America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  America’s enemy in the war against terrorism, he said, is Satan, and he will only be defeated “if we come against him in the name of Jesus.” Most famously, General Boykin said of a Somali warlord, “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” This last was widely described as “crude machismo,” which it may have been, but it was also a straight biblical reference to the victorious contests of Hebrew prophets with the priests of Baal.138 Similar statements concerning Islam have emanated from several leaders of the Christian Right, including Franklin Graham (son of Billy), Jerry Falwell, and the Reverend Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals.139

  Concerning the United States itself, leading officials of the Bush administration made no secret of their belief that the American state rests on essentially religious foundations, that “the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator,” in Ashcroft’s words.140 Even Vice President Dick Cheney sent a Christmas card in 2003 with a message asking, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”141

  General Boykin’s remarks indicate once again two salient features of this sector of American society, as discussed above. The first is their intense nationalism. As for the English and Scottish Puritans of the seventeenth century, from whom they derive their religious culture—as indeed for the Israelites of the Old Testament—their God is essentially a tribal God, a Cromwellian “God of Warre” who fights for them against Amelekites, Irish papists, Red Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards, Germans, Japanese, Communists, Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Muslims, and any other enemy who comes along.

  The second is that their religion-based culture is to a very great extent premodern and definitely pre-Enlightenment. A comparison of General Boykin with his equivalents in other armed forces is instructive. A great many French, British, and Russian officers would feel more comfortable in the nineteenth century, and some surviving aristocratic elements in the eighteenth century. British officers in particular sometimes have an affection for horses that trembles on the brink of impropriety. However, the golden ages they yearn for are still post-Enlightenment. Unlike General Boykin, they would not feel at home in Cromwell’s New Model Army. The extent of this ideologically premodern sector in the United States is therefore greater than almost anywhere else in the developed world—except for Northern Ireland.

  This kind of religious nationalism is fuelled both by religious moralism and by a paranoia fed in turn by a feeling of cultural embattlement. In the words of Richard Hofstadter:

  Since what is at stake is always a conflict between good and evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to the finish. Nothing but total victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and utterly unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated…This demand for unqualified victories leads to the formulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s frustration.142

  The implications of this belief system for the “war on terrorism” will be one of the subjects explored in the next two chapters.

  Five

  The Legacy of the Cold War

  Where the hell is Cambodia? People see a headline, and suddenly we’re in trouble in Cambodia. It’s got to be somebody’s fault, so we start attacking somebody. The news is too fast and too confusing. We see a headline, and we go over to the atlas to find out where Cambodia is. Then we attack somebody about it. We do more damn talking about things we don’t know anything about than anybody in history.

  —Sam Bloom (Texan businessman, 1960s)1

  The cold war perpetuated and strengthened long-standing messianic, paranoid, and Manichaean strands in American nationalism. However, it also added a new element, largely unknown in the United States before World War II, but very important in the history of nationalism elsewhere: a massive military–industrial and security complex with great influence and a stake in promoting armed rivalry with other states.

  Since the Vietnam War, the impact of this new force in American affairs has been seen above all in what I have described as the American Nationalist Party, or Republicans. However, it has had a strong presence among the Democrats as well. No one should have been surprised that while the Obama administration took a much more restrained, pragmatic, and multilateral approach than the Bush administration to a number of key issues, it also deferred heavily to the military establishment and remained devoted to preserving American military superiority and American dominance in the world. In the 1990s, although Bill Clinton somewhat reduced the military budget, he also presided over both a still greater extension of the U.S. military presence in the world and a geopolitical campaign to “roll back” the influence of Russia within the former Soviet Union.

  This legacy of the cold war had a very damaging effect on U.S. strategy after 9/11, by helping to direct U.S. attention away from the terrorist groups themselves. In the words of James Mann, the collective biographer of the George W. Bush foreign and security policy team, “the Vulcans [the name Bush’s senior foreign and defense policy team gave themselves] were fully prepared to deal with security threats of the sorts they had confronted in the past—major powers, rogue states, dictators and land armies, all entities that operated inside fixed territories and identifiable borders—but they were not as ready to combat a stateless, amorphous terrorist organization like Al Qaeda.”2

  Moreover, even in confronting threats from states, their approach was based on a simplistic right-wing cold war paradigm of building up ever stronger American military forces. “The Vulcans were far less active in developing new institutions, diplomacy or other approaches that could deal with these issues.”3

  The cold war essentially created all the leading members of the Bush administration’s foreign and security staff. Many had already been senior officials in Republican administrations of the 1970s.4 As the official White House photographer of the Ford administration remarked concerning the George W. Bush administration: “I feel like Rip van Winkle. It’s like I woke up twenty-five years later, and not only are my friends still in power, they’re more powerful than ever.”5

  The Neoconservatives

  The cold war also produced the neoconservative academic and bureaucratic grouping, whose members between 2001 and 2003 critically influenced the Bush administration and acted as some of its leading officials and propagandists.6 The neoconservatives had their ultimate origin in the “Vital Center” group set up by Reinhold Niebuhr and others in the late 1940s to rally American liberals against the threat of Stalinist Communism. The “Vital Center” split over the Vietnam War, with the future neoconservatives generally taking up stances in support of the war and of tough anti-Soviet policies. Via support for the hawkish Democrat Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, most ultimately moved to the Republicans (though some remain formally Democrats to this day).7

  Also of central importance to their development was their reaction against the left-wing “counterculture” of the 1960s, and especially its romantic, pacifist, anti-intellectual, and hooligan elements, and against the increasing tendency of the Left to condemn Israel. However, just as many of the original neoconservatives like Irving Kristol had been Trotskyite Marxists, so some of the second generation were also 1960s radicals, like Stephen Schwartz (of the “Foundation for the Protection of Democracy”), who later moved to the radical Right. In both generations they brought with them from the Left a radical style, a taste for vicarious violence, and a certain sense of politics as theater. In this, they closely resembled an old pattern in Europe of members of the radical Left crossing over to the radical Right (Mussolini is the most famous example of this sort of movement).8

  As Irving Kristol admitted in a candid moment, a desire for drama played a part in his shift to the radical Right. In the 1950s he had become �
��bored with my own sensibly moderate liberal ideas.”9 Like many of the cold war elites in general, they have proved incapable of dropping this style once the ostensible reason for it—the Communist threat—disappeared.

  Over time, the original neoconservative grouping became highly fractured.10 Some of those still occasionally described as neoconservatives, like Samuel Huntington, in fact came to differ radically from the remaining core group on key issues, such as the right and ability of the United States to spread its values in the world, especially by force of arms.11 Others, like the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, broke with their former comrades a generation ago.

  The remaining neoconservatives are best described as a kind of parabureaucratic grouping that (as Jacob Weisberg has pointed out), given the level of intermarriage and hereditary descent among its members, also somewhat resembles a sort of clan.12 This kind of grouping is made possible by the American system’s blurring of the lines between government, academia, the media, and business, which I described in chapter 2. The self-image of this grouping was encouraged by the cold war tendency in the American security elites as a whole to see themselves as a version of Plato’s Guardians, a closed, all-knowing, elect group guiding, protecting (like guard dogs), and when necessary deceiving an ignorant and flaccid populace for its own good in order to protect it from ruthless enemies.13

  In the case of the neoconservatives, this tendency was also encouraged by certain secretive and conspiratorial tendencies in the thought of one of their founding intellects, Leo Strauss.14 His thoroughly Platonic belief that it is both necessary and legitimate for the philosophical elite to feed the populace with religious and patriotic myths in which the elites themselves do not believe may have contributed to the remarkable facility with which the neoconservatives over the years have abandoned prior positions (e.g., on humanitarian and democratic interventionism, as described in chapter 2) and formed alliances with groups, like the Christian Right, that should be quite alien to them.

  This inconsistency and opportunism is one reason why, despite their harshly ideological tone and radical nationalism and imperialism, I would hesitate to describe the neoconservatives today as a true ideological tradition. Another is that for all their noise, they have not in fact contributed anything truly new to American political culture. With the exception of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, their works are characteristic of many radical nationalist movements in that they often combine fanaticism with dullness and banality. Most indeed are little more than collages of newspaper op-eds.

  Rather, what they have done is to take some of the existing traditions described in this book and given them a radical and extremist twist. Thus they have turned sympathy for Israel into support for Likud, and they have taken beliefs in America’s role as a democratic model and the need for American national security and turned them into arguments for interventionist war. The triumph of the neoconservative program under Bush was only possible in the context of a wider feeling of national emergency existing at times during the cold war, and in a more dramatic form after 9/11. However, because they tap into and seek to build upon the deep strains of American nationalism described in this book, the neoconservatives have a future even after the disasters of the Bush administration. In Justin Vaisse’s words,

  Seeing neoconservatism as a form of nationalism only strengthens the likelihood that it will remain an intellectual force of some importance on the American scene and that it will someday make its influence felt once more, even though its fortunes now seem on the decline. Although it will always remain a minority school of thought, it resonates with certain deep currents in the American psyche, has a simple and powerful message, and is borne by a historical vision that justifies it in the eyes of those who want to believe. In short, neoconservatism has a future.15

  Present Dangers, a book of essays by leading neoconservatives and other right-wing hard-liners, edited by Robert Kagan and William Kristol and published in 2000, provides evidence of how Bush administration policy might have developed had 9/11 not intervened. Its title intentionally recalled the “Committee on the Present Danger,” a group of hard-line cold warriors that grossly exaggerated Soviet power and threats in the early 1980s. Such works remain worrying in the context of growing U.S. fears of China.

  In keeping with the pre-9/11 realist tradition, the authors were indifferent to terrorism and issues of violence and stability within societies; of 15 essays, not one was devoted to terrorism as such (with the partial exception of one on Israel). Instead, they were obsessed with the threat to the United States from a range of supposedly powerful rival states, all of which must be approached with the maximum degree of toughness. “Appeasement” was a constant theme. The last essay of Present Dangers, for example, was a paranoid attempt to suggest that the U.S. position vis-à-vis China resembles that of Britain vis-à-vis Germany in the early 1930s.16

  The former British diplomat Jonathan Clarke described the tendency the authors represent:

  Far from looking for ways to take the toxicity out of international problems, the authors purposefully seek out trouble spots (the Taiwan Strait, North Korea, Iraq) and then reach for the gas can…“Steely resolve” is the watchword, with the emphasis on steel. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that if the book’s combined recommendations were implemented all at once, the U.S. would risk unilaterally fighting at least a five-front war…

  There is a curious flavor of Nietzschean “will” running through this book. There is a constant appeal to the need to mobilize the people to war. The “present dangers” of the title turn out to be not external threats, but the possibility that the American people will not be sufficiently ready to lift up arms. There is a fascination with history’s strong men, as if the “Triumph des Willen” was an admirable trait, albeit expressed as evil in certain of them. Whether this is really compatible with American ideals of limited, constitutional government by laws rather than men is a subject for another essay.17

  This widespread and sinister obsession with national “will” among the neoconservatives is brought out in a striking passage by Charles Krauthammer: “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”18

  And once again, these words were not written after 9/11, calling for a tough response to savage terrorism. They appeared in March 2001, and were pegged to what the author at that stage celebrated as a tough new Bush approach to dealing with Russia, a state which since 1991 had posed no direct threat whatsoever to the United States.

  In such circles, neither 9/11 nor the bloody occupation of Iraq had much effect on this underlying psychological stance. If anything, it only widened the circle of enemies and intensified demands for America to display its will and toughness by deliberately standing alone. Thus the book An End to Evil, by Richard Perle and former Bush speechwriter David Frum (2003), expressed a greater or lesser degree of embittered hostility not just to the Muslim world, but to Russia, China, the United Nations, and every country or institution that had in any way questioned or resisted the United States over war with Iraq.

  In this book the United States is advised to oppose European unity. Most of Western Europe is said to be affected by “the same jealousy and resentment that animate the terrorists”—an astonishingly extreme and provocative statement to come from a man still serving as a senior government advisor at the time he wrote it. No exception whatsoever was to be made for different terrorist movements, or between their political and military wings—except in the case of Russia, which is accused of having invented its terrorist threat and fabricated its terrorist attacks. The only country treated positively is Britain—whose views and interests are then treated with dismissive contempt.19

  Despite public disillusionment with military interventions and state-building programs, in 2012 neoconservatives rema
ined of great importance in the Republican Party, dominating the foreign and security policy side of leading conservative think tanks and journals, and continuing to contribute heavily to supposedly “mainstream” papers, including the Washington Post. In 2009 Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor launched a new organization, the Foreign Policy Initiative, with a wholly neoconservative agenda.20

  Moreover, growing tension between a declining America and a rising China could give a new impetus to American beliefs in America’s mission to lead “the free world” against “dictatorship,” thereby giving neoconservatism a new lease on life. Neoconservatism therefore seems likely to play an important part in shaping the policy of any future Republican administration—unless, perhaps, that administration is headed by a president who is a retired general, for in senior military circles there is far less admiration for this movement.

  Confirmation of Myths

  The development of a program of containment of China justified in terms of a “defense of democracy” would continue that of the cold war against Communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. Ideologically speaking, the U.S. struggle against the Soviet Union was expressed above all in terms of defending democracy and freedom, though the theme of defending religion against Communist atheism was also present. The American struggle against first Nazism and then Communism naturally gave a tremendous new strength to messianic feelings stemming from the American Creed. These feelings stressed America’s role as the exemplar, leader, protector, and savior of the “free world” in the battle against the evil Communist “enemies of freedom.” Indeed, for a number of years these sentiments were justified, at least as far as Western Europe and (to a lesser extent) northeast Asia were concerned.