It isn't very fashionable to be a geopolitical neocon these days. That is because the War in Iraq is going badly. It is going badly because it has been managed poorly, and it has been managed poorly because of GWBush's fidelity to expediency and value of loyalty over flexibility.
But even though the Bush Administration has its foot in a steaming pile, there are reasons to be optimistic in Iraq, as well as for the prospects of our current and future efforts against Jihadism. That is because America is so much more than GWBush and the best minds in this country are really looking to address and solve these problems. That includes neoconservatives.
I have always asserted that the greatest mistakes that Bush made in his lead up to war in Iraq was that of his timetable and subsequent inability to maintain coalition. However neither of these are a damaging as the simple fact of losing to the Iraqi insurgency. While it is clear that Jihadists have taken to Iraq as a front, I have been persuaded that the Iraqi insurgency was genunine and is primarily a consequence of patriotic sentiment and not of ideology. It needn't have been that way. In that regard there was no equivalent to the Taliban, who without weapons of mass destruction, deserved the thrashing they got at the hands of a more righteous American-led coalition. Although a case can be made for al-Sadr, I wouldn't make it.
For me personally, now is a time for retrenchement. I am currently assimilating all of the best criticisms of the Bush Whitehouse which isn't too difficult given the paucity of people not suffering Bush Derangement Syndrome or Right Wing Kneejerkism. I think it puts me in the company of experts, which is all I can hope for. What remains is a strategic rethinking of what it is America must do in projecting its ample resources in a different manner.
I think that a fundamental premise of the PNACian neoconservatism has been broken, and that is the power of American military hegemony. It can be asserted, although not with finality, that the threat of American military intervention is not so effective at this moment in history as it was before Iraq. But that is not because the effectiveness of our military is in question, but that the political will exists in the US to sustain that threat. What George W. Bush sought to accomplish as a 'uniter and not a divider' has been utterly destroyed. Red and Blue states came to be under his watch, and his very personality has been divisive. He has inspired instead great logic defying defenses and seditiously shrill denunciations. And this has left the prospects for neoconservatism in the lurch.
What might have saved the face of neoconservatism would be a good war. We don't have it. What might have saved the face of neoconservatims would be effective diplomacy. That has been patchy. What would have been best for neoconservatism would have been that GWBush himself was a neocon. But he isn't, and that has blurred the distinction between those things that neocon policy makers would like to have seen happen and what has actually transpired in the past 5 years.
When asked about neoconservatism and the PNAC agenda many people will mistake corporate cronyism, an earlier criticism of Bush vis a vis Cheney and Halliburton. That is not a principle. Many people would assert that pursuit of oil in the Middle East is an unalterable principle of neoconservatism. It is not. I hear neoconservatism conflated with a fundamentalist Christian antipathy to Islam almost on a daily basis. Nothing could be further from the truth. The GWOT would be in effect no matter who was President of the US, Jihadists don't have an anti-Christian agenda so much as an anti-semitic, anti-Western and anti-statist agenda.
What I think can be fairly placed at the foot of neoconservatism was Wolfowitz' eagerness to convert the threat of military hegmony to military engagement. In short, I'll cop to 'pre-emptive war' as a neocon overproduction. We were on the Cheney Bus. We drove the Cheney Bus. And in that regard, I'm not so sure it mattered to us whether the causus belli was marketing of WMD, post-hoc rationalization of an Al Qaeda connection, the danger of Saddam's expansionism, regional stability, the corruption of the Oil For Food program or the suppression of Democracy. It could have been any and it didn't need to be all of them. Of course I had my own reasons for supporting the War in Iraq and I won't back away from them. In fact, I'd say that it's one of the aspects of this crisis that has gone exactly as it should have:
There are no insurgents in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. A hard internal border between the Kurds’ territory and the Arab-dominated center and south has been in place since the Kurdish uprising at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Cars on the road heading north are stopped at a series of checkpoints. Questions are asked. ID cards are checked. Vehicles are searched and sometimes taken apart on the side of the road. Smugglers, insurgents, and terrorists who attempt to sneak into Kurdistan by crossing Iraq’s wilderness areas are ambushed by border patrols.
The second line of defense is the Kurds themselves. Out of desperate necessity, they have forged one of the most vigilant anti-terrorist communities in the world. Anyone who doesn’t speak Kurdish as their native language—and Iraq’s troublemakers overwhelmingly fall into this category—stands out among the general population. There is no friendly sea of the people, to borrow Mao’s formulation, that insurgents can freely swim in. Al Qaeda members who do manage to infiltrate the area are hunted down like rats. This conservative Muslim society does a better job rooting out and keeping out Islamist killers than the U.S. military can manage in the kinda sorta halfway “safe” Green Zone in Baghdad.
In a region where rule by reactionary clerics, gangster elites, and calcified military dictatorships is the norm, Iraqi Kurdistan is, by local standards, an open, liberal, and peaceful society. Its government is elected by a popular vote, competing political parties run their own newspapers, and the press is (mostly) free. Religion and the state are separate, and women can and do vote. The citizens here are tired of war, and they’re doing everything in their power to make their corner of the Middle East a normal, stable place where it’s safe to live, and to invest and build.
Now it is entirely possible that my reading of the neoconservative agenda is warped. It is true that I haven't read either of Fukyama's books. But I remain convinced that as much as any active citizen, that I understand its principles. In either case I am willing to take the full heat for those which I do support even as we witness potential disasters in our foreign policy.
So what I'm saying is that there's a practical gap between the aims of the neoconservative engagement and the implementation of foreign policy that has been hijacked by events, undermined by lack of poltical support and straight botched by incompetency and lack of coordinated planning. We have chosen a bold path, I think rightly, but we have also made strategic errors.
I'm keeping my eye on the PNAC signers and watching them as they process reality, and I close with these principles intact:
[The] United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership or the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.
Our aim is to remind Americans of these lessons and to draw their consequences for today. Here are four consequences:
• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;
• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
• we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.
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