Something About The End Of The War In Iraq

NeoCons are nervous for some reason

The war is kind of coming to a grinding halt. A million Americans fought there. Early Thursday morning Progressive Caucus co-chair Keith Ellison was tweeting about how tragic and pointless it was. His sane perspective, however, isn't the only perspective. There's a far less sane one, which, alas, is a more dominant one.


I guess that's called "blooding." The Pentagon needs a good blooding every now and then, they think-- or they get rusty. A few days ago, in a post about the new rise of fascism in Europe, I suggested everyone read an old Corey Robin paper, Remembrance of Empires Past: 9/11 and the End of the Cold War. We looked at how dissatisfied neo-Cons were with the pointlessness of the glorification of "free" market consumerism. "[Irving] Kristol confessed to a deep yearning for an American empire: 'What’s the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role? It’s unheard of in human history. The most powerful nation always had an imperial role.' But, he continued, previous empires were not 'capitalist democracies with a strong emphasis on economic growth and economic prosperity.' Because of its commitment to the free market, the United States lacked the fortitude and vision to wield imperial power." And then along came 9/12.

Neo-cons could barely contain their glee. As Robin points out, "Not only does the idea of a global free market fit uneasily with the coercive exercise of imperial power, but it also fails to provide the home population of that empire with a compelling reason for participating either in its defense or in the reproduction of its civic life. Perhaps for that reason, the lead item of American intellectual complaint throughout the 1990s has been that the United States is insufficiently civic-minded or martial, that its leaders and citizens are too distracted by glittery prosperity and showy affluence to take care of its inherited institutions, common concerns, and world-wide defense." The Cheney wing of the GOP was about to get its prayers answered-- and it's why where Ellison saw pointlessness, Liz Cheney, her deranged father and other right-wing freaks are grousing-- if not screeching-- that we should not be leaving. And they still want to invade Iran.

For many elites and intellectuals, the attacks of September 11 and the war on terrorism are supposed to have resolved these tensions. September 11, we are told, shocked America out of its complacency, forcing its citizens to look beyond the borders of the nation, to understand at last the very real dangers that confront a world power. It has reminded men and women of the goods of civic life and of the value of the state, putting an end to that perilous fantasy of creating a public world out of private acts of self-interested exchange. It has restored to America’s woozy civic culture a sense of depth and seriousness, of things “larger than ourselves.” Most critical of all, it has given the United States a coherent national purpose and focus for imperial rule. The dispensation emerging from 9/11 envisions not a discrete war but a permanent world order, a Pax Americana stretching indefinitely, perhaps permanently, into the future. This new order will take many years to create, but they will be years profitably spent in the pursuit of a higher calling, of a vision more profound and dear than the Clinton Administration’s pallid quest for an “enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.”

...Voicing what seems to be a widespread sentiment among America’s ruling elites, journalists and intellectuals have welcomed 9/11 as an occasion for America’s cultural, political, and international renewal after a decade of wandering uncertainty and moral decline. The fires of the World Trade Center were still burning and bodies had scarcely been recovered when Frank Rich announced in the New York Times that “this week’s nightmare, it’s now clear, has awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decade long dream.” Writing from the opposite end of the political spectrum, David Brooks was buoyed by the fact that “violence has come calling” and that “it is no longer possible to live so comfortably in one’s own private paradise” as Americans had throughout the Clinton years. And while the specific source of Christopher Hitchens’ elation may have been peculiarly his own, his self-declared schadenfreude was not: “I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out to be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy – theocratic barbarism – in plain view... I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.”

Future historians, I suspect, will look back upon these and other similar reactions to September 11 with some bewilderment. Not just because so many cultural spokespeople have opened their arms to the political fallout from mass death. More significant is that September 11 has given pundits and politicians an opportunity to air their apparently long-brewing contempt for the very peace and prosperity that preceded it. On September 12, one might have expected expressions of sorrow, perhaps bittersweet, over the bursting of bubbles-- economic, cultural, and political. But instead, many liberals and conservatives saw 9/11 as a thunderous moral judgment upon-- and necessary corrective to-- the frivolity and emptiness of the 1990s. We would have to reach back almost a century-- to the opening days of the First World War, when the “marsh gas of boredom and vacuity” enveloping another free-trading, globalizing fin de siècle exploded in an orgy of welcome destruction-- to find a remotely exact parallel to our present moment.

To understand this spirit of quiet rejoice, we must return to the waning days of the Cold War, those years between the late 1980s and early 1990s when American elites first realized that the United States could no longer define its national mission in terms of the Soviet menace. While the end of the Cold War unleashed a wave of triumphalism in the United States and Western Europe, it provoked among elites an anxious uncertainty about US foreign policy. With the defeat of communism, many asked, how should the United States define its role in the world? Where and when should it intervene in foreign conflicts? How big a military should it field? Underlying these arguments was a deep unease about American power, both its size and its purpose. The United States seemed to be suffering from a surfeit of power, which made it difficult for elites to formulate any coherent principles to govern its use. Against-- and for-- what was the United States defending itself, now that communism was dead? As Richard Cheney, the first President Bush’s Secretary of Defense, acknowledged in his February 1992 testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, “We’ve gained so much strategic depth that the threats to our security, now relatively distant, are harder to define.” Almost a decade later, the United States would still seem, to its leaders, a floundering giant. As Condoleezza Rice noted during the 2000 presidential campaign, “The United Sates has found it exceedingly difficult to define its ‘national interest’ in the absence of Soviet power.” So uncertain about the national interest did political elites become that a top Clinton defense aide-- and subsequent dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School-- would eventually throw up his hands in defeat, declaring that the national interest was whatever “citizens, after proper deliberation, say it is”-- an astonishing abdication by a national leader, a statement that would have been simply unthinkable during the Cold War reign of the Wise Men.

...Though conservatives are often reputed to favor wealth and prosperity, law and order, stability and routine-- all the comforts of bourgeois life-- the fact is that most of Clinton’s conservative foreign policy critics hated him precisely for his fundamentalist commitment to these very virtues. The free-market obsessions of the Clinton Administration betrayed an unwillingness to embrace the murky world of power and violent conflict, of tragedy and rupture. His foreign policy was not just unrealistic; it was insufficiently dark and brooding. “The striking thing about the 1990s zeitgeist,” complained Brooks, “was the presumption of harmony. The era was shaped by the idea that there were no fundamental conflicts anymore.” Conservatives thrive on a world filled with mysterious evil and unfathomable hatreds, where good is always on the defensive and time is a precious commodity in the cosmic race against corruption and decline. Coping with such a world requires pagan courage and an almost barbaric virtú, qualities conservatives embrace over the more prosaic goods of money, peace, and prosperity. It is no accident that Paul Wolfowitz, the darkest of these dark princes of pessimism, was a student of Allan Bloom (in fact, Wolfowitz makes a cameo appearance in Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s novel about Bloom), for Bloom-- like many other influential neoconservatives-- was a follower of the political theorist Leo Strauss, whose quiet odes to classical virtue and ordered harmony merely veiled his subterranean, Nietzschean vision of torturous conflict and violent struggle.

But there was another reason for the neocons’ dissatisfaction with Clinton’s foreign policy. Many of them found it insufficiently visionary and consistent. Clinton, they claimed, was reactive and ad hoc rather than proactive and forceful. Despite Clinton’s far-flung rhetoric, conservatives dismissed him and his advisers as foreign policy lightweights, unwilling to imagine a world where the United States shaped rather than responded to events. Breaking again with the usual stereotype of conservatives as non-ideological muddlers, figures like Wolfowitz, Libby, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, the father-son teams of the Kagan and Kristol families, called for a more ideologically coherent, morally grounded, martial projection of US power, where the “benign hegemony” of American might would spread “the zone of democracy” rather than just extend the range of the free market. They wanted a foreign policy that was, in the words of praise that Robert Kagan recently used to describe Senator Joseph Lieberman, “idealistic but not naïve, ready and willing to use force and committed to a strong military, but also committed to using American power to spread democracy and do some good in the world.” As early as the first Bush Administration, these neocons were insisting that the United States ought, in Cheney’s words, “to shape the future, to determine the outcome of history,” or, as the Kagans would later put it, “to intervene decisively in every critical region” of the world, “whether or not a visible threat exists there.” They criticized those Republicans, in Robert Kagan’s words, who “during the dumb decade of the 1990s” suffered from a “hostility to ‘nation-building,’ the aversion to ‘international social work’ and the narrow belief that ‘superpowers don’t do windows’.” What these conservatives longed for, in other words, was an America that was genuinely imperial-- not just because they believed it would make the United States safer or richer, and not just because they thought it would make the world better, but because they wanted to see the United States make the world. Conservatives sought to literally create history-- to commit, in other words, the very sins that they have long accused Marxists and other ideologues of committing: hubris, worship of state power, and utopian aspiration.

A stolen election-- courtesy of a candidate's brother well-placed in Florida-- and a rouge actor on the international stage directing some fanatics with boxcutters and the NeoCons were able to implement and celebrate the program they yearned for and Keith Ellison was morning early in the morning on Twitter. NeoCon foreign policy mavens believed that with 9/11, they had "struck a vast vein of political gold", and they made no bones about their intention to mine its entire inventory. “It’s taken us 13 years to get here, but we’ve arrived,” declared Frank Gaffney. They're not terribly thrilled with the current crop of Republican candidates, perhaps why the unsavory and untrustworthy Gingrich promised to appoint Bolton Secretary of State. These people are far from finished.