John Rapley - FOREIGN FOCUS THE CONSERVATIVE commentator Patrick Buchanan will shortly release a book sharply critical of the neoconservatives he says have subverted the US government. Mr. Buchanan is hardly the first to argue that a dogmatic clique has captured the administration, at least its foreign-policy arm. But with the criticism, so strong on the left, now also coming from the right, the so-called neocons are becoming ever more isolated.
They are said to include Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and some of the civilians they have put in place atop the Pentagon. Long-time associates, they share what in academic circles is called an idealist view of international affairs. That is to say, rather than let U.S. foreign policy be guided by hard-headed realism, they believe it should submit to the ideals animating U.S. life.
PREOCCUPATION WITH MIDDLE EAST
The neocons around President George W. Bush share a particular preoccupation with the Middle East. There, they believe that American power should be used to remake the region, toppling dictators and establishing democracies. Apparently convinced that the U.S.'s chief ally in the Persian Gulf Saudi Arabia is unstable, unreliable and embarrassing, they set out to liberate Iraq in the name of democracy.
Therefore, whereas the American left has condemned the Iraq war for its cynicism going after oil and using American soldiers to settle the Bush family's personal scores the American right is levelling precisely the opposite criticism. The war, says people like Mr. Buchanan, was guided by woolly idealism. The U.S. has no business trying to democratise other nations. As long as they do not threaten U.S. interests, they should be left alone. That, says Buchanan, is theconservative approach.
THROUGH THE BARREL OF A GUN
There is little sign that Americans today want to export democracy through the barrel of a gun. So it is said that the neocons had to concoct a fiction that Americans would swallow. Hence, the claim that Saddam's weapons made him an imminent threat. As fiction goes, it was as sophisticated as an airport paperback.
It is in this exaggeration of the Iraqi threat that some critics detect the true agenda of the neocons. Shadia Drury, a Canadian philosopher, points out that many of the neocons were, in one way or another, students of Leo Strauss. Drury happens to have devoted much of her career to studying Leo Strauss, an otherwise obscure American philosopher. Strauss' thesis was that truth is always so dysfunctional to human existence that only an enlightened few can be let in on its secrets. So the great minds of history always bury their messages in their texts. Most readers of their work see only a surface meaning. But an elect few will penetrate the veil, see the true meaning, and pass it on.
Were it not for the ascent of the neocons, Straussians might have remained what they were before, an annoying little group of travellers at philosophy conventions who dismissed what everyone else said as missing the point. But now, led by Drury, the critics are saying the neocons deliberately fed the U.S. public lies, believing that they had a right to hide the true meaning of U.S. actions from a nation too simple-minded to understand it.
A CONSPIRACY?
And what might that true meaning be? Here is where lovers of conspiracy theories have a field day. Strauss happened to be Jewish. So too are many of the neocons (Drury, incidentally, is an Arab). Ideologically, they are close to the Likud Party which currently governs Israel. It is said that what the neocons really want to do is align U.S. policy with the interests of this government.
This is not as conspiratorial as it sounds. For decades now, the U.S. foreign policy establishment has seen its Middle Eastern interests closely tied to those of Israel. It has also been very uneasy with the Arab allies it has, and some policy-makers fear being on the wrong side of history if and when democratic revolutions sweep the Middle East.
Nonetheless, the almost obsessive and illogical focus on Iraq by the neocons remains unsettling. And with even moderate voices talking of the Likudniks in the White House, it is not surprising that American Jews most of whom dislike the neocons complain that with friends like these, they don't need enemies.
John Rapley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
