[Peace-discuss] The need for a "Hands Off Iraq" committee

[C. G. Estabrook]

What follows is not a joke, although it reads like an Onion dispatch. 
It's published by Foreign Policy, the more liberal of the elite foreign 
policy journals (the other is Foreign Affairs).  The neocons have always 
been just one end of the foreign policy spectrum in the US, not a 
separate or extraneous group; they haven't gone away, as this piece 
shows.  They worked to influence Clinton's policy, succeeded 
spectacularly after 9/11, and will continue to have the ear of the Bush 
administration and its successor.  --CGE

===

	http://www.foreignpolicy.com
	THE FP MEMO: ADVICE FOR GLOBAL LEADERS
	Operation Comeback
	By Joshua Muravchik
	November/December 2006

Neoconservatives have the president’s ear, but they also have lots of 
baggage. To stay relevant, they must admit mistakes, embrace public 
diplomacy, and start making the case for bombing Iran.

TO: My Fellow Neoconservatives
FROM: Joshua Muravchik
RE: How to Save the Neocons

We neoconservatives have been through a startling few years. Who could 
have imagined six years ago that wild stories about our influence over 
U.S. foreign policy would reach the far corners of the globe? The loose 
group of us who felt impelled by the antics of the 1960s to migrate from 
the political left to right must have numbered fewer than 100. And we 
were proven losers at Washington’s power game: The left had driven us 
from the Democratic Party, stolen the “liberal” label, and successfully 
affixed to us the name “neoconservative.” In reality, of course, we 
don’t wield any of the power that contemporary legend attributes to us. 
Most of us don’t rise at the crack of dawn to report to powerful jobs in 
government. But it is true that our ideas have influenced the policies 
of President George W. Bush, as they did those of President Ronald 
Reagan. That does feel good. Our intellectual contributions helped to 
defeat communism in the last century and, God willing, they will help to 
defeat jihadism in this one. It also feels good to see that a number of 
young people and older converts are swelling our ranks.

The price of this success is that we are subjected to relentless 
obloquy. “Neocon” is now widely synonymous with “ultraconservative” or, 
for some, “dirty Jew.” A young Egyptian once said to me, 
“‘Neoconservative’ sounds to our ears like ‘terrorist’ sounds to yours.” 
I am shocked to hear that some among us, wearying of these attacks, are 
sidling away from the neocon label. Where is the joie de combat? The 
essential tenets of neoconservatism—belief that world peace is 
indivisible, that ideas are powerful, that freedom and democracy are 
universally valid, and that evil exists and must be confronted—are as 
valid today as when we first began. That is why we must continue to 
fight. But we need to sharpen our game. Here are some thoughts on how to 
do it:

Learn from Our Mistakes. We are guilty of poorly explaining 
neoconservatism. How, for example, did the canard spread that the roots 
of neoconservative foreign policy can be traced back to Leo Strauss and 
Leon Trotsky? The first of these false connections was cooked up by 
Lyndon LaRouche, the same convicted scam artist who spends his days 
alerting humanity to the Zionist-Henry Kissinger-Queen Elizabeth 
conspiracy. The second probably originated with insufficiently 
reconstructed Stalinists. To say that our core beliefs remain true is 
not to counsel self-satisfaction. We got lucky with Reagan. He took the 
path we wanted, and the policies succeeded brilliantly. He left office 
highly popular. Bush is a different story. He, too, took the path we 
wanted, but the policies are achieving uncertain success. His popularity 
has plummeted. It would be pigheaded not to reflect and rethink.

But we ought to do this without backbiting or abandoning Bush. All 
policies are perfect on paper, none in execution. All politicians are, 
well, politicians. Bush has embraced so much of what we believe that it 
would be silly to begrudge his deviations. He has recognized the 
terrorist campaign against the United States that had mushroomed over 30 
years for what it is—a war that must be fought with the same 
determination, sacrifice, and perseverance that we demonstrated during 
the Cold War. And he has perceived that the only way to win this war in 
the end is to transform the political culture of the Middle East from 
one of absolutism and violence to one of tolerance and compromise.

The administration made its share of mistakes, and so did we. We were 
glib about how Iraqis would greet liberation. Did we fail to appreciate 
sufficiently the depth of Arab bitterness over colonial memories? Did we 
underestimate the human and societal damage wreaked by decades of 
totalitarian rule in Iraq? Could things have unfolded differently had 
our occupation force been large enough to provide security?

One area of neoconservative thought that needs urgent reconsideration is 
the revolution in military strategy that our neocon hero, Secretary of 
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, has championed. This love affair with 
technology has left our armed forces short on troops and resources, just 
as our execrable intelligence in Iraq seems traceable, at least in part, 
to the reliance on machines rather than humans. Our forte is political 
ideas, not physics or mechanics. We may have seized on a technological 
fix to spare ourselves the hard slog of fighting for higher defense 
budgets. Let’s now take up the burden of campaigning for a military 
force that is large enough and sufficiently well provisioned—however 
“redundant”—to assure that we will never again get stretched so thin. 
Let the wonder weapons be the icing on the cake.

Deploy More Than the Military. Recent elections in the Palestinian 
territories and Egypt have brought disconcerting results that suggest 
democratizing the Middle East may be more difficult than we imagined. 
That parties unappealing to us have done well should not in itself be a 
surprise. (After all, it happens in France no matter who wins.) But 
there is plenty of reason to wonder whether Hamas and the Muslim 
Brotherhood, once empowered by democracy, will simply turn around and 
crush it.

We need to give more thought to how we aid Middle Eastern moderates. 
They are woefully unequipped to compete with Islamists. When the U.S. 
government tries to help them, they stand accused of being American 
stooges. We can do more through private-sector groups, such as Freedom 
House, and partially private ones, like the National Endowment for 
Democracy and its affiliates. They could use appreciably more resources 
to train journalists, independent broadcasters, women’s advocates, human 
rights investigators, watchdog groups, and for civic education for 
various audiences, including imams. In relatively open countries such as 
Egypt, Jordan, and many of the Gulf states, funding from the Middle East 
Partnership Initiative should make it possible for a range of American 
nongovernmental organizations to maintain a presence on the ground. And 
we should develop and fund training programs back at home that allow 
Middle Eastern democrats to come to the United States—free of charge—to 
hone their electoral, organizational, and public relations skills. James 
Carville and Karl Rove should be the titular heads of this program.

Fix the Public Diplomacy Mess. The Bush administration deserves 
criticism for its failure to repair America’s public diplomacy 
apparatus. No group other than neocons is likely to figure out how to do 
that. We are, after all, a movement whose raison d’être was combating 
anti-Americanism in the United States. Who better, then, to combat it 
abroad?

The silver lining in the cloud of anti-Americanism is that every stuffy 
orthodoxy inspires some bright, independent-minded people to rebel. Like 
many of you, I receive a steady stream of messages from behind enemy 
lines, so to speak—from France, Germany, Arab countries, and even the 
BBC—saying, “The people all around me hate America, but I love America.” 
These people, strengthened and inspired, are our best defense against 
anti-Americanism. We need representatives on the ground in every country 
whose mission is to find and develop such friends, to let them know we 
appreciate them, to put them in contact with others of like mind, and to 
arm them with information and talking points.

Today, no one in the U.S. Foreign Service is trained for this mission. 
The best model for such a program are the “Lovestonites” of the 1940s 
and 1950s, who, often employed as attachés in U.S. embassies, waged 
ideological warfare against communism in Europe and Russia. They learned 
their political skills back in the United States fighting commies in the 
labor unions. There is no way to reproduce the ideological mother’s milk 
on which Jay Lovestone nourished his acolytes, but we need to invent a 
synthetic formula. Some Foreign Service officers should be offered 
specialized training in the war of ideas, and a bunch of us neocons 
ought to volunteer to help teach it. There should be at least one 
graduate assigned to every major U.S. overseas post.

Prepare to Bomb Iran. Make no mistake, President Bush will need to bomb 
Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office. It is all but 
inconceivable that Iran will accept any peaceful inducements to abandon 
its drive for the bomb. Its rulers are religio-ideological fanatics who 
will not trade what they believe is their birthright to great power 
status for a mess of pottage. Even if things in Iraq get better, a 
nuclear-armed Iran will negate any progress there. Nothing will embolden 
terrorists and jihadists more than a nuclear-armed Iran.

The global thunder against Bush when he pulls the trigger will be 
deafening, and it will have many echoes at home. It will be an injection 
of steroids for organizations such as MoveOn.org. We need to pave the 
way intellectually now and be prepared to defend the action when it 
comes. In particular, we need to help people envision what the world 
would look like with a nuclear-armed Iran. Apart from the dangers of a 
direct attack on Israel or a suitcase bomb in Washington, it would mean 
the end of the global nonproliferation regime and the beginning of 
Iranian dominance in the Middle East.

This defense should be global in scope. There is a crying need in 
today’s ideological wars for something akin to the Congress for Cultural 
Freedom of the Cold War, a global circle of intellectuals and public 
figures who share a devotion to democracy. The leaders of this movement 
might include Tony Blair, Vaclav Havel, and Anwar Ibrahim.

Recruit Joe Lieberman for 2008. Twice in the last quarter-century we had 
the good fortune to see presidents elected who were sympathetic to our 
understanding of the world. In 2008, we will have a lot on the line. The 
policies that we have championed will remain unfinished. The war on 
terror will still have a long way to go. The Democrats have already 
shown that they are incurably addicted to appeasement, while the 
“realists” among the GOP are hoping to undo the legacy of George W. 
Bush. Sen. John McCain and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani both 
look like the kind of leaders who could prosecute the war on terror 
vigorously and with the kind of innovative thought that realists hate 
and our country needs. As for vice presidential candidates, how about 
Condoleezza Rice or even Joe Lieberman? Lieberman says he’s still a 
Democrat. But there is no place for him in that party. Like every one of 
us, he is a refugee. He’s already endured the rigors of running for the 
White House. In 2008, he deserves another chance—this time with a 
worthier running mate than Al Gore.


Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.