Have you read America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order by Stefan Halper, Jonathan Clarke?
''We set out to demystify the neo-conservatives'', the authors write at the outset of the book, and over the following 369 pages, including some 1,300 footnotes, they largely succeed. Their motivation is clear from the outset: while consistently measured and reasoned in their tone, Halper and Clarke are clearly outraged that the neo-conservative foreign policy pursued by this administration has put Washington's greatest strategic asset -- its ''moral authority'' -- at risk.
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This last tendency particularly galls the authors, not only because it ignores the fact that neo-conservatives expressed bitter and well-documented disenchantment with Reagan, known as the "Great Communicator," over his distancing the United States from Israel after the Lebanon invasion in the early 1980s and his eager grasp after 1985 of the outstretched hand of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, but also because they see Reagan as a fundamentally optimistic leader who, in the words of his secretary of state, George Shultz, ''appealed to people's best hopes, not their fears''.
And from a different source I got:
Ideologues are in the business of myth-making, and the iconization of Ronald Reagan as the progenitor of neoconservative foreign policy prescriptions began well before his death, in 1996, when William Kristol and Robert Kagan titled their post-cold war manifesto "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." "Benevolent global hegemony" – and nothing less – is the announced goal of this "neo"-Reaganism. "Peace through strength" became "peace through domination." "Trust but verify" was transmuted into "preempt and lie." Lots of conservatives noticed this revisionism, and it annoyed them at the time, but then came the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when neocon ideologues such as Richard Perle grabbed the banner of Reaganism and tried to run with it, arguing that Reagan would have endorsed the invasion of Iraq and claiming the Gipper's imprimatur for the neoconservative program of unrelenting bellicosity. The Rush Limbaugh know-nothings nodded and slipped back into their habitually narcotized state, while the War Party wrapped itself in the "Reaganite" flag, and the neoconservative movement enjoyed a post-9/11 boom.
But as Stefan Halper, who served in three Republican administrations, and is a senior foreign policy advisor to the Republican National Committee – and Jonathan Clarke, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, pointed out in a piece that appeared last month, the neocon-ization of Ronald Wilson Reagan amounts to a radical rewriting of history:
"The implication is that Reagan too would have attacked Iraq. But would he? We make the case that the neoconservative interpretation of Reagan's foreign policy is, to be blunt, a travesty of Reagan's record. Moreover, Reagan's historic achievement – the defeat of Soviet communism – was secured largely because he rejected neoconservative policy recommendations, not because he embraced them."
It was Reagan, Halper and Clarke remind us, who reached an accommodation with the Soviet Union on arms control, moving in the opposite direction from the hardline policies advocated by the warlike neocons – who, right up to 1990, were still warning that Gorbachev and the Commies were pulling off an elaborate trick to snare the West and crack down on Soviet dissidents. Far from functioning as loyal Reaganites, the neocons, in their characteristically factional and manipulative fashion, constantly criticized Reagan in terms that would normally be reserved for one's bitter enemies.
In 1981, Norman Podhoretz, the neocons' scold-in-chief, berated Reagan for "following a strategy of helping the Soviet Union stabilize its empire" – because the President wouldn't impose an economic embargo on the long-suffering Polish people following the Commie crackdown on Solidarity.
Polish communism fell, anyway, and, not too long afterward, so did the rest of the Evil Empire, but even as it was decomposing the neocons refused to believe it. In 1983, Podhoretz, upset by Reagan's overtures to the Soviets, accused the Reagan administration of committing "appeasement by any other name." Two years later, the Committee for the Free World, founded by Podhoretz and Midge Decter, his wife, featured Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Sovietologist Richard Pipes, and neocon "godfather" Irving Kristol at a conference, the main theme of which was the inability and apparent unwillingness of the Reagan administration to roll back Soviet influence. Even as the Kremlin was imploding, and Reagan was negotiating the terms of Gorbachev's surrender, the CFW group, including Norm and Midge, spent two days complaining that Reagan had gone soft on Communism.
Reagan had gone into retirement and retreated into a merciful dimness by the time the neocons achieved their present apotheosis. But Podhoretz kept up the attack. In an essay in Commentary that wondered aloud under what circumstances George W. Bush would "go wobbly" and deviate from the neoconservative timeline – which demanded not only an invasion of Iraq, but also attacks on Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, to start with – Podhoretz kvetched that previous Republican Presidents had sometimes failed to follow neocon prescriptions to the letter – and even, as in the case of Bush '41, defied them outright, by refusing to march on Baghdad in the first Gulf War. In Podhoretz's long litany of betrayals, Reagan figures prominently:
"Just hours after Ronald Reagan's inauguration in January 1981, the hostages were finally released by the Iranians, evidently because they feared that the hawkish new President might actually launch a military strike against them. Yet if they had foreseen what was coming under Reagan, they would not have been so fearful. In April 1983, Hizbullah – an Islamic terrorist organization nourished by Iran and Syria – sent a suicide bomber to explode his truck in front of the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Sixty-three employees, among them the Middle East CIA director, were killed and another 120 wounded. But Reagan sat still.
"Six months later, in October 1983, another Hizbullah suicide bomber blew up an American barracks in the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. Marines in their sleep and wounding another 81. This time Reagan signed off on plans for a retaliatory blow, but he then allowed his Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, to cancel it (because it might damage our relations with the Arab world, of which Weinberger was always tenderly solicitous). Shortly thereafter, the President pulled the Marines out of Lebanon.
"Having cut and run in Lebanon in October, Reagan again remained passive in December, when the American embassy in Kuwait was bombed. Nor did he hit back when, hard upon the withdrawal of the American Marines from Beirut, the CIA station chief there, William Buckley, was kidnapped by Hizbullah and then murdered. Buckley was the fourth American to be kidnapped in Beirut, and many more suffered the same fate between 1982 and 1992 (though not all died or were killed in captivity)."
He then segues into a denunciation of the Iran-Contra deal, neglecting to note that one of the chief figures in his "Committee for a Free World," Michael Ledeen, served as an essential go-between with the Iranian mullahs: and, somehow, Israel's key role in that affair also goes without mention.
Reagan was soft on terrorism, according to Podhoretz, and stands condemned as an "appeaser" – yet Field Marshall Podhoretz never explains why American Marines were in Beirut to begin with, nor what the American interest in such a presence was. Short of invading and permanently occupying Lebanon, one wonders what Reagan could have done except "cut and run" – especially given the militarily untenable position of U.S. Marines barracked like sitting ducks in a sea of perpetual hostility.
This, of course, is precisely the position U.S. troops in Iraq find themselves, much to their dismay, but to Podhoretz such matters as high casualties hardly matter. What's important is waging what he and other prominent neocons characterize as "World War IV" – an all-out decades-long struggle against Islam, which has now taken the place of Communism in the neocons' international rogues gallery.
That the neocons are claiming Reagan as one of their own is just the most recent example of a series of wholesale appropriations that they have so far managed to pull off, starting with their organizational and financial control over the "official" conservative movement institutions, the big philanthropic foundations and thinktanks, and including all of the major magazines and newspapers generally considered to be on the Right (National Review, the Washington Times, the New York Post, etc.). But if you look at the record, another story emerges: the neocons, given an entrée to government circles for the first time, responded to Reagan by relentlessly harping on his alleged shortcomings and criticizing him bitterly when he failed to conform to the "correct" line.
Halper and Clarke make a good case that the neocons are very selective when they point to the invasion of Grenada and U.S. military adventurism in Central America as the essence of the "Reaganite" foreign policy legacy, while ignoring what doesn't fit into their mythological narrative. The Halper-Clarke piece, which first appeared in The American Spectator and was widely reprinted, also points to a difference in tone and style between the bright optimism of Reagan's "morning in America" "shining-city-on-a-hill" rhetorical style and the dark vision of the neocons:
"When the technical analysis of Reagan's foreign policy philosophy and execution is laid aside, perhaps the more fundamental difference between him and today's neoconservatives is one of temperament. As George Shultz records, Reagan was optimistic; he 'appealed to people's best hopes, not their fears.' By contrast, the neoconservative vision is one that has mobilized fear as a binding political adhesive in support of a one-dimensional approach to global affairs.
"We detect a deep pessimism among neoconservatives about human nature and human society – and one that is much darker than the skepticism about human perfectibility often found in conservative thinking. They reject the notion – implicit in Reagan's striving for accord with the Soviet Union – that democracy can be brought to nondemocratic countries other than at the point of the bayonet or on the back of a Tomahawk cruise missile."
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