A brief Twitter exchange yesterday got me to thinking about one of the favorite former topics here in the discourse-o-sphere: neocons. If you're over 40 50 you remember them: the cabal of foreign policy intellectuals who were behind the invasion of Iraq and had visions of an American imperium that stretched across the entire Middle East. Their names were little known to average folks, but within the national security community they produced many of the ideas that led to the Iraq War.
But time passes and memory fades. Who were these men? There was Doug Feith, “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth,” according to General Tommy Franks. There was his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, who insisted that General Eric Shinseki was "wildly off the mark" when he said it would take several hundred thousand soldiers to keep peace in postwar Iraq. On the contrary, he told Congress, it would be a piece of cake:
In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq.
He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that "stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible," but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it.
"I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction," Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.
Who else? There was Paul Bremer, who was appointed czar of Iraq after the invasion and promptly disbanded the Iraqi army, got rid of every Baathist he could find, and laid the groundwork for the uprisings that were to come.
And there were the old talkers, people like Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, who didn't play much of a role in the Bush administration but spoke and wrote a lot about neoconservative ideas.
Whatever happened to these guys? Well, Feith does a bit of speechifiying these days, but not much else. Wolfowitz was appointed president of the World Bank a couple of years after the war started but was forced to resign before the Bush administration even ended.
Paul Bremer paints and serves on a board or two. Perle doesn't do much of anything. Abrams wrote a book and then spent a couple of years in the State Department under Donald Trump.
In other words, not to put too fine a point on it, all of these folks dropped off the face of the earth after the Bush administration ended. Their influence is now about zero.
But that's not really what interests me. Since we're reminiscing about the Iraq War this week, I began thinking about the neocons and reevaluating how much influence they ever had. They certainly influenced the Reagan administration, but that was a couple of decades in the past when George W. Bush came to office.
With the benefit of hindsight, my conclusion is that they had almost no influence at all on the Iraq War. The architects of the war were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Bush, none of whom were neocons or anything close to it. They were just ordinary Republican hawks. They didn't care about democracy promotion or an imperial America or any of that. They just wanted to kick Saddam Hussein's butt and take his oil.
For them, the neocons were handy partners—true believers who could help promote a war with Iraq—but that was about it. Cheney was happy to have their help with that, but otherwise they didn't influence his thinking one whit.
So they never got what they wanted. Of course, Cheney didn't get what he wanted either: a quick demolition of Iraq followed by an auction of its oil to the highest (American) bidders. But unlike the neocons, who failed because they were deceived by Cheney and Bush, Cheney failed because events on the ground exploded in his face. Both the neocons and the hawks were stupid, but they were stupid in different ways.
The neocons offered a handy public face to attract the hatred of anti-war activists, but they never had anywhere near the influence we thought they did. They weren't quite useful idiots, but they were in the ballpark.
I don't think that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld went into Iraq with the goal of kicking butt and getting the oil. Woodward's book at the time seemed to indicate that especially Bush were interested in sparking a sort of successful Arab Spring, which by draining the swamp that was the Middle East of dictatorial regimes which were seen as prompting Islamic Fundamentalism, would undercut Islamic Extremism and win the war on terror. Recall that at the time, democracy was seen as on the march, with the "domino theory in reverse" of what happened in the former Warsaw Pact clear in peoples' heads.
Bush may have thought that but if you think Cheney gave a Rat’s ass about democracy in the Middle East I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.
The Neocons may have been useful idiots, Bush absolutely was one.
Sounds right to me. The "getting the oil" is always an annoying and cynical accusation. It is one of those: find the worst motive you can think of, and say that is what drives your political opponents. BTW, Trump and the MAGA world have taken this thinking to a new level.
Kevin omitted Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of the Washington Post, who endlessly helped Bush/Wolfowitz/Cheney et al cheerlead America in the wrong war, against the wrong dictator, and lied consistently about it in the editorial pages about the causes, costs, results while the real reporters were reporting it from the get-go as a disaster on the FRONT PAGE of his paper.
Apparently, Fred was unable to shut down the truth, though doubtless he tried.
It remained for his heirs and assigns to managed that as the “both sides” America into thinking that #TFG gives a hoot about anyone except himself, and his own wallet, or that they care about anything except clicks. .
Hiatt is dead now, and as the mother a permanently disabled USMC vet (two tours in Fallujah, got blown up by an IED which didn’t even count as an injury b/c the brass deliberately tried to minimize the human costs) I hope he is rotting at the bottom level of hades.
Was it really a difference of vocabulary and bluntness? Is the difference you're indicating one really of style?
Because I'm sure stupid with philosophy and stupid with cowboy hats aren't different.
Hey! Don't forget, Paul Bremer wore combat boots too. That stood for... something.
I like to view the Iraq war as a mania ginned up when the stupidest people possible were allowed in positions of authority. Not knowing what their actual jobs were at DOD, State, etc, these goons embarked on a group project with all the enthusiasm of kids who didn't do the reading but craved attention.
They wanted to do something big! Because they didn't know how to do the small things that make civic life work.
And at the time, many of us actually thought these guys were "the stupidest". Little did we know... It makes me worry about what the next Republican walking atrocity will be. No doubt something even worse than the yelling yahoos of the House.
this is looking more like a documentary every day
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
I think there's a blurry line between the aims of the neocons and the aims of the hawks, and they were all pretty much in concert around the time of Iraq. "Democracy promotion" is at best to neocons a means to an end (American hegemony) and one they'll happily discard if it gets in their way. Really, both factions wanted America in control of the region for similar political AND economic reasons. They just dressed it up and justified it a little differently.
I think it goes too far to assume that neocons were fooled by Cheney and Rumsfeld. It's not like they were pushing for a massive post-war intervention; they thought it would be a simple lightweight war, too. I suppose they could have just been incredibly stupid about what it takes to establish democracy, but I think they just didn't care enough about the democracy part to give it much thought.
GWB himself seemed to enjoy the pro-democracy part of the neocon fantasy. But he was also listening to the hawks, and possibly motivated partly by his own relationship with his father, so, there's a lot to unpack there.
Apropos of nothing, is there any difference between "neoconservatism" and "neoliberalism"? It has seemed to me that the descriptions of both pretty much coincide, with "neocon" being used pejoratively by the Left and "neoliberal" used similarly by the right wing.
There are large differences, as well as some common ground. This is something that ChatGPT will never understand.
Some interesting points Kevin, but I would also suggest we can't discount that we defeated the neocons in that multi-year process, even though it never made any headlines. They're irrelevant because they lost.
This is smoke and mirrors established by the oil corporations to justify the invasion of Iraq. The whole point of the Iraq war was to keep Iraq oil off the world market. The embargo that existed was blamed for destroying the Iraq middle class and even a bipartisan congressional group argued to eliminate the embargo. The American oil corporations faced economic ruin if Iraq oil flooded the world market and they acted to prevent the embargo from being lifted. Everything else was smoke and mirrors to confuse the issue.
"The whole point of the Iraq war was to keep Iraq oil off the world market."
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Iraq's oil production doubled in the years following the invasion.
This was definitely not why we invaded Iraq, as someone who was involved in all of the discussion at the time, never heard this one.
Don't forget what DC really wanted: Iran in his stocking for Christmas.
You forgot Bill Kristol, who played the outside man in this con.
Amusingly, if you don't read him carefully, he sounds like a Democrat now. I think this is similar to SCOTUS - the authoritarian right is getting worse so fast that "the most conservative possible viable candidate" 5 years ago is a RINO today.
When you think of the people Dubya and Trump defeated - Al Gore and Hillary - the contrafactual universe sure looks a lot more appealing.
I've always suspected that the only reason for the Iraq invasion is that Bush Jr. wanted to do one better than Daddy, who had commanded the liberation of Kuwait and explicitly decided NOT to invade Iraq. What we can hope Junior learned from that was that Daddy was right.
He also wanted to avenge the attempt on his father's life, which many in the intelligence community believed was Saddam's revenge for the first Iraq war.
+1
There has been a ton of revisionism about GWB and his administration, but any history of the Iraq war that doesn't comment on Bush's very personal vendetta against Saddam is missing a big element of the overall motivation for the war and also GWB's personality.
Just finished Confronting Saddam Hussein by Melvin Leffler. While there is an amazing amount of redundancy in the book, it provides a pretty good history of how and why we went to war with Hussein and how monumentally we screwed up the aftermath.
Leffler suggests that Bush wasn't all in on war against Hussein or getting rid of him from day one. That his biggest concern was eliminating his WMD and if that meant regime change because Hussein wouldn't commit to inspections and getting rid of all of his WMD, so be it. Then he would reluctantly have to go to war.
What amazes me is that they did almost no planning for the aftermath until the very last minute and that Rumsfeld basically did everything he could to ruin the prospects for a more positive outcome after the war was over. He is a particular brand of arrogant evil.
It's risible to suggest that GWB was primarily concerned with ensuring that Iraq didn't have WMD. That's literally the cover story that his administration was constructing as the propaganda structure that would enable them to invade Iraq.
It's like writing a book explaining that Putin's one personal flaw is that he is overly concerned with the plight of ethnic Russians in Crimea and the horrible war crimes that EU/Ukrainian government has been visiting on them for decades, leading him to overcommit to a self-defeating military blunder. It mistakes the propaganda as fact, and the predictable disaster afterward as a noble tragedy instead of the original sin.
The one criticism I had before the start of the war was the foolish attempt to do two wars (and reconstruction) at the same time. Even if the yellow cake story was true, they had no good reason to rush immediately to Iraq. They got distracted by Iraq and took their foot off the pedal in Afghanistan. That is why we spent two decades there with nothing to show for it in the end.
That was all Rumsfeld.
From Richard Clarke, way back in 2004:
I read Clarke's book! 😀
Per Wikipedia, the original signatories of the Project for a New American Century were as follows:
Elliott Abrams, National Security Advisor (2005-2009)
Gary Bauer
William J. Bennett
John Ellis "Jeb" Bush, Governor of Florida (1999-2007)
Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States (2001-2009)
Eliot A. Cohen, Counselor of State Department (2007-2009)
Midge Decter
Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs (2001-2009)
Steve Forbes
Aaron Friedberg
Francis Fukuyama
Frank Gaffney
Fred C. Ikle
Donald Kagan
Zalmay Khalilzad, Ambassador to Afghanistan (2003-2005), Ambassador to Iraq (2005-2007), Ambassador to United Nations (2007-2009)
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Chief of Staff to Vice President (2001-2005)
Norman Podhoretz
J. Danforth Quayle
Peter W. Rodman
Stephen P. Rosen
Henry S. Rowen
Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense (2001-2006)
Vin Weber
George Weigel
Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense (2001-2005)
Some have since died, of course. Bauer, Bennett, Cohen, Dobriansky, Fukuyama, Podhoretz, Rosen and Weigel remain active in think tanks, academia and the media. Khalilzad oversaw the end of the Afghanistan War for Trump and Biden. How much "influence" they have, or had, can only be guessed at, but they certainly haven't "dropped off the face of the earth".
I don't know how much influence that little country between Lebanon and Egypt had but I expect the top politicians were rubbing their hands with glee over the US knocking off Saddam. They certainly have an influence in our domestic politics.
I have my own views, but Max Fisher’s Vox article is a thoughtful and well informed analysis which reflects my own, then and now.
"He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq" Per Wolfowitz.
This was the killer for me, as I knew about the constant conflict between the Shia and the Sunnis.
Watching General Powell speak to the UN was another deal-breaker for me. Anyone who could not see, quite graphically, that he did not want to be there and obviously, to me, was doing a job he was ordered to do and not something he was comfortable with.
I was never so angry at our country as us invading Iraq. Yes, Saddam was a jerk. but then, so was George W. Bush and his cabal. They deliberately muffled any investigation into the terrorists prior to 9-11. Graphic example was GWBush tossing paper notifying himself that terrorists were plotting, all done at the gate to his weed farm. We all knew there was a plot to hijack up to ten airliners. They covered it up.
I lost friends in 9-11 and will never forgive those who deliberately covered things up that led to 9-11.
Couple points for our host, about the framing. Neocon influence on the Iraq war specifically is a little narrow, imho. There are a lot of countries in the general region encompassed by Pakistan and Egypt east-to-west and Somalia and Ukraine south-to-north, which (I may be wrong) have been the major neocon focus since the USSR passed into history. But haven't I seen Victoria Nuland, for example, referred to as a neocon? Isn't she fairly influential, or is that just a slur? Second, even if neocon influence peaked with the Reagan administration, that takes us to 1988, so w's term began 13 years later, not 20 or so.
On the war specifically, I think maybe we've learned from the trump days that garden-variety non-ideologues can take strange turns (looking at you, W Barr). It's hard for me to think of Cheney and Rumsfeld as "ordinary republican hawks" in how they went after Iraq. Why were these guys so hopped up about destroying Saddam that they really didn't give a damn about how many people they killed or what would follow the destruction they unleashed, or what kind of a government or leader might result from it all?
For anyone shaped by WWII and Cold War thinking, the geopolitical outcome would be the *whole point* of the adventure, not something you dismiss with a hand-wave. Iraq was really the first big event I can think of in our modern foreign policy history when the primary goal was to break stuff and leave it broken.
I can really only connect it to the Iran-Iraq war somehow. It wasn't widely publicized but was known that at points during that war we supplied sensitive targeting intel to the Iraqis. And in the immediate run-up to the talks that ended the war, one of our cruisers shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, which other countries took as a sign that we weren't going to let the Iraqis lose or the Iranians win. At the same time, the Iraqis were using poison gas in the north.
Rumsfeld certainly was a player during all this; I don't know about Cheney. But something about Iraq and Saddam transformed them from those "ordinary hawkish republicans" into people who only cared about smashing things. Maybe that's where people see neocon influence?
@kenalovell, thanks so much for that list of signers. I was wondering if any of our current "leaders" were among them, but it's been a full generation since 1998.
I don't think Victoria Nuland is a neocon -- I'm not so sure about Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan. Nuland for sure and Blinken and Sullivan probably, are obsessed with destroying Russia. I'm not sure they have any wider strategic vision, as the neocons did/do. It's clear, however, that as long as they are in power the U.S. will never accept an end to the war in Ukraine nor lift the (counterproductive) sanctions imposed in February, 2022. This, of course, creates problems for their desired war with China, which is scheduled for 2025 (assuming Biden is reelected).
I always thought Cheney's motivation was to steal oil (in fact, I recall a report about a meeting held just after inauguration day where he was splitting up oil fields among companies), Bush's motivation was to one-up his father, and Rumsfeld wanted to prove his bullshit theories about the new way of fighting wars.
Iraq was a clusterfuck of converging idiocies and daddy issues.
Irving Kristol has often been called the neocon "godfather". What does a godfather do? He takes care of people (in all sorts of ways of course). And that's exactly what the neocons did with Dick Cheney after the Bush I administration, putting him on all sorts of their foundation boards, magazine boards and the like. Why? Because after the Cold War he was one of the few Republicans still interested in foreign policy, which they were as well and their view were in synch. So while it's true that Cheney's interests in the Middle East had a lot to do with the oil companies he worked for, he also knew what the neocons were thinking and indeed viewed them as valuable partners, which I think you make a good point about even if Cheney was exactly a "neocon" himself.
A lot of neocons have fanned out during the anniversary of Gulf War II trying to defend the decision to go to war an excuse themself the mistakes they made. It reminds me of a term the historian Barbara Tuchmann used in her book "The March of Folly". It's called "willful blindness". There was plenty of intelligence out there indicating that Saddam was lying about WMDs. There was plenty of intelligence out there indicating the disaster awaiting the U.S occupying the country. They all chose to ignore it. All of it. They only looked at what confirmed their biases and suspicions and intuitions. Nothing could shake them of their own certainty. And that's really is what lies at the heart of this debacle, an ideology's stubborn insistence on making reality fit their pre-conceived notions. It failed miserably and many are dead because of it. It doesn't matter, in the end, as one book on the war stated "We Meant Well". The U.S. meant well in Vietnam too.
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