Neocons and Pax Americana on the Line

Newsweek - Now the deputy defense secretary and his fellow neoconservatives are on the defensive. They are battling a growing crowd of critics on Capitol Hill and around the world as the Bush administration’s credibility—and its assumptions—are tested as never before. In Iraq, after another week in which U.S. troops died and got into fierce fire fights, elements of more than half of America’s Army divisions are tied down. Some U.S. officials have begun muttering the dreaded Q word—quagmire, a term Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had mocked on a visit to Baghdad in the days just after the three-week war. In the Mideast, the hard-liners’ move to replace Yasir Arafat with the moderate Mahmoud Abbas—and to ignore the conflict until after the Iraq war—has touched off a new cycle of violence that stunned even the White House in its savagery. It seems increasingly difficult to argue that “the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad.”

In the face of a possible congressional probe into why Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction have not been found, two Pentagon neocons, Doug Feith and Bill Luti, sought earlier this month to identify themselves with, of all people, Bill Clinton. In a fumbling news conference, they insisted that their intel squared with the previous administration’s.

Hovering over all this is a more philosophical question: can democracy really be imposed by force, or even outside pressure? And is it such a panacea?

What is clear is that the neocon vision has become the hard core of American foreign policy, making the neocons every critic’s favorite demon. Wolfowitz and Perle are the leading lights, most agree, joined by a supporting cast including I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff; Feith, the Pentagon’s No. 3, and leading ideologues in the Beltway commentariat like William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Collectively, they are often misportrayed as a cabal of conspiring former Democratic hawks who grew alienated from their party after Vietnam. Typically, the neocons are characterized as intellectual groupies who worship Leo Strauss, a mid-20th-century philosopher who idealized Platonic virtues in rulers and whose views have been summed up as “it’s the regime, stupid.”

The problem that Bush hard-liners must confront is that power and democracy don’t mix easily, that America is not the Rome of Livy. Speaking in the sober tones now coming out of the White House, one senior administration official sums up the problem: America has the power of a true empire, like Rome or like Britain in the 19th century, but not the taste for acting like one. “Look at us in Iraq—how much difficulty we have in saying we will not anoint people to run the country. Does anyone think the Romans or the Brits would have been deterred for one second?” he says. “People keep accusing the administration of being imperialist, or neo-imperialist, or seeking an American empire. It’s just not in our nature to be imperialist.”