[Mb-civic] Bacevich on the Neocon Revolution and Militarism

[Michael Butler]

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Tomgram: Bacevich on the Neocon Revolution and Militarism

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2337

On Wednesday, I posted The Normalization of War, the first of two excerpts
from a remarkable new book -- Andrew J. Bacevich's The New American
Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War. In the second excerpt,
Bacevitch takes up the subject of neoconservatism, which he terms "a
singularly inapt label that suggests an ideological rigor that neocons have
never demonstrated nor perhaps even sought." Speaking of the early neocons,
including figures like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, he points out
that, "from the outset, the neoconservative identification with the
post-Vietnam Right was a marriage of convenience rather than a union of
kindred spirits."

Below, in an excerpt adapted from the book and posted with the kind
permission both of the author and of his publisher, Oxford University Press,
Bacevich takes up the second generation of neocons, the new boys who moved
to Washington and, from various think tanks and front groups, laid siege to
governmental policy-making. Though the label neocon has increasingly become
one of opprobrium, Bacevich suggests that "the heat generated by the term
also stands as a backhanded tribute, an acknowledgement that the
neoconservative impact has been substantial." As indeed it has ­ to the
misfortune of us all. He suggests as well that "one aspect of the
neoconservative legacy has been to foster the intellectual climate necessary
for the emergence of the new American militarism." His discussion of that
legacy follows. Tom

    New Boys in Town
    The Neocon Revolution and American Militarism
    By Andrew J. Bacevich

    In our own time -- and especially since the ascendancy of George W. Bush
to the presidency -- "neoconservative" has become a term of opprobrium,
frequently accompanied by ad hominem attacks and charges of arrogance and
hubris. But the heat generated by the term also stands as a backhanded
tribute, an acknowledgment that the neoconservative impact has been
substantial. It is today too soon to offer a comprehensive assessment of
that impact. The discussion of neoconservatism offered here has a more
modest objective, namely, to suggest that one aspect of the neoconservative
legacy has been to foster the intellectual climate necessary for the
emergence of the new American militarism.

    As a practical matter, the task of reinventing neoconservatism for a
post-Communist world -- and of spelling out an "imperial self-definition" of
American purpose -- fell to a new generation. To promote that effort,
leading members of that new generation created their own institutions.

    The passing of the baton occurred in 1995. That year, Norman Podhoretz
stepped down as editor of Commentary. That same year, William Kristol
founded a new journal, the Weekly Standard, which in short order established
itself as the flagship publication of second-generation neoconservatives.
Although keeping faith with neoconservative principles that Commentary had
staked out over the previous two decades -- and for a time even employing
Norman's son John Podhoretz in a senior editorial position -- the Standard
was from the outset an altogether different publication. From its founding,
Commentary had been published by the American Jewish Committee, an august
and distinctly nonpartisan entity. The Weekly Standard relied for its
existence on the largesse of Rupert Murdoch, the notorious media mogul.
Unlike Commentary, which had self-consciously catered to an intellectual
elite, the Standard -- printed on glossy paper, replete with cartoons,
caricatures, and political gossip -- had a palpably less lofty look and
feel. It was by design smart rather than stuffy. Whereas Commentary had
evolved into a self-consciously right-wing version of the self-consciously
progressive Dissent, the Standard came into existence as a neoconservative
counterpart to the neoliberal New Republic. Throughout Norman Podhoretz's
long editorial reign, Commentary had remained an urbane and sophisticated
journal of ideas, aspiring to shape the terms of political debate even as it
remained above the muck and mire of politics as such. Beginning with volume
1, number 1, the editors of the Standard did not disguise the fact that they
sought to have a direct and immediate impact on policy; not ideas as such
but political agitation defined the purpose of this new enterprise.

    Better than anything else, location told the tale. Commentary's
editorial offices were on Manhattan's East Side; for first-generation
neoconservatives, the East River on one side and the Hudson on the other
defined the universe. In contrast, the Standard set up shop just a few
blocks from the White House; for William Kristol and his compatriots, the
perimeter of the Washington Beltway delineated the world that mattered.

    The Power of Positive Thinking

    What emerged as the hallmarks of this post­Cold War variant of
neoconservatism? Unlike their elders, second-generation neoconservatives did
not define themselves in opposition -- to Communism, to the New Left, or to
the sixties. Theirs was no longer an "ideology of anti-ideology." Rather,
they were themselves advocates of a positive ideological agenda, a theology
that brought fully into view the radical implications -- in John Judis's
formulation, the "inverted Trotskyism" -- embedded within the
neoconservative insurgency from the outset.

    Fearing the implications certain to flow from an America that was weak
or tormented by self-doubt, the elder statesmen of the neoconservative
movement had labored to restore to the idea of American power the legitimacy
that it had possessed prior to the sixties. With American power now fully
refurbished -- and seemingly vindicated by the outcome of the Cold War --
the second generation went a step further, promulgating the notion that the
moment was now ripe for the United States to use that power -- especially
military power -- to achieve the final triumph of American ideals. In this
sense, the neoconservatives who gravitated to the Weekly Standard showed
themselves to be the most perceptive of all of Woodrow Wilson's disciples.
For the real Wilson (in contrast to either the idealized or the demonized
Wilson) had also seen military power as an instrument for transforming the
international system and cementing American primacy.

    Efforts to promote "a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military supremacy
and moral confidence" found expression in five convictions that together
form the foundation of second-generation neoconservative thinking about
American statecraft.

    First was the certainty that American global dominion is, in fact,
benign and that other nations necessarily see it as such. Thus, according to
Charles Krauthammer, a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard, "we are
not just any hegemon. We run a uniquely benign imperium. This is not mere
self-congratulation; it is a fact manifest in the way others welcome our
power."

    However much they might grumble, the baby-boomer neocons believed, other
nations actually yearned for the United States to lead and, indeed, to
sustain its position as sole superpower, seeing American dominance as both
compatible with their own interests and preferable to any remotely plausible
alternative. Despite "all bleating about hegemony, no nation really wants
genuine multipolarity," Robert Kagan observed in this regard. "Not only do
countries such as France and Russia shy away from the expense of creating
and preserving a multipolar world; they rightly fear the geopolitical
consequences of destroying American hegemony." According to Kagan, the cold
hard reality of U.S. supremacy was sure to have "a claming effect on the
international enviroment, inducing other powers to focus their energies and
resources elsewhere." Joshua Muravchik concurred; rather than eliciting
resistance, American dominance could be counted on to "have a soothing
effect on the rest of the world." With the passing of the Cold War, wrote
Charles Krauthammer, "an ideologically pacified North seeks security and
order by aligning its foreign policy behind that of the United StatesŠ
[This] is the shape of things to come."

    Failure on the part of the United States to sustain its imperium would
inevitably result in global disorder, bloody, bitter, and protracted: this
emerged as the second conviction animating neoconservatives after the Cold
War. As a result, proposals for organizing the world around anything other
than American power elicited derision for being woolly-headed and fatuous.
Nothing, therefore, could be allowed to inhibit the United States in the use
of that power.

    On this point no one was more emphatic than Krauthammer. "Collective
security is a mirage," he wrote. For its part, "the international community
is a fiction." "ŒThe allies' is a smaller version of Œthe international
community'--and equally fictional." "The United Nations is guarantor of
nothing. Except in a formal sense, it can hardly be said to exist." As a
result, "when serious threats arise to American national interestsŠ
unilateralism is the only alternative to retreat."

    Or more extreme still, "The alternative to unipolarity is chaos." For
Krauthammer the incontrovertible fact of unipolarity demanded that the
United States face up to its obligations, "unashamedly laying down the rules
of world order and being prepared to enforce them." The point was one to
which younger neoconservatives returned time and again. For Kristol and
Robert Kagan, the choice facing Americans was clear-cut. On the one hand
loomed the prospect of "a decline in U.S. power, a rise in world chaos, and
a dangerous twenty-first century"; on the other hand was the promise of
safety, achieved through "a Reaganite reassertion of American power and
moral leadership." There existed "no middle ground."

    A Military Transformation of the International Order

    The third conviction animating second-generation neoconservatives
related to military power and its uses. In a nutshell, they concluded that
nothing works like force. Europeans, wrote Robert Kagan, might imagine
themselves "entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative
prosperity, the realization of Kant's ŒPerpetual Peace.'" Americans of a
neoconservative bent knew better. In their judgment, the United States
remained "mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world
where international laws are unreliable and where true security and the
defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and
use of military might." Employing that military might with sufficient wisdom
and determination could bring within reach peace, prosperity, democracy,
respect for human rights, and American global primacy extending to the end
of time.

    The operative principle was not to husband power but to put it to work
-- to take a proactive approach. "Military strength alone will not avail,"
cautioned Kagan, "if we do not use it actively to maintain a world order
which both supports and rests upon American hegemony." For neoconservatives
like Kagan, the purpose of the Defense Department was no longer to defend
the United States or to deter would-be aggressors but to transform the
international order by transforming its constituent parts. Norman Podhoretz
had opposed U.S. intervention in Vietnam "as a piece of arrogant stupidity"
and had criticized in particular the liberal architects of the war for being
"only too willing to tell other countries exactly how to organize their
political and economic institutions." For the younger generation of
neoconservatives, instructing others as to how to organize their countries
-- employing coercion if need be -- was not evidence of arrogant stupidity;
it was America's job.

    By implication, neoconservatives were no longer inclined to employ force
only after having exhausted all other alternatives. In the 1970s and 1980s,
the proximate threat posed by the Soviet Union had obliged the United States
to exercise a certain self-restraint. Now, with the absence of any
counterweight to American power, the need for self-restraint fell away.
Indeed, far from being a scourge for humankind, war itself -- even, or
perhaps especially, preventive war -- became in neoconservative eyes an
efficacious means to serve idealistic ends. The problem with Bill Clinton in
the 1990s was not that he was reluctant to use force but that he was
insufficiently bloody-minded. "In Haiti, in Somalia, and elsewhere" where
the United States intervened, lamented Robert Kagan, "Clinton and his
advisers had the stomach only to be halfway imperialists. When the heat was
on, they tended to look for the exits." Such halfheartedness suggested a
defective appreciation of what power could accomplish. Neoconservatives knew
better. "Military conquest," enthused Muravchik, "has often proved to be an
effective means of implanting democracy." Michael Ledeen went even further,
declaring that "the best democracy program ever invented is the U.S. Army."
"Peace in this world," Ledeen added, "only follows victory in war."

    By their own lights, the neoconservatives of the 1990s did not qualify
as warmongers, but once having gotten a whiff of gunpowder during the
Persian Gulf War of 1990­91, they developed a hankering to repeat the
experience. The neoconservative complaint about Operation Desert Storm was
that President George H. W. Bush and his commanders had failed to press the
attack. In their eyes, the war demonstrated that the U.S. military was a
superb instrument wielded by excessively timid officers, of whom General
Colin Powell was the ultimate embodiment. "One of the [Gulf] war's important
lessons," wrote one neoconservative, "is that America's military leadership
is far too cautiousŠ Now the success of that campaign has had the effect of
enhancing the prestige of our military leadership while doing little or
nothing to change its underlying attitude to fighting. Thus today and
tomorrow it may feel even less inhibited in opposing the use of force than
it did before the Gulf war." Indeed, promoting the assertive use of American
military power became central to the imperial self-definition devised by
second-generation neoconservatives.

    Using force to advance the prospects of peace and democracy implied that
the United States ought to possess military power to spare. The fourth
conviction animating second-generation neoconservatives was a commitment to
sustaining and even enhancing American military supremacy. Recall that
throughout the 1990s, even before Osama bin Laden declared his jihad against
America, U.S. defense spending remained at Cold War levels despite the
absence of the Cold War. Even so, neoconservatives assessed the Pentagon's
budget as completely inadequate and pressed for more. Highly respected
historians of a neoconservative persuasion even charged that the United
States was repeating the folly of Great Britain in the period between the
world wars: engaging in de facto unilateral disarmament. With the Cold War
now history, it seemed, the world was becoming even more dangerous, and the
United States therefore needed more military power than ever before. Whether
or not a proximate threat existed, it was incumbent upon the Pentagon to
maintain the capability "to intervene decisively in every critical region"
of the world.

    To alarmists, the prospect of conflict without end beckoned. Surveying
the world, Frederick W. Kagan, brother of Robert, concluded in 1999 that
"America must be able to fight Iraq and North Korea, and also be able to
fight genocide in the Balkans and elsewhere without compromising its ability
to fight two major regional conflicts. And it must be able to contemplate
war with China or Russia some considerable (but not infinite) time from
now." The peace that followed victory was to be a long time coming.

    Dealing with the "Professional Pessimists"

    The fifth and final conviction that imparted a distinctive twist to the
views of second-generation neoconservatives was their hostility toward
realism, whether manifesting itself as a deficit of ideals (as in the case
of Henry Kissinger) or an excess of caution (as in the case of Colin
Powell). As long as the Cold War had persisted, neoconservatives and
realists had maintained an uneasy alliance, based on their common antipathy
for the Soviet Union. But once the Cold War ended, so too did any basis for
cooperation between the two groups. From the neoconservative perspective,
realism constituted a problem. Realism was about defending national
interests, not transforming the global order. Realists had a marked aversion
to crusades and a marked respect for limits. In the neoconservative lexicon,
the very notion of "limits" was anathema. To the extent that realists after
the Cold War retained influence in foreign policy circles, they were likely
to obstruct neoconservative ambitions. So second-generation neocons trained
their gunsights on realism and shot to kill.

    The problem with realists, complained Robert Kagan, was that they were
"professional pessimists." In that regard there had always been "something
about realism that runs directly counter to the fundamental principles of
American society." The essential issue, according to Kagan, was this: "if
the United States is founded on universal principles, how can Americans
practice amoral indifference when those principles are under siege around
the world? And if they do profess indifference, how can they manage to avoid
the implication that their principles are not, in fact, universal?" To Kagan
and other neoconservatives the answer was self-evident: indifference to the
violation of American ideals abroad was not simply wrong; it was
un-American. Worse, such indifference pointed inevitably down a slippery
slope leading back toward the 1960s or even the 1930s. An authentically
American foreign policy would reject amorality and pessimism; it would
refuse altogether to accept the notion of limits or constraints.

    As the 1990s unfolded, neoconservatives pressed their case for "a
Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity," emphasizing the
use of armed force to promulgate American values and perpetuate American
primacy. Most persistently, even obsessively, neoconservatives throughout
the Clinton years lobbied for decisive U.S. action to rid the world of
Saddam Hussein. From a neoconservative perspective, the Iraqi dictator's
survival after Desert Storm exposed as nothing else the cynicism and
shortsightedness of the realists who had dominated the administration of
George H. W. Bush and who had prevented the American army from completing
its proper mission -- pursuing the defeated Iraqi army all the way to
Baghdad. Topping the agenda of the second-generation neoconservatives was a
determination to correct that error, preferably by mobilizing America's
armed might to destroy the Baathist regime. "Bombing Iraq Isn't Enough,"
declared the title of one representative op-ed published by William Kristol
and Robert Kagan in January 1998. It was time for the gloves to come off,
they argued, "and that means using air power and ground forces, and
finishing the job left undone in 1991."

    Neocons yearned to liberate Iraq, as an end in itself but also as a
means to an eminently larger end. "A successful intervention in Iraq," wrote
Kagan in February 1998, "would revolutionize the strategic situation in the
Middle East, in ways both tangible and intangible, and all to the benefit of
American interests." A march on Baghdad was certain to have a huge
demonstration effect. It would put dictators around the world on notice
either to mend their ways or share Saddam's fate. It would silence doubters
who questioned America's ability to export its values. It would discredit
skeptics who claimed to see lurking behind neoconservative schemes the
temptations of empire, the dangers of militarism, and the prospect of
exhaustion and overstretch.

    Above all, forcibly overthrowing Saddam Hussein would affirm the
irresistibility of American military might. As such, the armed liberation of
Iraq would transform U.S. foreign policy; not preserving the status quo but
promoting revolutionary change would thereafter define the main purpose of
American statecraft. After all, wrote Michael Ledeen well before 9/11,
stability was for "tired old Europeans and nervous Asians." The United
States was "the most revolutionary force on earth," its "inescapable mission
to fight for the spread of democracy." The operative word was fight.
According to Ledeen, Mao was precisely correct: revolution sprang "from the
barrel of a gun." The successful ouster of Saddam Hussein could open up
whole new vistas of revolutionary opportunity.

    The Neoconservatives Become the Establishment

    What did all of this expenditure of intellectual energy actually yield?
During the decade between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the
global war on terror, the achievements of second-generation neoconservatives
compare favorably with those of the anti-Communist liberals who in the
immediate aftermath of World War II created the ideological foundation for
what became a durable postwar foreign policy consensus. Through argument,
organization, and agitation, leading liberal intellectuals of the 1940s such
as the historian Arthur Schlesinger and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
imbued the muscular, implacably anti-Stalinist internationalism that they
favored with the appearance of offering the only acceptable basis for U.S.
foreign policy. To diverge from this "the vital center" of American
politics, which they themselves defined and occupied, as Senator Robert Taft
on the right and former vice president Henry Wallace on the left proposed to
do, became almost by definition perverse.

    When deciding how to respond to growing Communist influence in Western
Europe or to the invasion of South Korea, President Harry S. Truman did not
necessarily pause to consult the latest scribblings of Schlesinger or
Niebuhr. The influence of intellectuals on policy is seldom that
straightforward. Indirectly, however, these Cold War liberals helped to lend
respectability to certain propositions that in the 1930s might have seemed
outlandish -- for example, the decision to permanently station U.S. troops
in Europe and to create the apparatus of the national security state. In
short, they fostered a climate congenial to Truman's pursuit of certain
hard-line anti-Communist policies and increased the political risks faced by
those inclined to question such policies.

    During the 1990s, the intellectual offspring of Irving Kristol and
Norman Podhoretz repeated this trick. By the end of that decade,
neoconservatives were no longer insurgents; they had transformed themselves
into establishment figures. Their views entered the mainstream of public
discourse and became less controversial. Through house organs like the
Standard, in essays published by influential magazines such as Foreign
Affairs, through regular appearances on TV talk shows and at conferences
sponsored by the fellow-traveling American Enterprise Institute, and via the
agitprop of the Project for the New American Century, they warned of the
ever-present dangers of isolationism and appeasement, called for ever more
munificent levels of defense spending, and advocated stern measures to
isolate, punish, or overthrow ne'er-do-wells around the world.

    As a mark of the growing respectability of such views, each of the three
leading general-interest daily newspapers in the United States had at least
one neocon offering regular foreign policy commentary -- Max Boot writing
for the Los Angeles Times,, David Brooks for the New York Times, and both
Charles Krauthammer and Robert Kagan for the Washington Post.
Neoconservative views also dominated the op-ed pages of the Wall Street
Journal. As a direct consequence of this determined rabble-rousing, neocon
views about the efficacy of American military power and the legitimacy of
its use gained wide currency. On issues ranging from ethnic cleansing in
Bosnia to the "rise" of China to the proper response to terror,
neoconservatives recast the public policy debate about the obligations
imposed upon and prerogatives to be claimed by the sole superpower. They
kept the focus on the issues that they believed mattered most: an America
that was strong, engaged, and even pugnacious.

    Ideas that even a decade earlier might have seemed reckless or
preposterous now came to seem perfectly reasonable. A good example was the
issue of regime change in Iraq. On January 26, 1998, William Kristol and
Robert Kagan along with more than a dozen other neoconservative luminaries
sent a public letter to President Bill Clinton denouncing the policy of
containing Iraq as a failure and calling for the United States to overthrow
Saddam Hussein. To persist in the existing "course of weakness and drift,"
the signatories warned ominously, was to "put our interests and our future
at risk." Nine months later, Clinton duly signed into law the Iraq
Liberation Act of 1998, passed by large majorities in both houses of
Congress. That legislation declared that it had now become the policy of the
United States government to "remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein,"
with legislators authorizing the expenditure of $99 million for that
purpose. Clinton showed little enthusiasm for actually implementing the
measure, and most of the money remained unspent. But neoconservative efforts
had done much to create a climate in which it had become impolitic to
suggest aloud that publicly declaring the intent to overthrow regimes not to
the liking of the United States might be ill-advised. At the end of the
1940s, thanks to the Cold War liberals, no politician with the slightest
interest in self-preservation was going to risk even the appearance of being
soft on the Soviet Union. At the end of the 1990s, thanks to the
neoconservatives, no politician was going to take the chance of being tagged
with being soft on Saddam.

    In fact, the grand vision entertained by second-generation
neoconservatives demanded that the United States shatter the status quo. New
conditions, they argued, absolved Americans from any further requirement to
adhere to the norms that had defined the postwar international order. Osama
bin Laden and the events of 9/11 provided the tailor-made opportunity to
break free of the fetters restricting the exercise of American power.

    Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and Director
of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. A graduate
of West Point and a Vietnam veteran, he has a doctorate in history from
Princeton and was a Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is the
author of several books, including the just published The New American
Militarism, How Americans Are Seduced by War.

Copyright 2005 Andrew J. Bacevich

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War, copyright ©
2005 by Andrew J. Bacevich. Used by permission of the author and Oxford
University Press, Inc.

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