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?
