MARCH 30
SHAPING THE WORLD
The rise of the neo-conservatives
IT WAS an election year. The New York Times got hold of a secret draft Pentagon report entitled 'Defence Planning Guidance', and splashed it on the front page.
The Guidance went on to advocate 'pre-emptive strikes' against rogue states that acquired weapons of mass destruction, and sketched scenarios for such wars, including another attack on Iraq.
The underlying idea was that the US could 'shape', not just react, to the world, using its overwhelming military and economic might to create conditions conducive to American values and interests.
A howl of protest greeted the leak, and the Guidance was denounced as bellicose and unilateralist, not least by the then Governor of Arkansas, who was campaigning for the presidency on the slogan: 'It's the economy, stupid'.
The incumbent President denied the document reflected his thinking, and a few weeks later, after a 'scrubbed' version of the Guidance was leaked, the controversy died.
The year, of course, was 1992, and the President was Mr George H. W. Bush. His Defence Secretary was Mr Dick Cheney, and the document's chief drafters were Messrs Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis ('Scooter') Libby and Eric Edelman.
Within months, they were all out of office, and the Arkansas Governor took possession of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Eight solar revolutions of the earth later, they were back in office, in tow to another President Bush, George W.
Mr Cheney became Vice-President, Mr Libby his Chief of Staff and Mr Edelman his senior foreign policy adviser.
Mr Wolfowitz returned to Defence as No. 2 to Mr Donald Rumsfeld, the man who first spotted Mr Cheney way back in the Nixon Administration.
Others associated with this group included Mr Douglas Feith, now Under-Secretary of Defence for Policy, Mr Stephen Hadley, now deputy to National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, and Mr Richard Perle (nicknamed the 'Prince of Darkness' by liberals), the unpaid chairman of the Defence Advisory Board till he resigned last Thursday in the wake of questions involving his lobbying activities.
Vaguely, if loosely, dubbed 'neo-conservatives' (or neo-cons), their views were different from Secretary of State Colin Powell's and Dr Rice's, not to mention the traditional pragmatic realists who dominated past Republican administrations - the Henry Kissingers, Brent Scowcrofts and James Bakers.
By September 2002, when the 'National Security Strategy of the United States' was released, it was clear the neo-cons had won. Proclaiming a 'distinctly American internationalism', the new document reinstated the muscular language of the unscrubbed 'Guidance' of 10 years ago, and added some.
'The President has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge (military) lead the US has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union,' it stated flatly.
'Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the US.'
The document promulgated the doctrine of pre-emption, and stated clearly that the US 'will not hesitate to act alone' in pursuing its interests if necessary. As the oxymoronic term 'American multilateralism' gave notice, the US would condescend to multilateralism, but only when it did not frustrate its will.
Significantly, this time there was no howl of protest, no denunciation in either the media or Congress of America's bellicosity and unilateralism. Why?
Well Sept 11, of course, a tectonic shift that neo-cons say both justifies and proves the necessity for an un-apologetic assertion of US power. Perhaps so. But did Sept 11 justify the new policy, or did the new policy find its justification in Sept 11? (note from bw - Bush quote ---> I hit the trifecta)
After all, the neo-cons had first staked out their vision of a post-Cold War world 10 years before Sept 11. Unless they are to be credited with extraordinary prescience, the vision clearly preceded the historical event that was invoked to justify the vision.
Indeed, the vision preceded even the vision, for neo-conservatism didn't originate in 1992, at the start of the post-Cold War period, but earlier, during the Cold War itself, when it took shape as a counter not only to mainstream liberalism, but also mainstream conservatism. Significantly, the first Anti-Christ of neo-cons was not President Bill Clinton, but a fellow conservative - Dr Henry Kissinger.
ORIGIN OF NEO-CONSERVATISM
SOME years ago, when I met Mr Robert Kagan, I saw on his office wall the photographs of two very dissimilar presidents - Harry Truman, a liberal Democrat, and Mr Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican.
When I remarked on the unusual conjunction, Mr Kagan, a prominent neo-con intellectual, replied heatedly, 'not at all. Truman had the vision to initiate the Cold War, and Reagan had the courage to end it'. What neo-cons detest most was what came in-between - Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and detente.
The first neo-cons were intellectuals, mostly Jewish, who began as leftists but migrated rightwards in the 1950s and 1960s, in disgust over the Soviet Union's suppression of Eastern Europe and what they took to be the weakness of the West's response. As Irving Kristol, a founder of the movement, put it once, a neo-conservative is a 'liberal who has been mugged by reality'.
They didn't give up their liberalism in the process, though. If anything, neo-cons might be called muscular neo-liberals, or liberals with boots.
They believe fervently in the supremacy of Western civilisation - in particular its American variation, liberal capitalism plus Jeffersonian democracy - and are possessed by a messianic zeal to spread its virtues throughout the world.
This idealistic strain is most evident in the next generation of neo-cons - the Wolfowitzs, Perles and Kagans. They all cut their teeth fighting a supreme realist, Dr Kissinger, opposing what they believed was his amoral 'balance of power' conception of foreign policy.
Detente was for them appeasement, containment of the Soviet Union a form of defeatism, nuclear arms control the legitimation of an unacceptable status quo, and rapprochement with China a cynical betrayal of Taiwan.
The centre of neo-con resistance to Dr Kissinger in the 1970s was actually a Democrat, Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson, who held the Soviet Union should not just be contained but also challenged. Mr Perle began his career as a Jackson aide, jamming the arms control treaties that Dr Kissinger had negotiated with the Soviets when they came up for Senate ratification.
The young neo-cons achieved a significant victory over Dr Kissinger in 1976 when they prevailed on the then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr George H. W. Bush, to assemble a 'Team B' to look over the CIA's estimates of Soviet nuclear strength. The 10-member team, which included Mr Wolfowitz, produced a report painting the Soviet Union as an expansionist power, bent on achieving strategic nuclear superiority over the US.
To meet the threat, detente must be ended, arms control abandoned, and the US must increase its military expenditure dramatically, Team B argued.
They got their chance four years later, when Mr Ronald Reagan took office. A former Roosevelt Democrat himself, Mr Reagan became a neo-con hero.
He rejected detente, and openly called the Soviet Union an 'evil empire'. He challenged the Soviets at the Berlin Wall: 'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.' Refusing to believe that mutual assured destruction (or MAD) was the last word in nuclear strategy, he proposed a missile defence system.
Without a doubt, the Reagan defence build-up was instrumental in bankrupting the Soviet Union.
And without a doubt, Mr Reagan's presidency changed also American conservatism, and with it, the Republican Party. No longer could ideological idealism be confined to liberals, and no longer could the party's foreign policy be dominated exclusively by pragmatists.
B<>PRAGMATIC CONS VS IDEOLOGICAL NEO-CONS
THE pragmatists had the upper hand in the first Bush presidency, in large part because of the 41st President's own instincts and convictions. When 43 re-appointed many of his father's people to high office - Mr Cheney, Mr Powell and Dr Rice, among them - it was assumed he would continue with 41's foreign policy. People didn't account for his pronounced conservatism, more Reaganesque than Bush pere, and his religious convictions.
Still, the second Bush presidency was not neo-con from the word go. Mr Powell and Dr Rice were old-style pragmatists, while Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld were really 'assertive nationalists', not neo-cons, as one analyst put it.
The relevant distinction in the Bush Administration is not between hawks and doves - for they are all hawks to some degree - but rather between ideologues and realists. The main personalities might be distinguished roughly as follows: Mr Powell and Dr Rice are non-ideological realists; Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld are ideological realists; and Mr Wolfowitz, Mr Libby and Mr Perle are realist ideologues.
For someone like Mr Rumsfeld, national interest, and the projection of power to advance that interest, would be primary. For Mr Wolfowitz, national interest would encompass also transforming the world in America's image.
As Mr Charles Kupchan of the Council of Foreign Relations explains: For the neo-cons 'it's not just about American security and American pre-eminence; it's also about using that pre-eminence to further a political programme'.
When Mr Wolfowitz wrote two years ago that 'nothing could be less realistic than the version of 'realism' that dismisses human rights as an important tool of American foreign policy', he was distinguishing himself not only from liberal Democrats, who may talk the talk but not walk the walk, but also traditional Republicans, who neither talked the talk nor walked the walk. Neo-cons are optimists; realists are pessimists.
Before Sept 11, the pessimists prevailed. 'The notions of power politics, great powers, and power balances,' are the proper concerns of US foreign policy, wrote Dr Rice in 2000. In early 2001, Mr Cheney dismissed the neo-cons, saying: 'Oh, they have to sell magazines; we have to govern.'
The neo-cons did not immediately prevail even after Sept 11. When Mr Wolfowitz pressed for an invasion of Iraq in the weeks after Sept 11, arguing that only a political and cultural transformation of the Middle East would suffice to defeat terrorism, he was opposed by both the non-ideological realists and the ideological realists, and Mr Bush took their side.
But the neo-con arguments did not fall on deaf ears. Somehow, there was a tectonic shift in the Administration's policy between the Afghan campaign and the State of the Union address in January 2001, when Mr Bush named the 'axis of evil'. The invasion of Iraq was set in motion in that period, 'regime change' became US policy, and 'pre-emption' became a doctrine
It is a matter of speculation what role, if any, Mr Bush's own religious convictions played in the triumph of the neo-cons, but he could not but have found their ideological messianism congenial.
Just as Mr Reagan saw the contest with the Soviet Union not merely as a balance of power problem, but as a moral combat with evil, Mr Bush seems to see the fight with terrorism not merely as a security challenge, but as a contest between good and evil.
And just as Truman tried to shape the world at the outset of the Cold War, by bringing countries like Japan and South Korea into the Western ambit, he seems to believe the US must now shape and transform the Middle East.
The next time I visit Mr Kagan's office, I may well find another photograph on the wall - Mr Bush's.
Janadas Devan is a senior writer with The Straits Times.
