I’ve been telling critics of the war in Iraq for three years that they have to take the neoconservative argument about American foreign policy seriously when it’s made by serious people like Paul Berman, Paul Wolfowitz and a smattering of others in and out of the current administration. Seriously in several respects.
It should be taken seriously as one of the most important causal roots of post-9/11 policy, meaning that yes, for the second time in the last forty years, the United States is involved in a major war conceived of by intellectuals to service an abstract conception of global history and political causality.
A good deal of what neoconservatives have had to say about existing international institutions has a lot of validity, and indeed what they have said echoes some critiques on the left. The United Nations has been and remains largely captive to corrupt statist elites and bureaucratic inefficacy, many treaties are sham performances rather than binding commitments, many international institutions exist to reproduce themselves and their own interests rather than serve as vehicles of transformative power and so on. If we ever get beyond the fiasco of the Iraqi conflict (something I increasingly doubt) we shouldn’t just return to multilateralist business as usual, but work out instead some different configurations of international institutions and the assumptions that undergird their activities.
Equally, what the neoconservatives had to say about the contradictions and inconsistencies in a lot of existing postures taken by their critics was legitimately potent. I went to a meeting here at Swarthmore a year before the Bush Administration took office where speakers condemned the suffering to innocents caused by continuing sanctions against Iraq; by December 2001 some of the same people were calling for the extension and tightening of the sanctions regime as a preferable alternative to war. A lot of the material emerging now on Iraq before and after the war has made it clear that the sanctions really did have a grevious impact on Iraqi civilians and relatively little impact on Hussein: if you’re upset by civilian deaths in the war, it’s pretty hard to see how you could not be upset by the civilian costs of sanctions. Not that this contradiction is new: people who supported sanctions against South Africa opposed them against Poland and vice-versa, often on the flimsiest of grounds. I still remember Ronald Reagan saying in a press conference that the reason why sanctions weren’t appropriate in South Africa was that the conflict there was “a tribal thing”.
More deeply, I still think that some of the neoconservatives scored a legitimate point about the patterning of Western responses, both on the left and among conservative realists, to illiberalism abroad. It isn’t just that each side excused its friends and excoriated its enemies according to friend-or-foe signals set in the Cold War. There was a powerful intellectual moment in African studies whose influence is still very marked in the field where critical depictions of European colonialism and apartheid essentially complained of the illiberal character of those regimes while at the same time exempting postcolonial nationalists from the same critique on the grounds that their achievement of sovereignity was the key thing to cherish and protect. Sovereignity and liberalism bear a kind of distant causal relationship to one another, but the former is no guarantee at all of the latter. If the problem with colonialism or apartheid (or Israeli occupation of the West Bank, or various US-client dictators like Somoza or Marcos) were violations of rights-bearing humanity, then a transfer of power should have had few implications for a critique of such violations, the critique should simply continue with full force after such a transfer. If the problem with colonialism was simply a violation of sovereignity, then at least some of the conventional content of anticolonial and antiapartheid sentiment in African studies and political critique aimed at other areas of the world from the 1960s to the 1990s was misplaced. The more austerly intellectual forms of neoconservatism legitimately called attention to the mismatch between what many intellectuals in the West had to say about global injustice between the 1970s and 1990s with their reflexive idolatry at the shrine of sovereignity.
This being said, the number of truly disciplined, committed, intellectually authentic neoconservatives both inside and outside of the Bush Administration has always been in question. The danger with responding seriously and respectfully to the neoconservative critique as many “liberal hawks” did is that many of the people preaching the neocon line on Iraq, Afghanistan, the “war on terror” and much else were purely expedient and instrumental in doing so, exploiting the sincerity of such liberal hawks in order to advance a much darker kind of policy objective, an old-style paleoconservative form of uber-nationalist realism in an unusually brutalist, frankly stupid, and grossly triumphalist form.
I’ve gone around and around on this issue over the years in many different conversations, and yes, I think there’s no alternative but to admit that liberal hawks and folks like them, including myself, got played in some ways. Just as I think the authentic neocons inside and around the Bush Administration got played. Just as the deep strains of Wilsonian ambition in American culture got played.
What’s happening now, if you read the emergent structures of argument within the blogging world pretty widely, is that the realist parasite within neoconservatism has pretty much burst through the chest of its host and is grinning with sharp alien teeth at onlookers. Start tallying it up, and you’ll see a lot of wingnuts overtly discarding any pretence of being constrained by the ideals of “freedom” in their views of what the US should do in Iraq. Bit by bit, what is being advanced instead is the proposition that it’s time to stop playing by the rules, to give as good as we get, to abandon restraint. There’s always been a low throbbing drumbeat of that sentiment out on the right-wing fringes, rising often defensively as revelations from Abu Ghraib or Gitmo came forward, but now it’s becoming the overt and standard line among Bush loyalists. It has its popular doppleganger: increasingly one hears in vox populi coverage in the media the old Vietnam War trope that the politicians aren’t allowing the soldiers to win the war–a war which if you actually swallowed the neoconservative line was always about a political rather than military objective.
The shift can be heard even within the Administration, where there is more and more talk of democracy and less and less talk of freedom. How can there be talk of freedom, when even the most loyal US clients in Iraq, such as the Kurdish political elite, are being given a free pass to lock up dissenters and create a one-party state? Democracy, in this context, is an old realist code-word: it means the US is looking for a way to install a safely dominant figurehead like Mubarak or Musharraf, possibly with some sham pretence that the leader is elected or that there is a legislature that matters. We’ve done none of the work of building institutions that make either liberalism OR democracy meaningful. You could say that’s because the neoconservatives like Wolfowitz were naive, gullible, or plain stupid in their understanding of how democratic freedoms come into being, or you could say it’s because the realists like Rumsfeld and Cheney never had any intention to engage in institution-building. It ends up at the same place, with the US beating a retreat after building some kind of political fig leaf and from there incurring a costly legacy of subsidizing and propping up an unpopular regime against what is likely to be continuous pressure from many sides.
It’s one thing to be a realist in the context of an unmistakeably realist conflict. Sure, there were neoconservative forerunners in the Reagan Administration who were probably just loopy and deluded enough (Jeane Kirkpatrick, say) to think that Jonas Savimbi or any number of other US proxies were liberal democratic revolutionaries. Mostly proxy wars were fought under Reagan as they had been fought since Truman, with the single goal to push back on Eastern Bloc intrusions and maintain existing hegemonic spheres of influence.
Those policies were frequently stupidly unnecessary and destructive of long-term US interests, but with Iraq, the problem is far, far worse. First because the stakes are vastly higher than they were in Angola or El Salvador or Grenada or the Horn of Africa or even Vietnam. Second because about the worst possible combination of policy frameworks for advancing any coherent objectives is a genuinely idealistic neoconservative mask over a brutalist face. That combination leaves behind it broken and bitter local elites who actually trusted in the idealism and put their lives and futures at stake on its behalf, it serves as a license to brutalism everywhere, it feeds the ideological credibility of radical Islamism. It achieves nothing except the waste of blood and treasure, putting a regime into place whose long-term prospects amount to a return to Hussein’s version of Iraq. Already there are new mass graves being built busily in the soil of Iraq: some filled with the victims of the anti-American insurgency, some being filled by the secret militias of those that the US counts as allies or at least relies upon to prop up its occupation. Already the new Iraqi state is being divided up as a set of corrupt fiefdoms, having been tutored in the new era of corruption by various US-approved contractors.
The yearning for something better and freer in Iraq is real. The possibilities that its elections have revealed are authentic. It’s all being lost precisely because underneath what I take to be genuine passion for and authentic commitment to neoconservative ambitions, a realist beast has always lurked. Now that the intellectual shallowness and credulousness of the neoconservative understanding of historical causality has been inalterably revealed, there are really only two choices left for those who supported and still support the war. Either demand that the Bush Administration finally get serious about the promotion of freedom, which entails closing Gitmo, firing Rumsfeld, and a massive host of other policy shifts in that consistent direction or stop pretending to idealism. And if you’re a genuine realist, what the hell are you doing supporting this war in the first place? Any realist who is serious about that worldview, whether liberal or conservative, knew this war was a dog from the outset and said so.
Well, speaking as one of those terrible war-mongers … your largest misapprehension here is to assume that neoconservative, realist, paleoconservative, etc., neatly aligns with separate people and policies, when they are actually inclinations and beliefs, shared in differing proportions, within individual conservatives, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes in tension. I, and a great many others, have felt 1) idealistic desire to bring as much liberty and democracy as possible to Iraqis, and to free them from the Hussein regime’s butchery; 2) prudential desire to forward American security by hawkish measures; 3) a wish to minimize American blood and treasure spent in the effort; 4) deep disdain and dislike of Arabs and Muslims; 5) pessimistic suspicion that even after liberation from Hussein, the greatest urge of Arabs and Muslims is to butcher each other in large numbers; and 6) willingness to kill as many non-Americans as necessary, if all other means of self-defense fail. All these impulses and beliefs were present in us from the beginning; the shift in prominence among them is not a function of one group betraying the other, but a shift in emphasis by the same people in the relative importance of these beliefs.
The crucial part of the story you are avoiding is that our idealism was not idealism in a vacuum, but a very specific idealism, predicated on the belief that the Iraqi people and elites, offered the chance, would take sufficient constructive efforts toward liberal democracy on their own behalf to sustain it without us–after all, we were never interested in imposing a pure colonial regime on them for their own good. You say the Iraqis have lost faith in us? I submit to you that it is *we* who are losing faith in the Iraqis. I will accept for the sake of argument that the US has not behaved with perfect competence in Iraq, but I (and many others) can also say that given an imperfect world, the Iraqis have behaved more corruptly and barbarously than needed; that they have underperformed expectations. (Do you seriously think that Iraqi corruption was in any invented by or fostered by Americans? Obviously we have acquiesced in native Iraqi corruption as the only way to get anything done at all.) Given that the Iraqi people are not meeting the expectations of our ideals, a shift toward pragmatism seems appropriate: would it not be foolish to be idealistic forever about the nature of the Iraqi people?
And keep in mind that our idealism was never disjoint from pragmatic interests: We would prefer a liberal democracy in a Federal Iraq, but even a run-of-the-mill dictatorship will be a great improvement on the butcheries of Hussein (to speak nothing of a removed strategic danger). A divided Iraq might be more stable in the long run–and at the worst, a Shiite dictatorship will probably be less brutal than a Sunni one, since it has a larger base of supporters.
But as it so happens, I have not yet given up on the establishment of a reasonably democratic and liberal Iraq, and I am still willing to have substantial (if not infinite) US effort toward that goal. This despite having a very low opinion of Iraqis, and increased pessimism over the chances of success. It was always a gamble, but it was a very worthwhile gamble–and I’m not willing to fold just yet. My idealism remains linked to my sense of American interests, and indeed to my low opinion of Arabs and Muslims. I submit to you that I am neocon, con, and paleocon all at once, that most of us have been, and that your talk of internal division and changing beliefs is somehow missing something.
My mixture of idealism and pragmatism has always been best fulfilled by the Bush administration; I am quite satisfied with their performance to date. The extent of my critique of the administration is best summed up as “McCain 2008!”
I’d submit simply that what you sum up isn’t a philosophy that contains any meaningfully predictive or constraining commitments, any benchmarks of what would constitute failure or error, any real goals or aspirations. It’s a blank check custom-written to support a particular ruler, not even written with an ideology in mind. “The whole of the law is do as thou wilt”, as long as your name is George W. Bush. I’ve been really impressed with your sharp, forceful replies to me, so I have no idea how you can write things like “a dictatorship with a larger base of supporters is likely to be less brutal” or “our dictator will be better than Hussein simply because he’s our dictator” (how well did that work out in Iran, for example?) and so on.
Some views cannot be reconciled. Neither the empirical nor the philosophical presuppositions of a lot of neoconservativism are compatible with the sliding-scale, procrustian realism you lay out here, which isn’t so much realism about American power in application to definable ends as it is a kind of brutalist realism in the context of domestic American political in-fighting. I’m not sure it even qualifies as paleocon nationalism, truthfully.
Tim, as usual a very interesting post.
As to the bigger point. Hmm. I’ve always held the “liberal hawks” (and thats who you’re talking about here, not neoconservatives, who have never simply been about spreading freedom – they are only about it insofar as it coincides with American interests – read Charles Krauthammer’s writing or some of PNAC stuff, for instance) like Berman as being the most annoying and dunderheaded in this whole Iraq War thing and I’ll tell you why. You are correct that on one level their position has been more philosophically consistent than either many of the wars opponents or supporters. But there problem is there complete inability to understand that the philosophical level on which they are arguing is NOT the level on which foreign policy is conducted. Never has been, never will be. In this sense, I find withywindle, say, to be a more coherent and astute thinker than Berman, even though you find him “philosophically inconsistent” (which, on one level, he clearly is). But he understands in his gut what war is about and why it is practiced, and Paul Berman doesn’t.
I don’t think it is an accident that most of the “liberal hawks” are people with no ties to foreign policy thinking or the military and have no chance of themselves becoming involved in combat. See this is ultimately the thing. Personally, I agree with many of the humanitarian points raised by people who ultimately supported the war (I didn’t). However, I am not in the position to take gambles with the lives of my peers and acquaintances (I do in fact have some who have served in Iraq) over a sentiment or a philosophical theory. I’ll explain more later.
Some good points, Ben.
I mean, I take withywindle’s statement to be a pretty good anthropological representation of the consciousness and thought process of many war supporters both in power and outside of it. I just think it’s a shitty set of arguments in the context of public debate about policy, and a dubious set of empirical claims, all of which add up to a strange mix of confession and justification.
I think you’re also right about Berman (and for that matter Wolfowitz) which is why I get my dig in on the idea that we once again have a war in which an abstract intellectual theory of causation and power has been allowed to play an undue role in shaping policy. Insofar as there is a genuine professionalism in military and policy circles, it tends to a kind of pragmatism and realism, and appropriately so: there *ought* to be a firewall between ALL intellectuals and policy for precisely this reason.
I think you also touch on at least one of my own objections to the Wilsonianism that I feel a real temptation towards, which is its intrinsic hubris. This goes back to a point withywindle pushed me on that I’m still cogitating about, which is why I tend to demand that universalists consider particularity or locality and demand that particularists rise to comparative or universalist scales in their claims. It’s not that universalist liberalizing ambitions are wrong; the desires embodied within them are not just attractive but in the longer scale of things, nececessary. It’s more that the desire to bring about liberalism in an accelerated fashion through the top-down application of military or coercive force doesn’t work and that there is a kind of obscenity about spending lives and resources so freely in heedless pursuit of that ideal. It’s the bloodlessness and coldness and banality of some of those who invoke violence or torture or coercion in this context that repels much as much as what it is they’re asking for. I’ve noted this before here, but Lincolnian gravitas in the leadership would do something, maybe not that much, but something, to help with the war, some sense of being troubled, weighted, of suffering in the face of suffering.
The problem is that even in a “realist”, conservative sense of this war, this has always been a war about information, ideology, belief, consciousness, culture as much as it is about military power. In that, the truly idealistic neocons or liberal hawks are right–that it is a kind of realism to turn to idealism in fighting terrorism. In that respect, turning back to a “harder” realism, agreeing that the idealism was something of a sham, is not just an ethical error but a military mistake. I think that’s where the lack of philosophical coherence really disturbs me: it’s not just me getting prissy about people following proper argumentative procedure. The contradictions I see in withywindle’s arguments and within the Administration are in my view contributing to the global crisis. I’m aware that turns the trope of “liberal doubts are hurting the war effort” back on conservatism, but I’m comfortable enough doing so. In this particular case, the inability to live up to the commitments made in rhetoric, in fact, the apparent disinterest in living up to those commitments, has had real and lasting consequences on the ground in the larger theater of conflict. The war is lost, not won, in places like Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.
A quick reply before I run out to class. It may sound like a quibble, but it’s not. I think you have to go back to the Jackson and Polk administrations, as well as the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations, to find a serious parallel to the Bushies. I think ignorance of 19th C American history is a good part of what led those convinced by neoconservative or humanitarian intervention-style arguments to support the invasion of Iraq. See Anders Stephanson’s _Manifest Destiny_ (1995) for some of my reasoning here, particularly his analysis of intellectuals’ responses to the run-ups to, conduct of, and afterlife of the Mexican and Spanish-American wars. BTW, Lincoln wrote a devastating little critique of the Polk administration’s rationale for invading Mexico. If folks are interested in hearing more, I can add to this later.
1) I would distinguish here between ideology and interest. Part of the point of interest is that it supposed to be unconstrained by ideology; to pursue simply the civic virtue of the power of the state, the nation, the people. Ideology *can* constrain and limit policy, in your terms, but it more usually *articulates* interest in principled terms. “Neoconservatism,†assuming it exists, was always about the articulation of American national interest through the ideal of democracy-promotion abroad; it was never meant to be a trump of American national interest. And pragmatic conservatism I take to prefer its civic virtue uncorrupted by other ideologies.
2) As for benchmarks about Pres. Bush and his policies—I have all sorts of them, but perhaps less frequently in stark “on-off†positions, and more in terms of necessary compromises. (Which is not meant to suspend the operation of stark moral judgment, incidentally; I may disagree with your conclusions, but I wish and require your judgment of me and mine.) I am less than thrilled with various aspects of his domestic policy—as are virtually all conservatives, as you can tell by a quick perusal of the *National Review.* Since they’re often dissatisfied with him for opposite reasons, you can tell that he probably occupies a mid-point in the Republican party, and his success can be measured by the equal spread of irritation and satisfaction that he distributes to his varied constituents. But you are talking foreign policy in particular: There, my over-arching goal is not to be at risk at being blown up by foreign madmen. I would prefer to articulate this by spreading liberty and democracy, but it’s not essential. I rather think Pres. Bush dropped the ball on North Korea, may be dropping the ball on Iran, and got rid of the very great danger from Iraq. It’s a mixed record—but it’s also clearly more hawkish than that of any other leader in the world, with the possible exception of Tony Blair, more hawkish than most other politicians in America, possibly more hawkish than a majority of the Republican party, and certainly more hawkish than his prime rival in 2004, Sen. Kerry. So I can be not entirely pleased with Pres. Bush’s record, but still be satisfied with it in the main, and prefer him to his rivals—and also think I have not surrendered to leader-worship. If you like, I define failure as “nuclear bomb going off in New York City.†Will that do as a benchmark? And rest assured, I won’t be around afterward to defend our president.
3) It seems to me self-evident that a dictatorship with a larger base of support needs to repress fewer people, is less frightened, less fragile, and ultimately less likely to be brutal. Hussein’s extreme brutality, while partly ideological, was also partly a function of coming from a Sunni minority no more than 20% of the country, which needed to repress the aspirations of the 80%; a Shiite dictatorship, drawing on 60% of the country, would only need to repress 40%, and would, once the initial imposition of its authority in blood was done with, probably be less bloody on the whole than would a To-Be-Named Sunni dictatorship. I’m not arguing that it wouldn’t be bloody at all—as I recollect, your own area of expertise, Zimbabwe, shows how bloody a majority-ethnicity dictatorship can be—just that one should expect a majority-ethnicity dictatorship to be less bloody than a minority-ethnicity dictatorship, ceterus paribus.
4) I did not say “our dictator would be better.†I said a normal dictator would be better than Hussein—which I think incontrovertible, since he was at the far of the bell curve for butchery. This is also a variant of the totalitarian-authoritarian distinction Kirkpatrick made: Saddam’s Republic of Fear was a remarkably thorough Fascism, with no seeds of liberty possible; an Iraq remade as a Jordan, an Iran, a Saudi Arabia, would be unpleasant, but it would be an authoritarian seedbed for the possibility of democracy as Hussein’s Iraq could not have been.
5) Iran is still one of the most liberal of the regimes in the Muslim world (oy vey); its Parliament and its civil society still provide as good a hope as any for a transition to liberal democracy. I rather think that would never have been possible under a Mossadegh slide to communism; despite all the odd travails of Iran since, despite the fact we may (and should) be at war with them soon, our support for the Shah gave them a crucial quarter-century to develop a liberal society, and that may be the most important quarter century for all future Iranian history.
6) I’m not quite sure what the purport of your last paragraph is. Is neoconservatism inconsistent with a pragmatism based on a purer conception of national interest and civic virtue? As defined, perhaps—but as Ben notes, what you call neoconservatism seems best applied to Paul Berman rather than to anyone actually in the Bush administration, and it doesn’t say much to say that Berman and the Bush administration are not on the same page, since they never were. You also seem to call inconsistent what I would call a multiplicity of ideals and goals, in creative tension. Are you saying that ideological consistency requires the sacrifice of American interests?—or what I would find more persuasive, that American interests are best forwarded by the consistent application of a set ideological articulation? And what do you mean by brutal realism in domestic politics?
7) I’d like to reiterate my point that different impulses co-exist within individual conservatives. You may argue that this is inconsistent (see Emerson on hobgoblins), but it is, I think, a naïve inconsistency, and not reconcilable with your view of sinister realists deluding sweet little neocons down the garden path. Or if it is delusion, it is self-delusion, which is a somewhat different thing from what you’ve been describing.
Incidentally, I’m not sure all your different points are entirely reconcilable either, or based on one single philosophical premise. But I do like to think that doesn’t mean all your stray thoughts are invalid, or that you couldn’t possibly make a fruitful policy by the creative compromise of various of your ideals.
I continue to doubt the importance of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, in your sense, but I suppose you could take that for given.
I doubt that conservatives, who are generally more interested in history than liberals (see Jonah Goldberg), are “ignorant” of American history. Though I’m sure they’ve drawn different lessons from their knowledge of it.
If the last para of ww’s latest comment was directed at me, I’d just like to clarify that I was referring to public opinion, not policy makers in my “ignorance of Mexican War and Spanish-American War comment” above. I know foreign policy is about the least democratic aspect of the US govt, but even the US foreign policy elite has to take public opinion into account, if only to try to manage it (i.e., it makes a difference that Bush/Cheney’s approval numbers on how they’re handling the war in Iraq and the war on terror are going down).
I agree that policy makers tend to be better informed than the general public, but having expertise doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to apply it well. I’m interested in hearing what lessons from these 19th C expansionist wars conservatives (especially internally conflicted ones) could possibly have taken from them that lead to the conclusion that invading Iraq was a good idea that would work out better than any available options.
Or if you want to take another controversial invasion/reconstruction effort from 19th C American history, try the Reconstruction period itself and the rise of pro-Confederate, anti-black terrorism….
Indeed, the last paragraph I wrote was directed to Signor Simon. I apologize if that was unclear.
I suppose one lesson I would draw from the Mexican-American War is that Greater New England (whose map aligns remarkably with, for example, the states that voted for Gov. Dukakis in 1988) has been predisposed to oppose foreign wars for a very long time (Kevin Phillips made this point), that a war can be both controversial and successful, and that the long term interests of the United States (and, indeed, the world) often depend on the successful defiance of Greater New England’s opinions. Since the 19th century generally witnessed a remarkably successful expansion of the United States toward full occupation of our inland empire, and the establishment of hegemony over the nearer reaches of Latin America and the Pacific, both accompanied by the frequent use of military force, and culminating in a successful counter-insurgency war in the Philippines, it would seem to me that the 19th century provides a rather strong inspiration for a hawkish policy. Personally, I try to be more cautious than the example of 19th century American history provides me, since I realize there are a fair number of reasons out there which make the contemporary exertion of force abroad more difficult.
Your Reconstruction comment puzzles me. My understanding was that it was the pro-Southern school of historians, James Randall et al., who first emphasized the deep-rootedness of the KKK et al, to justify Jim Crow as inevitable; while it was the liberal-left historians, from C. Vann Woodward on, who emphasized that Pres. Grant’s exertion of military force did in point of fact stamp out the KKK in the states where it was opposed, and that a sufficiently resolute exercise of Federal power, already successful by 1876, could have brought about a significantly more egalitarian South—that Jim Crow was contingent, not predetermined. These contending viewpoints had immediate application in the post-World War II South, where it was argued by the deep-rooted school that a Federal imposition of Civil Rights would provoked a bitter, Southern terroristic resistance, while the left-liberals maintained that the Federal government could impose Civil Rights with minimal resistance. In the event, it would seem to me that the left-liberals had by far the better of the argument about the 1960s, and therefore gained some credence for their views about the 1870s. But are you telling me that opposition to the Iraq War is now leading American historians to have more sympathy with the views of James Randall and his cohort? If so, this is a fascinating (and, I would submit, telling) reversal.
And getting back to Mr. Burke: speaking of mixed motives, do you oppose what happened at Abu Ghraib as a categorical moral imperative, or, on prudential grounds, for the harm it does to American pursuit of its policy objectives? Or for both? If for both—and I think from your writing that you do—I would submit that your mixture of motive is no less incoherent (or, charitably, complex) than the mixture of idealism and pragmatism that inspires support for the war, no less in ultimate tension, and, potentially, no less liable to conflict. What, after all, if it could be proved to you that Abu Ghraib had the unforeseen consequence of successfully intimidating our foes, gaining the support of an Iraqi silent majority, and generally bringing on a reign of sweetness and light? And what then if you (or someone else) continued to oppose the war on pure moral grounds? I think I could work up an argument that a bunch of well-meaning pragmatists who had opposed the war had been deluded by the absolute pacifists/anti-Americans/choose your epithet, that the beast was rising from beneath the skin, etc., etc. Would you find this argument implausible? If so, why? And why would your argument about conservatives—not entirely parallel, but I think reasonably so—be any less implausible?
Both. In this case, both lines of argument are complementary, in my view, not contradictory–and they both advise the same thing. In the case of what I’m viewing as the neocon understanding of the war and the realist understanding of the war, the two lineages of justification for the war actively advise extremely different kinds of conduct. In fact, I think most versions of realism, conservative and otherwise, advise not going to war in the first place save on the grounds of WMD.
In my view, the moral imperative IS the prudential ground, e.g., that the promotion of liberalism (not democracy) is a legitimate policy objective because the reason it enhances American security is that a world devoted to liberalism is a safer world, that the dissemination of liberalism is both the sign and the method of the defeat of totalitarian ideologies. The defeat of totalitarianism is both a moral good and a prudential good at the same time, no contradiction at all in that, in my view. This is precisely why I take the idealist version of neoconservatism seriously: it has some sound aspirations, just a woefully underdeveloped understanding of causality, agency and power, of the extent to which it is possible to dictate the terms under which liberal modernity becomes part of everyday practice anywhere in the world. *That* is where the realism kicks in: not in terms of dictating harshly realpolitik or brute-force power policy prescriptions for achieving idealistically neoconservative ends (e.g., in the case of Abu Ghraib), but in understanding why neoconservative aspirations largely MUST rest in “soft power” rather than military force for the most part. And that must is both moral and prudential, yes. Not a moral objection to violence per se–I have no truck with pacifism–but an observation about how liberalism comes into being, through actual practice, through the constraint of power, through a commitment to treat all human subjects as rights-bearing sovereign individuals, through the rule of law, and so on. So bad enough that Abu Ghraib happened, but worse by far to show the relative indifference that the Bush Administration demonstrated to its occurance, its unwillingness to tackle systemic change or demand accountability or pursue reform.
Much as I’d say that one fraction of the Western left went badly wrong with its worship of sovereignity, I’d say equally that Western neoconservatism has gone badly wrong in its phantasmagorical conception of the possibilities of military power. It was one thing to use security as a post-Vietnam political wedge against the Democrats; the problem is that too many conservatives (both Cheney-style nationalist-realists and Wolfowitz-type neocons) came to actually believe that the only reason US foreign policy objectives hadn’t been as fully realized as they could be is that the US hadn’t been sufficiently unilateralist and sufficiently willing to use military force with little restraint where necessary. That’s a common mistake for imperial or quasi-imperial powers in world history, but for that reason, all the more depressing to see it made again.
If it could be “proved” to me that harshly punitive practices of incarceration, torture, indifference to civilian casualties, and summary execution of suspected enemies through proxy or paramilitary units helped to suppress an insurgency in a way that promoted long-term US interest in a more liberal and democratic world, yes, that would give me pause. It would give me pause because I think that would be roughly like proving that the sun revolves around the earth: I simply do not think it is possible. That such tactics might temporarily suppress an insurgency, yes, I’d believe that. That such tactics would be responsible for anything beyond that, I do not believe. They are an ouroborous: they swallow themselves up.
(Apologies for the length; I suffer both from interest in the argument, and insomnia.)
I do think you are still failing to address what could be taken as a severe fault line between your idealism and your prudentialism. Indeed, I take your rhetoric to be somewhat anxious–“roughly like proving the sun went round the earth†is not precisely the language of ideologically uncommitted prudence. I will recur to the Indian wars and the suppression of the Philippines insurgency: these, I would submit, very largely involved “harshly punitive practices of incarceration, torture, indifference to civilian casualties, and summary execution of suspected enemies through proxy or paramilitary units helped to suppress an insurgency in a way that promoted long-term US interest in a more liberal and democratic world.†(And to the extent they did not involve these tactics, I would also submit to you that our actual practice in Iraq is far more complex, and far more intertwined with the use of soft power that you favor, than the simple repetition “Abu Ghraib†conveys.) If these are of any use as counter-examples, will E pur si muove still be your refrain?
But to get away from examples, I reiterate that a categorical moral imperative is a categorically different basis for policy than is prudentialism; that prudentialism is by its very nature mutable; and it is in the nature of the case extremely unlikely that prudentialism can long or perfectly align itself with any single moral imperative. Your union of the two cannot be stable, and it cannot be considered naturally and eternally harmonious by other than an act of faith—of a rather neo-connish sort.
Incidentally, when you say “the moral imperative IS the prudential ground,†your rhetoric is almost identical to that of Pres. Bush’s in the Second Inaugural Address, and in most of his speechifying. Your chosen philosophical union *is*, here, that of the administration you attack.
You mention WMD: it should be noted that neocon hawkishness is rooted in WMD as much as is prudential conservative hawkishness. The neocon argument acquires its edge by the claim that the spread of liberal democracy is not only good, but *necessary*, so as to subvert regimes that have become dangerous to us by virtue of their possession of such advanced and unconventional military technology. You will note that neocons’ priority system is rooted in WMD, and therefore in good prudential thinking; we invaded Iraq, not Zimbabwe or Burma. Here, as elsewhere, I do not see an essential disjunction between neoconnery and prudential connery.
Your critique of neocon’s “woefully underdeveloped understanding of causality, agency and power, of the extent to which it is possible to dictate the terms under which liberal modernity becomes part of everyday practice anywhere in the world†is both fuzzy and complicated, and I think needs to be disentangled. Let me make an attempt:
1) the essential neocon position is that American military force is both a useful and an essential tool, for the promotion of American interests and (on occasion) the extension of liberal democracy. This is different from saying that is the only tool to use, and that it must be used on all occasions. There are nuances and qualifiers—much as your statement “neoconservative aspirations largely MUST rest in “soft power†rather than military force for the most part†makes adroit use of “largely†and “for the most part.†Presuming neither stupidity nor euphemism on your part or on theirs, you are both arguing for a mixture of hard and soft power, and your argument is about the proportions of the admixture.
2) When you speak of a neocon phantasmagoria, I think the crucial phrases you use are “the constraint of power†and “the rule of law.†You, I think, are using “constraint of power†to mean the governing of power by law, but the neocons understand that power itself provides the foundation for constraint—that the establishment of a new order, and indeed the maintenance of any sovereign state, is a precondition for law, liberalism, etc. (This same insight has been used to critique the Bush administration, for example for not shooting looters in Baghdad on sight immediately after the Hussein regime was toppled.) They also realize how much society, culture, etc., including liberal society and culture, aligns itself along the lines of power. This is not merely an appreciation of Foucault, but a result of the long study of the birth of liberty in Europe and America, which has depended on, and been shaped by, the use of force, adroit or brutal, throughout—witness a Dutch invasion of England in 1688, a Boston mob in the 1770s, Sherman marching to the sea. Liberalism must eventually constrain force, within a sovereign state, but unconstrained force is necessary as a midwife to liberalism.
“The rule of law,†I think, turns on a difference of opinion on the scope and justification of law. I think neocons would agree with you as to the applicability of the rule of law when rooted in the democratic desires of a sovereign nation, during peacetime; I believe that where they differ is the role of international law, and law during wartime. International law is a system of mutual obligations among sovereign states, not among peoples; neocons note (idealistically) that law rooted in the agreements with dictatorial regimes lacks any democratic authority or morality; (pragmatically) that international law is currently a mug’s game of dictators and unfriendly democrats who do not have our interests at heart, aimed at the indiscriminate emasculation of American power; (pragmatically and idealistically) that the democratic people’s sovereign right to act ultimately supercedes any international law. Furthermore, neocons recognize 1) that the laws of war are quite different from the laws of peace; and 2) war is an essentially unpredictable state, radically unpredictable, and that peacetime law cannot and should not cover every wartime exigency. In short, war is messy, and there’s only so much you can do to clean it up and still be able to fight. Abu Ghraib was a deplorable and unwanted incident; but, yes, neocons (and most cons) resist the straightjacketing emasculation of war necessary to absolutely prevent an Abu Ghraib. (See Charles Krauthammer for arguments.) It is unwanted, to be condemned, etc.; but better to risk an Abu Ghraib with an army that can win wars than to be assured of no Abu Ghraib, and equally assured of failure.
3) A fair bit of your second-order arguments I think rest on the belief that your (Western liberal) horror of Abu Ghraib is universally shared, and that American “soft power†rests on avoiding Abu Ghraibs as universally taboo. I would submit against that 1) I rather think more of the world thinks that war is messy, and doesn’t really give a damn; and 2) a large portion of those who cry out in horror or shock are overdetermined in their hatred of America, or cynically and hypocritically exploiting it, and it makes no difference what our avowed and unchangeable enemies think. I will agree that there is a margin of people willing to take Abu Ghraib as the crucial margin in their support for America and the war on our enemies—but is it a politically crucial margin, here or in any country abroad? Of that I am far less certain. I wouldn’t casually alienate this potential swing constituency—I am willing in principle to be even stricter about American military conduct than I would be otherwise, so as to please them—but I will not emasculate the American military to please an uncertain and possibly trivial constituency. That, surely, would not be prudent. And I rather think that Abu Ghraib will be forgotten quickly enough, and that the American military and its achievements will endure a longer time than the swirl of momentary opposition Abu Ghraib aroused.
To sum up: I would take the nub of your critique of the Bush administration, and various conservatives, to rest on the scope of the rule of law, both as a categorical imperative and as a prudentially useful “soft power†tool. I do not think this separates neocons from realists: both (as compared to what I take to be your position) would sharply circumscribe the role of law in foreign affairs and war; neither of their other ideals contradicts this shared belief; and their unity on this point is a significant explanatory element for the existence of the coalition. Your analysis of a disjunction between neocons and realist cons I think lacks bite; your critique that neocon ends and means are fundamentally at cross purposes, essentially over the issue of law, I think must ultimately rest on a judgment of the success in practice of their policy. I suppose you take your contention to be proven by events, and I take it to be not (yet) proven.
“I suppose one lesson I would draw from the Mexican-American War is that Greater New England (whose map aligns remarkably with, for example, the states that voted for Gov. Dukakis in 1988) has been predisposed to oppose foreign wars for a very long time (Kevin Phillips made this point), that a war can be both controversial and successful, and that the long term interests of the United States (and, indeed, the world) often depend on the successful defiance of Greater New England’s opinions. Since the 19th century generally witnessed a remarkably successful expansion of the United States toward full occupation of our inland empire, and the establishment of hegemony over the nearer reaches of Latin America and the Pacific, both accompanied by the frequent use of military force, and culminating in a successful counter-insurgency war in the Philippines, it would seem to me that the 19th century provides a rather strong inspiration for a hawkish policy. Personally, I try to be more cautious than the example of 19th century American history provides me, since I realize there are a fair number of reasons out there which make the contemporary exertion of force abroad more difficult.”
This is generally a correct reading of historical facts. The difference is that what you see as great triumphs, I see as immoral white man’s burden imperialism at best, ethnic cleansing at worst. Of course, I am a part of the “Greater New England” diaspora of which you speak (although I am a British immigrant, not a blood and soil New Englander – although my mother’s parents were dyed-in-the-wool Goldwater/Reagan Republicans, California transplants from the Midwest. The Liberalism in my family is from my parents generation down. My Dad’s parents were Tories – my dad, Labour.) Needless to say, such a position usually puts me on the losing end politically, but I believe what I believe as a matter of conscience.
BTW, the Phillipines example is a very good one. If people want to see a modern parallel to what might unfold in Iraq, I think the Phillipines in 1900 is a good place to get your bearings.
for the second time in the last forty years, the United States is involved in a major war conceived of by intellectuals to service an abstract conception of global history and political causality
I’m not sure about the premise. The “theory” of intervention in Vietnam was less intellectual abstraction than growing stack of rationalizations for realpolitik, beginning with the sop to the French in exchange for cooperation in Europe and, domestically, innoculation against the rabid right. A long and varied line of intellectuals from Gunnar Myrdal to eventual Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, a scholar in Far East history, issued prophetic warnings.
Likewise, I think it could be argued that the neoconservative project was more about balance of power than teleology.
Start tallying it up, and you’ll see a lot of wingnuts overtly discarding any pretence of being constrained by the ideals of “freedom†in their views of what the US should do in Iraq. Bit by bit, what is being advanced instead is the proposition that it’s time to stop playing by the rules, to give as good as we get, to abandon restraint. There’s always been a low throbbing drumbeat of that sentiment out on the right-wing fringes, rising often defensively as revelations from Abu Ghraib or Gitmo came forward, but now it’s becoming the overt and standard line among Bush loyalists.
From what I’ve seen, it’s been the party line among pro-Bush bloggers for some time. It’s also been the dominant meme throughout right-wing talk radio for at least two years now (IIRC, back in 2004 Rush Limbaugh was describing the Abu Ghraib abuses as “brilliant”).
What strikes me is that this kind of brutalist talk seems to be increasing just as popular support for the Iraq occupation has been sharply declining. I don’t know if the war supporters are simply being defensive, or trying to reignite war fever by appealing to post-9/11 bloodlust, or developing a preemptive “stab in the back” narrative for when the U.S. inevitably pulls out … Either way, it’s both disturbing (from a standpoint of concern for the Republic’s future) and fascinating (from a psychological standpoint).
It is depressing.
aw, shucks, double-dubya, you’re so good at putting words in my mouth I hesitate to open mine. all I was trying to do originally was get Tim to rethink his Bush-Wilson analogy, which I think is a fundamentally wrong-headed way of contextualizing the Bush-Cheney project. your own words confirm my point that Bush-Cheney are in the Jackson/Polk/McKinley/Roosevelt mold, from the manifest destiny populism for the idealistic and quite carefully un-/mis-informed (white) American public to the ‘those outside the pale of civilization only understand violence’ mindset and military action for the savages. so what more can I add? but, hey, I like a good argument as much as the next geek, so l’ll just jump right in.
first off, don’t get ahead of yourself on my little Reconstruction question, double-dubya. my point in bringing it up was apparently too simple for an expert in the historiography of the Reconstruction era to notice: in some regions of the South in the 1865-1877 period, white propertied Southerners were like the Sunnis of Iraq today–an artificially empowered minority unaccustomed to losing power to those they considered their inferiors, who became quite willing to resort to (or at least finance) terrorism to drive the then-black, now-Shiite majority back into submission. far from leading me to sympathize with the Sunni or KKK insurgency, as you are so willing to believe I believe, my response to this history is entirely consistent with the left-liberal historical tradition: I think it was shameful that the federal government cut and run from the South and that the Republican Party began its long descent to its present form with the Compromise of 1877.
I find it quite revealing that you would rather attribute sympathy to the KKK to me than to actually defend Reconstruction and lament its end, which is the only intellectually consistent way I can imagine a Bush supporter using the Reconstruction example. but I guess it’s ok to sacrifice intellectual consistency in the interests of political consistency. wouldn’t do to offend the neo-Confederates in the big tent of the Republican Party, eh?
second, I think outside-the-beltway-Republicans today are in much the same position Southern Democrats were in, in the midst of the Mexican War, when Calhoun gave his famous speech criticizing Polk. recall that the U.S. had taken Mexico City but had failed to install a government and so had no one to negotiate a peace with. Calhoun’s response was to chastise Polk for getting the US (and particularly the South) where its only alternatives were to keep Mexico, either as part of the U.S. (and in Calhoun’s view make citizens of the very savages he wanted to exclude, plus bring in a group of voters who might undermine Southern dominance of the American political system) or as a colony (he was against the republic becoming an empire and sounded almost Chomsky-esque in this part of his speech). if the Republican Party of today goes the way the Democratic Party of the 1840s went, we’re going to see some kind of deal along the lines of basing/oil rights for sovereignty in Iraq relatively soon (cf. Stephanson Manifest Destiny 32-38 for the pocket history I’m referring to).
which to my mind is what the Bush-Cheney project was about all along, the whole WMDs-morphing-into-modern-day-‘manifest destiny’ being a bait-and-switch diversion from good old-fashioned geopolitical stratergizin’. which is why I opposed it (in Iraq) from the start.
third, I would suggest that O’Sullivan played a similar role between 1845 and 1848 as liberal hawks did between 2001 and 2004. Clinton-like, he hoped for the spread of liberal capitalism through economic means (and morally appropriate ones), but rolled over for Polk when it was clear that’s where the government was headed (cf. Stephanson 44-47). as much as just about everyone else across the American political spectrum in the 1840s, he was concerned to avoid keeping Mexico, whether as a state or a colony. If Doug is right about the wingnut blogocracy and if double-dubya’s own words about Arabs and Muslims are to be taken seriously, we could end up seeing the same kind of coalition that defeated the Dubai ports deal leading to a ‘withdrawal’ from Iraq that actually fulfills the Bush-Cheney project’s mission.
which raises my big question for Tim: if the Bushies were as Wilsonian as you believe they should have been but now believe they weren’t or are in the process of becoming aren’t, so to speak (long day), why didn’t they press for a referendum for the Iraqi people right after they took Baghdad, with the following 3 choices put to a nation-wide vote: 1) petition to become America’s 51st state, or 51st-53rd states, whatever (which would solve the ‘why is our oil under their sand?’ problem for us and provide a federal-state model and time-tested checked-and-balanced, majority-rules-with minority-rights-protected system of government for them); 2) invite us to stay until they negotiated the form of a broadly representative sovereign state (and so give a stamp of popular legitimacy to our occupation); or 3) invite us kindly to leave Iraq to the Iraqi people and get the hell out of Dodge (and save us a lot of lives, bodies, and money while allowing them to assert their right to self-determination in the process)? This kind of referendum, were it actually proposed by anyone in the Bush administration, would have been DOA, right, double-dubya? So what kind of Wilsonianism is or was the Bush-Cheney project, ever? is it too late for such a referendum to happen? would it be a good thing were it to?
ok, to put aside historical analogies and questions for a second, let me just state that I think the Bushian neocons are not so far from the Clintonian neolibs when it comes to foreign policy; it’s just that the former trust the U.S. military a whole lot more than the latter trust multinational corporations and the IMF/World Bank/GATT institutions. so I fundamentally distrust a lot of the mainstream Democratic critiques of the Bush-Cheney project, which basically amount to the claim that ‘we’d be more competent managers of the whole world domination thing than they’ve proven themselves to be.’ hopefully I’m creating some suspense here as to what I actually believe with this interlude.
to get back to the purpose of my historical analogies, fourth, I would suggest that you really have to believe in America’s manifest destiny to see anything positive coming out of the Spanish-American War. how is America’s ‘liberating’ a few colonies from the dying Spanish Empire and then making sure that Cuba was Monroe-Doctrined and sugar-plantationed into colonial status (cf. Stephanson 74-78) and the Philippines was bludgeoned into an appearance of submission (while those being bludgeoned were quoting classic American principles back at us)–in, as Stephanson characterizes it, “a war of subjugation that would, directly or indirectly, cause the death of some 200,000 Filipinos” in 3 years (78)–not to mention what happened over the course of the 20th C in U.S.-Philippines relations, anything other than the US doing exactly what Japan was doing around the same time: embarking, after a period of domestic consolidation, on a project of industrialization and economic/military expansionism precisely on the model of post-scramble-for-Africa European imperialism (just that America went for client governments over colonial administrations)? (now that’s an almost Faulknerian question!)
I don’t think you subscribe to the Niall Ferguson ‘but what about the good that British imperialism did?’ school of thought, double-dubya, so how exactly do you see the major and rising powers of the 19th C world embarking on similar imperialist projects leading to anything but the catastrophic 20th C world wars they did in fact lead to? where are the positives of 20th C history that justify the negatives of mid-to-late-19th C imperialism and what that imperialism lead the world into next century?
so my big question for double-dubya is, how far are you willing to go in your endorsement of hard over soft power? or, more to the point, how far is the US foreign policy elite willing to go to in an era that Michael Klare suggests will be characterized by resource wars? if we can’t trust free markets to get us the oil we need to keep our society running, in other words, how many wars are we in for in the twenty-first century? how far into Conrad’s heart of darkness are you willing to trust Bush-Cheney to lead us? (hey, liberal hawks, is it ‘exterminate the brutes’?!) (or, neo-cons, is it to provoke a Sunni-Shiite regional war so that a potentially economically dominant region in the first half of the 21st C decimates itself as conveniently for the U.S. as Europe and Asia did in the first half of the 20th C?)
If America’s ‘prudential’ national interest becomes our ‘providential’ right to commit genocide for the greater good of humanity, that’s not any America I want to be a part of. And if starting a region-wide war while blaming the inhabitants of the region for their inability to get along is what realpolitik is all about, then I can understand the impulse to gussy it up with pretty words.
So while I strongly sympathize with Tim’s hope that Bush-Cheney develop some Lincolnesque qualities (and not just the suspending civil liberties during war time ones) or even Wilsonesque ones (looking for some international mechanism to arbitrate competing self-determination claims), I think where he should really be looking for inspiration is the Du Bois of the 1920-1940s and the kind of African-American anti-imperialist tradition that Penny Von Eschen analyzes in Race against Empire.
One option that the tenor of my historical analogies leads me to that I hadn’t considered seriously before in this context is to wonder what would have happened if the U.S. had offered countries we defeated in war, from 1848 up, the referendum options I noted above. we might have a weirdly shaped country, with the Southern Confederacy its own (3rd world) nation today, Mexico and some of the Caribbean and Central American countries we invaded U.S. states, the Philippines and Japan and parts of Europe U.S. states, and so on.
I mention this ‘alternate history’ hypothesis to set up an idea that Kim Stanley Robinson introduced in the Mars trilogy and that Orson Scott Card is playing with in his never-ending Ender series: the possibility of an emergence of a confederation of states that commit to some kind of constitutionalism without contiguity. this seems to me an intellectually bold way of dealing with the problems with current international/transnational institutions–at worst, they’re either merely tools of the great powers’s self-interests or held hostage by intransigent dictatorships (or both)–without falling into the dangers of a twenty-first-century American imperialism that I see some sectors of the Republican party dearly wishing for and some sectors of the Democratic party willing to go along with in hopes of an eventual good emerging.
but of course for this to happen Americans would have to commit to their principles as their interests and be willing to cede some political power. not to mention give up on double-dubya’s promotion of illiberalism for liberal ends. what I get from his latest comment is that we should seize the opportunity to become the new Rome, because that’s the only way we’ll ever see a global rule of law emerge. if you’ve read Robinson and Card, double-dubya, do you think they represent a ‘realistic’ alternative to a successful imperialism as the only way to world peace? and do you think they mitigate the down-side in a way an unsuccessful imperialist bid fails to?
time to end this never-ending comment.
Oh, dear, I don’t think I can match Mr. Simon’s comment in length or seriousness. (Slightly less insomniac tonight.) Let me give quick answers.
1) Double-dubya – heh, I rather like that.
2) I don’t believe I expressed an opinion one way or the other on Reconstruction. You should note from my approving mention of Sherman that I am part of the party of Lincoln, (and Victor Davis Hanson,) and that I consider the Confederacy a quite appropriate target of American military power. I’m less sure of how contingent Jim Crow was. If Jim Crow was a necessary price for American union, and victory in the World Wars of the twentieth century, than I would be willing (with great sadness) to pay it. I like to think there was some room to play with for continuing Reconstruction, without resort to a permanent military dictatorship in the South—but I just don’t know. I confess that while, if asked, I will readily state that the Confederacy was evil, and the slaughter of 600K white Southerners a price well worth paying for the end of slavery, I probably won’t volunteer my opinion the next time I’m invited to a Trent Lott soiree. It is indeed an unpleasant compromise.
3) I don’t agree with your oil analysis.
4) Re your question for Professor Burke: you can be Wilsonian and also believe it’s important to spend a few years building the institutions of liberal society before you get around to a referendum. I don’t think any political faction in America had any interest in annexing Iraq, so I’m not quite sure what use your question is as a way of discriminating between American political factions.
5) The Indian Wars, the Philippines, etc., were part of the process that made us a continental nation, and then superpower, strong enough to win the contests of the twentieth century, and make for an American-dominated world incomparably better than the totalitarian alternatives; hence they were necessary prices to pay for a greater good. (I assume you know the chapter and verse of the argument in favor of this view; I’m also reasonably familiar with the counter-arguments. I think we need not dispute the details here, which would be a long and weary process, but simply note that this is the (rather traditional) line of argument I’m making.)
6) I do generally agree with Niall Ferguson, though as I recollect he made his arguments somewhat simplistically.
7) “So my big question for double-dubya is, how far are you willing to go in your endorsement of hard over soft power?†– exterminate the brutes is always an option, but only if they insist on playing chicken with games of genocide. I disagree with enough of the presuppositions in your following sentences that it probably isn’t worth disputing them at length. Let me shift tacks slightly by way of response. The Iraq War has been helpful for getting a sense of the actual limits of American power. (And is, perhaps, a little chastening thereby.) So I would say—to mention one particular humanitarian crisis—that the US armed forces currently are stretched too thin to occupy Iraq, retain the possibility of bombing Iran, *and* intervene effectively in the Sudan to prevent genocide. So though I would say there is a categorical moral imperative for the US to intervene to prevent mass-slaughter in Darfur, I am dubious enough about the extent of our hard-power capabilities that I am reluctant to commit our forces there. And part of the thought process is that I think that the mere fact of intervention will tick off much of the Muslim world again, whether for good reason or no, in unpredictable ways, lead to unforeseeable commitments, and that’s not a headache I want to take on right now. Is that any sort of answer? I think what I’m trying to say is that I (and other conservatives) may have a greater faith in the efficacy of military power than you or Prof. Burke do, but that doesn’t mean we think we have infinite military power at our command.
8) I’ve read Card, but different books. *Songmaster*, for example, is more along the lines of what I’ve been saying—Emperor Mikal is a necessary stage, you may remember. *Hart’s Hope* and *Treason* also speak to premature kindness and necessary killing. The ending of *Ender’s Game* I found sufficiently badly written that I never read the sequels.
9) Neither I nor any current American conservative has advocated imperialism in the strict sense of territorial annexation—and the application of the term to looser systems of hegemony, influence, etc., make it so woozy as to lose analytical power. As to the example of Rome—what’s fascinating is how contemporary discourse still recurs to analysis of the present in terms of different aspects of Rome, the republic/empire dichotomy not least among the ever-present issues. I think the world would be best served by the preservation of American hegemony, undergirded by military might, until such time (cross fingers) as economic, social, and political transformations within the various nations make possible the capstone of utopia, the global rule of law. You can read various aspects of Rome into this, republic or empire, if you so desire, but I would hesitate to embrace the metaphor of Imperial Rome.
Only have enough energy tonight to talk sci fi as it connects to my referendum idea and double-dubya’s #7-#9. Tangentially related to Tim’s original post, I know, but his epic simile is straight from Alien….
I’m wondering what others think of novelists like Card and Robinson who at times seem to be looking for an alternative to the Hobbesian conception of international relations that I see double-dubya relying upon in his arguments with Tim. (No doubt Bush-Cheney also share this Hobbesian viewpoint, which is why I’m trying so hard to establish their links with mid- and late-19th C proponents of American manifest destiny–to show that the their early-21st C version of American manifest destiny becomes the functional equivalent of Hobbes’s divine right of kings in the international realm. Which is how realist prudentialism turns into exceptionalist providentialism, with disastrous consequences when we start to believe our own press releases or confuse spin and reality or argue that wartime presidents gain king-like powers.)
I really do think the Ender series is worth a second look (of course double-dubya hated the ending of Ender’s Game, since it so thoroughly and effectively upends the Heinlein of Starship Troopers, which the rest of the novel had appeared to be siding with, against Haldeman’s The Forever War). Although I don’t hesitate to admit that Card’s uneven (as much as I enjoy the premise of Pastwatch, I think it’s one of his worst novels) and sometimes overly simplistic (as much as I like the attempt to reimagine 19th C America in the Alvin Maker series, there’s too much wish fulfillment in the fantasy for me), I do find his geopolitical turn since Ender’s Shadow (1999) to be quite interesting and perhaps even important. With a focus on conflicts on Earth immediately after the victory over the Buggers, he’s able to take supporting characters from Ender’s Game and turn them into main characters in a future that’s near enough to our present to raise questions about what he’s getting at about our world today. If you follow the developments post-1999 in the series, you’ll see him broaching the non-contiguous constitutionalism idea over time, as an alternative to endless conquest attempts or maintaining a balance-of-power status quo.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s politics are quite different from Card’s but the Mars trilogy raises a similar idea–the first novel, Red Mars is ultimately about a failed revolution and an accidentally successful terraforming project; the second, Green Mars is ultimately about a successful revolution and the evolution of an independent Mars; the third, Blue Mars, is ultimately about what it means to form global governments and colonize the solar system. Of course, you have to get through three big novels to get to the Mars-wide constitutional congress scene, but if you want the cheat sheet check out the short story collection The Martians (1999) 265-280 for a look back at the constitutionalism it took him a couple of thousand pages to develop in the trilogy–just skipping to Blue Mars 111-158 won’t convey either the drama of the many false starts leading up to the formation of a global Martian constitution (detailed in the first two novels of the trilogy) or the drama of how geopolitics on Earth evolves in response to the Martian example and to a global environmental crisis (in the rest of the last novel).
In short, Card and Robinson in these novels (sorry, I haven’t read the ones double-dubya recommends) do seem to be at least flirting with alternate paths toward developing a truly global constitutionalism. Both imagine them coming not out of a Rome-like dominant power but from below, so to speak. And both wrestle with what obstacles would have to be overcome along the way (Robinson more thoughtfully than Card, IMO).
My own twist on this would be for the US to issue an open invitation for any nation to start the process of petitioning Congress for statehood under Article 4 of the Constitution and see what happens. This wouldn’t be territorial annexation, although it makes sense to first extend the offer to states we have a long history of occupying and abandoning (Haiti and the Philippines, for instance, and why not contemporary Iraq?). Or if the U.S.’s tradition of doubting others’ “fitness for self-government” (cf. Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color for the racialist and racializing implications of republicanist political theory) makes this unlikely, perhaps some other country would take the lead and push for a non-contiguous constitutional nation that improves on the U.S. model.
Sorry for the apparent digression into political fantasy, but I’m in no shape to engage double-dubya’s #3-#6 and anyway I’m more curious as to what Tim makes of my attempts to suggest that Bush-Cheney were not so much punking the “deep strains of Wilsonian ambition in American culture” so much as resurrecting even deeper destinarian strains and to respond to his idea that “If we ever get beyond the fiasco of the Iraqi conflict (something I increasingly doubt) we shouldn’t just return to multilateralist business as usual, but work out instead some different configurations of international institutions and the assumptions that undergird their activities.”
In reply to double-dubya’s #3, I’d be glad to hear why. If Michael Klare’s work isn’t convincing, I doubt this little posting from Cliopatria, not exactly the most left-wing place in the blogosphere, will. But if a national interest proponent isn’t able to discuss national interests, I don’t know what to say. Shouldn’t a realist case for the war and continuing occupation include economic as well as political interests?
Don’t say oil doesn’t matter; just said I didn’t agree with *your* oil analysis. It seemed crude (please note pun; I want brownie points), and vaguely redolent of the idea that American policy is all an oil company cabal. (As far as I can tell, oil companies hate rocking the boat, hate war, acquiesced in the Iraq War with unhappy resignation.) I don’t dispute that oil is or should be a strategic interest. I rather think the US does and should act, not to prevent high oil prices (the crude accusation), but to prevent any hostile power(s) from gaining a stranglehold on world oil supplies. The analysis I found most convincing, was that we invaded Iraq in part to get rid of the need for US defensive forces in Saudi Arabia, (which have indeed been largely gotten rid of, I believe,) thus getting rid of the permanent irritation our forces provided to the Saudi populace, thus smoothing our long-term supply of oil from Saudi Arabia–which matters far more than Iraq. On re-reading your post, you may have been saying something closer to this than I first thought–though I’m not sure what you were saying was entirely clear. I really don’t think we have any desire whatsoever to annex Middle Eastern oil deposits, which you do seem to be suggesting.
Definitely was not as clear as it should be, and probably fairly crude (heckuva pun, brownie!), but not too different from the one you laid out in response, actually, double-dubya (I suggest you read Klare; he’s a lot more substantial than the reviewers are making Phillips’s latest book out to be). BTW, I’m not trying to trap you into taking an annexationist position and I agree with you that one way the 21st century improves on the 19th is in the almost unanimous rejection of such classic imperialism. What I have been trying to get at in my recent posts are Tim’s and your views on whether the ‘non-contiguous constitutionalism by popular referendum’ idea that I’m clumsily cobbling together from Card and Robinson is a NEW alternative to existing ones (both international-institution-based and national sovereignty-based) and if so, whether it is a VALUABLE one. (Can it appeal to both realists and idealists among U.S. foreign policy elites and the American people more generally? To non-American elites and peoples?)
In response to double-dubya’s “national interests require us to use military action ‘to prevent any hostile power(s) from gaining a stranglehold on world oil supplies'” principle (a bipartisan one, I should acknowledge), I would be interested in a more realistic application to Iraq, one that gets into some of the worm cans applying it seems to have opened.
One, by getting our troops out of Saudi Arabia (a move I support), the difficulty of securing dependable alternate basing in the region arises (as can be seen even during the initial invasion of Iraq, when we ha the Saudi bases). Everything I’m reading suggests Bush-Cheney expected permanent bases in Iraq to replace those in Saudi Arabia (thereby positioning us to intervene in Saudi Arabia or Iraq if their regimes happened to collapse and something worse took their place). I suspect this is why Republicans haven’t endorsed the key Democratic action item in Iraq (not much for an opposition party, but something): a ‘no permanent bases’ pledge. But even if forced into it by domestic or international politics, the basing issue remains a thorny one.
Two, if Iraq is any example, the trigger for action, a “stranglehold on world oil supplies,” can mean any number of things in practice: 1) a major oil-producing country setting up oil contracts we don’t like (such as those with countries and corporations willing to go around the UN sanctions on Iraq that we promptly voided once we took Baghdad); 2) a major oil-producing country with a weak enough military and no nukes that nationalizes its oil production and shuts out Western oil multinationals; 3) potential threats to supplies, like Hussein could have been if the sanctions were lifted, if he got nukes, if he wanted to risk a wider regional war by pursuing his own annexationist agenda, and if he won it (that’s a lot of ifs). Pretty hair trigger, if you ask me.
Three, the geopolitical realists don’t have an airtight case against the economic realists, who point out that no matter how hostile a power controls the oil, they still have to sell it to someone to profit from it.
But here’s where the jack-in-the-box pops out of the worm cans ( mixing metaphors can be fun)–where the separation between the economic and the political that realists of all stripes seem to depend upon is so hard to maintain. In an earlier comment, double-dubya suggested that “liberal” institutions need first to be built in Iraq before any democratic institutions can realistically be expected to emerge. So in plain language this means that Iraqis need to submit to the kind of free market capitalism that the World Bank and the IMF push (and that maybe someday when the US’s debt levels get high enough we’ll actually have to follow as well)–and that Naomi Klein, William Greider, Tom Englehardt, and others have been calling illegal restructurings by an occupying power–in the hopes that the magic of capitalism will lead to the flowering of democracy (as it has in Singapore and Russia…). Besides this reading of “liberal,” what other liberal (in the political sense of individual protections against government oppression) institutions are we actually helping build right now? Do we need to offer any ‘republican’ ones, as well (based on the idea that the government can act in the common good)?
The reason I’d support a referendum along the lines I laid out sooner rather than later is that we seem to be actually pursuing the second option (“consulting on the road to Iraqi democratic sovereignty”), but with less legitimacy than a popular referendum on our presence and activities would provide, should the vote go that way. And if it doesn’t, it gives us an excellent reason for withdrawal, or, if our political system actually is more appealing than Iran’s or Hamas’s style of leadership to folks in the region, it starts the process for petitioning for U.S. statehood by Kurdish and perhaps even Shiite regions of Iraq. Whatever the outcome, it provides a clear path for future action not dictated by US economic or political elites, but by the Iraqi people themselves.
To me, this is just taking Bush at his most idealistic word (and not Cheney at his most secretive–what was agreed on in that energy policy meeting with the oil execs, really?). But it might be one concrete step we could take that demonstrates Tim’s point that idealism can be realistic in the right circumstances.
> What I have been trying to get at in my recent posts are Tim’s and your views on whether the ‘non-contiguous constitutionalism by popular referendum’ idea that I’m clumsily cobbling together from Card and Robinson is a NEW alternative to existing ones (both international-institution-based and national sovereignty-based) and if so, whether it is a VALUABLE one. (Can it appeal to both realists and idealists among U.S. foreign policy elites and the American people more generally? To non-American elites and peoples?)
Not having read the books in question … I think the point is that we don’t want casually to unite people politically unless they have enough in common, culturally, socially, and economically to be able to sustain a common polity—they have to be able to think of themselves as one people, to have a minimum affection toward each other as members of the same, fused nation. A freeish-trade regime between national sovereign states, such as we have now, seems to me most likely to allow for the *very* long-term process of fusing the habits of the earth’s quite disparate people, to be followed only hesitantly and slowly by any attempt toward political union. The European Union strikes me as providing a cautionary example: for all its successes (and they are considerable), even a variety of rather similar nations are sufficiently distinct that a rather bureaucratic, statist superstructure, worrying undemocratic in aspect if not necessarily in essence, is needed to forcibly homogenize the lot of them. I do think that even the EU needed another few generations of free trade before starting the ball rolling toward political union—and even longer periods of time are needed to homogenize the customs of the rest of the world before any real consensual political union should even be started.
Your suggestion that there should be an automatic opt-in to the United States is flawed: Americans get to decide, by democratic and sovereign right, whether to let other people into the Union. We are under no obligation, moral or legal, to let other nations join us, even if they so desire. (Do you honestly think any significant group in the Middle East really wants to be annexed by the US? Do you honestly think any significant number of Americans want to be saddled with Kurdistan, or what have you, as the 51st state? Good lord, we’re still ambivalent about Puerto Rico, and vice versa.)
> Everything I’m reading suggests Bush-Cheney expected permanent bases in Iraq to replace those in Saudi Arabia (thereby positioning us to intervene in Saudi Arabia or Iraq if their regimes happened to collapse and something worse took their place).
I think the relevant policy decisionmakers would like the option of permanent bases in Iraq, but I don’t think they’ve committed themselves one way or the other. I think the situation is still too fluid/chaotic for them to want to make a long-term decision until the dust has settled. I’m sure they don’t want to rule out the possibility, but that doesn’t mean it’s a necessity, or even a default option.
> Two, if Iraq is any example, the trigger for action, a “stranglehold on world oil supplies,†can mean any number of things in practice: 1) a major oil-producing country setting up oil contracts we don’t like (such as those with countries and corporations willing to go around the UN sanctions on Iraq that we promptly voided once we took Baghdad); 2) a major oil-producing country with a weak enough military and no nukes that nationalizes its oil production and shuts out Western oil multinationals; 3) potential threats to supplies, like Hussein could have been if the sanctions were lifted, if he got nukes, if he wanted to risk a wider regional war by pursuing his own annexationist agenda, and if he won it (that’s a lot of ifs). Pretty hair trigger, if you ask me.
As for 1), Venezuela has already been sending free oil to Cuba, and Chavez is still around. As for 2), we didn’t act against Mexico in 1940 or Venezuela in 1975, and there’s no particular reason to believe our policy has changed. 3) seems reasonable. You can call it a hair-trigger, but we still haven’t gone to war all that often in the oil-spots.
> Three, the geopolitical realists don’t have an airtight case against the economic realists, who point out that no matter how hostile a power controls the oil, they still have to sell it to someone to profit from it.
But vice-versa, economic realists don’t have an airtight case against those geopolitical realists who posit 1) regimes ignorant of or indifferent to economic interest; 2) the need to prepare for the worst-case scenario of war, where oil will not be sold across the battle lines.
There is also the point that control over oil affects the negotiations and deployments of force short of war, and the range of practicable policies; that, say, Iraq will always sell its oil to the United States, but the amount of oil it controls will affect the political balance in its jockeying for power.
> In an earlier comment, double-dubya suggested that “liberal†institutions need first to be built in Iraq before any democratic institutions can realistically be expected to emerge. So in plain language this means that Iraqis need to submit to the kind of free market capitalism that the World Bank and the IMF push.
Um, no. “Civil society†is the magic phrase. Town councils. Negotiations among political factions conducted at something other than the point of a gun. Bloggers. Setting up all sorts of organizations that aren’t run by the state/party, and aren’t just fronts for tribes. You are positing “free market capitalism†as some sort of imposition, but this is a sleight of hand of socialists; the point is simply to free people to act in the economic sphere as they will, and, hopefully, to build up enough private wealth to countervail state wealth, and build a more democratic political realm. At the very least, build up an Iraqi equivalent of the Iranian Bazaar, which I gather (like the Confindustria in Mussolini’s Italy) constrains to some extent the internal radicalism and power of the state. I rather think the Bush administration thinks a World Bank-IMF economic restructuring would be a good idea for Iraq—and they would generally be correct—but that they’ve shelved any attempt in that direction long since. They would be quite happy to have Iraq turn into something like Argentina—statist, sclerotic, permanently crisis-ridden and debt-ridden, but minimally stable and democratic wouldn’t be so bad.
> Besides this reading of “liberal,†what other liberal (in the political sense of individual protections against government oppression) institutions are we actually helping build right now? Do we need to offer any ‘republican’ ones, as well (based on the idea that the government can act in the common good)?
We’re trying to build the rule of law and constitution-build; I gather that civil society is trying to build itself up, in a rather chaotic mise-en-scene. Since we’re still trying to get a functioning army up and running, I fancy individual protections aren’t on the front burner. It would seem to me that all government actions purport to be for the common good; “republicanism†adheres more to belief than to action. I think a good series of courses on Harrington and John Adams would do no end of good in the Iraqi universities, but how else precisely are we supposed to “offer†republicanism? It would seem to me that laying our bets on Islamic democracy—attempting to recapitulate the fusion of religious and civic virtue in our own Republican evolution—is a strategic choice that fosters republican possibilities.
Interesting quotes from a Stratfor analysis of Iran/Iraq if you follow this link, along with commentary from the conservative investment advisor guy who’s quoting them. Relevant on the ‘how badly does the US want permanent military bases in Iraq?’ debate.
I find ww’s remarks (haven’t given up on double-dubya, just takes too long to type!) on prerequisites for national unity quite interesting. What I like about the ‘non-contiguous constitutionalism’ idea is that it bypasses the whole EU approach and says, here’s a political and economic system that has been working decently well for a few centuries for a very diverse group of people (didn’t we start off the debate with ww saying how good it was that one region–NE–didn’t dominate American decision-making when it came to war? haven’t we been discussing the regional conflicts in American history?), separation of powers, protection of individual liberties, federal/state tugs-of-war, e pluribus unum, etc.–do you want to join in? I wouldn’t have the foggiest as to how to implement the idea, but if it’s a good one, smart people would figure that out. Of course a vote to start the ‘application’ process wouldn’t be an automatic opt-in–was this ever true of any state that joined the Union?
Your Puerto Rico example is well-taken, ww. Another example that the U.S. is not ready to issue such an invitation is the quality of political debate over reforming U.S. immigration policy.
As I understand it, ww’s basic philosophy is that promoting economic, cultural, and civic interactions within and across national borders is the most realistic approach to eventually developing some kind of global political infrastructure that would be seen by most peoples as a legitimate enforcer of the rule of law and hence would minimize possibilities of war. An attempt to jump-start the process, say, through an American invitation to any existing nation-state to apply for entry into the Union, would more likely produce a short-circuit than a viable energy source (to extend the metaphor, painfully). And you say you are a supporter of the invasion and occupation of Iraq because sometimes you do need to jump-start the process? What was going so horribly wrong that an invasion was realistically the best option for the U.S. and the world? Were realists in the administration really driving the push for invasion or did they just go along for the ride or were they kicked to the curb? It seems to me the state of post-war planning in the Pentagon lends support to the third or second options rather than the first. Have you seen reviews of Fukuyama’s implicit critique of the Bush administration in his latest book?
On the oil issue, isn’t the point the ‘peak oil’ people are making is that as enegy calculations change over the course of this century, it’s inevitable that geopolitical ones will, too. I don’t find Jeremy Rifkin’s The Hydrogen Economy to be totally convincing, but I think his argument that US economic and geopolitical success has a lot to do with our understanding the uses of oil before other countries did interesting and his analysis of energy and the rise and fall of empires provocative. WW suggests that we have been pretty restrained in the past (by which I mean him to mean we’ve preferred covert ops over war) and that Iraq isn’t part of a pattern. Wonder what happens if there are political crises in Venezuela, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia at the same time….
The Washington Post on democracy building in Iraq.
Double-dubya, I must apologize. SF god Dan Simmons has written his own dystopian ‘time traveller returns with Cassandra-like warning to our time’ story, at his web site, so who am I to quote Card (whose politics may well be similar to Simmons’s apparent ones) and only possibly have Kim Stanley Robinson on my side? My question to you is, how close is Simmons’s story to realists’ assessments of where to expect the War on Terror to lead?
Hod the phone: SF god David Brin tries hard to peel away conservatives and libertarians from the neoconservative policy elite (there and elsewhere on his site), thoroughly rejecting the Huntington clash of civilizations thesis. My question to ww is, what’s wrong with Brin’s analysis?