Why Do Neoconservatives Still Exist?

Picture credit: The New Republic

William Kristol is an influential foreign policy strategist whose career has been distinguished by three main themes. One, for years Kristol has been very brave with other people’s courage. Though he never served in the military, he has nonetheless advocated the aggressive projection of U.S. military might around the globe for almost two decades. Among the chicken-hawks of Washington, Bill Kristol is the bantam rooster.

Two, Kristol has been wrong about most of the major foreign-policy issues on which he has offered an opinion. Demonstrably, factually in error. Especially when it comes to the biggest conceptual challenge of our age, America’s response to 9/11, Kristol got it wrong both strategically and tactically.

Three, Kristol is living proof that the “neoconservative movement” has long overstayed what should have been its short intellectual shelf life. 

I guess this is not surprising in Washington, where smooth-talking policy entrepreneurs like Kristol are held to no higher standard than their last snappy sound-bite. So rather than finding himself discredited, the always articulate and clever Kristol is still thriving. In fact, in what appears to be almost a panic, he’s now leading the neoconservative fight against Chuck Hagel,  a man whose policy record amounts to a living refutation of Kristol’s debunked worldview. Kristol,  in saying Saddam had “connections” with al Qaida and that weapons of mass destruction would certainly be found, and that George W. Bush could do it all and still preside over a strong economy, has made too many giant errors of judgment to count over the decades. But in untruths that achieve the level of the absurd—without the wit of, say, The Onion-- there is little that matches this recent Kristol diatribe in his Weekly Standard magazine against the former Nebraska senator:

“His backers can cite no significant legislation for which Hagel was responsible in his two terms in the Senate. They can quote no memorable speeches that Hagel delivered and can cite no profound passages from the book he authored. They can summarize no perceptive Hagelian analysis of defense or foreign policy, and can appeal to no acts of management or leadership by the man they'd have as our next secretary of defense.”

Let’s start with what is personally offensive about Kristol's views. Other critics of Hagel’s, like Sen. John McCain, have at least acknowledged his distinguished combat service in Vietnam. But not Kristol, who simply dismisses Hagel as a candidate with a “general lack of distinction.” It’s yet more evidence that war is, and has always been, just an abstraction to Kristol, and the actual experience of it means little to him. His calm advocacy of force –and he’s been very consistent in this -- remains unflustered by blown-off limbs and burned-off faces, devastated lives, desolate widows and orphans. 

But let’s get to the real meat of the matter. Yes, it’s enlightening to point out how mistaken some of Kristol’s past statements were, especially in comparison with what turned out to be, in truth, an impressively “perceptive Hagelian analysis.” While Kristol was agitating for war and saying things like, "I think we'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq" (March 5, 2003), Hagel was warning presciently that there was no evidence of Saddam's links to al Qaida, that his possession of WMD were in doubt, and that America was in danger of strategic overreach and enraging the Arab world. "Many of those who want to rush this country into war and think it would be so quick and easy don't know anything about war," Hagel told me in the summer of 2002. "They come at it from an intellectual perspective versus having sat in jungles or foxholes and watched their friends get their heads blown off.”

But even more important than the fact that Hagel was mostly right about the hazards of launching a new war, and Kristol was mostly wrong, is this point: I think it’s well past time to say neoconservatism is done. Bill Kristol’s 15 minutes are over. In truth he’s had more than 15 years, and that’s far too many. Neoconservatism was essentially a rebirth of Reaganism, a movement that Kristol and his co-author, Robert Kagan, single-handedly launched with a 1996 article in Foreign Affairs titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." It emerged out of the hubris of the post-Cold War era. In that heady time, when America became the lone superpower, the neocons sought to achieve a robust marriage of power and principle. They wanted to fuse what they saw as America’s precision-guided ability to change regimes at will with an evangelical belief that the only right regime is democracy. The neocons believed that, thanks to America’s unrivaled might, this was the moment in history to complete the global transformation begun by Reagan—who famously declared in 1982 that tyranny was destined for the ashheap of history—and left unfinished after the Cold War. After 9/11, they simply applied this template to the completely contrived idea that a tyrant like Saddam was the natural ally of an “Islamo-fascist” group like al Qaida and could supply it with WMD. The neocons said America could do it all: destroy al Qaida and Saddam's tyranny at the same time.

We have now seen the results of this philosophy: catastrophic overreach, just as Hagel warned. America has now suffered two terrible, draining wars. Contrary to neocon confidence about “walking and chewing gum at the same time,” we know that America couldn’t. We know that the first, necessary war, in Afghanistan, suffered because of the diversion to the second (and unnecessary) one in Iraq, just as Hagel warned. We know that, rather than reasserting U.S. power, the neocons achieved the opposite: They succeeded only in exposing our vulnerabilities to the world by creating generations of IED-savvy insurgents and generating more terrorists than existed before. The neocons wanted to put an end to the “Vietnam syndrome” of self-doubt about the use of force. Instead they left us with an “Iraq syndrome” that that will ensure no U.S. president, Democrat or Republican, will ever rush off to forcibly change regimes again.

That’s why this is probably Chuck Hagel’s time, and Kristol’s has long passed.