A neoconservative eulogy for neoconservatism

Happy neoconservatives are hard to find of late. Richard Perle and David Frum accuse the Bush administration of botching their program. Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and one of the most eloquent proponents of neoconservatism, has bailed on the movement altogether. But there is at least one optimist among the crowd: American Enterprise Institute fellow Joshua Muravchik.

Even after repeated readings, it’s not clear to me that Muravchik hasn’t penned a nasty bit of satire. If he weren’t writing in Foreign Policy Magazine, which isn’t a traditional forum for Onion-like opinion pieces, the preponderance of at least the early evidence would point Swiftward.

He begins with the standard disclaimer — we’re just a small group of powerless intellectuals to whose ideas the vice president, successive national security advisors and the entire top tier at the Pentagon subscribe — and then bemoans the wave of refugees fleeing the neoconservative apocalypse, telling his fellow neocons that far from being discredited, “the essential tenets of neoconservatism—belief that world peace is indivisible [but is anything divisible by world peace? - ed.], that ideas are powerful, that freedom and democracy are universally valid, and that evil exists and must be confronted—are as valid today as when we first began” and that movement followers simply need to regain their “joie de combat” and “sharpen our game.”

Yes, he says with regard to Iraq, “the administration made its share of mistakes, and so did we.” What were those mistakes? I don’t know: he offers some possibilities but declines to affirm them. “Did we fail to appreciate sufficiently the depth of Arab bitterness over colonial memories? Did we underestimate the human and societal damage wreaked by decades of totalitarian rule in Iraq? Could things have unfolded differently had our occupation force been large enough to provide security?”

Your guess is as good as his, and he doesn’t spend a lot of time dwelling on the matter. In fact, that mention of Iraq is the last but two, the first of those in connection with the pre-invasion intelligence on the country — “execrable” — and the second in a context we’ll examine a bit later.

There’s a certain Monty Pythonesque grandeur in the act of simply dismissing the worst foreign policy blunder in this country’s history as possibly but not certainly a failure of imagination, and Muravchik pulls it off beautifully. It happened, we made some mistakes (maybe), let’s move on. Chin up. Pip pip.

So move on he does, with a series of recommendations that again can be read as almost unbearably comic or representing a serious cognitive deficit or both, depending on your mood.

One area of neoconservative thought that needs urgent reconsideration is the revolution in military strategy that our neocon hero, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, has championed. This love affair with technology has left our armed forces short on troops and resources, just as our execrable intelligence in Iraq seems traceable, at least in part, to the reliance on machines rather than humans. Our forte is political ideas, not physics or mechanics. We may have seized on a technological fix to spare ourselves the hard slog of fighting for higher defense budgets. Let’s now take up the burden of campaigning for a military force that is large enough and sufficiently well provisioned—however “redundant”—to assure that we will never again get stretched so thin. Let the wonder weapons be the icing on the cake.

Grandeur plus all the moxy in the world. “Our forte is political ideas …” It’s not as though we thought about how to implement them. If we insist that cars can fly if we only drive them off a cliff and then someone actually does it, well, that’s not exactly our fault.

Muravchik does of course have a point about the military, but the brownie points he earns for that he loses by failing to notice until the car hit the ground. But rerevolutionizing the military is only the beginning of his five-step plan for getting the damn car to fly.

Recent elections in the Palestinian territories and Egypt have brought disconcerting results that suggest democratizing the Middle East may be more difficult than we imagined. That parties unappealing to us have done well should not in itself be a surprise. (After all, it happens in France no matter who wins.) But there is plenty of reason to wonder whether Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, once empowered by democracy, will simply turn around and crush it.

We need to give more thought to how we aid Middle Eastern moderates. They are woefully unequipped to compete with Islamists. When the U.S. government tries to help them, they stand accused of being American stooges. We can do more through private-sector groups, such as Freedom House, and partially private ones, like the National Endowment for Democracy and its affiliates. They could use appreciably more resources to train journalists, independent broadcasters, women’s advocates, human rights investigators, watchdog groups, and for civic education for various audiences, including imams. In relatively open countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and many of the Gulf states, funding from the Middle East Partnership Initiative should make it possible for a range of American nongovernmental organizations to maintain a presence on the ground. And we should develop and fund training programs back at home that allow Middle Eastern democrats to come to the United States—free of charge—to hone their electoral, organizational, and public relations skills. James Carville and Karl Rove should be the titular heads of this program.

Good lord: he’s talking about public diplomacy! And loosening visa restrictions. Set aside the obligatory France joke and the Carville/Rove one (?), and the question of exactly why non-governmental public diplomacy efforts are a much harder slog than bloating the defense budget these days, and he’s got some good ideas there. Again, though, he loses points for being more than a half-decade behind the curve.

The third point in the plan is also public diplomacy, only of the officially governmental sort.

The Bush administration deserves criticism for its failure to repair America’s public diplomacy apparatus. No group other than neocons is likely to figure out how to do that. We are, after all, a movement whose raison d’être was combating anti-Americanism in the United States. Who better, then, to combat it abroad?
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Today, no one in the U.S. Foreign Service is trained for this mission. The best model for such a program are the “Lovestonites” of the 1940s and 1950s, who, often employed as attachés in U.S. embassies, waged ideological warfare against communism in Europe and Russia. They learned their political skills back in the United States fighting commies in the labor unions. There is no way to reproduce the ideological mother’s milk on which Jay Lovestone nourished his acolytes, but we need to invent a synthetic formula. Some Foreign Service officers should be offered specialized training in the war of ideas, and a bunch of us neocons ought to volunteer to help teach it. There should be at least one graduate assigned to every major U.S. overseas post.

Actually there are state department employees trained in public diplomacy; some of them resigned upon the undiplomatic invasion of Iraq, and many others were neutered by the neocons in government, as when the White House and Pentagon trashed a year’s worth of study and recommendations by the state department on helping Iraqis move from a totalitarian state to something along the lines of a democratic one, and as when Karen Hughes took over the top public diplomacy slot. Who better than neocons to undertake this mission? Who better not to?

And here’s why. From point four in the plan:

Prepare to Bomb Iran [emphasis his]. Make no mistake, President Bush will need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office. It is all but inconceivable that Iran will accept any peaceful inducements to abandon its drive for the bomb. Its rulers are religio-ideological fanatics who will not trade what they believe is their birthright to great power status for a mess of pottage. Even if things in Iraq get better, a nuclear-armed Iran will negate any progress there. Nothing will embolden terrorists and jihadists more than a nuclear-armed Iran.

Well, you know: can’t have a bunch of fanatics running around with nuclear weapons, other than the ones we might have to use in order to destroy the nuclear facilities of those other fanatics. One might think bombing Iran would have a negative impact on both the public diplomacy and Iraq fronts — that’s the final Iraq reference, and note the passivity in “even if things get better” — but no, or at least not enough to warrant mention.

Point five is cool: “Recruit Joe Lieberman for 2008. … Lieberman says he’s still a Democrat. But there is no place for him in that party. Like every one of us, he is a refugee. He’s already endured the rigors of running for the White House. In 2008, he deserves another chance—this time with a worthier running mate than Al Gore.”

It’s a shame the essay didn’t come out sooner; that would have made a great Lamont ad.

And that’s the five-point plan for restoring neoconservatives to their rightful place atop the ash heap of history. And speaking of the ash heap of history: Muravchik does some whining about the neoconservative appellation and the perception some people have that neoconservatism has roots in Trotskyism.

We neoconservatives have been through a startling few years. Who could have imagined six years ago that wild stories about our influence over U.S. foreign policy would reach the far corners of the globe? The loose group of us who felt impelled by the antics of the 1960s to migrate from the political left to right must have numbered fewer than 100. And we were proven losers at Washington’s power game: The left had driven us from the Democratic Party, stolen the “liberal” label, and successfully affixed to us the name “neoconservative.”
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The price of [our] success is that we are subjected to relentless obloquy. “Neocon” is now widely synonymous with “ultraconservative” or, for some, “dirty Jew.” A young Egyptian once said to me, “‘Neoconservative’ sounds to our ears like ‘terrorist’ sounds to yours.”
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We are guilty of poorly explaining neoconservatism. How, for example, did the canard spread that the roots of neoconservative foreign policy can be traced back to Leo Strauss and Leon Trotsky?

Why would anyone conflate a group of people who rain death and destruction down upon their enemies, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity, with terrorists?

One of Muravchik’s fellow Fellows at the American Enterprise Institute is Irving Kristol, the ideological father of the movement, a former Trotskyist and the author of Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. Possibly Kristol adopted the label forced upon his ideology by Democrats, but regardless, he doesn’t seem bitter about it and he doesn’t deny his leftist heritage. Muravchik himself did a five-year stint as head of the Young Peoples Socialist League in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s. As for Leo Strauss, no one knows exactly what his philosophy was but he certainly embraced the concept of a governing elite.

And finally, although this comes early on in the essay and is in fact its raison d’être:

We got lucky with Reagan. He took the path we wanted, and the policies succeeded brilliantly. He left office highly popular. Bush is a different story. He, too, took the path we wanted, but the policies are achieving uncertain success. His popularity has plummeted. It would be pigheaded not to reflect and rethink.

And not to bomb Iran.

After all that, you can see why I’m still uncertain if this is satire or insanity. Muravchik seems sincere, but so does Sacha Baron Cohen when he’s interviewing people as Ali G. Excepting the sometimes justified complaints about anti-semitism and the more questionable assertion that neocons were driven from the Democratic party, this could be a particularly vicious funeral tribute to the movement.

We can always hope.

So what do you think? Satire or madness? Let us know.