Neo-cons: a tragic drama in three acts

Neo-cons: a tragic drama in three acts
By Jacob Weisberg
Published: March 2 2006 02:00 | Last updated: March 2 2006 02:00. Copyright by Slate.com

As Iraq continues to deteriorate under American occupation - the question now is whether it can avoid full-blown civil war - the issue of how we got into this mess presses ever more urgently. Several instant histories and inside accounts of the Bush administration's decision-making have already been published. But it is a book with no original reporting whatsoever that does the best job of explaining why the disaster unfolded the way it did. Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads argues that the US made the mistake of going into Iraq without preparing for a hostile occupation because of the flawed foreign policy thinking of a small group of people called neo-conservatives.

"Neo-conservative" has become such a loaded term that it tends to obliterate civil discussion. Some Europeans use it as a synonym for supporters of the Iraq war or for sophisticated warmongers in general. On the American far left and far right, "neo-con" often emphasises the Jewishness of many of its adherents, implying that they care more about Israel than America. Mr Fukuyama, who until recently counted himself a neo-conservative, defines the term not by the shared history of its members, but rather by a shared set of ideas.

Though there are endless exceptions, the most influential neo-cons are "hard" Wilsonians with respect to foreign policy. They reject the realist notion, most strongly identified with Henry Kissinger, that the US should act only according to its interests. Instead, neo-cons believe that America must provide the world moral leadership,spreading liberty and democratic ideas, by force if necessary. They like alliances, but have little time for global institutions or finer points of international law. Applying this characterisation, Mr Fukuyama counts among neo-cons both Ronald Reagan and the second-term George W. Bush, who is about as far from a Jewish intellectual as it is possible to be.

While remaining sympathetic to the democracy-spreading mission, Mr Fukuyama castigates the unilateral and militaristic turns that gave us concepts such as "preventive war" and "regime change". Neo-cons, he contends, have abandoned their fundamental political insight, namely that ambitious schemes to remake societies are doomed to failure and unintended consequences. "Opposition to utopian social engineering", he writes, "is the most enduring thread running through the movement". Yet neo-cons today are bogged down in an attempt to remake a poorly understood, catastrophically damaged and deeply alien semi-country in the Middle East. How did these smart people stray so far off course? Though Mr Fukuyama does not make this comparison, their failure looks increasingly like that of the architects of the Vietnam war. In the first act of the neo-conservative tragedy, an intellectual movement springs up in the early 1960s, animated by Lyndon B. Johnson's misguided expansion of the US welfare state. Applying a version of its critique of totalitarian communism to "great society" liberalism, the movement's key early figures - Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan - argue that good intentions are foundering on the shoals of recalcitrant humanity and ignorance about the realities of poverty. What distinguishes these writers from their more conventionally-minded liberal counterparts is shrewd skepticism about the possibility of social transformation and keen empiricism about people, programmes and results. In act two, in the late 1970s, a slightly different neo-con cast applies the same insight to US foreign policy of the détente era. There are scenes here of hostility to the United Nations and their battles with Kissinger's realism, which they see as too accommodating of communism. Once again, they look prescient in retrospect.

It is not until the third act that neo-conservatism goes catastrophically wrong. Imbued by the revolutions of 1989 with a sense of their own rightness and of America's unchallenged dominance, the neo-cons imagine that even backward, non-western societies with no liberal traditions can follow a Polish post-totalitarian path. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and William Kristol fantasise that a dubious Garibaldi figure, Ahmed Chalabi, can overthrow the world's most vicious dictator with a small band of followers. After that proves futile, they persuade the US vice-president and defence secretary - and ultimately, the president himself - that once the US military finishes the job, Iraqis will embrace their occupiers. In winning this climactic battle, the neo-cons forget who they are. Their two best qualities - skepticism about government-led change and sociological empiricism - get lost along the way. Mr Fukuyama is especially damning when he discusses the intellectual ferment over the past 15 years around the question of how democratic transitions are accomplished. The prominent neo-cons who supported the war stood largely outside this debate, and it is hard to "find much discussion of the concrete mechanics of how the US would promote either democratic institutions or economic development," he writes.

In Greek tragedy, the hero's fall is often charted in terms of his hamartia, sometimes translated as "tragic flaw". What ultimately undid the neo-cons may have been a residual fondness for categorical, Marxist-Hegelian thinking. People who should have known better came to believe that one place was like another and that historic inevitability would do the heavy lifting for them. Now the neo-conservative tragedy is ours as well.

The writer is editor of Slate.com