The republican party is currently driven by an alliance of religious-right Pharisees and Jacobin neoconservatives. While there can be some policy overlap between them, they have very different concerns. Their similarity lies in how they are inclined in their different ways toward self-delusion. Both are dangerous when they have power insofar as they live in their own imaginations of the world as it ought to be, because of their proclivity to use violence to make the world conform to their delusive imagination of it. Truth is for them not what is, but what they want it to be.
Fareed Zakaria in his review of New Yorker writer George Packer’s book, The Assassins’ Gate, points to the policy implications of this mentality when people like this get into power:
Packer describes in microcosm something that has infected conservatism in recent years. Conservatives live in fear of being betrayed ideologically. They particularly distrust nonpartisan technocrats – experts – who they suspect will be seduced by the "liberal establishment." The result, in government, journalism and think tanks alike, is a profusion of second-raters whose chief virtue is that they are undeniably "sound."
This is the other side of cronyism, the justification for cronyism–he or she may be an incompetent hack, but he’s one of us. "I know her heart", was Bush’s coded message to the movement conservatives who oppposed Harriet Miers. "She’s one of us. Trust me." For Pharisees and Jacobins it’s not about competence, but about being one of the elect, someone who is "sound".
In the Bush administration this kind of thinking among the neocons erupted into a policy war with the bureaucrats/experts in the state department and the CIA, whose ideology was not ‘sound’. From Zakaria’s review:
Packer recounts the prewar discussions in the State Department’s "Future of Iraq Project," which produced an enormous document outlining the political challenges in governing Iraq. He describes Drew Erdmann’s memo, written for Colin Powell, analyzing previous postwar reconstructions in the 20th century. Erdmann’s conclusion was that success depended on two factors, establishing security and having international support. These internal documents were mirrored by several important think-tank studies that all made similar points, specifically on the need for large-scale forces to maintain security. One would think that this Hobbesian message – that order is the first requisite of civilization – would appeal to conservatives. In fact all of this careful planning and thinking was ignored or dismissed.
Part of the problem was the brutal and debilitating struggle between the State Department and the Defense Department, producing an utterly dysfunctional policy process. The secretary of the Army, Thomas White, who was fired after the invasion, explained to Packer that with the Defense Department "the first issue was, we’ve got to control this thing – so everyone else was suspect." The State Department was regarded as the enemy, so what chance was there of working with other countries? The larger problem was that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (and probably Dick Cheney) doggedly believed nation-building was a bad idea, the Clinton administration has done too much of it, and the American military should stop doing it. Rumsfeld explained this view in a couple of speeches and op-ed articles that were short on facts and long on polemics. But how to square this outlook with invading Iraq? Assume away the need for nation-building. Again, White explains: "We had the mind-set that this would be a relatively straightforward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation, and therefore reconstruction would be short-lived." Rumsfeld’s spokesman, Larry Di Rita, went to Kuwait in April 2003 and told the American officials waiting there that the State Department had messed up Bosnia and Kosovo and that the Bush administration intended to hand over power to Iraqis and leave within three months.
Whatever many of the second-level neocons may have been told to believe, the whole point of this war was to make the middle east an American hegemony. So I don’t believe it was ever the intent to go in, knock out Saddam, and get out leaving the Iraqis to figure things out for themselves. That would never have justified the cost of the invasion. The intent was to put an U.S.-friendly government in place, most likely headed up by Ahmed Chalabi, who would implement American policies by proxy. It was Chalabi who told the neocons that the Americans would be universally greeted as liberators and that the invasion would be a cakewalk. But even here the neocons were deluded. The picture is still murky, but there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that Chalabi was playing the neocons for fools as a proxy for Iran.
Libby’s indictment is a loose thread in the fabric of the neocon delusion that Fitzgerald has gotten a grip on. I have some hope that as he pulls on it, the whole monstrous con perpetrated by the neocons will unravel. This will be disturbing, but it will be an essential exercise if the country is to go forward. This whole outlook has to be soundly discredited so we can see more clearly. If the Jacobins of the left have no place at the discussion table,neither should these Jacobins of the right.
I am also going to write about what I think of as the antidote to the naive idealism of the Pharisees and Jacobins. I am not with the so-called "realists", the Kissinger types who will take no action unless it promotes narrowly defined national interests. I am for a patient idealism that understands the world as it is, and that it is not what it should be–that we can make it better–but which also understands that it cannot be forced to be better; it must choose to be better. Such a choice is impossible for people if they are unaware that the choice exists.
PS: I’m ok with force used to protect the innocent and to protect the efforts of those who seek to develop a free, open society. I am not for using force to impose our will on others. There’s a big difference, and the distinction needs to be explored at another time.
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