When conservative critics of the Iraq War start portraying it as
a useless quagmire, the word neoconservative is usually not far
behind. Since it’s not claimed that Bush and his top policy team
are themselves neocons, there’s always an unpleasant implication
that neocons are people with extraordinary powers, capable, as
subordinate officials or pundits, of bending the nation’s top
leaders to their ways.
The bitterest part of the accusation is usually that neocons
have a crazed, crusading vision of remaking the world in the
American image, of bringing democracy to unlikely places like Iraq
or the Middle East in general. As someone of more or less neocon
description who’s been getting mugged by Middle Eastern reality for
about twenty years, I understand the criticism. My own attitude
toward the prospects of Iraqi democratization could be called
worried agnosticism.
But a few caveats are in order here. To begin with, the most
discouraging aspect of the current situation in Iraq — the
presence of a terrorist insurgency that is taking a daily toll in
blood and destabilization — is one that was probably avoidable,
and it wasn’t the neocons who enabled it.
As Jed Babbin argues in his new book Inside the Asylum
(Regnery), it was probably during the five months (November
2002-March 2003) that America wasted trying to get a U.N.
imprimatur for the war that Saddam and terrorist neighbors were
able to plan the postwar insurgency. And it’s worth adding that it
was Colin Powell — the top official who is the farthest from
neoconservative views — who apparently prevailed on Bush to seek
U.N. approval. Neocons are not multilateralists; probably without
exception, they would have preferred that the U.S. go it alone
(maybe with British help) and get the job done much sooner and
better. If so, the situation on the ground in Iraq would likely
have offered a lot less for neocon-bashers to complain about
today.
In any case, once the Saddam regime was overthrown, what was
Bush to do? If, on the one hand, you believe the war shouldn’t have
been launched at all, the question of democratization is irrelevant
or at least not paramount. Democratizing Iraq and the Middle East
may have been on the list of rationales for the war, but it wasn’t
at the top; that place was reserved for the danger Saddam posed, in
terms of WMD and support for terror, to his neighbors, America, and
the rest of the world. The war was a response to 9/11, not a
crusade for democracy by crazed ideologues.
But, given that the war was launched and Saddam was quickly
toppled, the issue is what should have been done next. Regarding
democratization, both optimists and pessimists could make strong
arguments. Optimists could point to the fact that, despite earlier
claims about democracy’s supposed incompatibility with various
peoples and cultures, by now it has spread not only to Protestant,
Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist countries but also, in
substantial degree, to Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia.
Pessimists could claim a special Muslim-Arab
democracy-unfriendliness, a particular, toxic mix of
authoritarianism and disorder that prevents civil society from
forming in these countries and keeps them problematic in a way that
neither the Bush administration nor anyone else knows how to remedy
for now.
The question, though, is where neoconservatism comes into all
this. If one claims that Bush took the optimistic route because
Richard Perle and William Kristol pushed him into doing so, one
makes a totally unsubstantiated allegation that, for one thing,
presumes to look inside the president’s mind and motives and, for
another, goes against what we do know about his strong personality
and leadership. It seems much more plausible that Bush was, and
still is, ready to make a go of democracy in Iraq because, for one
thing, the possibility faced him, open and enticing — much more
enticing than the option of “installing a strongman”; because it
offered hope of positively influencing the rest of the Arab world
and, concomitantly, reducing the threat to America; and also, if
psychologize we must, because it jibed much better with an
ingrained American optimism that is part of Bush’s makeup.
Some claim that, in this context, that optimism was closer to
naïveté; and in today’s Iraq both democratization and
“strongman” advocates can still find much evidence for their
positions. But the point is that the neoconservative connection is
hard to see.
To sum up, to the extent the U.S. involvement in Iraq now has a
“quagmire” cast to it, it makes little sense to pin the blame on
neoconservatism and much more sense to impugn its opposite,
multilateralism. Neoconservatism, conceived as a democratizing
crusade, was not the reason for launching the war, nor the reason
for attempting democratization once its first stage was over.
“Neoconservatism” is actually a bogey for those who don’t want the
war to be fought at all, and seem intent on dragging America down
in bitter arguments as it confronts an unprecedented menace.
