February 20, 2006
Re-accessing Iraq
The best anti-war piece you're ever going to see is in Sunday's NYTimes Magazine. After Neoconservatism is an adaptation of Francis Fukuyama's upcoming book, "America at the Crossroads."
I confess that I was thinking of Fukuyama's "End of History" over this weekend as I tired of the Cheney hunting accident. These are hard times for neocons; hard times for Sharansky-ites; and pretty tough times for Republicans (though it appears they're going to let us play the Democrats again this year...)
I was re-accessing the Iraqi liberation just before this came out. And it is a thoughtful exegesis. Fukuyama is no moonbat. I find much to agree with. Especially his retrospective questioning of the neo-Wilsonianism I felt so strongly.
The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."
The Romanian model was expected to repeat in Iraq, and the insurgency was underestimated. I yield to no-one in my support for this administration and the war on terror. But I am frequently asked to look people in the eye and say we did the right thing. To fail to reevaluate is stubborn. Am I still a Sharansky-ite? Yes. Am I still a neoWilsonian? I don't know.
What is certain, and only partially conceded by Fukuyama, is that it is hard to conceive a pleasant counterfactual. Had we not invaded Iraq, Saddam would still be in power, Iran would be making nuclear noises, payments to suicide bombers' families would still be occurring, training camps would still be open. Fukuyama has no great illusions about the UN's being able to sort this out.
The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a "multi-multilateral world" of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.
Yet, in the next breath (or page) he is ready to hand it off to USAID, and the State Department, which I consider our own, local, UN.
If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like.
In fact, I will bend quite a ways to agree with Fukuyama on problems, philosophy, and past history. It is his present and future to which I cannot subscribe. In fact this startling assertion undermines his entire argument:
The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.
Watching the Cartoon Wars for a couple of weeks, I cannot believe that we overestimate Islamicist Terror. And I accuse Fukuyama of underplaying the domestic safety that our foreign actions have produced. Robert Kaplan, quoted in the story, has stated that the original war was not worthy but that the larger conflict in which we are now embroiled is worthy of the blood and treasure.