Gentlemen, gentlemen, let’s have some order here. You are both
brilliant, witty, tall, and distinguished students of our country’s
glory-soaked history, but let us, as they used to teach in school,
be clear.
Jeff Lord is quite right to
point out that intervention in Central and South America is as
American as baseball (damn straight; where would the national
pastime be otherwise? and how else would those Latin athletes be
laughing at those clever Yankee (the race not the club) merchants
and their famous free market? You show ‘em Albert!).
And not only South and Central America, as you well
know.
But neoconservatism is not the issue here, and Jim
Antle is quite right to say so. Neoconservatism is a set
(scarcely a system) of ideas that evolved in conversations between,
and exchanges of essays by, a group of friends, all more or less of
the WW II generation or just after — Irving Kristol, Daniel P.
Moynihan, Robert Bartley, Leo Rosten, and a few others, notably
Nathan Glazer and peripherally Mel Lasky (he and Tony Robinson and
Stephen Spender were in a damp office in London). They were joined
by still others, such as Norman Podhoretz and Neal Kozodoy and
The American Spectator’s Mr. Tyrrell. The conversation was
almost entirely concerned with domestic issues — civil rights and
the public policies that ought, or ought not, to follow their legal
and constitutional consolidation in the '50s-60s, welfare matters
(e.g., “conservative safety net welfare state” vs. reliance on
private goodness and free markets), and many more.
The foreign policy of the first Bush administration — the
resort to war to enforce international borders — was widely
perceived, and surely not inexactly, as a traditional exercise of
state power, and it received broad support in our country as well
as amongst others, including old allies like France and Britain and
new-circumstantial ones like Syria and old-circumstantial ones like
Saudi Arabia. Some of them even helped us, as per the Foreign
Legion contingent that stayed in the rear, but I have it on good
authority that was not for want of volunteering, only Generals
Schwarzkopf and Powell were in the unilateral-chain-of-command mode
where they felt comfortable and did it their way. The second war
began as old-fashioned get-the-varmints warfare, but evolved with
the nation-building ambitions of the move into Iraq. The notion of
pre-emptive defense and punish-the-dictators and
battle-cry-of-freedom-and-democracy beyond our own borders was not
a neoconservative notion. It may have been a Wilsonian one, but I
leave that to specialists in the matter, as it is not certain
President Wilson’s “make the world safe for democracy” fantasy was
more important in his own mind and in its effect on 20th century
history than his “self-determination for all peoples” one. And
anyway, neither the president nor his top men were neos in any
recognizable sense, certainly not Mr. Rumsfeld or Mr. Cheney or
Miss Rice, nor Mr. Wolfowitz, who is widely called a neo but who
had taken his distances from the Committee on the Present Danger in
the '70s-80s when, organized by Democrats such as Mr. Nitze and Mr.
Rostow and Mrs. Kirkpatrick and others and that attracted Senator
Jackson as well as President Reagan (before he was president) and
was championed by the then-neos, except Mr. Luttwak, but he too
always took his distances from them, as did Prof. Bloom and Prof.
Wohlstetter, Mr. Wolfowitz’s great teachers. Please correct me if I
am wrong in any or all of these characterizations, I am quite open
to being corrected on points of fact, history, and even, yes,
judgment.
But, and this is an important but, the neos via several of
their key surviving members or their presumptive heirs, applauded
and rationalized the enterprise, with some notable
exceptions.
And also but, and this too is an important but, are we
really in neoconservative territory now? Well, you have to work it
out for yourselves and I am happy to see you doing this in a
spirited and courteous way. We will have to hope in the sound
judgment of future historians and note only that it — and let us
not, please, go Clintonesque and start arguing about what “it”
means — did not work out as planned, but that is what the
neoconservatives — the original items, taking a cue from Robbie
Burns — taught us to expect of the best laid plans o’ mice an’
men.
