Neocons vs. Supply-Siders
The coming war over Iraq.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, September 9, 2003, at 5:54 PM PT
Yesterday, Chatterbox observed that neoconservatives are struggling to
come to terms with the present troop shortage in Iraq. That struggle has
created an interesting schism between pro-Rumsfeld neocons (Midge
Decter, Max Boot) and newly anti-Rumsfeld neocons (Bill Kristol,
Robert Kagan, and possibly David Brooks). The neocon schism will
likely be temporary; disagreements among neoconservatives usually are.
But, stepping back for a wider-angle view, it's possible to see a much
larger fault line among conservatives, one that the Iraq war has widened
almost to the crisis point: the schism between neoconservatives and
supply-siders.
The neocons are the party of war, which is the favored path to what Bill
Kristol and David Brooks have termed "national greatness." The
supply-siders are the party of tax cuts, which is the favored path to
prosperity and, for some, limited government. Thus far, the two camps
have coexisted more or less peacefully because the two goals have not
come into conflict. Or rather, the two goals have come into conflict, but
both camps have refused to recognize that. The Weekly Standard has
supported Bush's tax cuts; Forbes (whose publisher and pre-eminent
columnist, Steve Forbes, twice ran for president as a supply-side
Republican) has supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now,
however, the Iraq war has bumped deficit projections up to roughly
$500 billion. Even though supply-siders usually insist that budget deficits
bring no harm to the economy, they surely will soon recognize the
political reality that it will be hard to legislate additional tax cuts if the
books are this far out of balance. Indeed, it's possible that the high cost
of regime change in Iraq—in today's Washington Post, Jonathan
Weisman, working off figures compiled by Yale economist William
Nordhaus (see Table 2, p. 55), states that the $166 billion thus far spent
or requested by Bush "already exceeds the inflation-adjusted costs of the
Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War,
the Spanish American War and the Persian Gulf war combined [italics
Chatterbox's]"—will inspire Congress to do the sensible thing and roll
back the Bush tax cuts it's already signed into law. There's even an
(admittedly slight) chance Bush would propose this himself.
Some key players in the conflict:
Former Wall Street Journal editorialist Jude Wanniski, declared war
against neoconservatives years ago. Wanniski has long engaged in
neocon-baiting courtships with Louis Farrakhan and Lyndon LaRouche
and has even made the preposterous claim (here and here) that Saddam
Hussein never gassed the Kurds in Halabja. (For Chatterbox's refutation
of this last, click here.) Wanniski opposed the war in Iraq because, he
said, Saddam didn't have chemical and biological weapons—a position
that seemed crazy at the time but looks prescient today. It was the
neocons, he says, "who cooked up the war."
Another supply-sider hostile to neocons is Paul Craig Roberts, who
was assistant secretary of the treasury during the Reagan administration
and is now a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. Almost a year
ago Roberts warned readers of his syndicated column that
"[n]eoconservatives are preparing the groundwork for far-reaching and
interminable U.S. involvement in the Middle East." After the war in Iraq
started, Roberts called it "a strategic blunder, the costs of which will
mount over the next half century," and suggested the only good likely to
come from it would be the public's realization "that that the
neoconservative agenda of conquest of the Muslim Middle East is
beyond our available strength." Yesterday, Roberts wrote that if Bush
wants to be a "real leader," he will "fire the neocon propagandists in high
government offices who misled both him and the public," which probably
refers to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
Columnist Robert Novak calls himself a supply-sider and once wrote
that Wanniski's supply-side primer, The Way the World Works, was
one of two books that "shaped my mature philosophy of politics and
government." (The other was Whittaker Chambers' Witness.) In his
writing and on television, Novak has avoided making direct attacks on
neoconservatives as a group, possibly because he contributes now and
then to the neocon Weekly Standard. But Novak has been critical of the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he tangles frequently with David
Frum, a paleoconservative-turned-neocon hawk who helped coin the
term, "axis of evil." Last March, in a widely discussed article for the (now
mostly neocon) National Review, Frum attacked "antiwar
conservatives," a group that mostly consists of supply-siders and a tiny
rump of xenophobic paleoconservatives, led by Patrick Buchanan, who
these days can be difficult to distinguish from the hard left. (The XPs have
a house organ, The American Conservative, but they don't seem to
have much influence in or affection for the Republican Party.) Several of
Frum's sharpest barbs were directed at Novak, who Frum suggested
was anti-Israel. It wasn't the first time Novak had been so accused. If
things get a little hotter, Novak could easily lose his self-control about
neocons.
The most famous supply-side politician is Jack Kemp, who represented
Buffalo in the House, ran for president, and pioneered compassionate (he
called it "bleeding-heart") conservatism as housing secretary during the
administration of Bush père. Kemp is a neocon-friendly supply-sider; he
even shares the directorship of a nonprofit, Empower America, with two
neoconservatives (William Bennett and Jeane Kirkpatrick). Lately,
though, Kemp has been thinking hard about how to get out of Iraq:
It is true that we cannot immediately pull our military
out of Iraq because it would create a power vacuum
and invite the Baathists and radical Jihadists to take
control and emulate that which happened in Beirut and
Mogadishu. However, if we attempt to impose order
by military force, even under U.N. auspices, the level
of violence and brutality required will inadvertently
create widespread popular resistance to our presence,
dehumanize our military and ignite a conflict we will be
unable to contain.
This puts Kemp on a collision course with Bennett, a fierce Iraq hawk
and scourge of self-doubt.
One wild card in the coming battle between neocons and supply-siders
will be the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Both its former
editor Robert Bartley and its current one, Paul Gigot, fit comfortably
into both camps. Tax cuts are closer to the Journal's heart than the war
on terrorism; it isn't, after all, the Tel Aviv Journal. But unlike Kemp, the
Journal editpage is not willing to entertain the notion of American troops
pulling out:
The danger now is not that the U.S. will be drawn into
some quagmire, a la Vietnam, but that we will show a
desire to leave too soon, as in Somalia. Terrorists
thrive on such weakness, indeed it is the basis for
their current strategy. They think that if they can
impose enough casualties, or create enough havoc,
the voices of retreat will begin to say once again,
"Come home, America."
Chatterbox predicts that the Journal editorialists, perhaps alone within
the supply-side faction, will refuse to take up arms against the neocons,
even if they come to agree with Kristol that more troops are needed in
Iraq. Gigot or Bartley may even try to broker a peace between the two
camps.
But what if no peace can be brokered? That would certainly be the case
if Bush came to his fiscal senses, scaled back his already-passed tax cuts,
and announced to the country that the recovering economy no longer
needed stimulus and that it was more important to stabilize Iraq and
Afghanistan, wipe out al-Qaida, and give senior citizens in the United
States easy access to pharmaceuticals. (This would be easier to pull off if
the recovering economy started producing jobs.) That outcome is what
Chatterbox the Policy Wonk wishes for. But Chatterbox the Partisan
Hack can also get behind it. Imagine a tax-cutting constituency within the
Republican party so furious at being conned—by yet another
Bush!—that it drafted a third-party candidate for president. Maybe
Forbes would stop supporting Bush on Iraq and jump in for a Perot-style
run. Maybe Kemp (who, as noted above, is further along toward
opposing the neocons) would run. If the 1992 and 2000 elections were
any guide, third-party candidates are death on the mainstream parties
with which they're most naturally aligned.
Say hello to President Dean.
<gg>
slate.msn.com |
