Reagan, Iraq, and Neoconservatism: An Exchange
Wallison, Peter J. & HALPER, STEFAN & CLARKE, JONATHAN
Reagan, Iraq, and Neoconservatism: An Exchange BY PETER J. WALLISON, WITH A REPLY BY STEFAN HALPER AND JONATHAN CLARKE HERE ARE SEVERAL MAJOR DEFICIENCIES—EVEN LOGICAL GAPS—in the Halper-Clarke...
...Wallison appears to miss another critical part of our argument: namely that methods used are every bit as important as objectives sought...
...it is virtually impossible when the circumstances are so different as to be without precedent...
...Even this, however, would not be sufficient...
...Looking at his options—the same as Bush's options—it seems virtually certain that he would have done so...
...they reject a half-century of risk-sensitive, alliance-oriented, multilateral policy that has characterized American interaction with the world and successfully promoted American objectives since World War II...
...As for Mr...
...Under neoconservative stewardship, the achievement of America's goals is farther away than ever...
...From Teddy Roosevelt onward, the rhetorical goals of American foreign policy have been remarkably consistent: a commitment to liberty and freedom, the virtues of market-democracy, the universal applicability of the Bill of Rights...
...Wallison ends by addressing the wrong questions...
...However, it's not very difficult to find a coherent description of neoconservatism if the authors had wanted one...
...Now I don't wish to sound overly optimistic, yet the Soviet Union is not immune from the reality of what is going on in the world...
...Perhaps we have a practitioners' bias against ideology, but our experience suggests that if foreign policy success lay in giving speeches, then all the desiderata contained in the neoconservative speechifying quoted at length by Mr...
...This offensive use of American values was previously employed by only one other American president—Ronald Reagan—and Bush reached back to Reagan in outlining his approach in a speech to the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute in February 2003—just prior to the invasion of Iraq—and again in a November 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy...
...In fact, Ronald Reagan's words were courageous and optimistic and entirely correct...
...There is a century-long, rock solid consensus on these goals...
...Beyond interest defined as power...
...Reagan's attack on Libya in 1986 was preceded by a painstaking intelligence analysis that linked the Libyan intelligence service to the deaths of two American servicemen without doubt...
...In short, we are grateful to Mr...
...A central claim of the neoconservative advocates of war was, as we document, that their policy was "Reaganite...
...We have already noted that Reagan faced a wholly different world than Bush—a world in which the United States dealt with nation-states that could be deterred by military force and compelled to negotiate on the basis of national interests...
...By the middle of that decade, Portugal, Spain, and Greece held free elections...
...Moreover, with reference to the issue at hand, rather than installing a "beacon of democracy" in the region, they have contrived to demonstrate the limits of American power, rendering American military and diplomatic policy dysfunctional in a region that respects strength—and that is a miscalculation for which we shall pay dearly...
...He offers us genuinely new reasons, namely that "its population was well-educated, relatively secular in outlook...and most likely to be capable of self-government...
...On September 12, 2001, the world had changed...
...If this doesn't sound much like the Hobbesian world confected by Halper and Clarke, it's no wonder...
...Well, if he was not, where is his evidence...
...The great democratic movement President Reagan described was already well underway...
...As President Bush put it in his speech at Whitehall last November: "The United States and Great Britain share a mission in the world beyond the balance of power or the simple pursuit of interest...
...But leaving this huge lacuna aside, the authors then lapse into a wholly hypothetical discussion of whether Ronald Reagan was a neoconservative—an effort that would have been worth undertaking if they had made any effort to define neoconservatism...
...So states the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which among other things, guarantees free elections...
...JUNE 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 35...
...On this basis alone, the Halper-Clarke analysis of Reagan should be dismissed...
...Reagan was not a militaristic interventionist...
...Also, a quick look at Kennedy's "pay any price, bear any burden" speech or Carter's 1977 Notre Dame speech (which caused the hair of many a totalStefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke are co-authors of the new book America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and Global Order (Cambridge University Press...
...Wallison chides us for suggesting that Reagan was "averse to military action...
...The here-and-now world in which neoconservatives see themselves is a world of Hobbesian state-of-nature primitivism and conspiracy where perpetual, militarized competition for ascendancy is the norm, and moderation—even of the sort envisioned by Hobbes—by the community of nations is impossible...[it continues on like this for another 50 words or so]...and where adversaries (defined as defeatist and more broadly as anyone who does not share the neoconservative worldview) must be preemptively crushed lest they crush you...
...It is difficult enough to demonstrate that one president would have acted differently than another under roughly the same circumstances...
...Ronald Reagan would be pleased, and he would not be surprised...
...By the end of that year, every communist dictatorship in Central America had collapsed...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 WALLISON, HALPER & CLARKE is a description of a worldview that seems to bear no coherent relationship to neoconservatism, which the authors portray as an ideology of compulsive militarism and interventionism...
...Take this fevered paragraph, for example: We detect a deep pessimism among neoconservatives about human nature and human society—and one which is much darker than the skepticism about human perfectibility often found in conservative thinking...
...Iraq was a target not only because it was a potential source of weapons of mass destruction for the terrorists and a threat to the stability of the region, but because its population was well educated, relatively secular in outlook among the Arabs, and one of the Arab populations most likely to be capable of self-government...
...participation in World Wars I and II, but in these cases American values were used defensively...
...The al Qaeda ideology springs from failed societies and a failed culture...
...T HE CORE OF THE DEBATE is thus not about ends—we all want a freer, more democratic, less evil world—but about means...
...Wallison should identify it...
...If we take Bush at his word, he invaded Iraq for two major reasons—to deprive terrorists of access to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and to create in Iraq a beacon of democracy and an example of an open society in the Arab world...
...As Halper and Clarke suggest, the neoconservative worldview has some relevance here, but not as they caricatured it...
...He would have either resolved the doubts or not initiated military action...
...That is the credo of democratic globalism...
...This very week in 1989, there were protests in East Berlin and in Leipzig...
...The first and most obvious is that the authors fail to deal with the realities that faced President Bush immediately after the attacks on September 11, 2001...
...Beyond interest...
...Even if this latter process is not realized soon, I believe the renewed strength of the democratic movement, complemented by a global campaign for freedom, will strengthen the prospects for arms control and a world at peace...
...to forget the past is to be blind in both...
...We are told to live in the past is to be blind in one eye...
...He argued that Soviet communism had failed, precisely because it did not respect its own people—their creativity, their genius and their rights...
...We were wrong...
...Their purpose in doing so is to assert that their vision and,more importantly, their force-based methodology represent the new orthodoxy of Republican foreign policy...
...This is critical in understanding the Reagan legacy...
...If we go back to Charles Krauthammer's AEI lecture, we can see in his discussion of the "success of liberty"—more than simply the defense of liberty—the same belief in the power of American values and ideals that can be traced through Ronald Reagan at Westminster to George W. Bush addressing the National Endowment for Democracy...
...homeland, it cannot be said that he would not have attacked Iraq...
...This is an improper—and in neoconservative hands, willful—misunderstanding...
...The military response was to deprive al Qaeda of bases and training resources...
...But we should remind ourselves of its hard edge...
...Wallison falls into the tired and emotional refrain of arguing that since Reagan never experienced an attack on the U.S...
...It is crucial that we not permit a casual rewriting of events for the sake of ideological convenience...
...Clarke IN HIS RESPONSE to our article "Neoconservatism Is Not Reaganism" (April 2004), Peter Wallison evinces a keen eye for the humorous...
...He was White House counsel to President Reagan in 1986 and 1987 and is the author of Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency (Westview, 2003...
...Wallison is right to say that any attempt to judge how Reagan would have reacted to 9/11 is necessarily speculative...
...Beyond power...
...The neoconservatives (succinctly defined in our article, pace Wallison, as "Wilsonians with guns") misread the Reagan military build-up—and Wallison repeats this error—to justify their use of military force as the preferred option of policy...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 What Bush needed was a strategy that included both a military and an ideological response...
...It is time that we committed ourselves as a nation—in both public and private sectors—to assisting democratic development...
...Four years later, he was elected president of his country—ascending, like Walesa and Havel, from prisoner of state to head of state...
...Here we require a more complicated analysis...
...It begins to allow its people a voice in their own destiny...
...To do that, we have to place Reagan in the same position as Bush on September 12, 2001, the day after the attacks in New York and REAGAN, IRAQ, AND NEOCONSERVATISM Washington, D.C...
...Describing the basis for his democratization policy in his National Endowment for Democracy speech, President Bush acknowledged his conceptual debt to his predecessor: Looking back on the 1980s, it seems far more likely that Reagan seldom used force because he could achieve his ends without it...
...Surely the issue is that had Reagan been in the same position as Bush: (a) believing—as Bob Woodward records Bush as doing—that the intelligence on Iraq's possession of WMD was unconvincing...
...If so, Mr...
...History matters...
...That is their true indictment which, we doubt, even Mr...
...Neither of us has yet heard the administration make this argument but, as the chaos in Iraq deepens, this deft insight will, no doubt, inspire administration wordsmiths...
...This is easy to do, but it means that Mr...
...Over the years the central question for American foreign policy has not been what Americans see as desirable outcomes...
...Reply By Stefan Halper and Jonathan...
...as long as the conditions that produced this cancer continued to exist, it would not be possible to eliminate the threat of further attacks...
...The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means...
...To accomplish this, Bush chose to use the idea of freedom and democracy—the American ideology—as a weapon...
...It would be hard to imagine even a Dukakis or McGovern doing this, let alone Reagan...
...Again, we need not be detained by this question...
...Further, the brief deployment of Marines to Beirut hardly makes the point in favor of military adventurism...
...The syllogism is as follows: Some people who identify themselves as neoconservatives (William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Richard Perle) have called their view Neo-Reaganism...
...the ideological response was to deprive it of support in Arab and Muslim lands...
...Perhaps this is why he has devoted so much space to lengthy quotes of Reagan and Bush, seeking to identify rhetorical continuities in the aspirations expressed by Bush and Reagan...
...But in the mild language he frequently chose when he laid out bold ideas, Reagan promised an aggressive ideological assault on the Soviet Union: In June of 1982, President Ronald Reagan spoke at Westminster Palace and declared the turning point had arrived in history...
...o be sure, Presidents Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt had used the T preservation of freedom as a way of justifying U.S...
...WALLISON, HALPER & CLARKE Reagan's Westminster speech was indeed a seminal event...
...To turn to more serious matters, Mr...
...We have set out the Reagan military record as it is usually recorded inthe history books...
...following their counsel caused George W. Bush to invade Iraq...
...One of the best and most lucid was given by Charles Krauthammer in his Irving Kristol lecture at the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute in February 2004...
...Reagan, like all his post-war predecessors, faced in the Soviet Union an expansionary bureaucratic state which could be deterred by military power and persuaded to negotiate by well-understood principles and incentives of national interest...
...Wallison for taking our argument sufficiently seriously to seek to counter it...
...But it shows very clearly that he shared with George W. Bush the same deep faith in the power of freedom and democracy—as an JUNE 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 33 REAGAN, IRAQ, AND NEOCONSERVATISM ideological weapon—that is a major tenet of neoconservatism and seemed to be a key motivating factor in Bush's actions with respect to Iraq...
...This is extraordinarily significant...
...Even a president who was averse to the use of force would have had to reconsider his position...
...There, Krauthammer described neoconservatism (renaming it Democratic Globalism) in the following terms: This conservative alternative to realism is often lazily and invidiously called neoconservatism, but that is a very odd name for a school whose major proponents in the world today are George W. Bush and Tony Blair—if they are neoconservatives, then Margaret Thatcher was a liberal...
...Suffice it to say that Ronald Reagan never saw a day as president in which the United States was attacked on its own soil, by suicidal maniacs, in service of a lunatic ideology...
...Soon there were new democracies in Latin America, and free institutions were spreading in Korea, in Taiwan, and in East Asia...
...In fact, the Soviet Union was consigned to history without a single hostile sortie by NATO —and remember that the Reagan years coincided with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and upheaval in Eastern Europe...
...In the early '70s, there were about 40 democracies in the world...
...Was there a parallel universe in which Reagan was constantly sending Americans into battle...
...these neoconservatives are militaristic interventionists...
...There is no escape to the question: What methods most effectively and efficiently achieve the nation's objectives...
...None of this proves, of course, that Reagan would have invaded Iraq...
...In Bush's view, changing the governance of Arab societies, making them more democratic and open, will eventually weaken the wellsprings of al Qaeda and other terrorist movements...
...Wallison will wish to excuse...
...We congratulate Mr...
...Likewise, Reagan's attack on Grenada proceeded only when there was incontrovertible evidence of that government's political-military relationship with the Castro regime and after it was clear that American lives on the island were in imminent danger...
...It has happened in the past—a small ruling elite either mistakenly attempts to ease domestic unrest through greater repression and foreign adventure, or it chooses a wiser course...
...A number of critics were dismissive of that speech by the President....Some observers on both sides of the Atlantic pronounced the speech simplistic and naive, and even dangerous...
...and (c) hearing consistent doubts expressed by the secretary of state, among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and at CIA that Iraq posed a direct threat to the United States, Reagan's record indicates that he would have moved much more deliberately...
...Through this marketing device, they wish to preempt debate among Republicans about post-9/11 policy...
...It drew strong opposition from groups who feared an adverse Soviet reaction, and those who could never understand—as Reagan did—the power of ideas...
...Our purpose is to show that they have gotten their history wrong and that the true lesson of the Reagan era is that ideas are effective only when they are properly balanced with interests—which the neoconservative-driven policy in the Middle East has clearly failed to do...
...While the social and economic benefits of market-democracy coupled with Reagan's cautious optimism gave buoyancy to dissidents throughout the Soviet system producing the Havels and Walesas, the neoconservative approach to "democracy" delivered on the back of a Humvee has produced a reawakened Iraqi nationalism and a resurgence of worldwide anti-Americanism...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 WALLISON, HALPER & CLARKE itarian militarist to stand on end) should quickly disabuse him of this assertion...
...As the 20th century ended, there were around 120 democracies in the world—and I can assure you more are on the way...
...We had supposed that the spectrum of arguments for attacking Iraq was filled...
...Within another year, the South African government released Nelson Mandela...
...There's nothing neo about Bush and there's nothing con about Blair...
...In fact, today's neoconservatives not only separate themselves from mainstream Republican thought on national security matters, they are an aberration...
...But our speculation is not self-willed...
...It is crucial that we not permit a casual rewriting of events for the sake of ideological convenience...
...We seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings...
...Bush faced two realities: He was not dealing with a nation state that could be defeated by military force, and his attackers could not be deterred by fear of retaliation—they had to be arrested and incarcerated for an indefinite period, or killed...
...Wallison's argument that Reagan and Bush uniquely used this rhetoric for offensive rather than defensive purposes, has our interlocutor forgotten the bold, forward-leaning statements of the Truman doctrine...
...While we must be cautious about forcing the rate of change, we must not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete actions to move toward them...
...therefore, Reagan was not a neoconservative and would not have invaded Iraq...
...In fact, events cruelly present something quite different: these noble aspirations have turned to dust amidst an unacceptable sacrifice of American credibility, blood, and treasure...
...UT WE CAN PUT THIS OBVIOUSLY FLAWED analysis B to one side and consider seriously the question whether Reagan would have invaded Iraq...
...Reagan, Iraq, and Neoconservatism: An Exchange BY PETER J. WALLISON, WITH A REPLY BY STEFAN HALPER AND JONATHAN CLARKE HERE ARE SEVERAL MAJOR DEFICIENCIES—EVEN LOGICAL GAPS—in the Halper-Clarke thesis that Ronald Reagan would not have invaded Iraq ("Neoconservatism Is Not Reaganism," TAS, April 2004...
...We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not thesole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings...
...Bush, however, in developing a strategy to combat Islamic terrorism, has attempted to use American values offensively, to establish democracy in a place it hasn't existed before—Iraq—as a beachhead for bringing democracy to the failed societies of the Arab world...
...In terms of foreign policy, the leitmotif of the second Reagan administration is one of negotiation...
...Wallison on getting there first...
...b) seeing only the most tenuous evidence about Saddam's operational links with al- Qaeda...
...It is hard to believe that Reagan, presented with these two objectives, would not have found them—under conditions identical to those that confronted Bush on September 12, 2001—equally compelling...
...Assuming then that Reagan had attacked Afghanistan, and defeated the Taliban but not al Qaeda, would Reagan have continued on to attack Iraq...
...What all this demonstrates is that Reagan was a neoconservative (or in Krauthamer's terms, a democratic globalist) before that worldview had been given a name in a foreign policy context...
...In this world, Reagan was a superb negotiator, but he negotiated from the strength provided by his unprecedented peacetime buildup of military force...
...Looking back on the 1980s, it seems far more likely that Reagan seldom used force (Grenada is a small exception) because he could achieve his ends without it, and little evidence, despite the Halper-Clarke analysis, that he was averse to military action where it was truly necessary in the national interests of the United States...
...The debate will no doubt continue...
...We went to war to make the world safe for democracy in World War I and to prevent the snuffing out of freedom and democracy in Europe in World War II...
...Yet they are the principal advocates of what might be called democratic globalism, a foreign policy that defines the national interest not as power but as values, and that identifies one supreme value, what John Kennedy called "the success of liberty...
...Instead, what we get Peter J. Wallison is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...He argued that Soviet communism had failed, precisely because it did not respect its own people their creativity, their genius and their rights...
...The first question we should ask about Reagan in this context is whether it seems reasonable to conclude that he would have attacked Afghanistan...
...Wallison treats this as though it were something routine ("well-understood principles" are his words...
...The second of these is clearly the only way to combat and defeat the jihadist movement among the Arab peoples, just as Reagan correctly saw it as an offensive weapon in the Cold War with the Soviet Union...
...What they describe as neoconservatism is a fictitious straw man, developed apparently to deny neoconservatives the right to claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan...
...To get this wrong is to fundamentally misunderstand the delicate balance of Reagan's political-military policy...
...Facts matter...
...Once it was established that Afghanistan was the haven and training ground for al Qaeda, and that al Qaeda was the sponsor of the attack, could any president have stood idly by...
...Wallison would be today's reality...
Vol. 37 • June 2004 • No. 5
