offer only hate and destruction have been vanquished from the Earth.”

IF THIS sounds redolent of David Frum and Richard Perle’s neocon manifestoAn End to Evil, that’s because it is. Over a decade ago, Illinois state senator Obama denounced the impending Iraq War as a “cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.” Now, under President Obama, it’s suddenly springtime for neocons.

No sooner did Obama sound the tocsin on Iraq than the neocons declared that they had it right from the beginning (one of the honorable exceptions is none other than Frum, who recently acknowledged, “The United States overestimated the threat from Saddam Hussein in 2003. Without an active nuclear-weapons program, he was not a danger beyond his immediate vicinity. That war cost this country dearly”). “Dick Cheney Is Still Right,” the Wall Street Journal editorial page announced. “Say what you will about George W. Bush: He got every one of these questions right while Mr. Obama got every one of them wrong,” wrote the paper’s columnist Bret Stephens.

The real dream of the neocons is not simply to defeat the Islamic State but also to engage in a renewed bout of regime change around the globe. Toppling the Syrian regime has been a long-standing goal of the neocons. In August 2013, the Foreign Policy Initiative—the successor to the Project for a New American Century (headed by William Kristol and Robert Kagan), which was itself the successor to the Committee for the Free World, which was the successor to the Congress for Cultural Freedom—issued a letter to Obama imploring him to take out Bashar al-Assad. At the time, Fouad Ajami wrote, “The regime itself—its barons, its secret police, its elite military units and its air bases—ought to be legitimate targets, and the same is true of Assad’s presidential palace.” That mantra is now being revived. In a New York Times op-ed, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham wrote that to stop the Islamic State, it would be necessary to end the civil war in Syria and to create a political transition “because the regime of President Bashar al-Assad will never be a reliable partner against ISIS [an alternate name for the Islamic State]; in fact, it has abetted the rise of ISIS, just as it facilitated the terrorism of ISIS’ predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq.”

But in asserting that Assad and Al Qaeda are united, McCain and Graham are engaging in semantic jiggerypook that is reminiscent of older claims that Saddam Hussein was allied with Osama bin Laden. What’s more, had Obama ousted Assad a year ago, it might well have expedited rather than retarded the rise of the Islamic State. McCain and the Foreign Policy Initiative, among others, have consistently declared that a moderate opposition could take power in Syria, but whether moderation backed by U.S. arms, which seem to have a penchant for ending up in the hands of militant Islamic rebel groupings, would really carry the day is a rather iffy proposition.

It’s also the case that the neocon program for combating the Islamic State is considerably more expansive than anything Obama should contemplate. According to Max Boot:

We need to send many more advisers and Special Operations Forces to Iraq, backed up by airpower, to aid not only the Iraqi security forces but also the Kurdish peshmerga and the Sunni tribes to fight back against ISIS—and . . . we should also step up our aid to the Free Syrian Army to put pressure on ISIS on the other side of the border.

Then there is the distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. In the Weekly Standard, she invokes Burke’s sulfurous “Letters on a Regicide Peace” to issue a demand for an apocalyptic struggle against the Islamic State:

With such an enemy, there cannot be a “red line” defining how far, and no further, we may go; a “no troops on the ground” policy, limiting our involvement in the war; an “end-of-war” strategy that prescribes at the outset when and how the war will be terminated. On the contrary, a war with such an enemy is a total war.

But America has already witnessed the depredations that the penchant for war without limits, domestic or foreign, has inflicted upon its reputation and democracy. It was Burke, after all, who warned about imperial hubris: “I must fairly say, I dread our being too much dreaded. It is ridiculous to say we are not men; and that as men, we shall never wish to aggrandize ourselves in some way or other.”

THE UNITED States lacks the ability to suture the suppurating wounds of the Middle East. At most it can attempt to cauterize them. What the neocons are offering, though, 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. In this regard, the neocons themselves appear to have lost their confidence and are eager to blame America first for its foreign woes. In 2004, Joshua Micah Marshall perceptively observed in the New Yorker that the neocons, buffeted by the descent of Iraq into civil strife, were starting to exchange an imperial “tone of mastery” for “fire and foreboding.” Gone was the “hopeful talk of a liberal-democratic domino effect.” “As we head deeper into our version of the 1930s,” wrote Robert Kagan recently in the Wall Street Journal, “we may be quite shocked, just as our forebears were, at how quickly things fall apart.” And so the counsel of these warrior intellectuals is a curious mixture of defeatism and false bravado. All that the United States has to offer the rest of the globe, it seems, is unremitting combat.

“There can be no such thing as a little war,” the Duke of Wellington said, “for a great nation.” That is why warfare should never be a matter of convenience, guided by the triumph of hope over experience. Uncle Sam shouldn’t have to cry uncle. But the very measures that the neocons advocate to reestablish American power would erode it. As Obama grapples with the rise of the Islamic State, however, it’s also becoming increasingly clear that he saw what he wanted to see in Iraq and Syria. His missteps have given a new lease on life to the crew that is responsible for much of the mess in the first place. Now that the region has become more inflamed than ever, Obama’s dream of extricating the United States from foreign entanglements has turned out to be a mirage that the neocons are deftly exploiting.

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest.

A METAPHOR FOR THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION:



An unmanned Antares rocket exploded seconds after lift off from a commercial launch pad in Virginia on Tuesday, a NASA TV broadcast showed