I thought Pollack was crawfishing with his last column. TNR thinks so also.
THE NEO CON: Reading Ronald Asmus and Kenneth Pollack's Washington Post op-ed contrasting the neoliberal and neoconservative approaches to the Middle East, we were struck much more by the similarities between the two positions than by the differences. Asmus and Pollack write, for example, that neocons believe, "If the regimes of the region won't change, American power should be used to bring change about." But then in the very next paragraph they note that neoliberals (the camp in which the authors place themselves) "supported the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq because we concluded that force was the only way to lance these boils." True, Asmus and Pollack argue that neocons believe that "[t]he invasion and reconstruction of Iraq are not an exception but a precedent that, if need be, can and will be replicated elsewhere," while neoliberals, they argue, believe in "political preemption first and military preemption only as a last resort." But as a practical matter, what's the difference between these two positions? Few neocons would insist that preemption should be the option you turn to first. Meanwhile, most honest observers would concede that if Iraq falls into the category of countries for which preemption is justified as a last resort, then there are probably four or five other countries for which preemption could be similarly justified. In any case, all of that is beside the point, since even the most hawkish neocons rarely advocate preemptively attacking any one of those remaining candidates.
In a similar vein, Asmus and Pollack assert that, unlike neoliberals, "[n]eocons don't like nation-building." Really? Wasn't Paul Wolfowitz the one who suggested back in September that, with the proper amount of care and attention, postwar Iraq could become a model of democracy in the Middle East? That's certainly what he told The New York Times Magazine at the time:
I don't think it's unreasonable to think that Iraq, properly managed--and it's going to take a lot of attention, and the stakes are enormous, much higher than Afghanistan--that it really could turn out to be, I hesitate to say it, the first Arab democracy, or at least the first one except for Lebanon's brief history ... And even if it makes it only Romanian style, that's still such an advance over anywhere else in the Arab world. In fact, listening to Wolfowitz sing the virtues of a pluralistic, democratic Iraq back in September sounds a lot like, well, listening to Ronald Ausmus and Kenneth Pollack sing the virtues of a pluralistic, democratic Iraq today: "In Iraq," the two argue, "[nation-building] is particularly worth the commitment because a stable, prosperous and pluralist Iraq could eventually become a model for the region, demonstrating that it is possible to be both 'Arab' and 'democratic.'"
Where Asmus and Pollack go wrong is in conflating (intentionally or not, our guess is intentionally) neocon foreign policy with Republican foreign policy. To wit, the sentence that begins, "Neocons don't like nation-building ..." ends with, "... and the Republican Party has largely opposed it for more than a decade." This in turn sets up the very next sentence: "Thus, while neoconservatives talk of democracy promotion, they have a hard time carrying through on it." The obvious point in response is that just because neocons have a hard time convincing the more retrograde elements of the Republican coalition that nation-building is a desirable undertaking doesn't mean that they don't personally support it. To the contrary, you'd expect neocons to be coy about their true position on nation-building precisely because others in the Republican Party are so skeptical of it.
What seems to be going on here is that, after being attacked as closet neoconservatives for their outspoken support of the war in Iraq these last several months, Asmus and Pollack are determined to prove both that they're truly neoliberals at heart and that their brand of sensible neoliberalism is completely at odds with the sort of brash war-mongering neoconservatives are wont to practice. Neither point is especially convincing.
tnr.com |
