Does the neocons’ initial support for quick withdrawal absolve them of responsibility for the course we actually pursued?

Randall Parker has an interesting post on Ahmed Chalabi, who is saying that if the U.S. had pursued its original idea, pushed by the neocons in the Defense Department, of quickly installing a pro-Western junta of Iraqi exiles including Chalabi, everything would have worked out much better. I wrote Mr. Parker an e-mail about it:

LA to RP:

Re your Chalabi post, one of the unresolved puzzles is: If (some) neocons wanted quick withdrawal, why, when quick withdrawal idea was abandoned and we settled in for full scale nation-building and democracy-facilitation, with the aim of turning Iraq into a template for Muslim democracy throughout the region, did those same neocons support THAT?

Did any neocons attack democratization, saying, “Hey, this can’t work, we’ve just got to hand things over to a Western-leaning junta and get out.” Nope. They somehow morphed from “hand it to Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress and they will make Iraq a pro-Western, pro-Israel regime, but it’s not our business to make this happen,” to “let us facilitate elections and constitution-writing and turn Iraq into a democracy, even as we try to suppress a terror insurgency which we have no realistic strategy to defeat.” Those two things are so different I don’t know how the same people could have supported both. But they did. Therefore they are just as responsible for the policy the U.S. actually pursued, as they would have been for the policy the U.S. did not pursue.

My point is, the neocons can’t use their earlier support for the quick withdrawal option as an escape from their responsibility for the course we actually did pursue, for two reasons: (1) apart from a few exceptions (Barbara Lerner and Micheal Ledeen come to mind), they did not protest the course we actually pursued, and (2) the course we actually pursued was fully based on the neocon idea that democracy is a universal desire of the human heart, and that a couple of elections constitutes a democracy. Oh, sure, they can say,with Michael Rubin, they didn’t like the implementation, but they didn’t protest that implementation (far from it, they kept celebrating every new election as the sign of “victory”), and that implementation, flawed or not, was the implementation of THEIR ideology.

- end of initial entry -

Randall Parker replies:

I am guessing the neocons didn’t consider which course was taken as all that important. They figured in the end the Iraqis were just liberal democrats straining to get out. After all, their pied piper Chalabi told them so. So the Iraqis would be liberal democrats under a US viceroy just as well as under Chalabi and perhaps better since the viceroy was one of them.

And I see you came to the same obvious conclusion I did: If liberalism is the universal desire of all beating human hearts then everything else is an insignificant implementation detail that surely can get fixed later.

LA continues:

To be fair to the neocons, I don’t want to minimize the differences between the sort of policy they advocated and the policy pursued by the Bush administration. Perle and Frum, for example, pushed for a stance in the war on terror far more aggressive and pro-active than anything ever contemplated by Bush. See their interview at FrontPage Magazine in 2004 in which they lay out the thesis of their (unfortunately entitled) book, An End to Evil. Their emphasis is not on the prospect of Muslims naturally gravitating toward democracy, but on the use of American military and political dominance to coerce Muslim regimes to stop supporting terror. What Frum and Perle proposed and what Bush did are so far apart as to appear to be in different universes.

Is it fair, then, to associate Perle and Frum with Bush’s failures? I still say it is, for the same reasons I gave above. Democracy and freedom remain their bottom line and their goal. In Frum’s summing up at the end of the interview, American liberty is the “explosive” idea (echoes of Michael Ledeen’s “global democratic revolution”) that will transform the world. True, Bush pursued this goal of democratic revolution in a squishy, inconsistent, ineffective way, while Perle and Frum would have pursued it in a much more active, hardline way. But both policies still assume that, given the chance, Muslim societies will embrace liberal democracy—an utterly utopian expectation, since it would require that Muslim societies cease to be Islamic. And there is no evidence that the neocons have ever grasped this fundamental point.

Further, because Frum and Perle share Bush’s democratist premise, they did not, at least to my knowledge, ever criticize the delusory and destructive positions the administration took on the basis of that premise, such as smugly allowing chaos to reign in Baghdad, since, as Rumsfeld said, that was the nature of “freedom”; such as saying that Iraq’s little difficulties with attaining freedom were really no different than those America faced in the civil rights movement, as Rice has repeatedly said; such as declaring, as Bush and his whole circle have repeatedly done, that freedom is “God’s gift” to mankind, implying that people don’t have to do anything to gain freedom, such as enter into the Lockean social contract where they recognize each other’s natural rights, but that they merely have to wait for someone else, namely America, God’s chosen minister, to hand them this freedom.

Which leads to an interesting question: Who was it who told the administration that looting is a natural outcome of freedom, that Iraqi terrorism is the moral equivalent of women’s inability to vote in 19th century America, and that freedom is a “gift”? A friend reminds me of Orwell’s remark, that there are ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. Yet Bush, who is no intellectual, believed them. Frum whom then, did these perles of wisdom come?

So, on one hand, the neocons have the right to be unhappy with the administration’s execution of the war on terror. On the other hand, they do not have the right to dissociate themselves from the administration’s idiocies and failures, as they are now seeking to do.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 12, 2006 09:30 PM | Send