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A brief note for those who're unfamiliar with Mr. ***uyama, who was widely regarded as an influential neoconservative thinkers, from the horse himself:
When the ME picture is viewed through the lenses of the collapse of the USSR, some of the pro-war rhetoric makes more sense. Of coure the obvious problem is the exact same problem that always accompanies argument by analogy - analguous or not, they ain't the same thing.
Perhaps Mr. ***uyama has a point and offers a valid insight. Maybe the Admin et al really did think that they would be "heroes in error" as Chalabi says. That is, perhaps the Admin decided that even though the basis for the war was not the best, the positive results would make the murky justifications irrlelvant (politically at least). Perhaps this is way they justified to themselves the case that they made for war.
"I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz."
Excerpts from his recent article, After Neoconservatism:
If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers ... argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off ... because they ... required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations ([eg] forced busing) or ... produced unanticipated consequences (... an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare).
How ... did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.
Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall." ... hopelessly out of touch by the bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war.
And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened ...
Communism collapsed within a couple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the West evaporated.
The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war ... ... an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside.
... Kristol and Kagan ... in ... "Present Dangers":
While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. ... the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion.
... 1990's, neoconservatism ... fed by several other intellectual streams. One ... from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss ... a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. ... concerned with the "crisis of modernity" brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another ... from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense)...
In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist [as contrasted to neoconservatism's Trotskyite beginnings]; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States.
To me, elements of this are like missing puzzle pieces tha help to complete my picture of the how and why of recent history.How ... did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.
Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall." ... hopelessly out of touch by the bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war.
And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened ...
Communism collapsed within a couple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the West evaporated.
The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war ... ... an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside.
... Kristol and Kagan ... in ... "Present Dangers":
"To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."
This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq.
While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. ... the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion.
... 1990's, neoconservatism ... fed by several other intellectual streams. One ... from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss ... a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. ... concerned with the "crisis of modernity" brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another ... from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense)...
In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist [as contrasted to neoconservatism's Trotskyite beginnings]; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States.
When the ME picture is viewed through the lenses of the collapse of the USSR, some of the pro-war rhetoric makes more sense. Of coure the obvious problem is the exact same problem that always accompanies argument by analogy - analguous or not, they ain't the same thing.
Perhaps Mr. ***uyama has a point and offers a valid insight. Maybe the Admin et al really did think that they would be "heroes in error" as Chalabi says. That is, perhaps the Admin decided that even though the basis for the war was not the best, the positive results would make the murky justifications irrlelvant (politically at least). Perhaps this is way they justified to themselves the case that they made for war.