Robert Kagan in Rehab

Herewith a brief review of Robert Kagan's "Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776," World Affairs, 2008:

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/Spring-2008/full-neocon.html

This interminable article is an interesting example of a piece that – being almost entirely taken up with a soporific summary of American history designed to show that Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Polk, Lincoln, McKinley, both Roosevelts, Wilson, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Reagan were all neoconservatives and would have invaded Iraq – cannot be found to have any particular lie in it, but instead is a single gigantic lie, or web of lies so closely woven from beginning to end that detaching any one strand of the sticky stuff is stultifyingly tedious and the task of disassembling the whole thing completely daunting. If you started to refute it sentence by sentence – for instance by taking those historical figures one by one and proving that their having firm convictions about American exceptionalism did not also mean that they threw their weight around the world like sociopaths on a wilding spree – you would soon have a book-length excursion into utter boredom. Your encyclopedia would be as pale and unreadable as his article.

To confine myself, then, solely to his opening sally: what Kagan summarizes in the first paragraph as an incorrect, hasty, bigoted view – that a small group of neoconservatives maneuvered this country into the Iraq debacle – is the exact truth; what Kagan then presents in the second paragraph as the nuanced version of how the Iraq debacle came about is a fantasy fiction designed to rehabilitate himself and his neoconservative cohorts who created the debacle. (History will record it as a debacle even if, as he devoutly hopes against all the odds, we stay and, at the end of the longest day, see the emergence of a stable friendly Iraq, because historians will understand that no such eventuality will ever pay out enough benefit to justify the mind-boggling cost in lives and wasted resources. So his hope that he will be ultimately vindicated if only we stay the course is deluded.)

As for his lengthy attempt to define "neoconservative" in some honorable way, save yourself the trouble and go directly to the website of the Project for the New American Century. The original signatories comprise precisely the cabal of extremists who seized control of American foreign policy under the de facto presidency of Dick Cheney and engineered the invasion of Iraq – the cabal that Kagan says is nonexistent. What he wants to do is define the term in such a way that he will have plenty of company on this ship of fools, but really, neoconservatism is effectively just a very few people. Obviously Congress and the country went along, along with the nominal president, but no one in Congress and the country was clamoring for a war with Iraq. It was the work of Project members Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, with cheerleading by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, the co-founders of the Project.

I will point out only one among hundreds of rhetorically slippery tricks in Kagan's article: he takes opponents of the neoconservatives to task for painting them with a broad brush as militarists and imperialists, then himself paints them with an even broader brush as purveyors of a "potent moralism and idealism in world affairs" and as promoters of the spread of "liberty and democracy." (That is how he contrived to find a place for every beloved past American president in his catalogue of neoconservatives.) Anyone who believes that Dick Cheney cares whether Iraqis have liberty and democracy or even whether they live or die is naive to the point of criminality. But just to underscore the point in a way that even a wingnut might be able to understand, I have been searching for, and failing to find, any commitment among neoconservatives to use American military power on behalf of moralism and idealism to bring liberty and democracy to the oppressed people of Myanmar, Tibet, Cuba, North Korea, or the West Bank. Unlike the people of Iraq, who brought tyranny upon themselves, the people of Tibet and the West Bank were overrun by an invading army and have been militarily occupied for decades. It may be said that Saddam Hussein was thought to possess weapons of mass destruction. That turned out to be a regrettable mistake, but gosh, who knew? – besides a large number of people in the CIA and the State Department who were subsequently targeted for career extinction by Cheney and Rumsfeld. I will content myself with pointing out that North Korea was then and still is known to possess weapons of mass destruction and has loudly threatened to use them against its neighbors. Could it be that these other oppressed people, equally deserving of liberty and democracy, are not sitting on billions of gallon of oil and that they are not in a part of the world where we Americans, or neoconservatives anyway, currently aspire to extend our imperial reach and throw our weight around as the primary shaper of geopolitical outcomes?

Readers who bother to acquaint themselves with the Project for the New American Century will understand perfectly well why we invaded Iraq: to project American power in the Middle East and establish permanent military bases in an Arab country close to Iran; to make sure that we control the supply of oil, which is so necessary to our viability as a superpower; and to maintain congruence between American policy aims and the policy aims of the Likud Party of Israel. These motives cannot be reconciled with any form of idealism and moralism recognizable to actually idealistic and moral people.

That Kagan and his associates at the Project for the New American Century believed sincerely that all this was right and proper goes without saying. It is not their sincerity that is at question, it is their rancid values and their tenuous connection to reality.