‘The Making of a Mess'(in The New York Review,sept.23,2004).
The venerable political author and longtime left-wing agitator Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. comes out swinging – to put it politely – in his September 23, 2004 New York Book Review article “The Making of a Mess,” which is ostensibly a review of three books analyzing the Bush Administration ‘war cabinet’, but in reality is a scathing polemic of the Bush Administration’s unilateral stampede to war with Iraq, and the complicity of the American news media in appropriately failing to scrutinize the reasons for doing so. Schlesinger has quite an axe to grind, and rather than truly reviewing the books — Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, by James Mann, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies by James Bamford, and After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order by Emmanuel Todd – he instead uses them for source material to excoriate the neoconservatives who populate Bush’s foreign policy apparatus. If the reader can get past the fact that this is hardly an objective piece of journalism, it soon becomes nevertheless clear that it is a very well argued critique of the ideas, rationales, and strategies employed to concoct, sell, execute, and spin the war with Iraq.
The neoconservatives (or Vulcans as Mann terms them) in Bush’s cabinet include Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor (and now Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice, (now former) Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Mann makes a distinction that Schlesinger does not, which is that the two administration officials who actually have military experience, Powell and Armitage (both served in Vietnam) were adamantly against the rush to war (not a coincidence, surely), and should more aptly be termed pragmatists, not neoconservatives. These war veterans were politically outmaneuvered and outnumbered in the Iraq debate, with disastrous results.
What is a neoconservative anyway? They are a newish breed of political animal in Washington, D.C., mostly right-wing Republicans of intellectual, academic backgrounds and narrowcast, idealistic ideologies about America’s entitlement to dominate world affairs in a unilateralist model. Mann believes that many in the neoconservative movement, whether working currently in the administration of George W. Bush or in the closely linked universe of conservative think tanks that form a revolving door in Washington, D.C., are disciples of the German philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who according to Schlesinger “… taught his disciples a belief in absolutes, contempt for relativism, and joy in abstract propositions. He approved of Plato’s "noble lies," disliked much of modern life, and believed that a Straussian elite in government would in time overcome feelings of persecution.” The neoconservative ideology bears little resemblance to traditional conservatism and its abhorrence for the stubborn idealism of activism, respect for tradition, and its belief in the fundamental good of limited government. With respect to Iraq, the neoconservatives hatched a fantasy in which Iraq could be easily converted into a democracy, which would in turn lead to a domino effect of American values – or at least the neoconservatives’ version — being inculcated into the culture of the Middle East. This is both arrogant and foolish, Schlesinger thinks, as among other things, it reflects the neoconservatives’ lack of regard for history and its accompanying lessons.
Despite George W. Bush’s declaration of “Mission Accomplished” and a free, national Iraqi election recently added to the history books, the adventure in Iraq has been an unmitigated failure from any objective standpoint, which of course rules out the skewed, self-serving propaganda of the Bush Administration. Countless tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed, public utilities and the economy are in worse shape than before Saddam Hussein was deposed, a full-fledged insurgency kills or assassinates dozens of Americans and Iraqis a day and has rendered entire sections of the country ungovernable despite the presence of 150,000 American soldiers. This is a far cry from Wolfowitz’ now-infamous pre-war assertion that the Iraqis would be throwing flowers at the American troops. The flowers are now improvised explosive devices (IEDs, in military parlance), and the neoconservative fantasy and its resultant experiment has cost the United States over $200 billion, many key alliances, and the respect of the world at large.
How on earth did these neoconservatives sell this war as a noble idea? One only has to look as far as the philosophy of Strauss – the noble lie – to understand that the reasons given to the American people and to the world at large were outright falsehoods. Whatever the true reason(s) for going to war, about which Schlesinger notes there are many theories but few hard facts, the Bush Administration basically decided in early 2002 that an invasion of Iraq was a fait accompli and began searching for plausible excuses to do it. At first, Bush and the neoconservatives created an air of extreme urgency, claiming Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, and was on the verge of using them at any time in the near future. To their chagrin, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, and Colin Powell’s humiliation at the United Nations — to whom he gave a presentation chock full of faulty intelligence to garner support for war – was complete. No matter – the Bush Administration simply changed its song and briefly flirted with the excuse that Saddam Hussein was in some way connected with the attacks of September 11, until the bipartisan 9/11 Commission unequivocally ruled out this possibility. The Bush spin machine then sought refuge in the only objectively verifiable truth in the whole mess, which was that Saddam Hussein was a brutal, genocidal dictator who was a menace to his own people. Conveniently omitted from this affirmative defense, however, was that Bush’s own father (in whose administration Dick Cheney served as Secretary of Defense) left Hussein in power after the first Gulf War in 1991, and did nothing to prevent him from slaughtering the thousands of Shi’ites who rebelled against Hussein at Bush Sr.’s urging.
In short, Schlesinger – as any thinking person should — finds the neoconservatives to be a repellent bunch, a terrifying combination of ideologically misguided arrogance coupled with a lack of conscience with respect to public accountability. He blames them for having not just failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam, but having created another one while pretending to have done something wonderful for the cause of democracy. Schlesinger then saves his last bit of vitriol for the American media, whom he accuses of being so terrified of the accusation of possessing a ‘liberal bias’ (an imaginary invention of the neoconservative political machinery) that they willingly parrot the Bush Administration’s pre-war propaganda with a minimum of scrutiny or investigation.
Schlesinger’s piece is obviously designed, among other things, to advocate regime change in the United States, given the timing of its publication a few short weeks before the 2004 presidential election. Unfortunately, Senator John Kerry was no Bill Clinton, and the neoconservatives who fumed and schemed in the shadows during Clinton’s eight years now find themselves with a self-appointed mandate to continue on their ill-advised missions for another four years. Who is next – Iran? North Korea? Only time will tell, but we can be sure that the truth behind why the Bush administration chooses its courses of action is more likely to come from Arthur Schlesinger than it is the White House spin doctors.
Bibliography
- Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur. “The Making of a Mess,” New York Book Review, September 23, 2004.
- Mann, James. Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet, Viking Publishers, 2003.