Foreign Affairs

bemildred

(90,061 posts) Mon Aug 24, 2015, 08:09 AM Aug 2015

Two Cheers for the Neo-Conservatives

Goldman is one of the people of whom he speaks. Two things to note here: 1.) "Neoconservative" is not the operative term now, time to roll out a new name, "Neocon" is now hopelessly tainted. 2.) The Bushites are being thrown under the bus, or maybe more emphatically under the bus.

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To the neo-conservatives, every country looks like Poland, whose democracy movement in the 1980s was the thin end of the wedge that ruptured the Iron Curtain. When the self-styled “realist” Stephen Walt taunts the neo-conservatives as “wrong for so long” about Iraq, he occults a more important piece of history: the neo-conservatives won the Cold War and rescued the world from a nightmarish half-century. They did this when Prof. Walt and the so-called realists had one foot nailed to the metaphorical floor and were turning tight little circles in pursuit of “balance of power.”

The term “neo-con” in the parlance of the global left replaces more cumbersome epiphets such as “Running Dog of Imperialism,” but it has a specific meaning. The neo-conservatives were anti-Communist social democrats recruited by Washington to fight fire with fire, through such entitles as Encounter Magazine (edited during the 1950s by the neo-conservative “godfather” Irving Kristol) and the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom. Backed by the international department of the American trade union movement at the AFL-CIO, with aid from the Vatican, the democratic socialists helped the Polish Solidarnosc movement challenge the Soviet empire. President Ronald Reagan, Prime Minister Margeret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II were the godparents of Eastern European democracy, as Thatcher aide John O’Sullivan reported in a 2007 volume.

It was the tragedy (and sometimes tragicomedy) of a lesser, second generation of neo-conservatives to imagine that the colonial construct that called itself Iraq, beset by ancient ethnic and sectarian hatred, and wallowing in backwardness and ignorance, could reproduce what the profoundly Catholic, formerly democratic, and modern nation of Poland had done. But that does not obviate the neo-conservatives’ accomplishments.

The neo-conservatives were responsible for the Reagan economic reforms that launched the longest economic expansion in US history. Irving Kristol’s small but influental magazine The Public Interest first brought the work of future Nobel Laureate Prof. Robert Mundell to broader public attention in 1974, and it was Kristol, then head of the American Enterprise Institute, who gave my future business partner Jude Wanniski a grant to write his book The Way the World Works. Mundell was not a conservative of any recognizeable ilk. On the contrary: He was trained by the arch-Keynesian and liberal economist Paul Samuelson at MIT. Mundell took the one-period, closed economy Keynesian model and turned it into a multi-period, global model, and reached radically different conclusions.

http://atimes.com/2015/08/two-cheers-for-the-neo-conservatives/

4 replies

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Two Cheers for the Neo-Conservatives (Original Post) bemildred Aug 2015 OP

Norman Bailey responds: Forget the term “neo-conservative” — we need common sense bemildred Aug 2015 #1

Fukuyama's a key neocon: but the neocons though that other than a few rogues--Kim, MisterP Aug 2015 #2

That is the thing that strikes me about them more than anything, bemildred Aug 2015 #3

go to the post-1973 Presidential libraries and read their stuff: they literally don't think more MisterP Aug 2015 #4

bemildred

(90,061 posts)

1. Norman Bailey responds: Forget the term “neo-conservative” — we need common sense

Reply to bemildred (Original post)

Mon Aug 24, 2015, 08:10 AM

Aug 2015

I don’t think the term “neo-conservative” serves any purpose any more except as a convenient epithet for the puerile political left. What is needed currently more than anything else, is common sense, which despite its name, is anything but common. To have thought, for example, following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the world was headed to a sort of Buddhist nirvana of peace, prosperity and happiness, a la Fukuyama, was contrary to common sense and indeed did not happen. Quite the contrary. The Fukuyama nirvana lasted a mere ten years before dissolving in the infernos of the twin towers in Manhattan.

Michael is certainly right about Iraq, and I would add Afghanistan. Two strategies would have reflected common sense. After the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden and his associates, a quick invasion, overthrow of the Taliban government and turn the country over to the Northern League. Stay for say six months to support the new government, and get out. In Iraq the situation was more complicated. Saddam did not threaten the national security of the U.S., so there was no necessity to do anything. If, however, the decision is made to overthrow Saddam (in this case because he tried to assassinate President Bush’s father), then invade, overthrow Saddam and turn the country over to a compliant general, with admonitions to be a good boy, stay six months or so to support the new government and get out.

Alternatively, settle down for a long stay and oversee the democratization of both countries. Supposedly this is what was done in Iraq, but as Michael points out execution was atrocious. Every possible mistake was made, including but not limited to the dismantling of the entire army and police force as well as the civil bureaucracy (“No member of the Ba’ath Party may stay in office”). Instead of receiving the medal of freedom, Bremer should have been dismissed and prosecuted for incompetence amounting to insanity. Finally, Obama put the seal on the idiocy by a precipitous withdrawal. In Afghanistan there was never any pretense of a real democracy, just the rigged election of a compliant stooge.

http://atimes.com/2015/08/norman-bailey-responds-forget-the-term-neo-conservative-we-need-common-sense/

MisterP

(23,730 posts)

2. Fukuyama's a key neocon: but the neocons though that other than a few rogues--Kim,

Reply to bemildred (Reply #1)

Mon Aug 24, 2015, 01:51 PM

Aug 2015

OBL, Saddam, Escobar, Lukashenka, maybe Serbia and Rwanda--we were the only superpower left and, aside from Clinton's "weakness," market capitalism had won even in Russia

PNAC aside, 9-11 wasn't supposed to happen in their world, even if we'd grown effete towards the vast Iraqi menace: we'd won, and now it was just a few mopping-up operations

bemildred

(90,061 posts)

3. That is the thing that strikes me about them more than anything,

Reply to MisterP (Reply #2)

Mon Aug 24, 2015, 02:23 PM

Aug 2015

even more than their stupidity,
the sense of ENTITLEMENT,
everybody OWES them cooperation and obedience,
and all their money and stuff too,
if they happen to need it.

You can be pretty stupid and still understand that people are not going to just do whatever you say.

MisterP

(23,730 posts)

4. go to the post-1973 Presidential libraries and read their stuff: they literally don't think more

Reply to bemildred (Reply #3)

Mon Aug 24, 2015, 02:38 PM

Aug 2015

than 3-6 months ahead (hence their constant self-contradiction--were the 90s a golden era that was spoiled by some Mooslim ruffians? an era of weakness that invited them in? and why does nobody remember that these were the guys we set up and then dumped hard in Afghanistan?)

they're so obsessed with "bloodying Russia's nose" that they really can't make the connection between the hijackings, refugees, monument destruction, and crack cocaine on the one hand and what they did in Iraq, Nicaragua/Panama, Syria, Libya, Honduras, Afghanistan on the other: Clinton clearly has the same syndrome, and it goes further than just not being able to admit they were wrong--they really DO think "we're getting it right THIS time!"

Reagan in fact declared that all terrorism and war and unrest and drugrunning were due to Soviet puppeteering (in fact many flunkies went further, saying that only Commies could traffic cocaine)

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