MacBush
The neoconservative tragedy.
By Jacob Weisberg
As Iraq continues to deteriorate under American occupation—the question of the week is whether it can avoid full-blown civil war—the issue of how we got into this mess presses ever more urgently. A number of instant histories and inside accounts of the Bush administration's decision-making have already been published. But it is a book with no original reporting whatsoever that does the best job of explaining why the disaster unfolded in the way it has. Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads argues that the United States made the mistake of going into Iraq without preparing for a hostile occupation because of the flawed foreign-policy thinking of a small group of people called neoconservatives.
"Neoconservative" has become such a loaded term that it tends to obliterate civil discussion. Some Europeans use it as a synonym for supporters of the Iraq war or for sophisticated warmongers in general. On the American far left and far right, "neocon" often emphasizes the Jewishness of many of its adherents, implying that they care more about the interests of Israel than those of the United States. Fukuyama, who until recently counted himself a neoconservative, defines the term not by the shared back story of some of its founding members (Trotskyism in the 1930s, opposition to the New Left in the 1960s, Commentary magazine in the 1970s, etc.), but rather by a shared set of ideas.
Though there are endless exceptions and caveats, the most influential neocons are "hard" Wilsonians with respect to foreign policy. They reject the realist notion, most strongly identified with Henry Kissinger, that the United States should act only according to its interests. Instead, neocons believe that America must provide moral leadership to the rest of the world, spreading liberty and democratic ideas, by force if necessary. They like alliances but have little time for global institutions or the finer points of international law. Applying this characterization, Fukuyama counts as neoconservatives both Ronald Reagan and the second-term George W. Bush, who is about as far from a Jewish intellectual as it is possible for someone to be.
While he remains sympathetic to the democracy-spreading mission, Fukuyama castigates the unilateral and militaristic turns that gave us such concepts as "preventive war," "benevolent hegemony," and "regime change." Neoconservatives, he contends, have abandoned their fundamental political insight, namely that ambitious schemes to remake societies are doomed to disappointment, failure, and unintended consequences. "Opposition to utopian social engineering," Fukuyama writes "… is the most enduring thread running through the movement." Yet neoconservatives today are bogged down in an attempt to remake a poorly understood, catastrophically damaged, and deeply alien semi-country in the Middle East. How did these smart people stray—and lead the country—so far off course?
Though Fukuyama does not make this comparison, their failure looks increasingly like that of the architects of the Vietnam War, chronicled by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest. In the First Act of the neoconservative tragedy, an intellectual movement springs up in the early 1960s, animated by Lyndon B. Johnson's misguided expansion of the American welfare state. Applying a version of its critique of totalitarian communism to Great Society liberalism, the movement's key early figures—Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan—argue that good intentions are foundering on the shoals of recalcitrant humanity and ignorance about the realities of poverty. What distinguishes these writers from their more conventionally minded liberal counterparts is both their shrewd skepticism about the possibility of social change and their keen empiricism about people, government programs, and results.
In Act 2, which takes place in the late 1970s, a slightly different cast of neoconservative characters applies the same insight to the American foreign policy of the detente era. There are scenes here of their hostility to the United Nations; of their battles with Kissinger's realism, which they see as too accommodating of communism; and of their push to challenge the Soviet Union more aggressively, both morally and militarily. Once again, they look prescient in retrospect, though in his sympathy for the golden era, Fukuyama doesn't consider the ways in which the neocons were also massively wrong about communism. For example, a central tenet of neoconservative thinking in the 1980s, derived from Jeanne Kirkpatrick's famous article "Dictatorships & Double Standards," was that Communist societies could not change from within.
It is not until the Third Act that neoconservatism goes catastrophically wrong. Imbued by the revolutions of 1989 with a sense of their own rightness and of America's unchallenged dominance, the neocons imagine that even backward, non-Western societies with no liberal traditions can follow a Polish post-totalitarian path to modern democracy. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and William Kristol fantasize that a dubious Garibaldi figure, Ahmad Chalabi, can overthrow the world's most vicious dictator with a small band of followers. After this hope proves futile, they somehow persuade the vice president and secretary of defense—and in the climactic scene, the president himself—that once the American military finishes the job his father started, Iraqis will embrace their occupiers.
In winning this climactic battle, the neoconservatives forget who they are. Their two best qualities—their skepticism about government-led change and their sociological empiricism—get lost somewhere along the way. Fukuyama makes an especially damning point when he discusses the tremendous intellectual ferment over the past decade and a half around the question of how democratic transitions are accomplished. "The prominent neoconservatives who supported the war stood largely outside this debate and one is hard-pressed to find much discussion of the concrete mechanics of how the United States would promote either democratic institutions or economic development," he writes.
In Greek tragedy, the hero's fall is often charted in terms of his hamartia, sometimes translated as "tragic flaw." What undid the neoconservatives in the end may have been an instinct left over from their old Trotskyist days, a weakness for categorical Marxist-Hegelian thinking (a pretty good expression of which, come to think of it, is Fukuyama's own most famous work, The End of History and the Last Man). People who should have known better came to believe that one place was like another, and that historic inevitability would do the heavy lifting for them. Now the neoconservative tragedy is ours as well.
- posted on 03/02/2006
谢blue river的转贴。今天早上看到这个新闻很沮丧。参议院可耻地一边倒,只有四票反对这个臭名昭著的“爱国者法案”。美国公民的权利又受到布什政府的监视与威胁。伊拉克战争前,也蛮喜欢这个Byrd参议员,老头子很敢说话。但这次也是寡不敌众。
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WASHINGTON - The Senate on Wednesday cleared the path for renewing the USA Patriot Act, swatting aside objections while adding new protections for people targeted by government investigations.
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The overwhelming votes virtually assured that Congress will renew
President Bush's antiterror law before it expires March 10. The House was expected to pass the legislation Tuesday.
The law's opponents, who insisted the new protections were cosmetic, conceded defeat.
"The die has now been cast," acknowledged the law's chief opponent, Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., after the Senate voted 84-15 to end his filibuster. "Obviously at this point, final passage of the reauthorization bill is now assured."
The overwhelming support for the renewal package holds great political value for Bush, who in 2001 made the act the centerpiece of what has become a troubled war on terrorism. Underscoring its import are GOP plans already in the works to make sure nobody misses the point this midterm election year.
After the House gives its blessing, Republicans are hoping to win a second day of coverage next Wednesday with a press conference by Speaker
Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. The package will receive a made-for-television enrollment — usually a routine administrative procedure in which a bill approved in both houses is prepared for the president's signature.
The House then will send the legislation to Bush, who will sign it before the deadline Friday.
The fanfare comes after a two-month standoff in which Feingold had succeeded in blocking a House-Senate compromise that would renew 16 major provisions of the law that are set to expire next week. Unable to overcome his objection by a Dec. 31 expiration date, Congress instead postponed the deadline twice while negotiations continued.
The White House and GOP leaders finally broke the stalemate by crafting a second measure — in effect an amendment to the first — that would somewhat limit the government's power to compel information from people targeted in terror probes.
That second measure passed overwhelmingly earlier in the day, 95-4. Voting 'no' with Feingold were Sens. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and the Senate's constitutional expert, Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va.
The second measure added new protections to the 2001 antiterror law in three areas. It would:
_Give recipients of court-approved subpoenas for information in terrorist investigations the right to challenge a requirement that they refrain from telling anyone.
_Eliminate a requirement that an individual provide the
FBI with the name of a lawyer consulted about a National Security Letter, which is a demand for records issued by investigators.
_Clarify that most libraries are not subject to demands in those letters for information about suspected terrorists.
Feingold and his allies complained that the restrictions on government power would be virtually meaningless in practice. Though small, his group of four objectors represented progress for Feingold. In 2001, he cast the lone vote against the original Patriot Act, citing concerns over the new powers it granted the FBI.
On Wednesday, the package's authors cast the vote in pragmatic terms.
"Both bills represent a vast improvement over current law," said the author of the new curbs, Sen. John Sununu (news, bio, voting record), R-N.H.
Feingold, a possible Democratic presidential candidate, said: "I am disappointed in this result. But I believe this fight has been worth making."
With that, he began reading the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Then he left the chamber. Feingold later returned to read resolutions from eight states expressing concerns about the Patriot Act.
Final Senate passage of the renewal was expected Friday.
Barring last-minute problems in the House, the package was expected to land on Bush's desk for his signature before the expiration next week.
Despite the legislation's advance, deep misgivings remained even among the law's chief supporters.
"While we have made some progress, much is left to be done," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (news, bio, voting record), D-Vt., who voted for the Sununu bill.
He and Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., were co-sponsoring new legislation and hearings on the Patriot Act.
Their bill would make the government satisfy a higher threshold for warrantless wiretaps and would set a four-year expiration date for the use of National Security Letters in terrorism investigations.
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