[A-List] US imperialism: neocons' reality check

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

NeoCon allies desert Bush over Iraq
These are the right-wing intellectuals who demanded George Bush invade
Iraq. Now they admit they got it wrong. Are you listening, Mr President?
The Independent: 09 March 2006

William Buckley Jnr

INFLUENTIAL CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST AND TV PUNDIT

'One can't doubt the objective in Iraq has failed ... Iraqi animosities
have proved uncontainable by an army of 130,000 Americans. Different
plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of
defeat.'

Francis Fukuyama

AUTHOR AND LONG-TERM ADVOCATE OF TOPPLING SADDAM

'By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling
prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training
ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American
targets to shoot at.'

Richard Perle

ARCH-WARMONGER AND PIVOTAL REPUBLICAN HAWK

'The military campaign and its political aftermath were both
passionately debated within the Bush administration. It got the war
right and the aftermath wrong We should have understood that we needed
Iraqi partners.'

Andrew Sullivan

PROMINENT COMMENTATOR AND INFLUENTIAL BLOGGER

'The world has learnt a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for
those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis ... than for a few
humiliated pundits. The correct response is not more spin but a sense of
shame and sorrow.'

George Will

RIGHT-WING COLUMNIST ON 'THE WASHINGTON POST' AND TV PUNDIT

'Almost three years after the invasion, it is still not certain whether,
or in what sense, Iraq is a nation. And after two elections and a
referendum on the constitution, Iraq barely has a government.'

****

Rupert Cornwell: At last, the warmongers are prepared to face the facts
and admit they were wrong
The Independent: 09 March 2006

It has taken more than three years, tens of thousands of Iraqi and
American lives, and $200bn (£115bn) of treasure - all to achieve a chaos
verging on open civil war. But, finally, the neo-conservatives who sold
the United States on this disastrous war are starting to utter three
small words. We were wrong.

The second thoughts have spread across the conservative spectrum, from
William Buckley, venerable editor of The National Review to Andrew
Sullivan, once editor of the New Republic, now an influential
commentator and blogmeister. The patrician conservative columnist George
Will was gently sceptical from the outset. He now glumly concludes that
all three members of the original "axis of evil" - not only Iran and
North Korea but also Iraq - "are more dangerous than when that term was
coined in 2002".

Neither Mr Buckley nor Mr Sullivan concedes that the decision to topple
Saddam was intrinsically wrong. But "the challenge required more than
[President Bush's] deployable resources," the former sadly recognises.
"The American objective in Iraq has failed."

For Mr Sullivan, today's mess is above all a testament to American
overconfidence and false assumptions, born of arrogance and naïveté. But
he too asserts, in a column in Time magazine this week, that all may not
be lost.

Of all the critiques however, the most profound is that of Francis
Fukuyama, in his forthcoming book, America at the Crossroads. Its
subtitle is "Democracy, Power and the Neo-Conservative Legacy" - and
that legacy, Mr Fukuyama argues, is fatally poisoned.

This is no ordinary thesis, but apostasy on a grand scale. Mr Fukuyama,
after all, was the most prominent intellectual who signed the 1997
"Project for the New American Century", the founding manifesto of
neo-conservatism drawn up by William Kristol, editor of the Weekly
Standard, the house journal of the neo-conservative movement.

The PNAC aimed to cement for all time America's triumph in the Cold War,
by increasing defence spending, challenging regimes that were hostile to
US interests, and promoting freedom and democracy around the world. Its
goal was "an international order friendly to our security, prosperity
and values".

The war on Iraq, spuriously justified by the supposed threat posed by
Saddam's WMD, was the test run of this theory. It was touted as a
panacea for every ill of the Middle East. The road to Jerusalem, the
neo-cons argued, led through Baghdad. And after Iraq, why not Syria,
Iran and anyone else that stood in Washington's way? All that, Mr
Fukuyama now acknowledges, has been a tragic conceit.

Like the Leninists of old, he writes, the neo-conservatives reckoned
they could drive history forward with the right mixture of power and
will. However, "Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it
has returned as farce when practiced by the United States."

But was it not Mr Fukuyama who claimed in his most celebrated work, The
End of History and the Last Man, that the whole world was locked on a
glide-path to liberal, free-market democracy? Yes indeed. But that book,
he points out, argued that the process was gradual, and must unfold at
its own pace.

But not only were the neo-cons too impatient. A second error was to
believe that an all-powerful America would be trusted to exercise a
"benevolent hegemony". A third was the gross overstatement of the post
9/11 threat posed by radical Islam, in order to justify the dubious
doctrine of preventive war.

Finally, there was the blatant contradiction between the neo-cons'
aversion to government meddling at home and their childlike faith in
their ability to impose massive social engineering in foreign and
utterly unfamiliar countries like Iraq. Thence sprang the mistakes of
the occupation period.

Some, however, are resolutely unswayed. In the latest Weekly Standard,
Mr Kristol accuses Mr Fukuyama of losing his nerve - of wanting to
"retrench, hunker down and let large parts of the world go to hell in a
handbasket, hoping the hand-basket won't blow up in our faces."

Christopher Hitchens, the one-time Trotskyist turned neo-con fellow
traveller and eternal polemicist, derides Mr Fukuyama for "conceding to
the fanatics and beheaders the claim that they are a response to
American blunders and excesses," and for yearning for a return of
Kissingerian realism in foreign affairs.

The fact, however, remains that future Bush policymakers who signed the
PNAC nine years ago are now mostly gone. Paul Wolfowitz, the war's most
relentless and starry-eyed promoter, has moved on to the World Bank,
silent about the mess he did so much to create. Richard Perle, leader of
the resident hawks department at the American Enterprise Institute
think-tank here, has vanished from the scene. Lewis Libby meanwhile has
stepped down as Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, to focus
his energy on staying out of jail.

Yet another signatory was Zalmay Khalilzad, now the US ambassador to
Iraq. This week even he - Afghan born and the one original neo-con who
had the region in his blood - admitted that the invasion had opened "a
Pandora's box" that could see the Iraq conflict spread across the entire
Middle East.

Those left in the administration - primarily Mr Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, are not so much neo-conservatives as
"Hobbesian unilateralists", concerned to protect and advance US national
interests in a lawless and violent world, whatever it takes.

As for Condoleezza Rice, never a signed-up member of the movement but
mostly sympathetic to it when she was the President's security adviser -
she has metamorphosed from hawk into pragmatist with her move from the
White House to the State Department.

It is on George Bush's lips that neo-conservatism most obviously
survives - in the commitment to spreading freedom and democracy that he
proclaims almost daily, and most hubristically in his second inaugural
in 2005 that promised to banish tyranny from the earth.

But even the extravagant oratory of that icy January day cannot obscure
the irony of America's Iraq adventure. The application of a doctrine
built upon the supposed boundlessness of US power has succeeded only in
exposing its limits.

Thus chastened, Mr Fukuyama now wants to temper the idealism of the
neo-conservative doctrine with an acceptance that some things are not so
easy to change, and that the US must cut its cloth accordingly. He calls
it "realistic Wilsonianism". A better description might be neo-realism.
And if that brings a smile to the face of a certain former US high
priest of realism with a pronounced German accent, who can blame him?



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