The Mideast: Neocons on the Line
A growing number of critics on Capitol Hill and around the world are questioning the Bush
administration�s credibility�and its assumptions�as never before.
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Monday 23 June 2003
IT WAS WOLFOWITZ, the gentlemanly superhawk, who within days of 9-11 prodded the Bush
administration into a radical new strategy: forcefully confronting states that sponsor terrorism. It
was Wolfowitz�the ex math whiz who fell in love with the idea of �national greatness� as a youth
and is now seen as the Bush administration�s chief intellectual�who pressed Bush hardest to
transform the war on terror into a campaign for regime change and democracy in rogue nations,
especially in Iraq and the Islamic world.
Now the deputy defense secretary and his fellow neoconservatives are on the defensive. They
are battling a growing crowd of critics on Capitol Hill and around the world as the Bush
administration�s credibility�and its assumptions�are tested as never before. In Iraq, after
another week in which U.S. troops died and got into fierce fire fights, elements of more than half
of America�s Army divisions are tied down. Some U.S. officials have begun muttering the dreaded
Q word�quagmire, a term Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had mocked on a visit to
Baghdad in the days just after the three-week war. In the Mideast, the hard-liners� move to
replace Yasir Arafat with the moderate Mahmoud Abbas�and to ignore the conflict until after the
Iraq war�has touched off a new cycle of violence that stunned even the White House in its
savagery. It seems increasingly difficult to argue that �the road to Jerusalem runs through
Baghdad.� In the face of a possible congressional probe into why Saddam Hussein�s weapons of
mass destruction have not been found, two Pentagon neocons, Doug Feith and Bill Luti, sought
earlier this month to identify themselves with, of all people, Bill Clinton. In a fumbling news
conference, they insisted that their intel squared with the previous administration�s.
QUESTIONS ON U.S. CREDIBILITY
Fairly or not, Paul Wolfowitz has become a lightning rod for much of this criticism, and to �cry
Wolfowitz� has already become a catchphrase for the pressing questions about U.S. credibility.
At a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Wolfowitz�always a striking presence
with his thick black hair, vaguely lupine looks and air of tense repose�was rocked by hostile
questioning. Wolfowitz not long ago dismissed Army chief Eric Shinseki�s call for a large
peacekeeping force as �wildly off the mark.� Now he indicated that Iraq looked more complicated
than Bosnia. �We�ve been in Bosnia for eight years,� Sen. Joseph Biden snapped back. �That
would seem to compute that we�re likely to be in Iraq for a long time�a long time.�
Wolfowitz himself never thought that his long-sought goal of democratic transformation would
be easy. This week, Wolfowitz and the neocon elite gather again for their annual conclave in
Beaver Creek, Colo., the ritzy ski resort where last year Natan Sharansky, the Israeli politician
and hard-line advocate of Arab democracy, gave the keynote speech (inspiring Dick Cheney,
among others). And in Beaver Creek the neocons can�and will�claim an uncertain triumph.
There is a kind of emerging democracy in the Palestinian territories. And there is regime change
in Iraq. If WMD evidence remains elusive, the horrific evidence of Saddam�s savagery only grows:
many Iraqis remain grateful for the U.S. intervention. In some ways, things have been easier than
expected: U.S. troops scored a lightning victory in Iraq and the worst fears proved unfounded.
Americans were not hit by chemical or biological weapons, and the country hasn�t yet
disintegrated into civil war as some warned. Certainly no one expected a sudden flowering of
Mideast peace.
Yet even as the neocons savor these victories, some critics suggest their moment may
already have passed. Few in the Bush administration invoke the toppling of Saddam�s statue in
Baghdad any longer, as they did so euphorically in early May. The future does look messier and
more ambiguous than some neocons had hoped, and the hawks now have to figure out how to
build things up, rather than knock them down. Among those at last year�s Beaver Creek
gathering�which is sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, the neocon think tank�was
Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader who was then seen as the neocon candidate of choice to
lead postwar Iraq. Now he�s been sidelined by the American czar in Baghdad, State Department
careerist L. Paul Bremer. Other key neocons, like Wolfowitz�s old ally and friend Richard Perle,
have withdrawn from public view; Perle resigned as chairman of the Pentagon�s Defense Policy
Board in March amid questions over alleged conflicts of interest related to his business dealings.
Most deflating of all, a new Pew Research poll shows rampant anti-Americanism has overtaken
even formerly pro-American Muslim countries like Indonesia and Nigeria, both chaotic places
where terrorists can congregate.
PAINTED INTO A CORNER?
Just as worrisome is the issue of how to confront other state sponsors of terror and WMD, like
Iran, Syria and North Korea. The administration seems far less willing to go to war in those
places than it was in Iraq, pushing for multilateral solutions for the moment. But �the neocons
have painted themselves, rhetorically, into a corner,� says a former senior Bush official. �They�re
kind of stuck in a position where they can�t just let this go. If they�re not seen as doing something
to get Syria and Iran to take care of terror, they�ll look incoherent.�
Yet on these issues the administration seems adrift, and once again internally conflicted.
Officials talk of waiting for grass-roots democracy in Iran, but some civilian hawks are still
discussing a strategy with parallels to their pre-invasion designs on Iraq: funding covert activity
and sponsoring exile leaders like Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah of Iran. North Korea is
again brazenly threatening to build nuclear weapons and here, too, the administration is flirting
with regime change, reducing food aid in an apparent effort to strangle the totalitarian state.
Wolfowitz, on a recent trip to South Korea, commented that North Korea �is teetering on the edge
of economic collapse.�
Hovering over all this is a more philosophical question: can democracy really be imposed by
force, or even outside pressure? And is it such a panacea?
What is clear is that the neocon vision has become the hard core of American foreign policy,
making the neocons every critic�s favorite demon. Wolfowitz and Perle are the leading lights,
most agree, joined by a supporting cast including I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney�s chief of
staff; Feith, the Pentagon�s No. 3, and leading ideologues in the Beltway commentariat like
William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Collectively, they are often misportrayed as a cabal of
conspiring former Democratic hawks who grew alienated from their party after Vietnam. Typically,
the neocons are characterized as intellectual groupies who worship Leo Strauss, a
mid-20th-century philosopher who idealized Platonic virtues in rulers and whose views have been
summed up as �it�s the regime, stupid.�
In fact, some like Perle and Kagan say their views have nothing to do with Strauss, and
Wolfowitz, for one, mocks the idea that he is a Straussian. Yes, he took two college courses
from Strauss, but he asks, chuckling, �You need an obscure political philosopher to understand
that it makes a difference what kind of regime rules Iraq?� The neocons, many of whom are
Jewish, are also sometimes maliciously caricatured as shills for Israel�s hard-right Likud
Party�even by some in the senior GOP establishment. But that does little to explain how the
neocons have won the hearts and minds of good Methodists like Cheney, Presbyterians like
national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice or WASPs like Rumsfeld.
A MARRIAGE OF POWER AND PRINCIPLE
The neocon view is, in truth, far more complex than most of these portraits suggest.
Essentially a rebirth of Reaganism, today�s neoconservatism has deep roots in the old ideological
fights of the cold-war era. It stands at heart for a robust marriage of power and principle, a fusing
of America�s precision-guided ability to change regimes with an evangelical belief that the only
right regime is democracy. Driving it all is the idea that thanks to America�s unrivaled might, this
is the moment in history to complete the global transformation begun by Ronald Reagan�who
declared in 1982 that tyranny was destined for the ash heap of history�and left unfinished after
the cold war. Especially in a post-9-11 world, this is no time for old-fashioned conservatism. It is
a time to be bold. Sharansky, who first got to know the neocons when he was a Soviet dissident,
says hard-liners like Wolfowitz and moderates like Secretary of State Colin Powell are mainly
refighting the battles of detente vs. confrontation over the Soviet Union. �It�s the same
debate�trying to make dictators more friendly or replacing them with democracy and not with
other dictators.�
Wolfowitz, for one, resists neat labels to describe his views. He also denies that he has any
grand global strategy. For hawks like him, the invasion of Iraq was in large part about finishing a
war that never really ended in 1991. But it was also about dispensing with a traditional GOP
foreign policy dependent on careful consensus and alliance-building in favor of a more aggressive
one. Leaving Saddam in power in 1991, merely handing Kuwait back to its rulers after the gulf
war, had been a classic �realist� response once favored by the GOP establishment. But after 9-11
conservatives considered the decision to restore the Arab status quo their biggest mistake, the
chief sin of Bush the father. Over the next decade it generated hatemongers like Osama bin
Laden, left WMD in the hands of defiant tyrants like Saddam and �peace� in the hands of corrupt
autocrats like Yasir Arafat. September 11 was an indictment of every policymaker over the
decade who�d seen the Arab world merely as a gas station to the globe. The Arabs had to
change, too, fundamentally.
Partly what fuels the neocons� air of certainty is the sense that they�ve been vindicated by
history. Wolfowitz, like Perle, is only in his latest of many incarnations in power. Thirty-four years
ago he and Perle had first worked together in pushing for missile defense, decrying the
arms-control accords that needlessly held America�s superior technology back, fulfilling the
agenda of their mutual mentor, cold-war hawk and grand theorist Albert Wohlstetter. On this, as
on so many things, they believed they had been prescient: the Soviet Union, more economically
backward than anyone knew, collapsed in the face of U.S. Defense spending, unable to keep up
with the high-tech wizardry that today gives America its unparalleled might. It was Wolfowitz who,
as far back as the Carter administration, also first warned of the danger from Saddam. And it was
Wolfowitz who, in 1992, authored a Defense planning paper that stirred a huge controversy in
Washington by declaring that America intended to remain the world�s only great power.
THE NEO-REAGANITE VISION
This aggressive world view has, by most accounts, won over George W. Bush, who is himself
far more of a Reaganite than he is an acolyte of his father. The neo-Reaganite vision has provided
a liturgy and a purpose to the president�s Christian evangelical sense of destiny, and imbued his
Texas tough-guy persona with a historic mission. Even before 9-11, the neocons felt they had a
soulmate, says Perle�that the son had �a more robust world view� than the father. �He was
prepared to assume greater risk for greater gains,� says Perle.
Until now, Democrats and moderate Republicans have found themselves at a loss to counter
this ideological onslaught. �These guys are the conservative version of the best and brightest,�
says Biden, harking back to the Democratic-policy establishment during the Vietnam War.
Republican-establishment types, meanwhile, grumble that their revered Grand Old Party has
been body-snatched by a foreign host, former Democratic hawks who have tossed moderation to
the winds. �I think the party basically has been taken over by the neocons,� says a senior official
from the first Bush administration.
For Wolfowitz, the irony is that while he is known as the most powerful neoconservative in
Washington, he�s never swallowed all of the neocon Kool-Aid. True, he seems to have been a
hawk from childhood, deeply influenced by his father�famed mathematician Jack Wolfowitz, a
Vietnam hard-liner who drilled the lessons of the Holocaust (appeasement never works) into his
children. (Wolfowitz�s sister, Laura Sachs, says her brother often jokingly told their father: �You
have only yourself to blame for all this.�) Later, at the University of Chicago grad school, a haven
for right-wing thinkers, Wolfowitz was smitten with the grandeur of great empires, says Charles
Fairbanks, a fellow Chicago grad and friend. Fairbanks remembers a long drive back from
Chicago to New York with Wolfowitz. �He had just been reading Livy�s history of Rome. He was
obviously somehow in love with political greatness, I think in the same way as the young Lincoln
was. He talked for hours at a time about the ancient Romans, about what kind of men they were
and what they achieved.�
But wolfowitz is far too pragmatic and smart to push blindly for regime change everywhere. �I
actually am a great believer in the importance of evolutionary change,� he says. On Mideast
peace, Wolfowitz has privately suggested that the Bushies will end up where Clinton did:
pressing the Israelis to give up their settlements (though as yet Ariel Sharon is adamantly
resisting). Wolfowitz�s sister, who is an Israeli citizen and holds moderate political views, says
her brother �is not a Likud supporter. He believes in the peace process.� And even as Wolfowitz
talks of economic collapse in North Korea, he is still seeking to prod dictator Kim Jong Il to follow
China�s path: reform from within. On Iran, says Fairbanks, it was Wolfowitz who 20 years ago
suggested regime change may not always be a good thing. As State policy-planning chief in
1982, when he and others were conceiving the Reagan Doctrine (the precursor to today�s
democracy-transformation vision), Wolfowitz cited the disaster of the then young Khomeini
revolution. The Islamist takeover, of course, had been inspired by a 1953 U.S.-orchestrated coup
that installed the shah.
The problem that Bush hard-liners must confront is that power and democracy don�t mix
easily, that America is not the Rome of Livy. Speaking in the sober tones now coming out of the
White House, one senior administration official sums up the problem: America has the power of a
true empire, like Rome or like Britain in the 19th century, but not the taste for acting like one.
�Look at us in Iraq�how much difficulty we have in saying we will not anoint people to run the
country. Does anyone think the Romans or the Brits would have been deterred for one second?�
he says. �People keep accusing the administration of being imperialist, or neo-imperialist, or
seeking an American empire. It�s just not in our nature to be imperialist.�
It is possible the neocon embrace of regime change and pre-emption may prove to be as
important and enduring as cold-war-era containment doctrine. Or it may just be that the military
triumph in Iraq marks the high tide of neocon thinking. Having had two regime-changing wars, and
having corrected the historic mistake of 1991, the hawks don�t seem eager for another. Even
Kristol, never shy about asserting U.S. power (he can afford to be: he�s a magazine editor, not a
policymaker), says, �I don�t quite know what to do about North Korea.� The ultimate question, he
adds, is whether �Iraq was sort of a one-off deal. Bush understands that if North Korea and Iran
are still chugging toward nukes a year from now unimpeded in any way, and the dynamics of the
Middle East haven�t been changed at all, then the Bush doctrine gets called into question.� Paul
Wolfowitz may be the one who is called in to answer.
With Dan Ephron in Jerusalem and Tamara Lipper in Washington
Mitayo Potosi
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