http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/magazine/06wwln_lead.html?_r=1&oref=sloginUntil the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah broke out on July 12, the foreign policy pursued by the Bush administration in its second term was a source of increasing consternation to those who had most fervently supported its aspirations to rid the world of evildoers — that is, the thinkers and policy analysts identified with muscular neoconservatism. Writing in The Weekly Standard, William Kristol, the magazine’s editor, accused the administration of pursuing policies that had allowed North Korea to test missiles with impunity and that had left the regime in Tehran “sitting pretty” — in short, of pursuing a “Clintonian” foreign policy, which is about as severe a condemnation as any upstanding neoconservative can deploy. For her part, Danielle Pletka, a Middle East expert at the American Enterprise Institute, recently told an interviewer, “I don’t have a friend in the administration, on Capitol Hill or in any part of the conservative foreign-policy establishment who is not beside themselves with fury at the administration.”
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The idea that America has a special responsibility to combat tyranny around the globe has been a bipartisan assumption at least since the Truman administration. But in recent years, conservatives have been the most ardent proponents of aggressive regime change — witness their support for aiding the Nicaraguan contras and Jonas Savimbi’s Angolan guerrillas in the 1980’s. Today many conservative thinkers regard the Bush doctrine as the reiteration of the Reagan doctrine and take it as their sacred responsibility to promulgate such holy writ. But will their bellicose hopes be dashed in the coming weeks — as, historically, the hopes of the American right in Republican presidents so often have been (consider the Eisenhower administration’s indifference to the Hungarian revolution in 1956, or the right-to-life movement’s disenchantment with Ronald Reagan)?
There is a better-than-even chance that they will be. After all, despite what some of its spokesmen said at the start of the conflict, Israel is looking less and less willing to expend the blood and treasure necessary to deal a mortal blow to Hezbollah. The costs are just too high. America’s U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, may insist publicly that there can be no negotiating with a terrorist organization like Hezbollah, but his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, sent the opposite message when, during her lightning visit to Beirut in late July, she met with Nabih Berri, the Shiite speaker of the Lebanese Parliament and Hezbollah’s unofficial interlocutor with Western governments. It is one thing for President Bush to present Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah as part of the wider global war on terrorism and quite another to open another front in that war when the fate of Iraq hangs in the balance and American commanders are faced with the necessity of committing more troops to what even the U.S. military is now beginning to characterize, rather desperately, as the battle for Baghdad.
Neoconservatives still speak confidently of the moral clarity of America’s agenda in the Middle East, but after more than three years of war in Iraq, this moral clarity is all but gone as far as the American people are concerned: according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, half of the public thinks that whether we stay in Iraq a few more years makes “no difference” to America’s security. It is highly unlikely that this same public could be persuaded of the urgency of another war in the Middle East, another war on evil that will transform the region for the better. The president’s own party may need persuading as well: anyone doubting this need only look at how many Republican officeholders are putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the war in Iraq as they seek re-election in the fall. Airstrikes against Syria and Iran may be contemplated by both American and Israeli war planners, but a boots-on-the-ground war is a nonstarter for both Jerusalem and Washington, and bombing alone cannot produce regime change.
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