The Crossed Pond

Andrew Sullivan has a must-read today, brief but devastating, presenting a critique of the current state of neoconservative thinking.

The real story of political history from 2001 to today is not Bushian ineptitude, Republican corruption, partisan hackery, or any of the surface stuff that we tend to spend most of our time talking about. It’s not even terrorism, which has become such an over-hyped bugbear that it might even vault somebody as patently anti-American as Rudy Giuliani to the new executive throne (boy I’m gonna get some hate mail for that one). No, the real story is the startling and sudden ascension of neoconservatism into the mainstream of American political thought and as the new functioning principle behind the way we engage the world. It’s always been there, of course, and in particular was a hugely influential element of the Cold War, but with the election of the Bush administration, and with it its cabinet, and finally with 9-11 and the sheer panic and desire to act that it spurred, the effect on American political thought has been roughly equivalent to cuckoo eggs hatching in a robin’s nest.

As I’ve said before, the most emblematic statement in the lead-up to the Iraq war wasn’t about Niger and yellow cake, it wasn’t about mushroom clouds, it wasn’t about WMD or the United Nations or Mission Accomplished or Bring it On. It was a simple throw-away line uttered by the Vice President that nearly perfectly, if unintentionally, encapsulated the entire force of thought behind this neoconservative movement. “We’ll be greeted as liberators”.

That wasn’t pat, or glib–quite the opposite, it was the chief underpinning of the entire Bushian endeavor, the main conceptual thrust of the new direction of American foreign policy. America has always believed in freedom, for us and for others. America has always believed in the power of ideas, the power of democracy, the power of liberty and the ability for a person, a state, a nation, to chart their own course, to decide their own destiny. Nobody denies the inherent power of all of this. But the new spin on it that the neoconservatives brought is something different entirely. It’s the idea that democracy and Western liberalism is easy. Clear out the impediment, instantiate voting, and democracy will sprout and flourish no problem. Everybody on earth is just an American on the inside, right?

What might the democratization of Iraq look like? Something like this I guess, was the idea:

And yet, there’s a lot of obvious tension there. For one, even neocons aren’t immune to the idea that not everybody is obviously a democrat-in-hiding. Sullivan points to a Marty Peretz column in which he gives voice to the notion, often just bubbling under the surface of right wing loudmouths, that Arabs are inherently subhuman, incapable of freedom or tolerance or anything else in a similar vein. It’s a pat, disgusting characterization, but the kernel of it, if one is to generously attempt to extract one, is that not everybody immediately approaches Western liberalism and democracy from the same starting point, and perhaps there’s something to that. The problem, of course, is the selectivity of that critique. Generalizing it, as the right seems disinclined to do these days, one has to come to the conclusion that maybe people are very fundamentally different, not in a racialist or inherent way, but that the soup of cultural, religious, and ethnic influences on various peoples, cultures, and nations varies so dramatically and so wildly that what works easily for one may not have the same effect on another. That it’s not necessarily the top-down message that’s most important, but the bottom-up realities. This is a point that Republicans have much experience making in relation to say, racial identity, or Middle East cynicism, or Soviet ideology, or whatever else, but which either doesn’t internalize, or doesn’t generalize enough. At some basic level, Republicans have never had a problem popularizing notions that people are different. And yet, when it comes to foreign interventionism, that notion, that what works for some may not work for all, seems utterly lost on them. That’s a pretty fundamental oversight.

Another obvious tension is that, in practical effect, our efforts to make people more free might, inherently, make us less safe (I’m speaking specifically of attempts to tinker around in the Middle East). Now, that’s not to dismiss those efforts out-of-hand on those grounds–there is long term calculation involved, there is cost benefit analysis, etc–but it’s worth thinking about, if for no other reason than the entire project has been sold to the American public from well before the Iraq war as being entirely contrary to that logic. By most every measure I can think of, Iraq has made us profoundly less safe. The effect, on us and against us, is hugely significant. We CAN try to democratize the world, and as per point one, may not even be capable of success, but we have to be aware of the blowback, not derisively dismiss it and wave it off every time the subject comes up. Sullivan again:

I read Bob Kagan and I don’t see why he logically doesn’t support American enmeshment in or occupation of almost the entire world. For him, this search-and-rescue-mankind mission gives America meaning. For me, America’s meaning lies not in its control of the world, but in its search for individual freedom, away from the old world, and its proof that constitutional democracy is the best system we have. When the world threatens that democracy and that constitution, or that democracy as it has been established among our allies and friends, we should act, sometimes proactively, sometimes swiftly, often with solid alliances, sometimes with military power. But when any lack of total control is interpreted as a threat, when we are committed to occupying a restive, ungrateful, toxic brew of religious and political hatred for the indefinite future as a price for “security” or “freedom”, then we obviously need to rethink. If the occupation had gone swimmingly in Iraq, then envisaging a few thousand residual troops for the indefinite future as a geo-strategic act of support, is a fine idea. But after this occupation and in this global struggle, what we’re envisaging is an imperial outpost for decades ahead – a permanent casus belli between us and every Islamist on the planet. I think we have to be firm on this point: no. Unless we want to become Israel. And please don’t give me that crap that somehow if we leave there, they’ll follow us home. They’ve already followed us home. They can now. They always will be able to target us in the modern world. The question is simply whether ineptly occupying a country that even the Brits couldn’t pacify makes us less or more safe. I don’t see how any sentient observer of the last five years can believe it has made us more safe. It has certainly made us less free.

I think what it boils down to for me, the patronizing conceit at the heart of the Bushian and neoconservative conception of foreign policy (and freedom generally) is the notion that democracy is easy. I believe in the American experiment, profoundly and to my core. And I think the neoconservatives, for the most part, do too. But where I think we differ, where I get off the bus, is I think at some point the neoconservatives have taken that American experience for granted. They’ve become so comfortable in OUR freedom that it’s hard for them to see the real machinations of it, the real blood sweat and tears that go on every day to keep it functioning, the real sacrifices and tough, tough choices that had to be made to get it off the ground (and continue to have to be made to keep it afloat), and the fact that nobody but ourselves could make those choices. Democracy wasn’t fiated to us. Liberty isn’t granted. Freedom isn’t something you can just expect. You fight for it, it’s something you TAKE FOR YOURSELF (most often, take back for yourself).

If you don’t want it, you don’t get it until you do. Libertarians understand that profoundly, which is why they’ve been such a positive influence, traditionally, on Republican foreign policy thinking. But now that they’ve been all but jettisoned from the party, the conceptualization has run off the rails.

The neoconservatives have a very optimistic view of democracy, and that optimism is certainly seductive. But it’s also profoundly cynical, a view that democracy just sort of happens. That it’s a natural condition. That, barring random muck-ups, it’s the default.

And so they run around expecting to be greeted as liberators, and viewing even the idea that people might fight back against us as an unthinkable notion. It’s not just something they disagree with; it’s something that doesn’t even fit into their thinking, in any capacity, at all. You can almost see their eyes cross and their faces scrunch up when it’s brought up.

We weren’t under-prepared in Iraq just because we mucked up the planning. Our failure in Iraq isn’t a failure of execution—or rather not just a failure of execution—it’s a failure of thought. We went in the way we did because it honestly didn’t occur to the architects of our policy that that might not work. There wasn’t a Plan B for Iraq, and there never has been, and under the current administration, there never will be. In this mindset, there IS no such thing as a Plan B. Plan A: Freedom. That’s all you need to know. People love freedom. They’ll greet us as liberators. Freedom is the default. You just have to give the breaker a good flip.

And so we find ourselves, again, lost in the dark, unwilling to concede that we can’t see. At the heart of the matter is the failure of a core group of American policy-makers to understand and appreciate the sheer power of the foundations of America, a knee-jerk willingness to take everything we have for granted. The failure is a failure in realizing that democracy is not easy. It doesn’t just happen. It takes tens of millions of profound sacrifices every day, some small, some huge, from not torturing a suspect who might have information we can use to make us safer, to not punching somebody in the face for saying something distasteful, to not sweating too much your neighbor’s choice of lifestyle, or demanding that they be brought into line. We in the West have been conditioned for a good long while to make those sacrifices, but that doesn’t make them easy, or insignificant, or cheap, or certain.

Freedom, my friends, is hard.

And until you recognize that key fact, nothing–over there or over here–can get done.