Last Neocon Standing
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Danville, California
The neocons backed the decision to invade Iraq, depose Saddam Hussein and unfurl American political values and systems over the Arab World. Five years later, their failure is nothing short of spectacular. Most neocons have been swept into oblivion.
The stalwarts of yesterday include Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Paul Bremer who were in the heart of the Bush administration. Behind them are the fallen intellectuals who egged them on, such as Normon Podhoretz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Charles Krauthammer.
Only one neocon has been left standing: Francis Fukuyama who teaches at Johns Hopkins University. His career began at RAND where he penned an analytical report about the Soviet-Afghan War based on a field visit to the NWFP.
Fukuyama rose to prominence in 1992 with a book that extolled the end of communism, “The End of History and the Last Man.” Two years ago, he wrote “America at the Crossroads.” In this masterpiece, he shows that the Iraq war betrayed neocon principles.
The war was fought on seven false premises. First, Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Second, Iraq was connected with the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Third, Iraq posed an existential threat to the US. Fourth, US troop levels would be reduced to 60,000 in six months after the invasion.
Because of the hype created by the victory over Saddam Hussein’s rag tag army, President Bush appeared atop the floating deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 under a big “Mission Accomplished” banner. Vice President Cheney went on the talk show circuit to say that US troops would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqis, evoking the imagery of Allied troops being greeted with flowers and kisses by Parisians in 1945.
The fifth premise was that the transition to post-Saddam Iraq would be relatively painless, like that in Japan and Germany after World War II. In the heat of advocacy, the neocons forgot that a fundamental tenet of their movement was that social engineering was a high-risk endeavor. Japan and Germany had viable political institutions before the dictatorial interventions that plunged them into war. Iraq had none.
Sixth, Radical Islam posed a serious threat to world peace and the best place to decimate it was in Iraq, which was claimed to be the central battleground in the war on terror. The Bush administration conflated the jihadis, who were a post Gulf War creation, with Arab nationalists like Saddam Hussein who were a post-colonial creation.
The neocons theorized that the terrorist problem was due to religion or culture. This was plain wrong and glossed over important political, sectarian and social distinctions within the Muslim world.
Fukuyama argues that the West is fighting a relatively small number of fanatics sheltering behind a larger group of sympathizers in a counterinsurgency that has spread around the globe. Thus, as argued by others such as Sir Michael Howard, an exclusively military response to this challenge is inappropriate, “since counterinsurgency wars are deeply political and dependent on winning the hearts and minds of the broader population from the beginning.”
Seventh, the world would accept the preventive war doctrine on which the invasion of Iraq was predicated. When it became obvious that world opinion was strongly opposed to the war, they dismissed it as misguided and irrelevant.
Not surprisingly, the world was appalled that the US had given itself a right that it was unwilling to grant other nations. It was not simply asserting a right to engage in a pre-emptive war to ward off an imminent attack but a right to engage in a war against a threat that had not yet materialized from a remote corner of the globe.
In the 19th century, the great German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had dismissed the notion of a preventive war, saying its logic was on a par with “committing suicide for fear of death.”
Looking at the future, Fukuyama calls for a radical change in American foreign policy. The new approach would dispense with the rhetoric about World War IV and the global war on terror which overstates the problem and suggests that the US is taking on the entire Muslim world.
He notes, “Before the Iraq War, there were probably a few thousand jihadis willing to cause nihilistic damage to the US.” Now there are several times that number.
He does not call upon the US to withdraw from world affairs. As the world’s richest and most powerful nation, the US cannot walk away from helping the world solve its political and economic problems. It should care about what happens inside other states. However, it should not expect instant results.
The new focus should be on the development of institutions which takes time and requires patience. Moreover, it is not possible to achieve reform from the outside. To be sustainable, it has to originate from the inside.
Fukuyama’s advice is spot on for future US policy toward pivotal states such as Pakistan. Since 1954, the US has spent billions on the Pakistani military and almost nothing on the development of civilian institutions. The failure is evident for all to see.
Fukuyama has clearly distanced himself from the rest of the neocons who continue to blind the White House from reality. Speaking to 17,000 troops at Fort Bragg last week, President Bush said, “The terrorists and extremists are on the run, and we are on our way to victory.” And presumptive Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, has forecast that victory will be achieved in the year 2013.
Strategic myopia is writ large on the apocalyptic vision of the neocons. If they had digested Fukuyama’s sage counsel, they would not have stayed on the same disastrous course two years later.
When a new administration takes over the White House in January, it should tell the world that the hubris-laden doctrine of American Exceptionalism has been put to rest. America will no longer set itself on a higher plane from all other nations and call itself exempt from the international laws that apply to other countries.
Just as the US Constitution calls for checks and balances in the exercise of power domestically, the smooth flowing of order around the globe also calls for a similar system of checks and balances. If unbridled power is corrupting domestically, why would it not be corrupting internationally?
(The writer is an associate of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford . Faruqui@Pacbell.net
