Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  —Douglas Feith, May 4, 2004, addressing the

  American Enterprise Institute at “Winning

  Iraq: A Briefing on the Anniversary of the

  End of Major Combat Operations”

  The storm of enthusiasm in “old Europe” is muted.

  —Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, German

  development minister, March 17, 2005,

  on the nomination of Paul Wolfowitz,

  former U.S. deputy defense secretary and

  chief architect of the Iraq war, as head of the

  World Bank

  DRIVING THE RUNAWAY TRAIN:

  NEOCONS, 9/11, AND THE PRETEXTS FOR WAR

  THE EDITORS' GLOSS: In this compelling piece, adapted from America the Virtuous as it appeared in the Summer 2003 Orbis, Prof. Ryn gets to the heart of the obsession that America has developed with freedom and democracy over the years, under the influence of predominantly neoconservative “thinkers.” Not that these ideas or realities are not good things, if correctly understood. Indeed, freedom to fulfill essential duties and pursue one's true end is an absolute good, while the idea of democracy, taken to mean the legitimate participation of citizens in a nation's political life, is extremely laudable.

  Yet this “freedom and democracy” vision should emphatically not embrace what National Reviews Jonah Goldberg, for instance, sees as the defining note of the current American presidency. “In a literal sense,” he noted, “revolutionaries and radicals tend [to] call for the violent overthrow of the government …. that is precisely what lies at the core of Bush's revolutionary foreign policy. Bush has already violently overthrown two governments – Iraq and Afghanistan – and he's made it clear that he wouldn't cry in his non-alcoholic beer if a few more regimes went the way of the dodo, with our help.” How many soldiers and sailors who sign up to support and defend the Constitution, we wonder, want to get into the business of violently overthrowing foreign governments? How many should, whether they want to or not? Should we as a nation be doing so as a matter of national policy?

  A tyrant might say “yes,” insofar as his goal might be to remake the world according to his own image. But it's a little hard to take when the professed exemplar of “democracy” isn't at all concerned about what the rest of the world's citizens might prefer as forms of government or styles of life in their own backyards.

  CHAPTER

  5

  The Ideology of American Empire

  ………

  Prof. Claes G. Ryn, Ph.D.

  THE PRESIDENT OF the United States has committed his country to goals that will require world hegemony, not to say supremacy. In numerous speeches and statements since September 2001, President Bush has vowed to wage an exhaustive, final war on terror and to advance the cause of a better world. “Our responsibility to history is clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”1 In the President's opinion, the United States represents universal principles. He summarizes them in the word “freedom.” As mankind's beacon of political right, the United States must, he believes, remove obstacles to freedom around the world. Accomplishing this task is associated in the President's mind with using American military might. In June 2002, he informed the Congress that the “Department of Defense has become the most powerful force for freedom the world has ever seen.”2 Since 9/11, the U.S. government has relentlessly mobilized and deployed that force far and wide, with effects that remain to be seen.

  What had happened? In his 2000 presidential campaign, President Bush had repeatedly called for a more “humble” U.S. foreign policy and expressed strong reservations about America's undertaking nation building and following a generally interventionist foreign policy. A cynic might suggest that, having won the presidency partly by appealing to Americans' weariness of international over-extension, President Bush had now seized an opportunity to extend his power greatly. A less cynical observer would note that the 9/11 attacks outraged the President. They aroused nationalistic feelings in him and shifted his focus to world affairs. Since then he has also gained a new sense of the military and other power at his command.

  Yet it is not likely that George W. Bush would have changed his stated approach to foreign policy so drastically had he not been affected by a way of thinking about America's role in the world that has acquired strong influence in recent decades, not least in the American foreign policy establishment inside and outside of government. A large number of American political intellectuals, including many writers on American foreign policy, have been promoting what may be called an ideology of empire. Many of them are in universities; some are leading media commentators. Today some of the most articulate and strong-willed have the President's ear.

  When the 9/11 terrorists struck, the time had long been ripe for systematically implementing an ideology of empire, but in his election campaign George W. Bush had seemed an obstacle to such a course. He advocated a more restrictive use of American power. If he had done so out of genuine conviction, 9/11 brought a profound change of heart. The already available ideology of empire helped remove any inhibitions the President might have had about an activist foreign policy and helped shape his reaction to the attack. It can be debated to what extent his advisors and speechwriters, who were to varying degrees attracted to the ideology, along with numerous media commentators of the same orientation, were able to channel the President's anger. In any case, President Bush moved to embrace the idea of armed world hegemony. The attack on America could have elicited a much different reaction, such as a surgical and limited response; it became instead the occasion and justification for something grandiose.

  In spite of its great influence, the ideology of empire is unfamiliar to most Americans, except in segments that appear disparate but are in fact closely connected. Drawing these connections is essential to assessing the import and ramifications of the evolving Bush Doctrine.

  Though heavily slanted in the direction of international affairs, the ideology of American empire constitutes an entire world view. It includes perspectives on human nature, society, and politics, and it sets forth distinctive conceptions of its central ideas, notably what it calls “democracy,” “freedom,” “equality,” and “capitalism.” It regards America as founded on universal principles and assigns to the United States the role of supervising the remaking of the world. Its adherents have the intense dogmatic commitment of true believers and are highly prone to moralistic rhetoric. They demand, among other things, “moral clarity” in dealing with regimes that stand in the way of America's universal purpose. They see themselves as champions of “virtue.” In some form, this ideology has been present for a long time.

  There are similarities between the advocates of the ideology of American empire and the ideologues who inspired and led the French Revolution of 1789. The Jacobins, too, claimed to represent universal principles, which they summed up in the slogan “liberté, égalité, et fraternité.” The dominant Jacobins also wanted greater economic freedom. They thought of themselves as fighting on the side of good against evil and called themselves “the virtuous.” They wanted a world much different from the one they had inherited. The result was protracted war and turbulence in Europe and elsewhere. Those who embody the Jacobin spirit today in America have explicitly global ambitions. It is crucial to understand what they believe, for potentially they have the military might of the United States at their complete disposal.

  The philosopher who most influenced the old Jacobins was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who asserted in The Social Contract (1762) that “man was born free, but he is everywhere in chains.”1 The Jacobins set out to liberate man. The notion that America's military might is the greatest force for freedom in human history recalls Rousseau's famous statement that those who are not on the side of political right may have to be “forced to be free.”

  The new Jacobins have taken full advantage of the nation's outrage over 9/11 to advance their already fully formed drive for empire. They have helped rekindle America's long-sta
nding propensity for global involvement. Knowingly or unknowingly, President Bush has become the new Jacobins' leading spokesman, and he is receiving their very strong support. Reflexes developed by American politicians and commentators during the cold war have boosted the imperialistic impulse. Many cold warriors, now lacking the old enemy of communism, see in the goal of a better world for mankind another justification for continued extensive use of American power. President Bush's moralistic interventionism gains additional support and credibility from a number of antecedents in modern American politics. Woodrow Wilson comes immediately to mind. But the current ideology of empire goes well beyond an earlier, more tentative and hesitant pursuit of world hegemony, and it has acquired great power at a new, formative juncture in history.

  The most conspicuous and salient feature of the neo-Jacobin approach to international affairs is its universalistic and monopolistic claims. The University of Chicago's Allan Bloom (1930–92) argued in his best-selling The Closing of the American Mind that what he called “the American project” was not just for Americans. “When we Americans speak seriously about politics, we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable.” World War II was for Bloom not simply a struggle to defeat a dangerous enemy. It was “really an educational project undertaken to force those who did not accept these principles to do so.”1 If America is the instrument of universal right, the cause of all humanity, it is only proper that it should be diligent and insistent in imposing its will.

  The new Jacobins typically use “democracy” as an umbrella term for the kind of political regime that they would like to see installed all over the world. In their view, only democracy, as they define it, answers to a universal moral imperative and is legitimate. Bringing democracy to countries that do not yet have it ought to be the defining purpose of U.S. foreign policy. One may call this part of neo-Jacobin ideology “democratism.” It has been espoused by many academics, Duke University political scientist James David Barber prominent among them. “The United States should stand up and lead the world democracy movement,” he wrote in 1990. “We have made democracy work here; now we ought to make it work everywhere we can, with whatever tough and expensive action that takes.”2

  Numerous American intellectual activists, journalists, and columnists, many of them taught by professors like Bloom and Barber, sound the same theme. It has become so common in the major media, newspapers, and intellectual magazines and has been so often echoed by politicians that, to some, it seems to express a self-evident truth.

  Not all who speak about an American global mission to spread democracy are neo-Jacobins in the strict sense of the term. Some use neo-Jacobin rhetoric not out of ideological conviction, but because such language is in the air and appears somehow expected, or because war is thought to require it. Many combine Jacobin ideas with other elements of thought and imagination: rarely, if ever, is an individual all of a piece. Contradictory ideas often compete within one and the same person. The purpose here is not to classify particular persons but to elucidate an ideological pattern, showing how certain ideas form a coherent, if ethically and philosophically questionable, ideology.

  New Nationalism

  Two writers with considerable media visibility, William Kristol and David Brooks, who label themselves conservatives, have led complaints that the long-standing prejudice among American conservatives against a larger federal government is paranoid and foolish. Big government is needed, Kristol and Brooks contend, because the United States is based on “universal principles.” Its special moral status gives it a great mission in the world. In order to pursue its global task, the American government must be muscular and “energetic,” especially with regard to military power. Kristol and Brooks call for a “national-greatness conservatism,” which would include “a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of national strength and moral assertiveness abroad.”1

  Similarly, foreign policy expert Robert Kagan writes of his fellow Americans: “As good children of the Enlightenment, Americans believe in human perfectibility. But Americans … also believe … that global security and a liberal order depend on the United States – that 'indispensable nation' – wielding its power.”2

  International adventurism has often served to distract nations from pressing domestic difficulties, but in America today, expansionism is often fueled also by intense moral-ideological passion. Since the principles for which America stands are portrayed as ultimately supranational (for Bloom they are actually opposed to traditional national identity), “nationalism” may not be quite the right term for this new missionary zeal. The new Jacobins believe that as America spearheads the cause of universal principles, it should progressively shed its own historical distinctiveness except insofar as that distinctiveness is directly related to those principles. Though countries confronted by this power are likely to see it as little more than a manifestation of nationalistic ambition and arrogance, it is nationalistic only in a special sense. Like revolutionary France, neo-Jacobin America casts itself as a savior nation. Ideological and national zeal become indistinguishable. “Our nationalism,” write Kristol and Brooks about America's world mission, “is that of an exceptional nation founded on a universal principle, on what Lincoln called 'an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.'”3

  This view of America's role can hardly be called patriotic in the old sense of that word. Neo-Jacobinism is not characterized by devotion to America's concrete historical identity with its origins in Greek, Roman, Christian, European, and English civilization. Neo-Jacobins are attached in the end to ahistorical, supranational principles that they believe should supplant the traditions of particular societies. The new Jacobins see themselves as on the side of right and fighting evil and are not prone to respecting or looking for common ground with countries that do not share their democratic preferences.

  Traditionally, the patriot's pride of country has been understood to encompass moral self-restraint and a sense of his own country's flaws. By contrast, neo-Jacobinism is perhaps best described as a kind of ideological nationalism. Its proponents are not precisely uncritical of today's American democracy; Bloom complained that American democracy was too relativistic and insufficiently faithful to the principles of its own founding. But it should be noted that he regarded those principles as “rational and everywhere applicable” and thus as monopolistic. Greater dedication to “American principles” would by definition increase, not reduce, the wish to dictate terms to others.

  New Universalism

  Having been nurtured for many years in pockets of the academy, American neo-Jacobinism started to acquire journalistic and political critical mass in the 1980s. It was well-represented in the national security and foreign policy councils of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. As Soviet communism was crumbling, it seemed to people of this orientation increasingly realistic to expect an era in which the United States would be able to dominate the world on behalf of universal principles. Missionary zeal and the desire to use American power began to flood the media, the government, and the public policy debate. Columnist and TV commentator Ben Wattenberg offered a particularly good example of this frame of mind when he wrote in 1988 that the prospects for exporting American values were highly propitious. “Never has the culture of one nation been so far-flung and potent.” Wattenberg pointed out that “there is, at last, a global language, American.”1

  After the cold war, American culture could only spread, he continued, with global sales of American TV shows, movies, and music. “Important newsstands around the world now sell three American daily newspapers. There is now a near-global television news station: Cable News Network.” Not mentioned by Wattenberg was that the content being transmitted to the world might be of dubious value and a poor reflection on America and democracy. What intrigued him was the potential to expand American influence by exporting America's culture.

  Behind the argument that the United States and its v
alues are models for all peoples lurked the will to power, which was sometimes barely able to keep up ideological appearances. Again by way of example, Wattenberg desired nothing less than world dominance: “It's pretty clear what the global community needs: probably a top cop, but surely a powerful global organizer. Somebody's got to do it. We're the only ones who can.” He called “visionary” the idea of “spreading democratic and American values around the world.” As if not to appear immodest, he wrote: “Our goal in the global game is not to conquer the world, only to influence it so that it is hospitable to our values” (emphasis added).1 Later he urged, “Remember this about American Purpose: a unipolar world is fine, if America is the uni.”2

  In the major media, one of the early and most persistent advocates of an assertive American foreign policy was the columnist and TV commentator Charles Krauthammer. In 1991, for example, he urged “a robust interven-tionism.” “We are living in a unipolar world,” he wrote. “We Americans should like it – and exploit it.” “Where our cause is just and interests are threatened, we should act – even if … we must act unilaterally.”3 This point of view would eventually become a commonplace.

  The idea of spreading democracy sometimes took on a religious ardor. In a Christmas column published in 1988, Michael Novak said about the Judeo-Christian tradition that it “instructs the human race to make constant progress …. It insists that societies must continually be reshaped, until each meets the measure the Creator has in mind for a just, truthful, free, and creative civilization.” All over the world people were “crying out against abuses of their God-given rights to self-determination.” The spread of democracy was for Novak a great religious development that he compared to God's Incarnation. The “citizens of the world … demand the birth of democracy in history, in physical institutions: as physical as the birth at Bethlehem.”1 The enthusiasm of the Christmas season may have inclined Novak to overstatement, but he was clearly eager to have his readers associate democracy with divine intent.