The latest National Interest has a fine exchange between Stephen Walt and Joshua Muravchik on realists versus neocons.
Muravchik's claims for neoconservatism lie in the past. He says
that America's post-WW2 foreign policy was neocon–building
interventionist alliances around the globe and bringing down the Soviet
Union. (Did we ever invade East Germany?) He says 200,000 lives were lost in Bosnia to realist indifference, and half a million in Rwanda. He assiduously
avoids the subject of Iraq till he can't avoid it. I think it's one
paragraph at the end:
The war in Iraq grew out of Bush’s neocon strategy, whether or not it
was a necessary part of that strategy. [my emphasis] Since the war turned into a
fiasco, neocons rightly receive much blame, just as they or their
ideological predecessors did over the war in Vietnam. But Vietnam was a
flawed and painful episode in what proved ultimately to be a sound,
even brilliant, strategy. The strategy that led us into Iraq may also
in the end be vindicated. Meanwhile, neocons take their lumps for Iraq.
Well it was a necessary part of neocon strategy, it's all they pushed
for for years. But what of those lumps? Do the ideas change? What does Iraq say for the policy
of intervention? Muravchik continually says that the neocon idea of
intervention is a "moral" one, but where is the moral of the 100,000+
lives and the broken society in Iraq? How can such suffering be
vindicated, unless you have some religious faith that overlooks human
lives.
Walt, meanwhile, reels off the string of neoconservative bad
predictions about the Middle East, from Muravchik's claim that victory
in Iraq would shake the mullahs in Iran (they're far more powerful now)
to Bill Kristol's claim that the invasion would only require 75,000
troops and it would have healthful benefits throughout the Arab world (I
think Kristol must have been one of Joe Klein's informants). Then Walt ends on the most important point, that, amazingly, neocons are still in the saddle.
[W]e have run the experiment and the results are in. If a physician misdiagnosed ailments with the regularity that
neoconservatives have misread world politics, only patients with a
death wish would remain in their care.
Yet politicians like John McCain and media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post
continue to treat neoconservatives as fonts of wisdom, while giving
only occasional space to the realists whose track record has been far
superior… Until
politicians and media organizations consign neoconservatism to the same
ash heap reserved for Leninism, Lysenkoism, phrenology and other failed
beliefs, anyone who wants a more effective U.S. foreign policy had
better get used to disappointment.
Actually, I think the answer is money. The neocons have big backers.
The exchange continues with responses by the authors to each others' pieces. Muravchik gets slightly choleric, saying that Walt came to fame with an anti-Israel "tirade." Walt says neocons have delivered apartheid to Palestine and that realists licked the Soviet Union. Then he gets to the psychology of the neocons: their hubris, their indifference to ordinary human beings.
Muravchik claims neoconservatives “treat purely moral concerns
. . . as a higher priority than would realists,” yet his response
evinces little concern for ordinary human beings. He expresses no
remorse at the suffering that neoconservative policies have wrought and
seems mostly concerned that the neocons are now “taking their lumps”
over Iraq. What matters to him is political standing in Washington, not
the hundreds of thousands of needless Iraqi deaths, the millions of
refugees who fled their homes, or the tens of thousands of patriotic
Americans killed or wounded. [emphasis mine] So let us hear no more about the
neoconservatives’ “moral” convictions. Amid such company, the realists
who opposed the war can stand tall.
Again I think of hearing young Michael Pomeranz at Yale last week, adopting the lordly moral tones that go along with defending "liberal values" around the world. How many of these intellectuals have ever served in the battles they prescribe for others?
"where is the moral of the 100,000+ lives and the broken society in Iraq?"
This is the issue that makes all emotionally healthy Americans heartsick.
"Muravchik's says that America's post-WW2 foreign policy was neocon"
More correctly, Neocons were emulating what they perceived to be America's post-WW2 policy, in a kind of Steven Spielberg read on reality — that is, through the perspective of a fairy tale-driven collective. But fairy tales aren't real, hence those who try to make history through fairy tale goggles bring on disasters like Iraq.
But what did the two-party regime expect when it turned American foreign policy over to a tribe of Peter Pans? A Hollywood ending? Probably, considering how morally and intellectually stunted the Bush-Clinton-Cheney-McCain generation itself is. Hey, let’s just turn things over to the Jews! Their Hollywood movies always turn out, don’t they? The same approach seems to have been taken with Wall Street, too.
'Meanwhile, neocons take their lumps for Iraq.'
What lumps? A twitting from Librul Media commentators anxious to deflect attention from their own shameful dereliction of duty? Some scapegoating by the complicit Democrats? The hatred of maybe 70% of the populace who want the war stopped but have no political representation to accomplish it and no media voice to complain about it?
Muravchik is still foreman material at the AEI isn't he? And Kristol not only still runs the Weekly Standard, but he's punished with a prime perch at the Times as well. Plus he gets to choose the President in waiting for the GOP after having helped ruin that party for generations, perhaps forever.
Some fucking lumps.
'Walt, meanwhile, reels off the string of neoconservative bad predictions about the Middle East'
It's not just there. Russia (arms build-up) – wrong. Angola – wrong. Afghanistan – catastrophically wrong. Darfur – whoops, wrong again. Have they ever been correct about anything?
'the 100,000+ lives and the broken society in Iraq'
All respectable indices agreee that well over a million people have died in Iraq since the invasion, who otherwise would not have. This on top of over 4 million refugees, the vast majority of whom were refused entry into the US and other countries that invaded to free these poor souls. Here in Australia, we sent the navy out to greet them ('Turn around or we'll shoot' – that sort of thing)
'Until politicians and media organizations consign neoconservatism to the same ash heap reserved for Leninism, Lysenkoism, phrenology and other failed beliefs,'
Communism arrived on that ash heap courtesy of a certain wall in Berlin falling over, and Joe Stiglitz makes the point that 'market fundamentalism' is headed the same way, thanks to it's spawn, that brand of 'leave it to the market' foolishness which has led to what Nouriel Roubini calls the worst crisis in capitalism since the Great Depression.
Neoconservatism's failure is every bit as thorough in it's sphere as those other two, but the 'politicians and media organizations' that could illuminate and then act upon this canker in the body politic, are owned by the people that own the neocons. It's like expecting L'Osservatore Romano to berate the Pope over child abuse.
Money is important here, it always is, but ideology is the active ingredient.
'He expresses no remorse at the suffering that neoconservative policies have wrought'
If that suffering was shouldered predominantly by Jews rather than Muslims and Arabs, would we see the same blithe response from Muravchik?
Kristol is a big drinker, so more than likely he did indeed talk out of school to Joe Klein over cocktails.
Like a lot of the neocons (Kristol among them) I was raised Straussian. And I can tell you they absolutely did see this as an intellectual experiment.
One of the Straussians' foundation texts is a passage in book 8 or 9 of The Republic where Socrates talks about how regimes form character. Oligarchic regimes produce oligarchic characters, democratic regimes produce democratic characters, philosopher-king regimes produce philosophic characters, and so on.
The idea was, you just change the regime in Baghdad and overnight all of Mesopotamia comes up Americanizing.
The ultimate test of a regime in Straussian terms is whether it fosters 'philosophers' (i.e. neocons). In that sense they may actually see Iraq as a success if it produces a couple of AEI fellows.
In private – and even not so much in private – Straussians are shockingly forthright about the human suffering their agenda will incur. Muravchik's touchingly un-cynical embrace of 'morality' marks him as one of the Useful Idiot category.
Muravchik's touchingly un-cynical embrace of 'morality'
that caught my attention too …
In Yaron Brook's outlook "morality" turns–with a little help from Ayn Rand's objectivism– into hardly disguised will to power, rational selfishness.
All that is necessary: We have to be willing, morally willing.
No matter were you look it all seems to lead to one ideological end: less tax and more war.
"No matter were you look it all seems to lead to one ideological end: less tax and more war."
Or, more correctly, less tax on those who can most afford to pay it (corporations and the super rich), more tax on the entire range of "middle" classes (lower, middle, even lower well-to-do). And yes, more war.
Reading down the thread, what does Neo-conservatism boil down to? Fascism, literally, with the racialist component being the "choseness" of Jewish Zionists.
The Left narrative has always been: Beware! Fascism is making a comeback!
Being as stubborn and dogmatic as it is though, it refused to acknowledge that neo-fascism's key vanguard was emerging from the Jews who had once been amongst its own ranks, and who were bringing its own Leftists “victim” tactics to bear against the world. In fact, the Left denies it to this day, apparently out of ideological consistency in favor of any group of grifters that has managed to attain (or has been granted) an officially recognized "victim" status.
The remedy to the neo-fascist problem will have to come from outside the traditional Left-Right statist spectrum, which has been triangulated by the neo-fascists, with the “opposition” populated by dogmatically stubborn sticks-in-the-mud who refuse to throw over the Judeo-fascists out of ideological conceit and pig-headedness.
higginslads wrote: "less tax on those who can most afford to pay it (corporations and the super rich), more tax on the entire range of "middle" classes (lower, middle, even lower well-to-do). And yes, more war."
Yes, because the taxes to pay for this massive transfer of wealth from "the people" aka the federal government to the "elites" will eventually come, and will be imposed on the working and middle class.
In fact, a massive "inflation tax" has already kicked in, which is the huge price rise in food and fuel and other staples in dollar currency as a result of the Fed printing US dollars so the "elites" and the "chosen" can continue to pile billions upon their millions.
But you'll never hear a whisper of complaint about this from the left-liberals, who are neck deep in the scam themselves, and who, deep down, have a greedy, elitist mindset themselves, which is why the Judeo-fascists don't really bother them: they're all peas in a pod.
I’d like to see them all turned into pea soup.
The bottom line is do you have a personal family dog in the fight in the sense of anyone in your immediate family risking their physical life, say in Iraq. This POV tells more than all others. Or does it? Witness Sarah Palin.
The blank slate.
philosopher liar is the working definition of a neocon.
but since reality is only what they say it is (according to them), then lying and truth are meaningless, like their philosophy.
so according to their own rules, they are as meaningless as their reality.
to wag the dog, catch the tail.