I had wanted to write about this over the weekend, but then it became clear that I was using my weekend to do things--such as fly to Vancouver--that don't really involve blogging, so now it's Monday and the reference point is a bit old, but here we go.
I think Ross is right and Henry Farrell wrong about the best way to interpret the Kristol/Kagan argument for a "Neo-Reaganite" foreign policy -- the argument about this helping the Republican Party is probably offered in a pundit's fallacy spirit. The dark truth is probably closer to what Bykofsky expressed, something like national greatness conservatism icon Teddy Roosevelt's sense that war was, as such, a good thing because of its influence on the national character. Strains of this kind of thinking were definitely discernable post-9/11 on both the right and in the more hawkish precincts of the left -- a kind of genuine enthusiasm for violence, the sense that war is a force that gives us meaning, and that it's only by having giant disasters occur that our true national spirit is revealed.
If you read the Kristol essay, you'll see that what Matt's saying is indeed true. But here's what Henry wrote:
First – the use of the Iraq war and the spread of democracy by force by a particularly unscrupulous crowd of conservative public intellectuals to, as they hoped, establish Republican hegemony. This was never a secret – read Kristol and Kagan’s 1996 Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy for the blueprint – an argument in which the good of the oppressed of the world and the good of the USA inevitably redound to the dominance of the Republican party.
This is, it seems to me, is also self-evidently true. It just happens to be the case that the blueprint was flawed. There's a twisted feedback loop at play here, and it seems to have its origins in the kernel of thinking that Matt's rightly lambasting. But as time has gone on, the establishment of Republican dominance became the other magnifying force in this dynamic. Kristol isn't really all that shy about the fact that he wants to see more war in the world, but that's not what makes him dangerous. What makes him dangerous is that he understood quickly that the way to do this was within the Republican party and that he became extremely influential within their ranks.
The axiom was, "to be a great nation, we must be at war all the time." And so the thinking, at least among that segment of neo-conservative powerbrokers, became "to be at war all the time, we must elevate the Republican party--or hawkish politicians more generally--into a position of fairly permanent dominance, and to do that we must not only argue in favor of every opportunity to go to war, but in favor of just about every other Republican policy on the agenda. And then we will be a great nation." This, of course, resulted in famously muddled thinking on just about every issue of the day, and at some point it became unclear--perhaps even to Kristol himself--where loyalties should be placed and what the whole project was really all about to begin with.
Perhaps it's true, based upon this picture of things, that Kristol supported (and continues to support) the Iraq war, even to the detriment of the GOP, because this all started as a grander war project. But first a couple of things. One, it's pretty apparent that this war has not only damaged the Republican party, but has also damaged the American war machine itself, which makes it a little bit less clear what the Iraq gambit tells us about Kristol himself--other than that he's a short-sighted man with fundamentally incoherent ideas.
What's more important, though, is that--whatever you say about Kristol's core motives--his tactics have always been perfectly clear and perfectly ugly. Here is a man--an academician, and son of a one-time socialist--who has argued loudly against civil liberties, abortion, social security and on and on as a means to completely unrelated ends. It's a bit silly, given this, to quibble about the spinning wheels in Kristol's mind when what's completely evident is that all of the terrible things that have emerged from conservative leadership in this country are connected to the man's broader movement and that movement's underlying lust for war.
I think it's probably safe to say--on the issue of war and Republicanism--that it was never a question of one vs. the other for Kristol. More accurately, it became for him a strong, even psychotic, obsession with both interwoven ideas, and even if we could definitively say whether he valued one a tiny bit more than the other, at the end of the day I'm not really sure why that matters. Anyhow, for more on this, I recommend a BBC documentary called The Power of Nightmares. Give it a looksee.
You are absolutely correct about the need for constant war, but not in order to establish a great nation so much as it being a necessary condition for the establishment of that Leo Staussian (The acknowledged mentor of the NEOCON movement and the Professor under whom Krystal studied) idea of the perfect society in which the atheistic cabal of philosophers gets to rule while all the rest, including the figurehead from one of the best of families (Can you think GWB?)are ruled. See http://www.swans.com/library/art11/mdolin10.html.
Posted by: tbaum | August 13, 2007 at 07:10 PM