The HyperTexts
Time to End the Neocon Con Game
by Bruce P. Cameron
As Washington’s long debate on the Afghan war unfolded, one group had an
unhealthy advantage though—based on its record—it should have had no
influence at all. These are the neoconservatives, and they have captured The
Washington Post’s editorial pages along with other outlets of elite opinion.
Over the past three decades, the neocons have carved this important place for
themselves in Washington by purporting to stand for liberal values, such as
democracy and human rights, while using those worthy goals to justify the
frequent use of military force.
For the neocons, war also is not just a last-resort option. Rather, it is how
they have gained—and how they maintain—their prominence. When the United
States is at peace—or without a war looming—the neocons are at a loss.
(Of course, one of the signature characteristics of the neocons is that few have
served in the military next to the soldiers whose blood the neocons so
reflexively are willing to spill as a "solution" to nearly any problem. As elite
intellectuals, the neocons view soldiers from inner-city or small-town America
as expendable for the grander cause.)
What the neocons do excel at is the internal Washington policy debate. They are
well-schooled and self-assured; they are fierce debaters; they understand media;
and they don’t hesitate to question the patriotism or toughness of anyone who
disagrees with them.
On the Iraq War, the neocons were the ones who gave inspiration to two of their
own, L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, head of the occupation, and Douglas Feith, Under
Secretary for Policy in the Defense Department, who was responsible for
day-to-day Pentagon operations in Iraq in 2003.
In eight days—after the U.S. invading force had ousted Saddam Hussein’s
government—Bremer and Feith changed the whole tenor of the occupation from a
quick get-in and get-out to a complex nation-building scheme that was designed
to bring free-market "democracy" to Iraq.
Bremer and Feith did this by abolishing the Iraqi army and the civilian
bureaucracy, thereby placing American solders in the middle of a Sunni
insurgency that followed soon afterwards.
Neocons Abandoned Reagan
The neocons also have claimed as their chief credential, their participation in
Ronald Reagan’s muscular foreign policy at the end of the Cold War. In reality,
however, they abandoned Reagan from 1985 on, when he began the real work of
ending the Cold War by negotiating with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
In his first term, Reagan was a neocon favorite, treating the Soviet Union in
the black-and-white manner that the neocons prefer. He coined the phrase "evil
empire"; promoted guerrilla warfare against leftist governments; and built up
the U.S. military budget along with introducing the Star Wars missile defense.
Neocons played a major role in the intellectual architecture of these policies:
Richard Perle on nuclear strategy, Elliott Abrams on the Nicaraguan contra
rebels; Jeane Kirkpatrick on the immutability of leftist dictatorships.
However, as Reagan rethought the nuclear stalemate, the President became
intellectually prepared, even eager, to embrace Gorbachev as a man who was
sincere about changing the Soviet Union.
In Gorbachev, Reagan found a negotiating partner who would join in a game of
give-and-take, and Gorbachev gave more than he took. Gorbachev was also capable
of grand intellectual leaps.
At Reykjavik in October 1986, Gorbachev proposed eliminating all nuclear weapons
by the year 2000. He renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine that had called for using
force to keep Eastern Europe in the Soviet orbit.
Gorbachev and his commitment to perestroika—the restructuring of the Soviet
system—confounded neocon ideology, which held that only force could roll back
the Soviet empire and uproot its allied governments around the world.
The neocons had no intellectual framework for accepting the changes occurring
under Gorbachev. The neocon view remained frozen: there would always be a Soviet
Union; there would always be a Cold War; Gorbachev's reforms were a trick.
Perle kept insisting that the Soviets would revert to type and Reagan should
make no substantial moves toward them. Kirkpatrick agreed, after all it was her
doctrine that leftist dictatorships could not evolve toward democracy. Both
eventually resigned.
To the neocons’ dismay, Reagan joined in the liberal give-and-take approach
toward negotiations. Reagan "had an Emersonian sense of the becoming and
unfolding of all things," in the words of his biographer John Patrick Diggins.
Reagan never saw the Soviet Union or nuclear weapons as permanent.
Reagan’s engagement with the Soviet Union in his second term could be viewed as
a continuation of the gradual, fits-and-starts winding down of the Cold War that
began with John F. Kennedy’s arms-control outreach to Nikita Khrushchev in the
1960s, through Richard Nixon’s Soviet détente in the early 1970s and Jimmy
Carter’s emphasis on human rights which put the Soviets on the defensive in the
late 1970s.
In that analysis, Reagan’s first term was more an anomaly than a turning point.
But if that historical narrative were accepted, then the neocon war strategies
would be viewed as unnecessarily brutal, inflicting widespread death and
destruction in places like Central America, Angola and Afghanistan while
accomplishing little.
So, in the years after Reagan engaged Gorbachev and Gorbachev’s perestroika sped
the end of the Cold War, the neocons used their extraordinary influence in the
opinion circles of Washington to reshape the history.
Rather than seeing the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as an outcome driven
by Moscow’s own internal failings combined with a half century of Western
containment policies—capped off by Reagan’s collaboration with Gorbachev—the
neocons claimed that it was their application of force in the 1980s that did the
trick.
The neocons, who had abandoned Reagan early in his second term, re-embraced him.
They then whitewashed Reagan’s second-term emergence as Gorbachev’s peace
partner and locked in the memory of Reagan’s "evil empire" phase.
For instance, neocon intellectual Joshua Muravchek called Reagan the
arch-neocon, which is perhaps the greatest intellectual theft of the late
Twentieth and early Twenty-first centuries.
Neocons Screw Up Iraq
Having reinvented themselves as "winners of the Cold War," the neocons became
fixtures at key Washington think tanks and at prominent policy magazines. They
became talking heads on the Sunday talk shows and wrote influential foreign
policy pieces for major newspapers like The Washington Post, Wall Street
Journal and New York Times.
So, by the time George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, the neocons were
ready for phase two, with new plans for flexing American military muscle around
the globe. Neocons filled key positions in Bush’s young administration,
especially inside the Pentagon and the White House.
To replace the Soviet Union as the evil enemy, neocons targeted hard-line Arab
states and looked forward to a "war of civilizations" with Islamic militants.
The terrorist attacks on 9/11 opened the way for these ambitious neocon plans to
remake the Middle East through violent regime change.
Within nine days of the 9/11 attacks, the neocon Project for the New American
Century (PNAC) announced to the world:
"Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming
at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined
effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an
effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on
international terrorism."
The PNAC had been organized by William Kristol, editor of the neocon
magazine The Weekly Standard, and Robert Kagan, a contributing editor. The
signers of PNAC’s letters and policy prescriptions read like a who’s who of the
neocon community.
Yet, in their drumbeat for invading Iraq, the neocons were wrong about many of
the supposed "facts" used to rally a frightened American public behind the
neocon agenda. They were wrong about Iraq’s WMD stockpiles, about Saddam
Hussein’s links to al-Qaeda, and about how the U.S. military conquest of Iraq
would terrify other U.S. adversaries—like Iran, Venezuela, Syria and Lebanon—into retreat.
But perhaps the most costly neocon error was the mismanagement of the Iraq
occupation.
Originally, Gen. Jay Garner was put in charge. When he arrived in Iraq after the
invasion, he hoped the occupation could be over in 90 days. His plan was to find
and eliminate any weapons of mass destruction, get the Iraqi government working
again, hold a quick election to select new Iraqi leaders, and leave.
Soon, however, Garner—with little staff and less money—found himself in an
uphill bureaucratic battle with powerful neocons at the Pentagon. Toward the end
of April 2003, he was fired.
In his place came the new head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Jerry
Bremer, who made common cause with Doug Feith, the Pentagon’s Undersecretary for
Policy. The pair made key decisions that effectively destroyed the Iraqi
bureaucracy and military.
Bremer and Feith put more than 500,000 Iraqis on the streets in one week,
including disgruntled soldiers who kept their guns and seasoned bureaucrats who
knew how to build an organization. These people would become the backbone of an
insurgency that would kill more than 4,300 American soldiers.
The violent disorder in Iraq also created fertile ground for al-Qaeda extremists
to put down roots. Though Islamists had been kept in check by Saddam Hussein,
they flourished for a time as the neocons organized a long-term U.S. occupation
of Iraq. Extremist violence was soon ripping the country apart.
Neocon Crisis
The Iraq War disaster and the growing American public awareness of the neocons’
central role in the catastrophe created a new crisis for the neocons. But they
still had an important card to play—their dominance of the opinion centers of
Washington.
Much as the neocons rewrote the closing narrative of the Cold War—by whiting
out Reagan’s second-term collaboration with Gorbachev—the neocons claimed that
their courageous support for George W. Bush’s Iraq troop "surge" in early 2007
brought the violence under control and "won" the war.
Over the past two years, this story of the "successful surge" has essentially
rehabilitated the neocons. Yet the surge was only one of many components that
contributed to the lessening of the Iraqi bloodshed, and the surge was possibly
one of the least significant.
In 2006, before the surge began, Sunni tribal leaders had turned against the
excessive violence of al-Qaeda’s Iraq faction under the leadership of Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi. The U.S. military also had begun paying the Sunni leaders to turn
their guns on al-Qaeda extremists, a process that became known as the Sunni
Awakening.
In June 2006, Zarqawi’s location was betrayed and he was killed by a U.S.
airstrike.
The sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite also began burning out as the
two groups, which had once lived side by side in peace, retreated to their own
enclaves, separated by concrete walls running through Iraqi cities. With the
targets of sectarian violence harder to reach, the killing declined.
There were other important factors unrelated to the surge, like the decision of
the anti-American Shi’a leader Muqtada al-Sadr to order his militias to
demobilize. By 2008, it also became apparent to Iraqis that their government
would succeed in forcing the Bush administration to accept a timetable for U.S.
military withdrawal, thus calming down those insurgents motivated by nationalism
and hatred of foreigners.
Yet in the neocon domain of Washington, the decline in Iraqi violence was simply
explained as the "surge worked." Despite the horrendous loss of life and the
war’s cost of some $900 billion, the neocons were largely forgiven and kept
their prized spots on the talk shows and op-ed pages.
Manichean World View
Another signature characteristic of the neocons is that they far better
understand how to shape perceptions in Washington than to deal with realities in
other countries. Indeed, despite their confidence in expounding about foreign
policy, they really don’t know much about specific countries or regions.
After all, such detailed knowledge would disrupt their easy prescription of more
war, since anyone who truly knows a country and its people would not so casually
advocate violence or arrogantly dictate its domestic policies.
But what the neocons do know is what sells in Washington. So, they have
consistently professed their love of "democracy" and put it at the center of
what they do.
In my view, all the neocon hoopla about spreading freedom is a public relations
device to put a patina of democratic nobility on right-wing, often repressive
governments that the neocons view as desirable allies.
Too many times in the 1980s, I saw neocons rush to embrace governments that may
have shown some democratic promise, but still had deep-seated human right
problems.
However, by making "democracy" at least a rhetorical goal, the neocons were
picking up on a favorite theme of Ronald Reagan, who prescribed "democracy" as a
necessary cure for leftist dictatorships even as he made excuses for brutal
right-wing regimes in countries such as Argentina and Guatemala.
Though Reagan deserves credit for recognizing the promise of Gorbachev’s
initiatives to resolve the Cold War, Reagan viewed the Third World with a
Manichean eye, seeing too much "good versus evil" and overlooking the
complexities of any specific country, as the neocons did.
One of the most tragic examples of Reagan’s distorted Third World vision was El
Salvador.
In the early 1980s, tens of thousands of Salvadorans—including Catholic
Archbishop Oscar Romero, four American churchwomen and six civilian leaders of
the political opposition—were butchered, but Reagan and the neocons insisted
on viewing the violence through a Cold War lens. They deflected guilt away from
the right-wing regime in order to justify increasing U.S. military aid.
After a series of elections put a Christian Democrat at the head of the
government—even as the military continued its brutal counterinsurgency
practices in the field—El Salvador faded as an issue of controversy in U.S.
political circles. (The civil war was resolved only after the Reagan
administration ended and more pragmatic leaders, including Sen. Christopher
Dodd, D-Connecticut, and Salvadoran exile Leonel Gomez, stepped forward with new
approaches.)
The Contra War
By the mid-1980s, El Salvador had been replaced at the top of the neocons’
Central American agenda by Nicaragua, which emerged as a test of Jeane
Kirkpatrick’s theory that a Soviet client state could only be dislodged by force—that reform was impossible.
In December of 1985, I found myself, a liberal, supporting the contras in their
war with Nicaragua’s leftist government. In this heresy, I had been joined by
three other Democrats: Bob Leiken, the late Penn Kemble, and Bernie Aronson.
One night we gathered at Kemble’s house to receive a visit from Elliott Abrams,
the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, who was accompanied by
Robert Kagan, Abrams’s personal assistant, and a State Department officer.
Abrams had been in his job for only three months, but he had been well briefed
on who the Sandinistas were and what they had done.
He spent some time describing the contents of a weapons-bearing truck that had
been blown up in Honduras, transiting from Nicaragua to its destination, a
leftist rebel camp in El Salvador. He knew the contents, and the backgrounds of
the people who had been driving it. He knew a lot about the Sandinistas.
But Abrams knew next to nothing about the contras, especially the rifts between
the civilian and military leadership.
When Abrams and Kagan finally left, the four of us sat stunned, speaking not a
word. Although each of us had our neocon friends, we were not ourselves
neocons. To us, it was important who the contras were and what they were
fighting for.
With this unwillingness to master details about the excessive violence and
troubling corruption within the contra movement, the Reagan administration’s
neocons could not fashion a sensible policy that would inspire widespread
support inside Nicaragua.
The neocons could not understand the dreams for Nicaragua of the two moderate
leaders—Arturo Cruz and Alfonso Robelo—whom they had convinced to join the
contras. Each battle that Cruz and Robelo had with the old contra leadership
started out on a very idealistic plane and wound up as a fight for jobs and
money.
Cruz and his associates had big ideas about middle-class recruitment, but in the
end his aides only struggled for a stipend for Cruz and for someone to fill the
human rights slot in the contra leadership. Finally, after 2 ˝ years of futility
trying to secure reforms, Cruz resigned for good.
That following Monday, Robert Kagan went to the morning State Department staff
meeting with a paper bag on his head, to announce to his colleagues that he was
a dunce for supporting Cruz for so long. In my view, he should have brought
dunce caps for his colleagues who had resisted Cruz’s initiatives.
Kagan knew very well that Cruz had finally resigned because of a message brought
to him by someone from Elliot Abrams’s office. Cruz was told that he would not
be allowed to challenge Enrique Bermudez, the notoriously corrupt head of the
contra army, over the issue of civilian control of the contra military forces.
In tearing up a contra unity document that had accepted civilian control,
Bermudez had said, "I have signed hundreds of agreements and have never complied
with any of them."
Cruz was told he could not hold Bermudez accountable for what Cruz had been
hired and rehired by the Reagan administration to do—lead. After Cruz
resigned, the administration never won another major vote on aid to the contras.
Nicaragua II
By July 1987, the Nicaraguan conflict was in a standoff, both in the field and
in Washington where Reagan and his team wanted to overthrow the Sandinistas and
the Democrats in Congress did not.
At that point, House Speaker Jim Wright agreed to a joint statement with Reagan
regarding a peace plan for Nicaragua. Its formula was simple: in exchange for
the Sandinistas allowing free elections there would be no more contra aid and
the contras would be demobilized.
This plan was issued on a Monday; by Friday night it was one of two peace plans
being considered by five Central American Presidents. At the end of Saturday
night, there was tentative agreement on the plan by Costa Rica’s Oscar Arias,
which was essentially the same as the Wright-Reagan plan: elections in exchange
for an end to the contras.
Hesitation by Honduras, which had become the major staging base for contra
military operations, was overcome by the indirect intervention of Wright and the
plan became binding on all Central Americans by Sunday morning.
The Arias Accords were not self-executing, however. Arias, Wright and other
members of the Democratic leadership of the House had to intervene forcefully
with the Sandinistas and occasionally with the opposition.
Reagan also balked. Even as he opened up to Gorbachev on the world stage, he
continued to empower the neocon hardliners on Central America. Reagan refused to
let Secretary of State George Shultz send his negotiator to strengthen
provisions of the Arias Accords.
Instead, Reagan backed Abrams in his hostility to the Arias plan. Reagan and
Abrams staked everything on a Feb. 3, 1988, vote on providing more aid to the
contras, which they lost 219-212.
By failing to show flexibility, Reagan didn’t share in the success in Nicaragua
that was achieved with the Arias Accords by opening up the political system. In
February 1990, abiding by the accords, the Sandinistas held an election and lost
55 percent to 41 percent. They didn’t regain power until 2007.
Mozambique
Though the neocons and other hardliners dominated Reagan’s policies toward most
Third World hot spots—from Central America to Africa to Afghanistan—there
was one major exception, Mozambique, where Reagan showed flexibility and it
worked.
Mozambique was a former Portuguese colony that won its independence late and had
to fight for it. In the 1970s, Mozambique embraced Marxism-Leninism as the
ruling ideology of its one party, the Frelimo, and concluded a treaty of
friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union.
However, the Reagan administration did not embrace the rebels fighting the
Frelimo. In fact, the administration concluded that the Mozambican rebels were a
proxy force of South Africa’s apartheid regime and guilty of horrific human
rights violations.
Under the policy of Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester
Crocker, the Reagan administration called for "constructive engagement" with
Mozambique and offered the government military aid and special assistance to its
railroads. However, Congress said no to these initiatives and prohibited seven
different kinds of aid.
I was hired by the Mozambique government in 1987 to lobby for the removal of
these restrictions. On the theory that Mozambique was ready to abandon the
Soviet model and embrace multi-party elections and a free-market economy, I was
successful in the first three months in winning the removal of three of the
seven restrictions.
Was I telling the truth or were the right-wingers right?
Everything I saw and every person I talked to convinced me there was no
deception. But the final event that cinched my belief in the Mozambicans was a
conversation I had with President Chissano in May 1988.
He related a recent conversation with an Eastern European president, who told
him that although we say we are for the people, those who do well under our
system are the Party and its apparatchiki. Where the people do well and where
the governments have succeeded is Western Europe. Those are the countries we
must now emulate.
Today, Mozambique is on the path of peace, yearly economic growth, and a
maturing citizenry. Reagan showed good sense on Mozambique; to my knowledge no
neocon played a role in moving Mozambique toward the West.
I cite these three examples—El Salvador, Nicaragua and Mozambique—because I
was involved in each of them and each showed the folly of following the
Manichean view of two sides—one good and one bad.
The Nicaraguan war—and the bloody struggle in nearby El Salvador—were
finally resolved when more flexible individuals, who did not see the situations
in blacks and whites, took control of the policy and recognized how to put
together a package that gave peace a chance.
I thus fear the real-life consequences when the neocons declare how they will
bring "democracy" to the Third World by force of arms if necessary. They respect
neither the role of history nor the power of culture in determining how a
country will respond to democratic initiatives.
Neocons—absorbed by their ideological certitude—don’t know when to back off.
Country specialists often do.
Neo-Cons on Afghanistan
Despite the neocons’ long history of bloody and costly miscalculations, they are
back at center stage again, influencing the new Obama administration and setting
the parameters for Washington’s debate about the war in Afghanistan.
Again, highflying rhetoric at the conceptual level is where the neocons are most
comfortable. Read the words of Robert Kagan, now an influential columnist, and
a Washington Post editorial (both published in March 2009) as they celebrated
President Obama’s initial decision to pursue a counterinsurgency strategy in
Afghanistan.
As Kagan wrote: "An effective counter terrorism approach requires an effective
counterinsurgency strategy aimed … at strengthening Afghan civil society
and governing structures, providing the necessary security to the population so
that it can resist pressures from the Taliban, and significantly increasing the
much-derided ‘nation-building’ element of the strategy.
"The United States, he [Obama] argues, has to help the Afghan people fulfill
‘the promise of a better future,’ by rooting out government corruption, helping
the elected government provide basic services, fighting the narcotics trade,
and, in general, advancing ‘security, opportunity, and justice.’ This is the
opposite of a ‘minimal’ approach." [Robert Kagan, "Obama’s Gutsy Decision on
Afghanistan" The Washington Post, March 27, 2009. Emphasis added.]
The next day, Kagan’s views were echoed in a Washington Post editorial, which
instructed its readers that:
"The lesson is that only a strategy that aims at protecting and winning over the
populations where the enemy operates, and at strengthening the armies,
judiciaries, and police and political institutions of Afghanistan, can reverse
the momentum of the war and, eventually, allow a safe and honorable exit for
U.S. and NATO troops." [Editorial "The Price of Realism," Washington Post,
March 28, 2009. Emphasis added.]
If Kagan and the Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt cared about details or
even bothered to read the reporting in The Washington Post, they would know that
beneath the terms "governing structures" (Kagan) and "political institutions"
(Hiatt), at least outside Kabul, there is nothing.
The fundamental problem with Obama’s Afghan counterinsurgency strategy is the
lack of qualified government officials and a functioning Afghan government.
Afghanistan has been without a qualified cadre of bureaucrats since the
communist government collapsed in 1992.
While President Hamid Karzai’s administration is rightly denounced for
corruption, it also deserves condemnation for ignoring the tedious work of
building a skilled cadre of government workers.
And it makes little sense for a beefed-up U.S. military to occupy unsecured
areas and provide government services when Afghanistan lacks the civil affairs
personnel to take over those jobs.
This past summer, after 4,500 U.S. Marines routed Taliban forces from parts of
Helmand Province, U.S. officials were struck by the shortage of trained Afghan
troops to augment the force and by the unwillingness of Afghan officials to
provide government services in a relatively remote and dangerous area.
Rather than a second wave of Afghan bureaucrats providing civilian services, the
Marines were followed by a small international "stabilization team."
As Post correspondent Pamela Constable reported, U.S. and British officials said
"several factors, including a lack of qualified and educated workers in the
remote province, a shortage of housing and office facilities for professionals
from larger cities like Kandahar or Kabul, and a series of tensions and
rivalries among various Afghan agencies, were impeding the kind of follow-up
needed to convince residents that the Afghan government is credible, committed
and a better alternative than the Taliban …
"‘What we need is to put visible Afghan government in these areas,’ said John
Weston, a U.S. civilian aide in Helmand who also had worked in Iraq. … Without a
solid Afghan presence, he added, 'we will have a lot of well-meaning Americans
doing good things, but it will be a trap.’" [Washington Post, July 18, 2009]
In Afghanistan, the key issue is not specific U.S. troop levels, but the need to
build up a government infrastructure, a competent Afghan military, and an
effective army of government bureaucrats.
On Oct. 22, another intrepid Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran found little
progress on the problem that Constable identified.
He wrote: "Skeptics of [Gen. Stanley] McChrystal's [counterinsurgency] strategy
worry that the Afghan government will not move with haste to take advantage of
security improvements created by the United States. Despite repeated requests,
the government in Kabul has not sent officials to Nawa to help on issues that
matter most to local people: education, health, agriculture and rural
development. …
"For now, the Marines are focused on another big risk to progress here—the
lack of basic services. They are working with diplomats and U.N. officials in
Kabul to prod key ministries to set up offices in Nawa."
Still, Robert Kagan and his neocon allies in charge of the Post’s editorial
pages gave full support for a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan that the
newspaper’s own reporters revealed is possibly fatally flawed because of the
dearth of qualified civilian experts who can take on the job of providing basic
services at the local level.
Why, at long last, should we pay any attention to what the neocons have to say?
They miss the essence of things every time.
Bruce P. Cameron has served as a Washington lobbyist for various governments
over the past several decades, including Nicaragua, Mozambique, Portugal and
East Timor. He is the author of My
Life in the Time of the Contras.
The HyperTexts