David Corn (Tom Paine): Robert Merry: the Anti-Neocon

[Jack Rabbit]

From TomPaine.com
Dated Wednesday July 20

The Anti-Neocon
By David Corn

"I'm the anti-neocon." That's how Robert Merry recent y described himself to me. After reading his new book—Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition —I have to say: He got that right.

His book is the most scorching mainstream critique of the neocons and their misadventure in Iraq that I have encountered. Merry, the publisher of Congressional Quarterly and a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, rips apart that small band of ideologically driven chickenhawks and leaves their bones scattered on the floor of a Council of Foreign Relations conference room. Merry is a hard-ass practitioner of global realpolitik. There is not a smidgeon of sentiment in a single sentence of this book. He's certainly not keeping company with one-worlders and those who would identify (or misidentify, in his view) American national security interests with feel-good global humanitarianism. But in a classic example of that old Middle East cliché—the enemy of my enemy is my friend—he has produced a book that liberal-minded foreign policy folks ought to gobble up. And I would dare the neocons to enter Merry's knife-throwing gallery.

His high-minded goal was to pen an intellectual history that traced the ideas that led—over decades—to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. (Let's assume that ideas had something to do with it.) Merry does reach back far, reviewing the works and notions of such profound ponderers as the Abbé Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre (who postulated that humankind was on an inevitable journey toward further enlightenment and civilization), Oswald Spengler (the chronicler of the ups and downs of civilizations), and such big-idea moderns as Frances Fukuyama (the premature prophet of the End of History), Samuel Huntington (the advocate of the Clash of Civilizations), and Thomas Friedman (the cheerleader for the Glory of Globalization). Merry suggests that in the broadest terms there are two ideas that have motivated Western thought: the Idea of Progress (humankind is on a never-ending advance), and the Cycle of History (history is the story of civilizations that rise and then fall; screw progress). And a corollary to the Cycle of History view, he notes, is Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, which suggests that not only is progress not inevitable but that conflict between civilizations is. The capital letters are his.

Out of all this, he notes, American history has yielded four basic strains of foreign policy: conservative interventionism (the hard-headed Cold War policy that came out of World War II), conservative isolationism (poster boy: Pat Buchanan), liberal interventionism (sending U.S. troops to help troubled countries such as Haiti), and liberal isolationism (think of the movement against the Vietnam War). His descriptions invite the charge that he is being overly simplistic. For instance, he claims Reagan's use of force in Central America in the 1980s—which he points to as an example of conservative interventionism—was necessary to "save Western civilization from the threat of Soviet expansionism." No, it wasn't. But the real question for him—and for us—is, which of these four teams is essentially right?

Read more.

Mr. Merry may have an interesting thesis.

[Jack Rabbit]

1. More . . .

Why does Merry devote himself to disproving Fukuyama and Friedman? It's because they are idealists whose out-of-touch-with-reality views (as Merry sees it) lead toward danger. But it is the neocons who have put this danger into practice. It's no secret: Merry is with the hardheaded conservative interventionists and quite sympathetic to Huntingtonism. The world is nasty and full of nasty people—most notably, Islamic extremists—and it's our job not to change the world but to define the threat wisely and specifically and to take the practical steps necessary to thwart that threat or at least keep it at bay for as long as possible.

It is interesting that in an article written just before the invasion of Iraq, I named Fukuyama and Friedman as two of the ideologues behind the war against Iraq:

Perhaps we could take a guess (at what Mr. Bush has in mind for Iraq). Let us take a clue from pundits and intellectuals like Thomas Friedman and Francis Fukuyama, who confuse democracy with global free market capitalism. Under this model, the liberators of Iraq would remove from the Iraqi people control of their resources in order to obtain IMF approval for loans from the World Bank. This has been a neo-colonial scheme advanced in other countries. From the perspective of those it is purported to benefit, the workers and peasants of developing nations, this model has been a universal failure. Of course, from the point of view of industrialists and bankers in the developed world, it has worked very well.

[Emendator]

2. He was on

C-Span Booknotes a couple of weekends ago. He's very good.

[laststeamtrain]

3. Ya gotta love internecine warfare on the right!

Paleo vs Neo, 'old oil' vs idealists...