While I disagree with some of the assumptions and prescriptions of
Norman Podohertz’s article (in Commentary Magazine) it is
important to understand the views of a well known and well respected
commentator.
Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary. His new book, "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism," was published on Sept. 11.
For other articles on this subject see:
http://www.moshereiss.org/special/26_persian.htm
I do not believe that Eurabia will result at the end of 21th century as
stated by Mr. Podohertz. Europe will react to the Islamization of its
continent. A recent poll by the U.N. documented that over two thirds of
the population of Italy, Spain, Britain France and Germany favor
restricting immigration (IHT, Oct. 7, 2007, pg. 2). Actually it is not
clear that Podohertz believes it himself. In an interview he gave to
his daughter Ruthie Blum he stated ‘I find it impossible to believe
that the evil forces Islamofascism will prevail over the political good
that embodied in Western civilization.’ (Jerusalem Post, Magazine, June
8, pg. 23).
WWIII - the Cold War - was a ‘real’ war including battles known as the
Korean War, the War in Vietnam, the genocide committed among millions
of Chinese, Tibetans and Cambodians and the potential for a nuclear
holocaust between two Superpowers and two ideologies; one Capitalism
and the second Communism – two different economic systems for running
the world. The latter failed as an ideology.
WWII was based on two different ideologies, democracy and fascism, the
latter failed as an ideology.
In both WWII and WWIII (the Cold War) the military winners contained
the superior ideology.
What Podohertz describes as WWIV has none of those qualities. The
Islamist ideology is not an ideology of Living but a culture of death;
that can never overcome an ideology of life. Only losers back death,
the Islamists are losers and cannot win!!
"The culture of death is a culture of irresponsibility” (Ali Salem,
Arabic Playwright and Poet (25 play and 15 books published.)
Former Secretary and General of the Chief of Staff Colin Powell stated
in an interview: “What is the greatest threat facing us now? People
will say it’s terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who
can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can
they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can
they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. . . We are
taking too much counsel of our fears. (GQ Magazine Sept 11) “
The War in Iraq and Afghanistan is a skirmish compared to any of the
two wars or genocides of WWIII. The chances of the West (both America
and Europe) becoming Muslim, the objective of bin Laden, the late
Ayatollah Khomeini and President Ahmadinejad approach zero. The War on
Terror may continue for a long time, but it is not a World War. It is
like the Red Terrorist group that prevailed in Germany and Italy in the
1960’s and 1970’s.
Even another spectacular terrorist event like Sept. 11 would not change
the fact Islamists do not have a winning ideology!
JOSHUA MURAVCHIK:
Joshua Muravchik in a Commentary magazine (Sept. 2007) in a very well reasoned argument affirms Podhoretz’s position from a neoconservative perspective
The Jihadists are a minority, but not an insignificant one. This summer, the Pew Global Attitudes survey heralded a sharp decline in Muslim support for suicide bombings. After this drop, reportedly, "only" 16 percent of Turks support such attacks--as do 21 percent of Kuwaitis, 23 percent of Jordanians, 34 percent of Lebanese Muslims, 42 percent of Nigerian Muslims, and 70 percent of Palestinians. Confidence in Osama bin Laden "to do the right thing in world affairs" tracks these numbers at a slightly lower level.
There are, thank goodness, some countries where Pew's figures are
lower, the lowest being Egypt, where only 8 percent approve suicide
bombings. But another Pew survey conducted just a couple of months
earlier found 15 percent of Egyptians believing that "attacks on
civilians . . . to achieve political goals" were justified. Perhaps the
discrepancy means that some Egyptians disapprove of suicide--which
presents its own theological difficulties--but not the killing of
innocents in a worthy cause. In the same poll, a mere 26 percent of
Egyptians disapproved both of al Qaeda's attitudes toward the U.S. and
of its tactics. When Egypt's Ibn Khaldun Center, run by the political
sociologist Saad Edin Ibrahim, asked Egyptians whom they most admired,
the three frontrunners were the Hizballah chief Hassan Nasrallah,
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Khaled Meshal of Hamas.
Troubling as they are, these data may understate the problem, at least
to judge by election results in the region. In Egypt, Lebanon, and the
Palestinian territories, Islamist parties, some of them non-violent but
some very violent indeed, have scored a string of successes. Although
Fukuyama rightly assures us that "we are not currently engaged in
anything that looks like a 'clash of civilizations,'" if Islamists and
jihadists take over additional countries, the consequences may well
resemble exactly that.
The terrorists are the shock troops of the jihadist or radical Islamist
movement, a movement whose strength is limited but substantial--far
greater than, for example, that of the Communists just after Lenin
seized power in Russia. Jihadism has many times more supporters, its
reach is more global, it has far more resources, and it has a natural
constituency that Communism only pretended to have. Lenin and his band
succeeded in fastening their grip on a backward country and used it as
a springboard from which their heirs could contest seriously for world
domination. Who is to say how powerful a threat radical Islam could
become if allowed to metastasize further?
This movement has already been at war with us for some time, and has
killed us by the thousands. Bush's announcement of a "war against
terror" was thus nothing more than a declaration that we had decided to
fight back. Soros, Brzezinski, and Fukuyama notwithstanding, this war
was not "optional." If we had declined to fight it now, we would only
have to fight more desperately later. If we do not fight back, can
anyone imagine that the jihadists will stop? Conversely, defeat of
their cause will assuredly demoralize that movement and thin its ranks.
As for the neoconservatives, they have taken their lumps over the war
in Iraq. Nonetheless, the tenets of neoconservatism continue to offer
the most cogent approach to the challenge that faces our country. To
recapitulate those tenets one last time: (1) Our struggle is moral,
against an evil enemy who revels in the destruction of innocents.
Knowing this can help us assess our adversaries correctly and make
appropriate strategic choices. Saying it convincingly will strengthen
our side and weaken theirs. (2) The conflict is global, and outcomes in
one theater will affect those in others. (3) While we should always
prefer nonviolent methods, the use of force will continue to be part of
the struggle. (4) The spread of democracy offers an important, peaceful
way to weaken our foe and reduce the need for force.
This suggests a few priorities. First, for all our failures in Iraq, we
cannot afford to accept defeat there; nor do we have to. True, our more
fanciful images of what Iraq would become after Saddam's removal have
gone by the boards. But there is still a world of difference between a
relatively stable if troubled country and a state of anarchy.
And then there is Iran. Even if we turn a corner in Iraq, our relative
success will be negated if we allow Iran to obtain a nuclear bomb. Once
it does, not only will we be haunted by the specter of nuclear
terrorism, but we may be constrained by nuclear blackmail from actions
we would want to take in future chapters of the war against terror.
Next, only by enlarging our military can we base strategic decisions on
military need and not on the availability of forces. How is it that a
nation of 300 million cannot indefinitely sustain a force level of
150,000 in a given theater, meaning one soldier for every 2,000
Americans?
Finally, our efforts to foster democracy in the Middle East must not be
curtailed but prosecuted vigorously and more effectively. True, the
"Arab spring" of 2005 did not turn out to be as successful as the
famous "Prague spring" of 1968. But then, it took two decades for that
Prague spring to yield fruit. The modest liberalization in the Middle
East and the democratic ferment that we have stirred there promise
further advances if we persevere.
None of this offers a complete guide to waging the war against terror.
But it does amount to a coherent approach, essentially similar to the
one by means of which we won the cold war. By contrast, liberals and
realists have no coherent approach to suggest--or at least they have
not suggested one. That, after all, is why George W. Bush, searching
urgently for a response to the events of September 11, stumbled into
the arms of neoconservatism, unlikely though the match seemed. One can
always wish that policies were executed better, but for a strategy in
the war that has been imposed upon us, neoconservatism remains the only
game in town.
Iranian Situation:
Iran’s economic situation is worse than noted in my above article. Unemployment may be 30% and youth unemployment up to 50%. Iran has difficulty producing oil, already only 64% of that of the Shah’s 1974 rate, due to poor infrastructure. Inflation is now 20%. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has recently reduced interest rates from 14% to 12%, against the advice of his own economic advisors. When inflation is higher that the interest rate people who can will borrow and hoard goods. This makes inflation grow more rapidly. Consequently severe economic sanctions will have an impact. Iran has a highly educated population and high rate of internet users. What the effect of sanctions on the government and the nuclear race is totally unclear to me. The separate ethnic groups within Iran may become more restive. The government may change to less hard-like policies. The government may gamble on war, always good to distract the suffering populace; in Lebanon even in Gaza. But that is a far cry from assuming Iranian leadership (Ahmadinejad – who appears a hardliner even in his own country - would no longer be President if Iran had nuclear weapons in 5-10 years) would push the button into a Gog and Magog apocalyptic war! Can Iran be considered a suicide – martyrdom nation? There is some possibility that that can be true, although very slight given the history of the world ethnic groups in the past. Would an attack on Iran before it attained nuclear weapons result in more deaths than the Iran having nuclear weapons?
Who are the decision makers in Iran:
The chief decision maker is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the supreme leader. He is simply the first among equals, because there are four or five different areas of decision-making power. Other groups have to be consulted. One of those is certainly the parliament, the president is one, but also the National Security Council, which is a collective leadership body that brings all of these people together in one place to make nuclear policy and is actually dominated by professionals and people who have had a tremendous amount of experience over the years. Ahmadinejad’s voice is really one of the least effective in that system.
For various articles on Iran’s likely collapse economically or militarily see
Spengler’s commentary in Asia Times:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II11Ak02.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IE30Ak03.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IE22Ak01.html
The Case for Bombing Iran
I hope and pray that President Bush will do it.
BY NORMAN PODHORETZ
Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what
Sept 11, 2001, did was to plunge us headlong into nothing less than
another world war. I call this new war World War IV, because I also
believe that what is generally known as the Cold War was actually World
War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great
conflict than it does to World War II. Like the Cold War, as the
military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we
are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet
another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the
shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of communism; it is
global in scope; it is being fought with a variety of weapons, not all
of them military; and it is likely to go on for decades.
What follows from this way of looking at the last five years is that
the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be understood if
they are regarded as self-contained wars in their own right. Instead we
have to see them as fronts or theaters that have been opened up in the
early stages of a protracted global struggle. The same thing is true of
Iran. As the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology
against which we have been fighting since 9/11, and as (according to
the State Department's latest annual report on the subject) the main
sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism's weapon of choice, Iran
too is a front in World War IV. Moreover, its effort to build a nuclear
arsenal makes it the potentially most dangerous one of all.
The Iranians, of course, never cease denying that they intend to build
a nuclear arsenal, and yet in the same breath they openly tell us what
they intend to do with it. Their first priority, as repeatedly and
unequivocally announced by their president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is to
"wipe Israel off the map"--a feat that could not be accomplished by
conventional weapons alone.
But Ahmadinejad's ambitions are not confined to the destruction of
Israel. He also wishes to dominate the greater Middle East, and thereby
to control the oilfields of the region and the flow of oil out of it
through the Persian Gulf. If he acquired a nuclear capability, he would
not even have to use it in order to put all this within his reach.
Intimidation and blackmail by themselves would do the trick.
Nor are Ahmadinejad's ambitions merely regional in scope. He has a
larger dream of extending the power and influence of Islam throughout
Europe, and this too he hopes to accomplish by playing on the fear that
resistance to Iran would lead to a nuclear war. And then, finally,
comes the largest dream of all: what Ahmadinejad does not shrink from
describing as "a world without America." Demented though he may be, I
doubt that Ahmadinejad is so crazy as to imagine that he could wipe
America off the map even if he had nuclear weapons. But what he
probably does envisage is a diminution of the American will to oppose
him: that is, if not a world without America, he will settle, at least
in the short run, for a world without much American influence.
Not surprisingly, the old American foreign-policy establishment and
many others say that these dreams are nothing more than the fantasies
of a madman. They also dismiss those who think otherwise as
neoconservative alarmists trying to drag this country into another
senseless war that is in the interest not of the United States but only
of Israel. But the irony is that Ahmadinejad's dreams are more
realistic than the dismissal of those dreams as merely insane
delusions. To understand why, an analogy with World War III may help.
At certain points in that earlier war, some of us feared that the
Soviets might seize control of the oil fields of the Middle East, and
that the West, faced with a choice between surrendering to their
dominance or trying to stop them at the risk of a nuclear exchange,
would choose surrender. In that case, we thought, the result would be
what in those days went by the name of Finlandization.
In Europe, where there were large Communist parties, Finlandization would take the form of bringing these parties to power so that they could establish "red Vichy" regimes like the one already in place in Finland--regimes whose subservience to the Soviet will in all things, domestic and foreign alike, would make military occupation unnecessary and would therefore preserve a minimal degree of national independence.
In the United States, where there was no Communist Party to speak of,
we speculated that Finlandization would take a subtler form. In the
realm of foreign affairs, politicians and pundits would arise to
celebrate the arrival of a new era of peace and friendship in which the
Cold War policy of containment would be scrapped, thus giving the
Soviets complete freedom to expand without encountering any significant
obstacles. And in the realm of domestic affairs, Finlandization would
mean that the only candidates running for office with a prayer of being
elected would be those who promised to work toward a sociopolitical
system more in harmony with the Soviet model than the unjust capitalist
plutocracy under which we had been living.
Of course, by the grace of God, the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain
and Ronald Reagan, we won World War III and were therefore spared the
depredations that Finlandization would have brought. Alas, we are far
from knowing what the outcome of World War IV will be. But in the
meantime, looking at Europe today, we already see the unfolding of a
process analogous to Finlandization: it has been called, rightly,
Islamization. Consider, for example, what happened when, only a few
weeks ago, the Iranians captured 15 British sailors and marines and
held them hostage. Did the Royal Navy, which once boasted that it ruled
the waves, immediately retaliate against this blatant act of
aggression, or even threaten to do so unless the captives were
immediately released? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed,
using force was the last thing in the world the British contemplated
doing, as they made sure to announce. Instead they relied on the "soft
power" so beloved of "sophisticated" Europeans and their American
fellow travelers.
But then, as if this show of impotence were not humiliating enough, the
British were unable even to mobilize any of that soft power. The
European Union, of which they are a member, turned down their request
to threaten Iran with a freeze of imports. As for the U.N., under whose
very auspices they were patrolling the international waters in which
the sailors were kidnapped, it once again showed its true colors by
refusing even to condemn the Iranians. The most the Security Council
could bring itself to do was to express "grave concern." Meanwhile, a
member of the British cabinet was going the Security Council one
better. While registering no objection to propaganda pictures of the
one female hostage, who had been forced to shed her uniform and dress
for the cameras in Muslim clothing, Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt
pronounced it "deplorable" that she should have permitted herself to be
photographed with a cigarette in her mouth. "This," said Hewitt, "sends
completely the wrong message to our young people."
According to John Bolton, our former ambassador to the U.N., the
Iranians were testing the British to see if there would be any price to
pay for committing what would once have been considered an act of war.
Having received his answer, Ahmadinejad could now reap the additional
benefit of, as the British commentator Daniel Johnson puts it, "posing
as a benefactor" by releasing the hostages, even while ordering more
attacks in Iraq and even while continuing to arm terrorist
organizations, whether Shiite (Hezbollah) or Sunni (Hamas). For
fanatical Shiites though Ahmadinejad and his ilk assuredly are, they
are obviously willing to set sectarian differences aside when it comes
to forging jihadist alliances against the infidels.
If, then, under present circumstances Ahmadinejad could bring about the
extraordinary degree of kowtowing that resulted from the kidnapping of
the British sailors, what might he not accomplish with a nuclear
arsenal behind him--nuclear bombs that could be fitted on missiles
capable of reaching Europe? As to such a capability, Robert G. Joseph,
the U.S. Special Envoy for Nuclear Non-Proliferation, tells us that
Iran is "expanding what is already the largest offensive missile force
in the region. Moreover, it is reported to be working closely with
North Korea, the world's No. 1 missile proliferator, to develop even
more capable ballistic missiles." This, Joseph goes on, is why
"analysts agree that in the foreseeable future Iran will be armed with
medium- and long-range ballistic missiles," and it is also why "we
could wake up one morning to find that Iran is holding Berlin, Paris or
London hostage to whatever its demands are then."
As with Finlandization, Islamization extends to the domestic realm,
too. In one recent illustration of this process, as reported in the
British press, "schools in England are dropping the Holocaust from
history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils . . . whose beliefs
include Holocaust denial." But this is an equal-opportunity
capitulation, since the schools are also eliminating lessons about the
Crusades because "such lessons often contradict what is taught in local
mosques."
But why single out England? If anything, much more, and worse, has been
going on in other European countries, including France, Germany, Italy,
Spain, Denmark and the Netherlands. All of these countries have large
and growing Muslim populations demanding that their religious values
and sensibilities be accommodated at the expense of the traditional
values of the West, and even in some instances of the law. Yet rather
than insisting that, like all immigrant groups before them, they
assimilate to Western norms, almost all European politicians have been
cravenly giving in to the Muslims' outrageous demands.
As in the realm of foreign affairs, if this much can be accomplished
under present circumstances, what might not be done if the process were
being backed by Iranian nuclear blackmail? Already some observers are
warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be
transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia. Whatever
chance there may still be of heading off this eventuality would surely
be lessened by the menacing shadow of an Iran armed with nuclear
weapons, and only too ready to put them into the hands of the terrorist
groups to whom it is even now supplying rockets and other explosive
devices.
And the United States? As would have been the case with Finlandization,
we would experience a milder form of Islamization here at home. But not
in the area of foreign policy. Like the Europeans, confronted by
Islamofascists armed by Iran with nuclear weapons, we would become more
and more hesitant to risk resisting the emergence of a world shaped by
their will and tailored to their wishes. For even if Ahmadinejad did
not yet have missiles with a long enough range to hit the United
States, he would certainly be able to unleash a wave of nuclear terror
against us. If he did, he would in all likelihood act through proxies,
for whom he would with characteristic brazenness disclaim any
responsibility even if the weapons used by the terrorists were to bear
telltale markings identifying them as of Iranian origin. At the same
time, the opponents of retaliation and other antiwar forces would rush
to point out that there was good reason to accept this disclaimer and,
markings or no markings (could they not have been forged?), no really
solid evidence to refute it.
In any event, in these same centers of opinion, such a scenario is
regarded as utter nonsense. In their view, none of the things it
envisages would follow even if Ahmadinejad should get the bomb, because
the fear of retaliation would deter him from attacking us just as it
deterred the Soviets in World War III. For our part, moreover, the
knowledge that we were safe from attack would preclude any danger of
our falling into anything like Islamization.
But listen to what Bernard Lewis, the greatest authority of our time on
the Islamic world, has to say in this context on the subject of
deterrence:
MAD, mutual assured destruction, [was effective] right through the cold
war. Both sides had nuclear weapons. Neither side used them, because
both sides knew the other would retaliate in kind. This will not work
with a religious fanatic [like Ahmadinejad]. For him, mutual assured
destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already
that [Iran's leaders] do not give a damn about killing their own people
in great numbers. We have seen it again and again. In the final
scenario, and this applies all the more strongly if they kill large
numbers of their own people, they are doing them a favor. They are
giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights. Nor are
they inhibited by a love of country:
We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another
name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land
go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the
world.
These were the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who ruled Iran from 1979 to 1989, and there is no reason to suppose that his disciple Ahmadinejad feels any differently.
Still less would deterrence work where Israel was concerned. For as the
Ayatollah Rafsanjani (who is supposedly a "pragmatic conservative") has
declared:
If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms
Israel has in possession . . . application of an atomic bomb would not
leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages
in the Muslim world. In other words, Israel would be destroyed in a
nuclear exchange, but Iran would survive.
In spite of all this, we keep hearing that all would be well if only we
agreed--in the currently fashionable lingo--to "engage" with Iran, and
that even if the worst came to the worst we could--to revert to the
same lingo--"live" with a nuclear Iran. It is when such things are
being said that, alongside the resemblance between now and World War
III, a parallel also becomes evident between now and the eve of World
War II.
By 1938, Germany under Adolf Hitler had for some years been rearming in
defiance of its obligations under the Versailles treaty and other
international agreements. Yet even though Hitler in :"Mein Kampf" had
explicitly spelled out the goals he was now preparing to pursue,
scarcely anyone took him seriously. To the imminent victims of the war
he was soon to start, Hitler's book and his inflammatory speeches were
nothing more than braggadocio or, to use the more colorful word Hannah
Arendt once applied to Adolf Eichmann, rodomontade: the kind of red
meat any politician might throw to his constituents at home. Hitler
might sound at times like a madman, but in reality he was a shrewd
operator with whom one could--in the notorious term coined by the
London Times--"do business." The business that was done under this
assumption was the Munich Agreement of 1938, which the British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain declared had brought "peace in our time."
It was thanks to Munich that "appeasement" became one of the dirtiest words in the whole of our political vocabulary. Yet appeasement had always been an important and entirely respectable tool of diplomacy, signifying the avoidance of war through the alleviation of the other side's grievances. If Hitler had been what his eventual victims imagined he was--that is, a conventional statesman pursuing limited aims and using the threat of war only as a way of strengthening his bargaining position--it would indeed have been possible to appease him and thereby to head off the outbreak of another war.
But Hitler was not a conventional statesman and, although for tactical
reasons he would sometimes pretend otherwise, he did not have limited
aims. He was a revolutionary seeking to overturn the going
international system and to replace it with a new order dominated by
Germany, which also meant the political culture of Nazism. As such, he
offered only two choices: resistance or submission. Finding this
reality unbearable, the world persuaded itself that there was a way
out, a third alternative, in negotiations. But given Hitler's
objectives, and his barely concealed lust for war, negotiating with him
could not conceivably have led to peace. It could have had only one
outcome, which was to buy him more time to start a war under more
favorable conditions. As most historians now agree, if he had been
taken at his own word about his true intentions, he could have been
stopped earlier and defeated at an infinitely lower cost.
Which brings us back to Ahmadinejad. Like Hitler, he is a revolutionary
whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to
replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran
and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism. Like
Hitler, too, he is entirely open about his intentions, although--again
like Hitler--he sometimes pretends that he wants nothing more than his
country's just due. In the case of Hitler in 1938, this pretense took
the form of claiming that no further demands would be made if
sovereignty over the Sudetenland were transferred from Czechoslovakia
to Germany. In the case of Ahmadinejad, the pretense takes the form of
claiming that Iran is building nuclear facilities only for peaceful
purposes and not for the production of bombs.
But here we come upon an interesting difference between then and now.
Whereas in the late 1930s almost everyone believed, or talked himself
into believing, that Hitler was telling the truth when he said he had
no further demands to make after Munich, no one believes that
Ahmadinejad is telling the truth when he says that Iran has no wish to
develop a nuclear arsenal. In addition, virtually everyone agrees that
it would be best if he were stopped, only not, God forbid, with
military force--not now, and not ever.
But if military force is ruled out, what is supposed to do the job?
Well, to begin with, there is that good old standby, diplomacy. And so, for 3 1/2 years, even predating the accession of Ahmadinejad to the presidency, the diplomatic gavotte has been danced with Iran, in negotiations whose carrot-and-stick details no one can remember--not even, I suspect, the parties involved. But since, to say it again, Ahmadinejad is a revolutionary with unlimited aims and not a statesman with whom we can "do business," all this negotiating has had the same result as Munich had with Hitler. That is, it has bought the Iranians more time in which they have moved closer and closer to developing nuclear weapons.
Then there are sanctions. As it happens, sanctions have very rarely
worked in the past. Worse yet, they have usually ended up hurting the
hapless people of the targeted country while leaving the leadership
unscathed. Nevertheless, much hope has been invested in them as a way
of bringing Ahmadinejad to heel. Yet thanks to the resistance of Russia
and China, both of which have reasons of their own to go easy on Iran,
it has proved enormously difficult for the Security Council to impose
sanctions that could even conceivably be effective. At first, the only
measures to which Russia and China would agree were much too limited
even to bite. Then, as Iran continued to defy Security Council
resolutions and to block inspections by the International Atomic Energy
Agency that it was bound by treaty to permit, not even the Russians and
the Chinese were able to hold out against stronger sanctions. Once
more, however, these have had little or no effect on the progress Iran
is making toward the development of a nuclear arsenal. On the contrary:
they, too, have bought the Iranians additional time in which to move
ahead.
Since hope springs eternal, some now believe that the answer lies in
more punishing sanctions. This time, however, their purpose would be
not to force Iran into compliance, but to provoke an internal uprising
against Ahmadinejad and the regime as a whole. Those who advocate this
course tell us that the "mullocracy" is very unpopular, especially with
young people, who make up a majority of Iran's population. They tell us
that these young people would like nothing better than to get rid of
the oppressive and repressive and corrupt regime under which they now
live and to replace it with a democratic system. And they tell us,
finally, that if Iran were so transformed, we would have nothing to
fear from it even if it were to acquire nuclear weapons.
Once upon a time, under the influence of Bernard Lewis and others I
respect, I too subscribed to this school of thought. But after three
years and more of waiting for the insurrection they assured us back
then was on the verge of erupting, I have lost confidence in their
prediction. Some of them blame the Bush administration for not doing
enough to encourage an uprising, which is why they have now transferred
their hopes to sanctions that would inflict so much damage on the
Iranian economy that the entire populace would rise up against the
rulers. Yet whether or not this might happen under such circumstances,
there is simply no chance of getting Russia and China, or the Europeans
for that matter, to agree to the kind of sanctions that are the
necessary precondition.
At the outset I stipulated that the weapons with which we are fighting
World War IV are not all military--that they also include economic,
diplomatic, and other nonmilitary instruments of power. In exerting
pressure for reform on countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, these
nonmilitary instruments are the right ones to use. But it should be
clear by now to any observer not in denial that Iran is not such a
country. As we know from Iran's defiance of the Security Council and
the IAEA even while the United States has been warning Ahmadinejad that
"all options" remain on the table, ultimatums and threats of force can
no more stop him than negotiations and sanctions have managed to do.
Like them, all they accomplish is to buy him more time.
In short, the plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented
from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the
actual use of military force--any more than there was an alternative to
force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938.
Since a ground invasion of Iran must be ruled out for many different
reasons, the job would have to be done, if it is to be done at all, by
a campaign of air strikes. Furthermore, because Iran's nuclear
facilities are dispersed, and because some of them are underground,
many sorties and bunker-busting munitions would be required. And
because such a campaign is beyond the capabilities of Israel, and the
will, let alone the courage, of any of our other allies, it could be
carried out only by the United States. Even then, we would probably be
unable to get at all the underground facilities, which means that, if
Iran were still intent on going nuclear, it would not have to start
over again from scratch. But a bombing campaign would without question
set back its nuclear program for years to come, and might even lead to
the overthrow of the mullahs.
The opponents of bombing--not just the usual suspects but many both
here and in Israel who have no illusions about the nature and
intentions and potential capabilities of the Iranian regime--disagree
that it might end in the overthrow of the mullocracy. On the contrary,
they are certain that all Iranians, even the democratic dissidents,
would be impelled to rally around the flag. And this is only one of the
worst-case scenarios they envisage. To wit: Iran would retaliate by
increasing the trouble it is already making for us in Iraq. It would
attack Israel with missiles armed with nonnuclear warheads but possibly
containing biological or chemical weapons. There would be a vast
increase in the price of oil, with catastrophic consequences for every
economy in the world, very much including our own. The worldwide outcry
against the inevitable civilian casualties would make the
anti-Americanism of today look like a lovefest.
I readily admit that it would be foolish to discount any or all of
these scenarios. Each of them is, alas, only too plausible.
Nevertheless, there is a good response to them, and it is the one given
by John McCain. The only thing worse than bombing Iran, McCain has
declared, is allowing Iran to get the bomb.
And yet those of us who agree with McCain are left with the question of
whether there is still time. If we believe the Iranians, the answer is
no. In early April, at Iran's Nuclear Day festivities, Ahmadinejad
announced that the point of no return in the nuclearization process had
been reached. If this is true, it means that Iran is only a small step
away from producing nuclear weapons. But even supposing that
Ahmadinejad is bluffing, in order to convince the world that it is
already too late to stop him, how long will it take before he actually
turns out to have a winning hand?
If we believe the CIA, perhaps as much as 10 years. But CIA estimates
have so often been wrong that they are hardly more credible than the
boasts of Ahmadinejad. Other estimates by other experts fall within the
range of a few months to six years. Which is to say that no one really
knows. And because no one really knows, the only prudent--indeed, the
only responsible--course is to assume that Ahmadinejad may not be
bluffing, or may only be exaggerating a bit, and to strike at him as
soon as it is logistically possible.
In his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush made a promise:
We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on
events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws
closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the
world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most
destructive weapons.
In that speech, the president was referring to Iraq, but he has made it clear on a number of subsequent occasions that the same principle applies to Iran. Indeed, he has gone so far as to say that if we permit Iran to build a nuclear arsenal, people 50 years from now will look back and wonder how we of this generation could have allowed such a thing to happen, and they will rightly judge us as harshly as we today judge the British and the French for what they did and what they failed to do at Munich in 1938. I find it hard to understand why George W. Bush would have put himself so squarely in the dock of history on this issue if he were resigned to leaving office with Iran in possession of nuclear weapons, or with the ability to build them. Accordingly, my guess is that he intends, within the next 21 months, to order air strikes against the Iranian nuclear facilities from the three U.S. aircraft carriers already sitting nearby.
But if that is what he has in mind, why is he spending all this time doing the diplomatic dance and wasting so much energy on getting the Russians and the Chinese to sign on to sanctions? The reason, I suspect, is that--to borrow a phrase from Robert Kagan--he has been "giving futility its chance." Not that this is necessarily a cynical ploy. For it may well be that he has entertained the remote possibility of a diplomatic solution under which Iran would follow the example of Libya in voluntarily giving up its nuclear program. Besides, once having played out the diplomatic string, and thereby having demonstrated that to him force is truly a last resort, Mr. Bush would be in a stronger political position to endorse John McCain's formula that the only thing worse than bombing Iran would be allowing Iran to build a nuclear bomb--and not just to endorse that assessment, but to act on it.
If this is what Mr. Bush intends to do, it goes, or should go, without
saying that his overriding purpose is to ensure the security of this
country in accordance with the vow he took upon becoming president, and
in line with his pledge not to stand by while one of the world's most
dangerous regimes threatens us with one of the world's most dangerous
weapons.
But there is, it has been reported, another consideration that is
driving Mr. Bush. According to a recent news story in the New York
Times, for example, Bush has taken to heart what "officials from 21
governments in and around the Middle East warned at a meeting of Arab
leaders in March"--namely, "that Iran's drive for atomic technology
could result in the beginning of 'a grave and destructive nuclear arms
race in the region.' " Which is to say that he fears that local
resistance to Iran's bid for hegemony in the greater Middle East
through the acquisition of nuclear weapons could have even more
dangerous consequences than a passive capitulation to that bid by the
Arab countries. For resistance would spell the doom of all efforts to
stop the spread of nuclear weapons, and it would vastly increase the
chances of their use.
I have no doubt that this ominous prospect figures prominently in the
president's calculations. But it seems evident to me that the survival
of Israel, a country to which George W. Bush has been friendlier than
any president before him, is also of major concern to him--a concern
fully coincident with his worries over a Middle Eastern arms race.
Much of the world has greeted Ahmadinejad's promise to wipe Israel off
the map with something close to insouciance. In fact, it could almost
be said of the Europeans that they have been more upset by
Ahmadinejad's denial that a Holocaust took place 60 years ago than by
his determination to set off one of his own as soon as he acquires the
means to do so. In some of European countries, Holocaust denial is a
crime, and the European Union only recently endorsed that position. Yet
for all their retrospective remorse over the wholesale slaughter of
Jews back then, the Europeans seem no readier to lift a finger to
prevent a second Holocaust than they were the first time around.
Not so George W. Bush, a man who knows evil when he sees it and who has
demonstrated an unfailingly courageous willingness to endure
vilification and contumely in setting his face against it. It now
remains to be seen whether this president, battered more mercilessly
and with less justification than any other in living memory, and
weakened politically by the enemies of his policy in the Middle East in
general and Iraq in particular, will find it possible to take the only
action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions
both toward us and toward Israel. As an American and as a Jew, I pray
with all my heart that he will.
Neoconservatism's Future
BY JOSHUA MURAVCHIK
Commentary Magazine. October 2007
Mr. Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute and the author of "Exporting Democracy, Heaven on Earth: The
Rise and Fall of Socialism, and The Future of the United Nations." This
article appears in the October issue of Commentary.
Have America's troubles in Iraq sounded the death knell of
neoconservatism, the political ideology that is said to be behind our
presence there? Over the past year, there has been no shortage of
voices saying so, many with undisguised glee. Abroad, the Times of
London heralded "the end of an ideological era in Washington," while
the Toronto Globe and Mail reported with satisfaction that
neoconservatism has been "decisively wiped out." Observers here at home
have agreed. To the historian Douglas Brinkley, Democratic electoral
victories in November 2006 spelled "the death of the neoconservative
movement," while at National Review Online John Derbyshire wrote that
"all the buzz is that neoconservatism is as dead as mutton."
Prognoses from within neoconservatism's ranks have been correspondingly
grim. Kenneth Adelman, an author and sometime defense official in
Republican administrations, has lamented that "most everything we ever
stood for now . . . lies in ruins." Francis Fukuyama, in a short book
excerpted in the New York Times Magazine, took leave of his own
sometime affiliation with neoconservatism, protesting that it had
"evolved into something that I can no longer support." Jonah Goldberg,
a columnist at National Review, despaired that the word neoconservatism
itself has become "useless, spent."
But more than a word is at issue. The opprobrium lately faced by
neoconservatism flows from a number of entwined propositions: that its
ideas shaped President George W. Bush's war against terrorism; that the
ensuing policy has failed disastrously; and that this failure
demonstrates the illusions and delusions embodied in those ideas. This
indictment must either be accepted or answered, and the exercise must
begin by identifying the ideas in question. That requires revisiting
history that has been told before.
The term "neoconservative" was coined in the 1970s as an anathema. It
was intended to stigmatize a group of liberal intellectuals who had
lately parted ways with the majority of their fellows.
As a heretical offshoot of liberalism, neoconservatism appealed to the same values and even many of the same goals--like, for example, peace and racial equality. But neoconservatives argued that liberal policies--for example, disarmament in the pursuit of peace, or affirmative action in the pursuit of racial equality--undermined those goals rather than advancing them. In short order, the heretics established themselves as contemporary liberalism's most formidable foes.
Two distinct currents fed the stream of neoconservatism. One focused on
domestic issues, specifically by reexamining the Great Society programs
of the 1960s and the welfare state as a whole. It was centered in the
Public Interest, a quarterly founded and edited by Irving Kristol. The
other focused on international issues and the cold war; it was centered
in Commentary and led by the magazine's editor, Norman Podhoretz.
The former current has little if any relevance to the controversy
surrounding neoconservatism today. Much of the domestic-policy critique
mounted by neoconservatives eventually became common wisdom, symbolized
by President Bill Clinton's welfare-reform program and his declaration
that "the era of big government is over." In the meantime, several of
the seminal figures of the domestic wing--Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer--drifted back toward liberalism.
It was the foreign-policy wing that was, all along, more passionately
embroiled in ideological disputation. For one thing, the stakes were
higher. If a domestic policy fails, you can try another. If a foreign
policy fails, you may find yourself at war. Also, the battles that
rived the Democratic party in the 1970s, at a time when virtually all
neoconservatives were still Democrats, principally concerned foreign
affairs. These battles sharpened ideological talons on all sides.
The divisions stemmed from the Vietnam war. Not that all
neoconservatives were hawks on this particular issue; some, including
Podhoretz, were (qualified) doves. But when opponents of the war went
from arguing that it was a failed instance of an essentially correct
policy--namely, resisting Communist expansionism--to contending that it
was a symptom of a deep American sickness, neoconservatives answered
back. Whatever problems we may have made for ourselves in Vietnam, they
said, the origins of the conflict were to be found neither in American
imperialism nor in what President Jimmy Carter would call our
"inordinate fear of Communism," but in Communism's lust to dominate.
Contrary to Carter and the antiwar Left, neoconservatives believed that
Communism was very much to be feared, to be detested, and to be
opposed. They saw the Soviet Union as, in the words of Ronald Reagan,
an "evil empire," unspeakably cruel to its own subjects and
relentlessly predatory toward those not yet in its grasp. They took the
point of George Orwell's "1984"--a book that (as the Irish scholars
James McNamara and Dennis J. O'Keeffe have written) resurrected the
idea of evil "as a political category." And they absorbed the
cautionary warning of the Russian novelist and dissident Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn against yielding ground to the Communists in the vain hope
"that perhaps at some point the wolf will have eaten enough."
Many in our history, both statesmen and scholars, had drawn a
distinction between Americans' sentiments and America's self-interest.
Where Communism was concerned, the neoconservatives saw the two as
intertwined. Communism needed to be fought both because it was morally
appalling and because it was a threat to our country.
For their passion against Communism, neoconservatives were accused of
being "zealots" and "Manicheans." To this, one neoconservative
rejoined: "we face a Manichean reality." That is to say, the struggle
between the Communist world and the West involved, on the one hand,
some of the most malign, murderous regimes ever created and, on the
other hand, some of the most humane. The moral consequences were
enormous.
This attitude was one of the things that set neoconservatives apart from traditional conservatives. To be sure, there were a few intellectuals of the Right, like William F. Buckley, Jr. and Whittaker Chambers, who shared the neoconservatives' loathing for Communism. But mainstream conservatives were better represented by the approach of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and their foreign-policy mentor, Henry Kissinger, according to which the Soviet Union was to be seen more as another great power than as the vessel of a lethal ideology; the policy of détente was devised accordingly. This approach was embraced by such conservative icons as the Reverend Billy Graham, who hoped to convert Russians to the Gospel, and the capitalist Donald Kendall, who hoped to sell them Pepsi--without, in either case, troubling with the issue of their enslavement.
Even those traditional conservatives who distrusted the readiness of
Nixon and Kissinger to make deals with the Soviet Union tended to share
the underlying philosophy of foreign-policy "realism." As opposed to
the neoconservative emphasis on the battle of ideas and ideologies, and
on the psychological impact of policy choices, realists focused on
state interests and the time-honored tools of statecraft. That was one
reason why, for the neoconservatives of the 1970s, the great champions
in American political life were not conservative or Republican figures
but two Democrats of unmistakably liberal pedigree: Senator Henry
"Scoop" Jackson and George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO. When
President Ford, on Kissinger's counsel, closed the White House door to
Solzhenitsyn upon his expulsion from Soviet Russia, these two stalwart
anti-Communists formally welcomed him to Washington.
It was only with the accession of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in
1981 that the neoconservatives made their peace with Republican-style
conservatism. Reagan brought several neoconservatives--notably Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle, Max Kampelman, and Elliott Abrams--into
pivotal foreign-policy positions in his administration (and, on the
domestic-policy side, William J. Bennett and others). With time, most
neoconservatives moved into the Republican fold. As for Reagan's
"belligerent" approach to the cold war, it was criticized as loudly by
both liberals and conservatives within the foreign-policy establishment
as it was cheered by neoconservatives. But there can be no question
that it issued in a sublime victory: the mighty juggernaut of the
Soviet state, disposing of more kill power than the U.S. or any other
state in history, capitulated with scarcely a shot.
By the 1990s, therefore, the neoconservatives' analysis seemed
vindicated. But, by the same token, the cause that had drawn them
together and defined them--the cold war--was concluded. In the
relatively quiet 1990s, most of the nation's attention was concentrated
on taxes and budgets and other domestic concerns. By 1996, Podhoretz
himself proclaimed that neoconservatism was "dead," and that "what
killed it was not defeat but victory; it died not of failure but of
success." As a consequence, he wrote, "in foreign policy it has become
impossible to define a neoconservative position."
This, in my judgment, underestimated the signs that a distinctive neoconservative approach to post-cold-war foreign policy had already been taking form. In 1990-91, cold-war neoconservatives lined up with traditional conservatives serving in the first Bush administration in support of military action to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. At the time, most liberals opposed the use of force, and so did some so-called paleoconservatives like Patrick J. Buchanan and Robert Novak, as well as various libertarians.
No less revealing than the debates between the war's opponents and
supporters was a division that opened within the ranks of the
supporters themselves once the fighting ended. In an act of
quintessential "realism," President Bush declined to order American
forces to capture Baghdad and oust Saddam Hussein or even to obstruct
Saddam's campaign to suppress Iraqis who had risen in rebellion against
him. Most neoconservatives disagreed with at least the latter of these
decisions.
In 1992, the Bush administration's realism got the better of it once
again when war broke out in Bosnia. The President dismissed the
violence there as a "hiccup," and James Baker, his Secretary of State,
famously declared that "we have no dog in that fight." When the new
Clinton administration proved equally inert, and with the death toll
mounting, a lobby developed for some form of American intervention.
Most active members of that lobby were neoconservatives, and other
neoconservatives, with notable exceptions like Charles Krauthammer,
embraced its position. By contrast, most traditional conservatives
believed that America's own interests were not sufficiently engaged to
justify intervention. Many liberals, for their part, while sharing a
sense of urgency about Bosnia, were characteristically chary of using
force or acting outside the aegis of the United Nations (whose actions,
as it happened, had been constraining the victims of aggression more
than the aggressors).
After Bosnia, the top foreign-policy issue in the latter half of the
1990s was the enlargement of NATO. Liberals and conservatives were
arrayed on all sides. But most of those associated with the
neoconservative camp, with the prominent exception of the historian
Richard Pipes, were united in favor of it. I worked with Jeane
Kirkpatrick and Paul Wolfowitz (and two moderate Democrats, Anthony
Lake and Richard Holbrooke) to organize a statement, signed by most of
America's former top foreign-affairs officials, that helped to seal the
debate.
This series of events suggests that some kind of common neoconservative
mentality endured beyond the cold war. What were its elements?
First, following Orwell, neoconservatives were moralists. Just as they despised Communism, they felt similarly toward Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic and toward the acts of aggression committed by those dictators in, respectively, Kuwait and Bosnia. And just as they did not hesitate to enter negative moral judgments, neither did they hesitate to enter positive ones. In particular, they were strong admirers of the American experience--an admiration that arose not out of an unexamined patriotism (they had all started out as reformers or even as radical critics of American society) but out of the recognition that America had gone farther in the realization of liberal values than any other society in history. A corollary was the belief that America was a force for good in the world at large.
Second, in common with many liberals, neoconservatives were
internationalists, and not only for moral reasons. Following Churchill,
they believed that depredations tolerated in one place were likely to
be repeated elsewhere--and, conversely, that beneficent political or
economic policies exercised their own "domino effect" for the good.
Since America's security could be affected by events far from home, it
was wiser to confront troubles early even if afar than to wait for them
to ripen and grow nearer.
Third, neoconservatives, like (in this case) most conservatives,
trusted in the efficacy of military force. They doubted that economic
sanctions or UN intervention or diplomacy, per se, constituted
meaningful alternatives for confronting evil or any determined
adversary.
To this list, I would add a fourth tenet: namely, the belief in
democracy both at home and abroad. This conviction could not be said to
have emerged from the issues of the 1990s, although the neoconservative
support for enlarging NATO owed something to the thought that
enlargement would cement the democratic transformations taking place in
the former Soviet satellites. But as early as 1982, Ronald Reagan, the
neoconservative hero, had stamped democratization on America's
foreign-policy agenda with a forceful speech to the British Parliament.
In contrast to the Carter administration, which held (in the words of
Patricia Derian, Carter's Assistant Secretary of State for Human
Rights) that "human-rights violations do not really have very much to
do with the form of government," the Reagan administration saw the
struggle for human rights as intimately bound up in the struggle to
foster democratic governance. When Reagan's Westminster speech led to
the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, the man chosen to
lead it was Carl Gershman, a onetime Social Democrat and a frequent
contributor to Commentary. Although not an avowed neoconservative, he
was of a similar cast of mind.
This mix of opinions and attitudes still constitutes the
neoconservative mindset. The military historian Max Boot has aptly
labeled it "hard Wilsonianism." It does not mesh neatly with the
familiar dichotomy between "realists" and "idealists." It is indeed
idealistic in its internationalism and its faith in democracy and
freedom, but it is hardheaded, not to say jaundiced, in its image of
our adversaries and its assessment of international organizations. Nor
is its idealism to be confused with the idealism of the "peace" camp.
Over the course of the past century, various schemes for keeping the
peace--the League of Nations, the UN, the treaty to outlaw war,
arms-control regimes--have all proved fatuous. In the meantime, what
has in fact kept the peace (whenever it has been kept) is something
quite different: strength, alliances, and deterrence. Also in the
meantime, "idealistic" schemes for promoting not peace but
freedom--self-determination for European peoples after World War I,
decolonization after World War II, the democratization of Germany,
Japan, Italy, and Austria, the global advocacy of human rights--have
brought substantial and beneficial results.
Whether or not a distinct neoconservative position could be discerned
in the relatively calm 1990s, everything changed, with a vengeance,
after September 11, 2001. As the second President Bush unfurled his
"war against terror," word spread that he himself had been captured by
neoconservatives. What gave plausibility to this idea was that Bush's
new approach constituted a radical break with his own earlier
predilections. Less than a year before, he had come into office
evincing little interest in international affairs and proclaiming that
America should be a "humble nation," with fewer global commitments. No
more than a handful of identifiable neoconservatives occupied
influential positions in his administration, and none at the highest
tier.
There was unintended irony in the post-9/11 liberal caricature of Bush
and Cheney as politicians who had haplessly allowed their
administration's policies to be hijacked by a few spookily effective
intellectuals--this, less than a year after having been such master
manipulators as to have allegedly stolen away the presidency from Al
Gore. But this was not the only grotesque charge leveled at the
President. Another was that the "neoconservatives" in question were in
reality a group of Jews who were attempting to divert U.S. policy in
the interests of Israel. This particular bit of slander ignored, among
other things, the fact that the neoconservative position on the Middle
East conflict was exactly congruous with the neoconservative position
on conflicts everywhere else in the world, including places where
neither Jews nor Israeli interests could be found--not to mention the
fact that non-Jewish neoconservatives took the same stands on all of
the issues as did their Jewish confrères.
However fantastical the conspiracy theories, and however polluted their
origins, what is undeniable is that Bush's declaration of war against
terrorism did bear the earmarks of neoconservatism. One can count the
ways. It was moralistic, accompanied by descriptions of the enemy as
"evil" and strong assertions of America's righteousness. As Norman
Podhoretz puts it in his powerful new book, Bush offered "an entirely
unapologetic assertion of the need for and the possibility of moral
judgment in the realm of world affairs." In contrast to the suggestion
of many, especially many Europeans, that America had somehow provoked
the attacks, Bush held that what the terrorists hated was our virtues,
and in particular our freedom. His approach was internationalist: it
treated the whole globe as the battlefield, and sought to confront the
enemy far from our own doorstep. It entailed the prodigious use of
force. And, for the non-military side of the strategy, Bush adopted the
idea of promoting democracy in the Middle East in the hope that this
would drain the fever swamps that bred terrorists.
It is possible that Bush and Cheney turned to neoconservative sources
for guidance on these matters; it is also possible, and more likely,
that they reached similar conclusions on their own. In either case, the
war against terrorism put neoconservative ideas to the test--and, in
the war's early stages, they passed with flying colors. The Taliban
regime was ousted from Afghanistan quickly and without a major
commitment of American forces. More striking still, a democratic
government was established in Afghanistan--one of the least likely
places on earth for it. Muammar Qaddafi, the ruler of Libya and one of
the world's most erratic and violent dictators, abandoned his pursuit
of nuclear weapons, and in effect sued to bring his country in from the
cold reaches to which Bush had assigned terrorism-supporting states.
Finally, Saddam Hussein was toppled from power in a brief campaign with
minimum loss of life.
Even more remarkably, Bush's advocacy of democracy brought an immediate
and positive reaction around the region. The Lebanese drove out Syrian
forces after a 30-year occupation. In an unprecedented development,
elections at various levels of government were held in Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, and a handful of other Arab states (and the Palestinian
Authority), including most dramatically Iraq itself. The collective
leadership of the Arab states, meeting at a summit, declared its
commitment to "strengthening democracy, expanding political
participation, consolidating the values of citizenship and the culture
of democracy, the promotion of human rights, the opening of space for
civil society, and enabling women to play a prominent role in every
field of public life." Crowning all these events was one crucial
non-event: the absence, despite the almost unanimous forecast of
experts, of further terror attacks on the United States.
But then, of course, the landscape shifted. Resistance and terror
mounted in Iraq to levels that the U.S. and allied forces could not
manage, and the entire war against terrorism bogged down. Not only did
Iraq itself devolve into a bloody mess, but gains on other fronts also
began to fray. The Taliban intensified terror and guerrilla attacks in
Afghanistan, Syria launched new depredations in Lebanon, Iran defiantly
accelerated its drive for a nuclear bomb, and autocrats around the
Middle East reneged on their pledges of democratic reform. The American
public, originally supportive, turned against the Iraq war. Bush's
popularity plummeted.
Today there are signs that the "surge" of U.S. troop levels and the new
counterinsurgency tactics designed by General David Petraeus will
succeed in stabilizing Iraq, provided they are not aborted by
congressional Democrats who, as the British writer Douglas Murray has
put it, "want the neoconservatives to fail more than they want Iraq to
succeed"--or, more accurately and more disgracefully, who want Bush to
fail more than they want America to succeed. Even so, it cannot be
denied that the war has proved far costlier in treasure, lives, and
American standing than its proponents imagined, and, at least for the
time being, the loftier dream of Iraq as a model for its neighbors has
turned to ashes.
But to what is all this to be attributed? According to one highly
publicized article in Vanity Fair, several leading neoconservatives put
the blame on poor execution of their ideas on the part of the
administration. This is not a very satisfying analysis. Complaints
about government incompetence dog every administration, almost always
with justice, and there is no convincing evidence that the functioning
of the present administration has been worse than that of its
predecessors.
More specific and more convincing targets for blame are a few key
decisions made by Paul Bremer, the chief of the allied occupation from
May 2003 to June 2004, and by former Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld. Bremer's decisions--to disband the Iraqi army and to
undertake a purge of Baath party members so sweeping as to dismantle
the Iraqi government--have been widely criticized. Whether it would
otherwise have been easier to cope with the insurgency is hard to say,
though the idea seems plausible. Rumsfeld's insistence, backed by the
President, on deploying to Iraq only a fraction of the troops requested
by General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, seems more clearly
to have courted trouble--a conclusion brought home all the more sharply
by the apparent success of today's "surge" in manpower.
In any event, the decisions about troop levels and about abolishing
Iraq's existing administrative structure had nothing to do with
neoconservative ideas. The most that can fairly be said is that
Rumsfeld was an ally of neoconservatives and that some among them,
enamored of military technology or influenced by the Iraqi dissident
Ahmad Chalabi, endorsed his choices. Besides, whatever measure of
responsibility may be placed on neoconservatives in this one matter, it
pales in comparison to the errors of the realists in the George H.W.
Bush administration who in 1991 chose to leave Saddam in power, and of
the liberals in the Clinton administration who allowed Saddam's
defiance of his disarmament obligations to swell steadily over eight
long years. Together, these failures left the problem of Saddam Hussein
festering for George W. Bush to confront in the aftermath of 9/11, when
it appeared in a more ominous light.
To point to an insufficiency of troops or to errors by Paul Bremer is
of course no answer to more searching questions about the wisdom of the
war itself. At the outset, liberal critics--initially there were more
of them abroad than at home--argued that UN inspectors should have been
given more time to find Saddam's hidden weapons of mass destruction,
and that the U.S. should not have gone to war without the approval of
the Security Council.
But the inspectors had been at their mission for twelve years, and
there was no reason to believe they would ever accomplish it. As we
later discovered, the Iraqi regime had apparently destroyed its stocks
of biological and chemical agents and concealed or destroyed the
evidence it had done so, or failed to make a record in the first place.
Why Saddam would have deliberately invited the suspicion that he still
possessed such materials remains the war's great mystery--probably he
did not want his enemies or his friends to know the actual state of
affairs--but whatever the final truth may be, the inspectors were
unlikely to have discovered it.
As for the Security Council, here we do hit on one of the signature
issues of neoconservatism. Although neoconservatives are not
necessarily unilateralists, they are certainly and pointedly
distrustful of the UN (as are traditional conservatives). And they have
reason to be.
America's decision to invade Iraq after failing to secure the support
of the Security Council cost it dearly in the coin of world public
opinion. But should we resort to war only upon the Security Council's
approval? Although some Europeans have articulated such a principle, in
1999, when Russia stood in the way of UN-approved military strikes
against Serbia over the issue of Kosovo, NATO went ahead and bombed
anyway, and all nineteen members took part. Surely, the stakes in Iraq
were far higher than in Kosovo, even in purely humanitarian terms, all
the more so in strategic.
Although the UN Charter gives the Security Council a near-monopoly on
the use of force, that same charter also envisioned a mighty UN army
that would protect every member against attack or even threat. In
return for this protection, the member states were to sacrifice much of
their freedom to defend their own interests. But the army never came
into being, so this part of the charter is a dead letter. Surely states
cannot have surrendered most of their right to defend themselves once
the other half of the bargain became null and void.
But arguments over the UN and the Security Council are only the tip of
an iceberg. The larger and more general issue is how readily America
should resort to the use of force and whether neoconservatives are too
promiscuous or "trigger-happy" in this regard. Liberal critics of the
war, who grew more assertive and numerous as our effort in Iraq bogged
down, reprised the dovish positions of the past 30 years. Over the
course of those decades, the likes of Carl Levin and Edward Kennedy and
Nancy Pelosi had opposed virtually every new U.S. weapons system and
every stout anti-Communist policy--in other words, the very measures
that led to victory in the cold war. They also opposed the 1991 Gulf
war to force Saddam out of Kuwait, and military action against Serbia
in Bosnia. Never once did they acknowledge error or revisit their own
mistaken judgments, although in each case the neoconservative critique
of those judgments was proved right. Are we now to suppose that,
whatever may have gone wrong so far in Iraq, we can vanquish the forces
of terrorism by restricting ourselves to the liberals' favored
instruments--diplomacy, foreign aid, and the UN?
On the other side of the ideological spectrum, some conservative
critics of the war have argued that we went to Iraq in pursuit of the
wrong mission--that is, democratization. As Charles R. Kesler, the
editor of the Claremont Review of Books, puts it: "the case for
toppling Saddam was much stronger than the one for staying indefinitely
to buy time for the Iraqis to democratize." And this, too, touches a
signature neoconservative issue.
It is hard to picture what would be better today, either for the Iraqis
or for us and our interests, had we just deposed Saddam and left.
Numerous scenarios are imaginable, all of them grisly. Saddam might
have been succeeded by one of his equally bloody henchmen, like the
infamous "Chemical Ali." An ethnically-based civil war might have
broken out, or the country might have devolved into anarchy like
Somalia, except with infinitely more weapons available. Or Iraq's
neighbors might have torn it to pieces, with the largest piece consumed
by Iran.
Perhaps Kesler envisions that we could have installed a benign
dictator. This thought is not far from that of some neoconservatives
themselves, who believe that we would have done better to place Ahmad
Chalabi in power. But whether it would have been Chalabi or Ayad Allawi
(who served briefly as prime minister) or some other Iraqi to our
liking, this would not have reduced our own burdens a whit. No such
figure could have remained in power unless we shouldered the job of
preserving him by force. To the contrary, the measure of democracy that
has taken hold in Iraq--along with the degree of legitimacy, however
attenuated, that this has given to both the Iraqi authorities and our
own continued presence--has made our burdens there so much the lighter.
Indeed, what with high voter participation and a degree of
give-and-take among the various factions, democratization can be said
to have received a decent start in Iraq. To be sure, the functioning of
the Iraqi government has been inadequate, but more mature democracies
have also faltered under the pressures of war and terror. In the
meantime, government on the local level, at least in areas relatively
free of violence, seems to be functioning. What is apparent is that
most Iraqis want democracy, but their wishes are hostage to a sizable
minority of violent recalcitrants, backed by outside force.
A more profound criticism of the war in Iraq is that it was the wrong
war in the wrong place. By attacking Iraq, so it has been said, Bush
diverted us from completing the vital mission of pacifying Afghanistan
and tracking down Osama bin Laden. This critique, which became another
staple of Democratic argument, has the advantage of sounding tough even
while opposing the war. Barack Obama revealed a new variation of the
theme when, in August, he announced that he would support bombing
terrorist targets in Pakistan.
But what good would it have done to have had tens of thousands more
U.S. troops in Afghanistan? From the perspective of "nation building"
and other humanitarian concerns, Afghanistan after the removal of the
Taliban was doing well--for Afghanistan. A thousand things were wrong,
but that poor and undeveloped country was progressing better than at
any other time in memory. From a strategic perspective, perhaps a
larger American force could have suppressed Taliban guerrilla activity
more completely, but was this a mission for which we should have tied
down the lion's share of our deployable forces?
And what of bin Laden? By all accounts, he is not in Afghanistan but in
Pakistan. There is still talk of U.S. forces attacking the tribal areas
where he is believed to shelter, but this would be another nettlesome
project. It would entail great military risk--Pakistan's own army has
done poorly in the region--and would possibly destabilize the world's
second largest Muslim country, a country that contains both a nuclear
arsenal and large numbers of extremists. Obama's hypothetical bombing
attack would more likely result in mayhem than in the death of bin
Laden.
A more serious version of the "wrong place" argument came from within
the neoconservative camp itself, and specifically from Michael Ledeen
of the American Enterprise Institute. He argued in 2003 that we should
focus not on Iraq but on Iran.
A key goal in the larger war against terrorism has been to put an end
to state support for terrorists either by inducing state sponsors to
mend their ways or by bringing about their downfall. Among these
sponsors and/or perpetrators, the most active have been Iran, Iraq,
Syria, and Libya.
All four are brutally repressive of their own citizens and opponents of
regional peace. All have attempted to acquire weapons of mass
destruction. All embrace radical anti-Western philosophies, secular or
Islamist. And all have been in place for decades. It seemed a sensible
strategy to use force against one in the hope that this would
precipitate the desired outcome in the others.
The administration did not spell out its rationale for choosing Iraq,
but it is possible to imagine the reasons. In Iran, internal dissidents
and reformers seemed far stronger at the time than they do today, and
there were grounds for hoping they might change the government on their
own. Hitting Syria first, the choice of some neoconservatives, might
have reinforced the canard that we were acting on Israel's behalf and
thus sparked an even stormier backlash in the Arab world than what we
have suffered over Iraq. Libya had been quiescent since Reagan bombed
the country in 1986 in response to a terrorist outrage.
The choice of Iraq as a target had another comparative advantage, a
particularly ironic one in light of the subsequent charge by Kofi Annan
(among others) that the war was "illegal." Actually, there was a clear
justification in international law for using force against Iraq, and it
did not rest primarily on the administration's controversial
interpretation of the traditional right of preemptive self-defense. It
rested on Saddam's own willful defiance of the terms and conditions
ending the 1991 war he had launched by invading Kuwait.
In hindsight, was Ledeen right? After all, Iran is closer to having a
nuclear bomb than Iraq seems to have been, and it has always been the
greater supporter of terrorism. Moreover, our difficulties in Iraq have
left an opening for Iran to bid for regional hegemony. But if it was
indeed a mistake to concentrate on Iraq first, the mistake had nothing
to do with neoconservatism. Rather, it was the kind of strategic error
that abounds in war. In World War I, our side may have concentrated too
much on the central front; in World War II, too much on the periphery.
In the cold war, we met disaster in Vietnam, where we either should not
have fought or should not have allowed ourselves to lose. In each case,
however, we won the larger war.
In sum, the most persuasive criticisms of the Iraq war--that we sent
too small a force, that we erred in dismantling the Iraqi state, that
we would have been wiser to concentrate on Iran--do nothing to impeach
neoconservatism. And as for the criticisms that do aim at the
distinctly neoconservative tenets of the war--that we should have
deferred to the UN, that we should have avoided resorting to force,
that we should not have tried to bring democracy to Iraq--none is
persuasive.
In the end, the validity of the neoconservative position, or for that
matter of the indictment against it, rests on two issues that go beyond
Iraq: whether and how the U.S. should try to spread democracy in the
Middle East, and whether we should be engaged in a war against
terrorism.
On the first count, Francis Fukuyama has explained his disaffection
from neoconservatism on the grounds that, in contrast to his own,
"Marxist" approach to democratization, his former friends and allies
had behaved like "Leninists." By this he means to separate his analysis
in "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) from the policies to
which that analysis seminally contributed. In writing about the "end of
history," Fukuyama now says, he was only attempting to discover the
historical laws that, sooner or later, would lead all nations to
democracy. But just as Lenin took matters into his own hands when he
tired of waiting for Marx's predicted revolution, so had the
neoconservatives tried, fatally, to force the pace of democratization.
The analogy may be catchy, but it is flawed. The socialism envisioned
by Marx was a fantasy, which came true neither by natural evolution nor
by Lenin's violence. Democracy, on the other hand, is the method by
which governments are chosen today in about two-thirds of the countries
of the world, and this is something that has come about via both the
"Marxist" and the "Leninist" paths. In the technologically advanced
countries of Europe, democracy in the postwar era may arguably have
developed organically, as the outgrowth of socio-economic development.
But the majority of today's democracies are not technologically
advanced; democracy came to them because people wanted it and worked or
fought for it. In other words, it has been a product of individual
choice and will. And though most of its proponents have been
indigenous, outsiders have often played influential roles.
In fact, even in the advanced countries, postwar democracy did not just
unfold naturally. There, too, it came with the help of various kinds of
foreign intervention, whether it was the Allied occupations of Germany,
Japan, and Austria, or the CIA's interventions in the politics of Italy
and France, or the role played by the Marshall Plan across Western
Europe. For that matter, America's own democracy was born with outside
assistance from the likes of Lafayette and the government of France. It
turns out that we are all "Leninists."
The strategy of promoting democracy in the Middle East flowed from
Bush's realization that the war against terror could not be won by
military means alone. Bush eschewed the old cliché that the
"root cause" of terror was poverty, a theory always contradicted by the
available evidence and one that should have received its final blow
this past summer from the appearance of a cell of terrorist physicians
in the United Kingdom. Instead, Bush hypothesized that the root cause
was the political culture of the Muslim Middle East, which is steeped
in violence. This political culture has incubated thousands of young
men ready to die for the joy of killing and tens of millions of
citizens ready to applaud their "martyrdom." Bush's thesis was, and is,
that the Middle East can be brought to partake in the global tide of
democratization that has touched every other region, and that such
democratization will lead to new ways of thinking and make violence
less acceptable.
Neither Bush nor anyone else can know if this strategy will work. There
are two obvious areas of uncertainty. One has been expressed well by
Kesler:
The conspicuous exception to democracy's spread was the Arab Middle
East. That could have meant, as the neoconservatives concluded, that
its turn was next. But it could also have meant that there were
cultural, religious, and political factors that had made it resistant
to the democratic wave--and would continue to do so.
Kesler here makes the neoconservatives sound more assertive and uniform
than I think is fair, but he is certainly right that we do not know
whether Arabs will in fact embrace democracy any time soon or, for that
matter, ever. And we also do not know--we can only suppose and
hope--that if they do, democracy will work to pacify Arab political
culture. That is the second uncertainty.
Was it irresponsible of Bush to rest such weighty national concerns on an unproved supposition? It would have been irresponsible had there been any better-tested or more plausible alternatives available. But none has yet been suggested, unless one counts those who persist in believing that stronger U.S. efforts to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict will solve everything else. (If that were the case, attacks on America should have subsided during the 1990s, the decade of our most vigorous efforts to broker just such a peace; instead, they crescendoed.)
Thus far, Bush's strategy has scored some steps forward and some back.
All in all, as Freedom House reported this year, "the Middle East
continues to lag behind other regions in the development of free
institutions." But, the Freedom House report immediately continues,
"the fact that progress has been made since the September 11, 2001
attacks gives some cause for optimism." Although no country in the
region (apart from Israel) can be judged "free," the number counted as
"partly free" (as opposed to "not free") has risen from 3 to 6 (or 7 if
one counts the Palestinian Authority). If appreciable progress is to
come, it will require more years, which is why Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice speaks of "a generational commitment."
If Bush's strategy of spreading democracy bears a neoconservative
imprimatur, it is not the largest issue on which neoconservatism stands
or falls. That issue is the war against terrorism itself. According to
the financier George Soros, among many others, terrorism ought to be
viewed simply as a form of criminal behavior, to be handled by means of
law-enforcement and not by means of war. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former
national-security adviser, argues that, under Bush, the country's fear
of terrorism has amounted to a species of "paranoia," resulting from
"almost continuous national brainwashing" that has been perpetrated not
only by our government but also by "security entrepreneurs, the mass
media, and the entertainment industry." This in itself sounds rather
paranoid.
The simple fact is that the attacks of 9/11 were the most deadly on the United States proper in its history. What is more, they followed by eleven months the suicide bombing of the USS Cole that killed seventeen U.S. sailors and wounded 39 others. Two years before that, two of our embassies in Africa were bombed, killing more than 300 people, and two years before that a truck bomb in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia struck U.S. military housing, killing nineteen and wounding 550.
One could go on. Perhaps more frightening is a fact I have already
mentioned: tens of thousands of young men in the Islamic world have
gone for formal training in terrorism. Their highest objective,
presumably, is to strike at "the Great Satan" even at the cost of their
own lives, or especially at the cost of their own lives. These myriads
are backed by a larger network disposing of considerable resources,
making use of modern technology, enjoying the support or complicity of
several governments, and striving to acquire or develop ever more
lethal means.
The 3,000 lives that were obliterated on 9/11 represented a new
benchmark in the success of terror operations, but no one then doubted
that the killers would turn at once to the challenge of outdoing this
toll. So, indeed, they have repeatedly tried to do. Contrary to
Brzezinski, to be frightened by this requires no brainwashing. Nor,
contrary to Soros, are those young men likely to be deterred if we
issue them restraining orders.
Fukuyama offers a somewhat more judicious argument. "'War' is the wrong
metaphor," he writes. "Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a
'long, twilight struggle' whose core is not a military campaign but a
political struggle." The extent of that jihadist challenge, moreover,
has been greatly overestimated, and its rootedness in Islam is itself
exaggerated. "It is . . . a mistake," Fukuyama asserts, "to identify
Islamism as an authentic and somehow inevitable expression of Muslim
religiosity."
Interestingly, the very phrase "long, twilight struggle" is borrowed by
Fukuyama from John F. Kennedy's characterization of the cold war--which
is exactly the model that neoconservatives have repeatedly offered for
the war against terrorism. And as for Islamism being an "authentic and
inevitable expression of Muslim religiosity," inevitable it surely is
not; but who are non-Muslims to say that it is inauthentic? It
certainly seems to be authentic to the individuals who espouse it.
Nor are they alone. Despite the insistence of U.S. officials that the
supporters of terrorism are a tiny minority of Muslims, the available
data tell a different story.
Yes, they are a minority, but not an insignificant one. This summer,
the Pew Global Attitudes survey heralded a sharp decline in Muslim
support for suicide bombings. After this drop, reportedly, "only" 16
percent of Turks support such attacks--as do 21 percent of Kuwaitis, 23
percent of Jordanians, 34 percent of Lebanese Muslims, 42 percent of
Nigerian Muslims, and 70 percent of Palestinians. Confidence in Osama
bin Laden "to do the right thing in world affairs" tracks these numbers
at a slightly lower level.
There are, thank goodness, some countries where Pew's figures are
lower, the lowest being Egypt, where only 8 percent approve suicide
bombings. But another Pew survey conducted just a couple of months
earlier found 15 percent of Egyptians believing that "attacks on
civilians . . . to achieve political goals" were justified. Perhaps the
discrepancy means that some Egyptians disapprove of suicide--which
presents its own theological difficulties--but not the killing of
innocents in a worthy cause. In the same poll, a mere 26 percent of
Egyptians disapproved both of al Qaeda's attitudes toward the U.S. and
of its tactics. When Egypt's Ibn Khaldun Center, run by the political
sociologist Saad Edin Ibrahim, asked Egyptians whom they most admired,
the three frontrunners were the Hizballah chief Hassan Nasrallah,
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Khaled Meshal of Hamas.
Troubling as they are, these data may understate the problem, at least
to judge by election results in the region. In Egypt, Lebanon, and the
Palestinian territories, Islamist parties, some of them non-violent but
some very violent indeed, have scored a string of successes. Although
Fukuyama rightly assures us that "we are not currently engaged in
anything that looks like a 'clash of civilizations,'" if Islamists and
jihadists take over additional countries, the consequences may well
resemble exactly that.
The terrorists are the shock troops of the jihadist or radical Islamist
movement, a movement whose strength is limited but substantial--far
greater than, for example, that of the Communists just after Lenin
seized power in Russia. Jihadism has many times more supporters, its
reach is more global, it has far more resources, and it has a natural
constituency that Communism only pretended to have. Lenin and his band
succeeded in fastening their grip on a backward country and used it as
a springboard from which their heirs could contest seriously for world
domination. Who is to say how powerful a threat radical Islam could
become if allowed to metastasize further?
This movement has already been at war with us for some time, and has
killed us by the thousands. Bush's announcement of a "war against
terror" was thus nothing more than a declaration that we had decided to
fight back. Soros, Brzezinski, and Fukuyama notwithstanding, this war
was not "optional." If we had declined to fight it now, we would only
have to fight more desperately later. If we do not fight back, can
anyone imagine that the jihadists will stop? Conversely, defeat of
their cause will assuredly demoralize that movement and thin its ranks.
As for the neoconservatives, they have taken their lumps over the war
in Iraq. Nonetheless, the tenets of neoconservatism continue to offer
the most cogent approach to the challenge that faces our country. To
recapitulate those tenets one last time: (1) Our struggle is moral,
against an evil enemy who revels in the destruction of innocents.
Knowing this can help us assess our adversaries correctly and make
appropriate strategic choices. Saying it convincingly will strengthen
our side and weaken theirs. (2) The conflict is global, and outcomes in
one theater will affect those in others. (3) While we should always
prefer nonviolent methods, the use of force will continue to be part of
the struggle. (4) The spread of democracy offers an important, peaceful
way to weaken our foe and reduce the need for force.
This suggests a few priorities. First, for all our failures in Iraq, we
cannot afford to accept defeat there; nor do we have to. True, our more
fanciful images of what Iraq would become after Saddam's removal have
gone by the boards. But there is still a world of difference between a
relatively stable if troubled country and a state of anarchy.
And then there is Iran. Even if we turn a corner in Iraq, our relative
success will be negated if we allow Iran to obtain a nuclear bomb. Once
it does, not only will we be haunted by the specter of nuclear
terrorism, but we may be constrained by nuclear blackmail from actions
we would want to take in future chapters of the war against terror.
Next, only by enlarging our military can we base strategic decisions on
military need and not on the availability of forces. How is it that a
nation of 300 million cannot indefinitely sustain a force level of
150,000 in a given theater, meaning one soldier for every 2,000
Americans?
Finally, our efforts to foster democracy in the Middle East must not be
curtailed but prosecuted vigorously and more effectively. True, the
"Arab spring" of 2005 did not turn out to be as successful as the
famous "Prague spring" of 1968. But then, it took two decades for that
Prague spring to yield fruit. The modest liberalization in the Middle
East and the democratic ferment that we have stirred there promise
further advances if we persevere.
None of this offers a complete guide to waging the war against terror.
But it does amount to a coherent approach, essentially similar to the
one by means of which we won the cold war. By contrast, liberals and
realists have no coherent approach to suggest--or at least they have
not suggested one. That, after all, is why George W. Bush, searching
urgently for a response to the events of September 11, stumbled into
the arms of neoconservatism, unlikely though the match seemed. One can
always wish that policies were executed better, but for a strategy in
the war that has been imposed upon us, neoconservatism remains the only
game in town.