My new Fordham International Law Journal speech-essay, US Counterterrorism Policy and Superpower Compliance with International Human Rights Norms

My speech/essay, US Counterterrorism Policy and Superpower Compliance With International Human Rights Norms, has just appeared in 30 Fordham International Law Journal 455 (February 2007).

I have posted a copy to SSRN, and it can be downloaded (free), here.

The piece has some copyediting mistakes in it - most significant is where William Wilberforce appears instead as Wilbur Luce, ouch! and Ben Wittes' name is misspelled, ouch ouch! - but those problems are my doing, not the journal editors, as I was unconscionably late getting them final handmarked changes and there was not time for me to review final proofs. It is a speech and deliberately left as a speech in essay format, not reworked as an article, so it is quite informal and perhaps quite unjustifiably provocative. It is also sweeping in its scope - I wanted to take in the big picture, the grand picture in a short space.

Earlier I posted some lengthy excerpts from the piece below as blog entries. I'm now deleting those entries, as they are distractingly long, and anyone who wants to read it can download the pdf from SSRN at the link above.

***
One short note about what is in this speech-essay. I call for Guantanamo to be closed in this piece. But I make it conditional on very specific and frankly unlikely events - viz., the legislative creation of a special counterterrorism/national security system that, while 'civilianized', does not put everyone into the regular US court system. We need a system of civilian administrative detention with processes for regular review, and we need a system for trying terrorist offenses, narrowly defined as a matter of substance and not applicable outside of terrorism thus narrowly defined (ie, no using the Patriot Act to prosecute (unrelated crimes of, say) child pornography - but which has its own set of more permissive procedural and evidentiary rules. If you can get that, then moving away from the miltiary tribunal system, closing Guantanamo and moving those not released to the US, etc., makes good sense. If not, well, then not.

People need to be clear that not everyone at Guantanamo - even beyond the undisputed "high value detainees" - is merely the innocent shepherd sold by the Northern Alliance. Hamdan was not, on his own admissions. Guantanamo contains people who were detained for regular war crimes on ordinary Afghan battlefields - including the murder of US military personnel - under circumstances which have always warranted military justice. Pure political expediency, not justice, argues for letting them go - and moreover, we already know that released detainees have returned to the battlefield, and more would do so if released - the people they will kill, however, are more likely to be Afghans, or people in Asia, than Americans.

Looking to the future, merely closing Guantanamo does not change the fact that we will pick up people whom we will want to detain for potentially years and yet will not be able to try in a regular court under regular domestic court rules. Either we find conditions of administrative detention, or ... well, what? We might find that we have thereby created an incentive not to detain, but instead to engage in assassination. Or we might look to sponsor proxy forces - eg Ethiopia in Somalia - somewhat in the way that Reagan policy used proxies and surrogates in Central America. Or we might rely on the French and Spaniards and other European countries and the fact that, despite the Western European human rights protection, structurally Continental legal systems provide nowhere near the legal protections of the US constitution in criminal investigation and prosecution, as a structural feature of an inquisitorial, rather than adversarial, system. Or perhaps we simply won't do much of anything at all - caught in stasis between clashes of different policies and different legal standards and different decisionmakers, frozen and immobile - the disaggregated state unable to be proactive in the protection of its citizenry - and so make a very different kind of bet about our safety.

It is easy for the Democrats and Congress to pretend that it is all otherwise and that we can just go back to Sept 10 criminal law paradigms, with some modest increases in homeland security, with targets that won't complain about discrimination - inanimate cargo containers, for example. Possibly the Democratic party would even enact that preference if in charge of the presidency and Congress. But I doubt it. We live at this moment in a period of Republican-facilitated Democratic kibbbutzing - facilitated and enabled by the Cheney policy of pure executive power - sniping without having to take proactive responsibilty and ownership of what protecting against terrorist attacks should mean as a going-forward policy of the United States. That condition is unlikely to last forever and, at the end of the day (if for no other reason than the fact of a new attack), the electorate will know where their leaders stand on counterterrorism and the legal regime shaping it, the necessary and inevitable tradeoffs between security and liberties that define counterterrorism in a liberal democracy.

So by all means let us avoid a police state - although what numbers of my colleagues in the legal academy seem to regard as the police state we supposedly already have seems to me a dangerous case of boy-crying-wolf - but let us also strive to avoid piles of body parts in American cities. The truism that there are necessarily trade-offs between these two is increasingly something denied by a significant part of elite opinion. The academics act as the high-intellectual end of a narrative that an increasing part of the electorate is eager to hear and absorb - there is no real terrorism danger, it stems from our own policies and attitudes, the problem is not terrorism but the invasion of civil liberties, talking about terrorism is simply a way of justifying the police state. Terrorism is not therefore the issue; counterterrorism is. 'They' are not the issue, 'we' are - and ignoring 'them' and focusing on 'us' promises a way back to the blessed land of nostalgia, a way of going back to live in the time of lovely ignorance, otherwise known as September 10, the quiet life, the morally unstrenous time of Before-Bush.

The intellectuals' attitude is not explainable, it seems to me, except on the assumption - which I wearily hear repeated without dissent at many, many academic conferences - that really there is no terrorism problem, except the one that the Bush administration created by invading Iraq or - the more intellectually grand alternative - the one that the West created for itself by being so intolerant of Muslims and Islam and, of course, Israel. But anyway, on either narrative, the problem turns out miraculously not to be terrorism, but instead our own viciously overreactive counterterrorism, which simultaneously creates a police state and promotes a cycle of Muslim radicalization.

Terrorism, on this account, is merely a second order problem. But it's not.

Despue de los neocons - my Fukuyama TLS essay in the June 2007 Madrid Revista de Libros

(Por si acaso alguien se interese en una traduccion de mi ensayo sobre el libro Despues de los neocons por Francis Fukuyama. El ensayo aparecio originalmente en el TLS, y esta traduccion en la Revista de Libros de Madrid, No 126, Junio 2007. Es una traduccion magnifica por Luis Gago de la Revista de Libros.)

(At SSRN, here.)

Benjamin Wittes on counterterrorism policy in Policy Review

Let me enthusiastically recommend Benjamin Wittes' superb new essay on counterterrorism and judicial review in the June-July 2007 issue of Policy Review, available free online here, "Terrorism, the Military, and the Courts."

Ben was formerly the Washington Post editorial writer on law and the judiciary, and is a Guest Scholar at Brookings and now my Hoover colleague as well as a friend. He gives a statement that is about as close anything comes to my own views, and much better expressed.

The "space" that Ben describes in his essay is certainly the space in which I live. From the essay's opening paragraphs:

The terrorist mastermind had slipped through their fingers before, and American forces were not about to let it happen again. At one point the previous year, they had actually arrested him, but not realizing who he was, had let him go. Unable to track him down now, they managed instead to locate and detain his wife and children, who were living in a remote area of Afghanistan. For several days, they interrogated his wife at an air base, but she repeatedly insisted that he was dead. Finally, they tried a new tactic. They noisily put a plane on a nearby runway, its engines running. As the commanding officer later recalled: “We then informed [her] that the plane was there to take her three sons to Saudi Arabia unless she told us where her husband was and his aliases. If she did not do this then she would have two minutes to say goodbye to her sons. . . . We left her for ten minutes or so with paper and pencil to write down the information we required.” Having threatened, in essence, to kill her sons — for nobody doubted what the Saudis would do to them — the interrogators got the information they wanted. And they got their man, disguised as a farm laborer, that evening.

What followed was a protracted habeas corpus action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Lawyers representing the high-value detainee decried the coercive interrogation of his wife, the threat to his children, and the savage beating he incurred on his arrest. (The medical officer accompanying the troops who detained him had shouted to the commanding officer to call his men off “unless you want to take back a corpse.”) Human rights groups uniformly condemned the interrogation tactic as torture; major newspapers weighed in on their side. The Bush administration, meanwhile, insisted that the courts had no jurisdiction over any such overseas military action, which had in any event been lawful and had yielded essential intelligence and the capture of a very big fish. As of this writing, the lower courts have deemed themselves powerless to hear the case and the Supreme Court — for now, at least — has not intervened.

Should the courts hear it, notwithstanding an act of Congress that explicitly precludes review? If so, what should they hold? Is such a tactic — garnering information from a mother by threatening to have her sons beheaded by a totalitarian regime — ever legitimate? And who, in a society committed both to law and to victory in a global struggle against terrorism, is to be the judge?

The answers to these questions may seem obvious to many readers. Yet in the years since September 11, 2001, something of a gulf has opened between the views of elites — mostly but far from exclusively liberals — and majority opinion on these questions. That gulf was only accentuated by the Supreme Court’s Hamdan opinion, the resulting Military Commissions Act, and President Bush’s disclosure of the CIA’s secret prisons for high-value detainees. Public opinion has tended to regard these issues pragmatically — tolerating tough measures and contemplating with relative equanimity the deprivation of certain rights to terrorist suspects that are nonnegotiable in a civilian context. While public opinion data is nuanced, the Bush administration’s supposed menace to civil liberties and human rights has not had traction as an electoral issue; to the contrary, its opponents in Congress have feared electoral retribution for hampering the fight. For prevailing opinion in the academy, the press, and the human rights world, however, the standards of international humanitarian law represent moral absolutes, the administration’s flexible approach to them an affront to the rule of law, and the courts the principal line of defense against excessive executive power and its abuse. After all, there are certain things that civilized governments just don’t do. And in functioning democracies, victims of such misconduct, no matter how odious these victims may be, have access to the courts for redress — the threat of tyrannical government being ultimately greater than whatever threat even the worst criminals or terrorists may pose. In the end, the rules that limit governmental power have to be tough and the courts have to be available to make them real.

But let me now confess that I have adjusted somewhat the facts of my opening anecdote, which is, indeed, the true story of the capture of an uncommonly evil and dangerous man: The plane was really a train; the country was not Afghanistan but Germany; the soldiers were British, not American; the year was 1946. And the high-value detainee was not an al Qaeda figure but perhaps the greatest mass murderer of all time: Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. And the resulting habeas litigation, de rigueur today, was beyond anyone’s wildest imagination then. The stark reality is that absent an interrogation tactic that “shocks the conscience,” Höss — like his colleague Josef Mengele — might well have escaped justice, Nuremberg lost its star witness, and history denied his crucial accounts of the factory where 1.1 million people died.

If the tactic — and the absence of any judicial review of its use — does not suddenly seem more defensible, stop reading now. You have proven yourself both a principled opponent of abusive interrogation and truly committed to judicial oversight of legally dicey wartime practices. This essay is not for you. While I admire the certainty of your nonconsequentialism and your faith in judges, I share neither and can only thank God that neither did the British soldiers who captured Rudolf Höss.

This essay, rather, is for those who live in that gulf between the centers of gravity of elite and mass opinion — those not content to give the president a free hand in a messy, unending quasi-war but also suspicious that courts can and should supervise detentions and interrogations and doubtful that such operations are, in any event, easily subjected to absolute moral rules. This is uncomfortable territory, for the slope is indeed as slippery as slopes get — and slippery, I should say, on a hill with two distinct bottoms. At one lies a government capable of torture with impunity, the very essence of tyranny. At the other lies a government incapacitated from expeditiously taking those steps necessary to protect the public from catastrophic attack. Those of us who occupy this space stand vulnerable to the charge of having forsaken American values and to the charge of having done so with insufficient boldness to enable the executive branch to win. In reality, however, this is the intellectual and practical territory in which wars have been won with liberty preserved. If the United States is to win the war on terror now in the context of stable, democratic, constitutional government, I venture the guess that it is within this space — not with a dogmatic commitment to executive power, nor with an undying faith in the wisdom of judges — that it will do so.

My purpose here is to sketch a vision of judicial review in the war on terror for those who live in this space.

The US under the next administration as 'meek multilateralist'?

This is from the conclusion of a new essay - remarks, really, prepared for a conference at which I was unfortunately unable to appear, and then revised for a seminar on human rights at NYU - appearing in Fordham International Law Review one of these days. It will be substantially edited from this form, but the point is still basically the same - the US in a new administration as 'meek multilateralist' - and why that is not an unalloyed good, even for those who would prefer the US to loom less large upon the world.

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The conventional wisdom seems to be that the US has quite exhausted itself with war – perhaps not unlike its exhaustion with war following Vietnam. Not everyone shares that view, but conventional wisdom says no more wars for a good while.[1] From the European point of view, that does not make the US security guarantee any less good – better even – because for Europe, US counterterrorism wars simply stir up Islamist terrorists in its own cities, places that can’t be attacked by the 82nd Airborne. What it most likely leads to is a return to the early Clinton era, perhaps with an added air, in a Democratic administration at least, of contrition for the wicked Bush years, and expressed as ‘meek multilateralism’.

But recall what that meek multilateralism served in those early Clinton years. It was a get along, go along foreign policy not really interested in anything foreign other than trade. It was willing, most of the time, to say all the right multilateralist things. It was always willing to feel everyone’s pain for anything out in the world. But it was much less willing to act. It wanted to be multilateralist precisely in order (partly, but only partly, through its lip service compliance with all those international norms), to try and be just another power in the multilateral gaggle of nation-states, whose compliance is partly lip service, too.

Being 'just one of the guys', so to speak, doesn’t work for the United States, of course, and it doesn’t work for the rest of the world either. What, rely, really rely, on the promise of collective security through the UN? Who are we kidding? Within a few years the Clinton administration was in a different mode – but it wasn’t willingly and it wasn’t for lack of desire to loom small on the world stage. We therefore face, under either a Democratic or Republican administration, the possibility of a return to a form of meek multilateralism by the United States. It might actually be more compliant with international law norms. It might be much more respectful of international law as the international law professors see it. It would almost certainly be more soothing to the sensitivities, so offended by the Bush administration, of the international community. One might wish that the US would essentially submit its power to supervision and control by its allies and friends and take instruction from them, but that seems unlikely. (One reason is that although the United States is fully capable of moral and legal mistakes, submitting one’s power to the supervision even of one’s friends invites – quite apart from its preposterousness from a strictly realist standpoint – the “give a mouse a cookie” problem, the inevitable tendency to demand more and more of the superpower as a condition of continuing to like it.)[2]

The actual choice is much more likely this. On the one hand, a meek multilateralism that masks a deep desire to ignore, at least for some quite possibly critical years, the responsibilities and obligations of the superpower, in order not to be seen to be exercising its privileges, and also frankly to lick its wounds. Or, on the other hand, the robust assertion of American exceptionalism, even to the point of special privilege, arrogant as that always in fact is, and infuriating to the rest of the US’s friends and allies, as that always is, and less compliant and respectful of others’ views of international law and the international system, such as it is.

The latter choice may not rise, in a new administration, to the Bush administration’s specially calibrated levels of bellicosity, but it would not be a return to the early 1990s, either. Think carefully upon which you prefer.

Notes:

[1] For example, Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan, two prominent foreign policy analysts of the center left and right, respectively, are releasing a joint paper arguing that the United States will be no less bellicose in a new administration than under Bush. See Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan, “America and the Use of Force,” Stanley Foundation Project, Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide, forthcoming 2007.

[2] I leave aside here, as too large a topic for these remarks, the currently popular idea of a “caucus of the democracies” that might provide a robust yet less evidently insincere forum in which the United States could argue its views, find greater grounds of agreement, and generally have a place among those who share its fundamental values against which to check its own behavior and achieve some agreement and coordination with others.

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Let me add this column from Mark Steyn.
***
Fortress America's gate is open

(http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/382787,CST-EDT-steyn13.article)
May 13, 2007
Chicago Suntimes

MARK STEYN

Most terrorists seem like bumbling losers if they're caught before the act: That's certainly true of the Fort Dix jihadists who took their terrorist training DVD to the local audio store to be copied. It was also true of the Islamists arrested in Toronto last year for plotting to behead the prime minister, one of whose cell members had a bride who wanted him to sign a prenup committing him to jihad. The Heathrow plotters arrested while planning to blow up U.S.-bound airliners included a Muslim convert who'd started out as the son of a British Conservative Party official with a P. G. Wodehouse double-barreled name and a sister who was a Victoria's Secret model and ex-wife of tennis champ Yanick Noah.

But then Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 gang would have seemed pretty funny if you'd run into them in that lap-dance club they went to before the big day where the girls remembered them only as very small tippers. Most terrorists are jokes until the bomb goes off.

So, when we're fortunate enough to catch them in advance, it's worth pausing to consider what they tell us about the broader threat we face. According to genius New York Times headline writers, "Religion Guided Three Held In Fort Dix Plot." You don't say. Any religion in particular?

Well, the trio were Muslims, but Albanian Muslims -- i.e., they weren't Arabs and didn't have names like Mohammed and Abdullah (though their accomplices did). Even if Amer- ica were minded to profile, it's harder to profile against chaps with names like "Shain Duka" (Fort Dix) or "Rich- ard Reid" (the shoebomber) or "Jer- maine Lindsay" (a July 7 Tube bomb- er) or "Muriel Degauque" (a Belgian lady who self-detonated in a suicide attack on U.S. forces in Iraq) or "Jack Roche" (an Australian arrested for plotting to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Canberra).

Second, the young Duka brothers are "radical Muslim" sons in a family of otherwise "moderate Muslim" oldsters. That, too, fits a pattern of de-assimilation, of young Western Muslims far more implacable and hostile than their parents and grandparents. The London bombers were British subjects born and bred, radicalized in the vacuum of contemporary multiculturalism. One of the Toronto plotters had a father-in-law who was the pharmacist at the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry base. The Princess Pats have done sterling work in Afghanistan, and pop supports their mission. But his daughter doesn't, and she named his grandchild after a Chechen terrorist killed by the Russians.

Third, what then radicalized so many Western Muslims? Answer: in many cases, the Balkans. When Yugoslavia collapsed 15 years ago, Jacques Poos told the Americans to butt out: "The hour of Europe has come!" he declared confidently. Poos was the foreign minister of Luxembourg, a country as big as your hot tub, but he chanced to be holding the European Union's rotating "presidency" at the time and, as it happened, the Americans were very happy to butt out. "We don't have a dog in this fight," said then-secretary of state, James Baker.

Well, the hour of Europe came and went, and a couple of hundred thousand corpses later the EU was only too happy for Americans to butt back in again. So NATO bombed Christian Serbs in defense of Albanian Muslims, and a fat lot of good it did if the Duka brothers are any indication.
In theory, Baker was right. But out there in the Balkans, if you're one of the dogs in the fight, great-power evenhandedness can seem pretty one-handed by the time you hear about it. Don't take my word for it. Here's Osama bin Laden: "The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system. They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that 2 million Muslims were killed."

Whoa, hold up there: How come a list of imperial interventions wound up with a bit of non-imperial non-intervention? Because, for serious nations, even not taking sides is seen as, in effect, taking sides. What was the single biggest factor in the radicalization of British Muslims? Omar Sheikh, convicted in Karachi for the kidnapping and beheading of Daniel Pearl, is British -- a Westernized non-observant chess-playing pop-listening beer-drinking London School of Economics student, until he was fired up by the massacres of Bosnian Muslims. And, while Europe dithered as the mountain of corpses piled up, Saudi money poured in, transforming the relatively mild Balkan Islam into something far more virulent. Look at the change in Muslim architecture in the region over the last 15 years: They build Wahhabist mosques now. Unlike the State Department complaceniks, the Islamists understand there is no stability.

Tough, you say. So what? Washington still has no dog in these fights. It's time to hunker down in Fortress America. Which brings me to the fourth lesson: What fortress? The three Duka brothers were (if you'll forgive the expression) illegal immigrants. They're not meant to be here. Yet they graduated from a New Jersey high school and they operated two roofing companies and a pizzeria. Think of how often you have to produce your driver's license or Social Security number. But, five years after 9/11, this is still one of the easiest countries in the world in which to establish a functioning but fraudulent identity.

Consider, for example, the post-9/11 ritual of airline security. You have to produce government-issued picture ID to the TSA official. Does that make you feel safer? On that Tuesday morning in September, four of the killers got on board by using picture ID they'd acquired through the "undocumented worker" network in Falls Church, Va. Half the jurisdictions in the United States issue picture ID to people who shouldn't even be in the country, and they issue it as a matter of policy. The Fort Dix boys were pulled over for 19 traffic violations, but because they were in "sanctuary cities," any cop who suspected they were illegals was unable to report them to immigration authorities. Again, as a matter of policy.

On one hand, America creates a vast federal security bureaucracy to prevent another 9/11. On the other hand, American politicians and bureaucrats create a parallel system of education and welfare and health care entitlements, main- taining and expanding a vast network of fraudulent identity that cor- rupts the integrity of almost all state databases. And though it played a part in the killing of 3,000 Americans, leaders of both parties insist nothing can be done to stop it. All we can do is give the Duka brothers "a fast track to citizenship."

The Iranians already are operating in South America's Tri-Border area. Is it the nothing-can-be-done crowd's assumption that the fellows who run armies of the "undocumented" from Mexico into America are just kindhearted human smugglers who'd have nothing to do with jihad even if the price was right? If you don't have borders, you won't have a nation -- and you may find "the jobs Americans won't do" covers a multitude of sins.

What I'm reading, a highly irregular series of posts

(Bleg note: can someone more expert in Blogger than I explain why, when I use bullets or insert a picture, the text gets all squinched up and how to stop/fix it? Thanks.)

Here is what is on my reading list, including my work desk and my night table:

• The Physics of the Buffyverse, by Jennifer Ouellete. Popular science in pop culture. I got this from the Lindbergs as part of extraordinarily thoughtful birthday package that included very good dark chocolate and cello music by Grieg. I thought it might be suitable as a way of introducing my daughter to basic concepts in things like physics - but reading it, you more or less have to have had basic science already in order to understand it. But I find it an amusing review of things I once studied and have more or less forgotten - entropic states, photons, etc.

• The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond, by Simon Winder. Cultural criticism of a witty and entertaining sort about the nature of Britain, British culture, in the 1950s and 60s seen through the Bond and Ian Fleming lens - I just started reading this, but won't finish it for a while because the Easter Bunny actually gave this to Uncle Jack.

• Belligerent Reprisals, by Frits Kalshoven. The classic work on this specialized topic of the laws of war from the early 1970s. I read it once long ago, have consulted it many times since, but decided that it would be helpful to my work on proportionality in the law of war to reread it whole. It appears from Amazon that it has been rereleased, although at the usual dismaying price. Highly recommended! as the great Larry Solum would say.

• Jack Reacher novels, by the thriller writer Lee Child. Pure escape. Very late night.

• If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, by Laura Joffe Numeroff and illustrated by Felicia Bond. The classic regulatory treatise on incentives. First came to scholarly attention in the Harrison Ford film Air Force One, the scene in which the President, being held hostage, explains to his daughter why giving into to terrorist demands is a fool's game - "If you give a mouse a cookie," he says, and she knows the rest. I have mentioned this book in a couple of talks on counterterrorism, when the question of being nice to the rest of the world so they won't hate us and will like us and stop trying to kill us inevitably comes up - I suggest that if you tell people in the wide world that you really, really, really want them to like us and won't you please just tell us what we can do so you'll like us, it is pretty near certain the bar will get set higher and higher on the likeability front and what you have to do to get there. American students of a certain age have often heard of the book, non-Americans not. However, one perceptive student at my talk at the NYU law school human rights colloquium last month said, on hearing my description, "Why, that's a near perfect fable for neoconservatism!" Quite.

• The Economics of Microfinance, by Beatriz Armendariz de Aghuion and Jonathan Morduch. This is quite simply the best book on microfinance I have read in a long time - and I read a lot of them, most recently in preparation for a TLS essay on the subject. Coupled with that I recommend The New Law and Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal, edited by David Trubek and Alvaro Santos - I do not agree with its fundamental policy framework, but I am very sympathetic to the idea that you have to take in sophisticated critiques that come from outside your own - in my case, essentially neoliberal - frame. This is an intellectually extraordinarily well done instance of that. I have repeatedly reread the all the essays - by my old and dear friend Scott Newton (I last saw him, I think, in Almaty in the mid 1990s when he came banging on my door out of the blue while I was returning from Tajikistan, perhaps, and he told me about a solo backpacking expedition across Death Valley in the dead of winter), my old friends and teachers Duncan Kennedy and David Kennedy. I take very seriously Frank Fukuyama's complaint that the center right has not developed a serious position on international economic development, and I don't think you can develop one without really understanding this kind of critique and the history from which it comes.

• United Nations stuff - lots of it that I am working my way through for purposes of finishing up and revising my UN book manuscripts.

• Infrastructure: The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape, by Brian Hayes. Actually, I just finished this - and what a great book! I learned more about everything, well, infrastructural, than you can imagine. Well written, informative, great photos. Great book. It's kind of a guy-book - not really, but that was certainly my wife and daughter's reaction - and since I don't follow sports and was indifferent to March Madness, this was my Manly Alternative.

• Strength Training Anatomy and Women's Strength Training Anatomy, by Frederic Delavier. Fifty one year old middle age guy trying to get back in shape ... hmm. These books help a lot to understand exercises and weight machines and all that in the gym. They have the most amazingly detailed drawings of the muscles to show what is worked by what exercise. The women's is helpful even for men because it is essentially a much more detailed book on lower body exercises.

Goodbye to All That? A Requiem for Neoconservatism: Post comments here

If anyone would like to post comments about my Requiem for Neoconservatism review of Francis Fukuyama's After the Neocons and Peter Beinart's The Good Fight, this is the place for them. I have no idea if anyone actually is interested, but anyway here is the place. Ones that I find especially interesting will be pulled up into the body of the post. I may also post a couple of excerpts from the article below.

Thanks Legal Theory Blog for mentioning my Goodbye to All That? A Requiem for Neoconservatism

When the brilliant and erudite jurisprudentialist Larry Solum posts my SSRN abstract on the Legal Theory Blog, gives it his highly coveted "highly recommended" rating, and tells the world that I am a "creative and deeply interesting thinker," well, who am I to disagree? Larry, who is an old and dear friend and must be forgiven some creative liberties in that post, is referencing my newly published Goodbye to All That? A Requiem for Neoconservatism. It just appeared in 22 American University International Law Review, No. 2, at 277 (March 2007). Available at SSRN, free download, here. (The earlier working paper is also up on SSRN, this one, with the American University vol. 22 reference, is the one you want, the final version.)

The piece is a long review essay on Francis Fukuyama's After the Neocons and Peter Beinart's The Good Fight but, as with most of my long review essays, it is mostly me on neoconservatism with a large discussion of multiculturalism, and a sharp attack by me on what I call the "new liberal realism." Fukuyama's book is a powerful one, and will likely be around for quite a while as the defining intellectual statement on neoconservatism. Beinart's book troubled me a great deal - it has a very powerful positive point wrapped up in a rant that seems mostly designed to reassure Beinart's liberal readers that he really is one of them. I will post a couple of bits from the essay up here, and if I can figure out how to do it, set up a space on this blog on the offchance that anyone wants to comment on the essay or the books reviewed.

The AUILR review is an expanded version of an essay just on the Fukuyama book in the September 20, 2006 Times Literary Supplement, downloadable at SSRN, here.

(Update, March 19, 2007. And thanks Instapundit for the Instalanche of the paper on SSRN! thank you Glenn Reynolds!)

Jacob Weisberg on neocons and Cheney in the Financial Times

Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, has this piece in the March 14, 2007 Financial Times, "Are Neocons History?" - on neoconservativism and Dick Cheney. In it he recounts attending the annual dinner at the American Enterprise Institute last week:

The term “neo-conservative” has many usages, including “former liberal” and “Jewish conservative”. In recent years, however, it has taken on clearer definition as a philosophy of aggressive unilateralism and the attempt to impose democratic ideas on the Arab world. The neo-conservatives also constitute a distinct group around George W. Bush, the US president. They pushed for the invasion of Iraq and remain identified with hardline positions on Iran, Syria and North Korea.

Outside the administration, the chief fulcrum of neo-conservatism is the American Enterprise Institute. The day after vice-president Dick Cheney’s former aide Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury, AEI held its annual black-tie gala. I did not go expecting contrition, but under the circumstances it seemed possible that self-examination might feature on the menu. Once a lazy pasture for moderate Republicans hurtled into the private sector by Gerald Ford’s 1976 defeat, AEI has turned in recent years into a kind of Cheney family think-tank. It had not been a good week, year, or second term for any of these people and I thought a few cocktails might cause them to consider their predicament. ***

But whether or not the neo-cons are prepared to face it, there are increasing signs that their moment is finally over. At the Defence department, Donald Rumsfeld has been replaced by Robert Gates, a member of the Iraq Study Group and an affiliate of the realist school associated with the previous President Bush. Paul Wolfowitz, the architect who wanted to build a new Middle East on Saddam’s rubble, has been moved to the World Bank, where he observes a Robert McNamara-like silence on the failure of his war. Another former Pentagon official, Douglas Feith, is under investigation for misrepresenting intelligence data to make the case for the invasion.

At the State department, Condoleezza Rice is returning to her realist roots and now actually seems to direct policy. She has embraced shuttle diplomacy in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, is considering conversation with Syria and Iran and even made a nuclear deal with North Korea. These steps signify a broader shift away from what the neo-con defector Francis Fukuyama calls “hard Wilsonian” ideas and back towards the less principled, more effective pragmatism of Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser, and James Baker, former secretary of state.

The most important sign of all is the fading influence of Mr Cheney, who for six years dominated foreign policy in a way no previous vice-president ever has. Mr Cheney is discredited, unwell and facing various congressional investigations.

I don't question that neoconservativism is dead, and indeed wrote exactly that in a review of Francis Fukuyama's After the Neocons, free download, here. And just today, I received the reprints of a much longer version of the same general thesis, in a long review essay of Fukuyama's book together with Peter Beinart's The Good Fight, in the American University International Law Review, downloadable free in final form, here. (The working paper form is also still up on SSRN, but you want the final form with the American University Vol. 22 citation - accept no substitutes!) I'll write more about the long AUILR piece later; for a while I didn't think I liked it, but I've changed my mind and like it quite a lot.

That said, I don't think Weisberg gets Cheney right in representing him as a neocon. Neocons are a certain species of foreign policy idealist. But Dick Cheney has never been an idealist or a neocon in foreign policy, so far as I can tell. He has always been a realist, always concerned about power. There were people - Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, among others, who really saw the issue as democracy. Not Cheney. Cheney is not precisely a classical American realist, either, in the school of Baker and Scowcroft - two realists whose policies of accommodation to dictators under earlier administrations including Bush pere, the neocons were right to say, are part of what got us to 9-11, despite the disaster in Iraq and despite the current liberal swoon for nasty realism of the kind that they used to disdain on grounds of higher Wilsonianism. Cheney, like Rumsfeld, is closer to what Fukuyama (drawing on Walter Russell Meade) calls a "Jacksonian nationalist" - sort of a realist, tending to a "narrow, security related view of American national interests [and] distrust of multilateralism." (Fukuyama, After the Neocons, at 7).

The traditional realists - the Bakers, Scowcrofts - did not buy into the neocon project of the Iraq war, believing instead in accommodation and containment. But the Jacksonian nationalists did - believing not in the democracy project but in the security risks posed by a dictator who, they were convinced - on the very good grounds that everyone else was, too - that Saddam had WMD, and at some point might well be inclined to pass it along to terrorists. No doubt it also had to do with a very Jacksonian nationalist calculation that it was probably the only moment in which the US would muster the will to go to war and ignore the rest of world - the moment would only come once, and they took it. But although they linked arms and joined forces with the neocons, the Jacksonian nationalists were never idealists, and their rationales for the Iraq war had very little to do with democracy and all that - it was a security calculation about, really, the limits of realist containment and accommodation or, in other words, an argument between themselves and, not the neocon idealists, but the traditional realists.

Goodbye to All That? A requiem for neoconservatism - draft review essay and SSRN abstract

Below is the SSRN abstract of my new draft review essay, Goodbye to All That? A requiem for neoconservatism? The full draft can be downloaded at SSRN, here. It is very much in draft - not finalized, footnotes incomplete, and I have no idea who might want to publish something that is a review essay of two books, Francis Fukuyama's After the Neocons and Peter Beinart's The Good Fight. I am finishing up a short review of Fukuyama's book for the Times Literary Supplement, and somehow wound up writing 16,000 words. In the next couple of posts, I stick up some excerpts from the beginning, middle, and end. But be advised that I will revise all this stuff in preparation for publication someplace.

***
Abstract:

The war on terror and the war in Iraq have occasioned a ferocious debate over the Bush administration’s commitment to neo-conservatism as the guiding philosophy behind war aiming at democratic transformation. Two recent, widely noticed 2006 books have attacked neo-conservatism – one, by a former neoconservative, Francis Fukuyama (After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads), and a second, by a centrist liberal, Peter Beinart (The Good Fight). Each seeks to anatomize neo-conservatism and what, in each author’s view, has gone wrong with it; each seeks to offer an alternative foreign policy. This review essay examines the two books, considering the respective cases they make against neo-conservatism and the rationales it has provided for the Iraq war and the war on terror. The essay considers the broader intellectual framework of neo-conservatism and its history within American conservatism, and the long-running American foreign policy debate over realism and idealism, setting out a seven point of schema of neoconservative doctrines. It is respectful of Fukuyama’s critiques, and particularly the internal contradictions that Fukuyama identifies within and among neoconservative premises that have led to what Fukuyama sees as disastrous policies. Still, the essay does not believe – even granting the strength of the critiques – that Fukuyama has decisively knocked down the neoconservative case for the Iraq war or, more broadly and importantly, the neoconservative commitment to democratic transformation as against realist doctrines of the accommodation and stability of corrupt or wicked authoritarian regimes. With respect to Beinart, the essay praises his call for the Democratic Party to recognize that the fight against transnational Islamist terrorism is really a fight against a form of totalitarianism, and hence similar to the Cold War. It rejects, however, Beinart’s characterization of neo-conservatism and Bush administration foreign policy as likewise a threat to American values, different in degree but not necessarily in kind. The essay also rejects the new foreign policy proposed by Fukuyama or Beinart – amounting, in each case, to a version of increased realist multilateralism, what Fukuyama calls “realistic Wilsonianism” – concluding that each is guaranteed from the outset to be merely ineffectual. (Working paper draft, still incomplete notes, 16,000 words, excluding notes. Parts of this essay are drawn from a short review by the author of the Fukuyama book appearing in the Times Literary Supplement.)

A bit from the draft introduction: Goodbye to All That? A requiem for neoconservatism

A bit from the draft introduction, full draft available at SSRN, here.

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Now that the hoopla has died down – the charges and counter charges, accusations of betrayal and bad faith, angry denunciations and bitter recriminations, ruptures of friendships and breaking of intellectual alliances – perhaps it is possible to give sober consideration to Francis Fukuyama’s farewell to neo-conservative foreign policy, After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads.[1]

The bitter arguments over Fukuyama’s book have taken place not just among conservative think-tank intellectuals in Washington DC, however, and it would be a mistake to write them off as simply internecine warfare of no special moment among one sector of the chattering classes. The most incendiary moment of debate occurred when the conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer (who in 2004 delivered an address cited by Fukuyama as a proximate cause of his apostasy) accused Fukuyama in the Washington Post of grossly misrepresenting his speech.[2] Krauthammer, by my reckoning, appears to be right about the specifics of his lecture, and yet I also reckon Fukuyama generally right about the ideological triumphalism generously spread among American conservatives even at a time when it was obvious that Iraq was more than a matter of removing the dictator and letting democracy take its lovely course.[3] Remarkably, too, the White House entered what might have been thought purely an intellectuals’ brawl, sending off emails quoting Fukuyama’s past statements in contradiction with the new positions in his book, particularly his 1998 support of the overthrow of Saddam – joining the melee for the very good reason that, as Tod Lindberg, editor of the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review, put it, the Bush administration has “been more influenced by Mr. Fukuyama’s work than by that of any other living thinker.”[4] Betrayal, bad faith, denunciation, recrimination, and rupture, indeed.[5] Meanwhile, liberal commentators and reviewers watched the feuding with a mixture of prim righteousness and undisguised glee at the long-awaited conservative crackup over the intellectual bases of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.[6]

The work that Lindberg had in mind as influencing the Bush administration was of course Fukuyama’s 1992 The End of History and the Last Man, a volume that began as an article while he was at the Rand Corporation, the quintessential Cold War think tank. (Which is not to say, conservative, but rather ‘anti-communist’ in the Cold War sense that shaped the American political center, in domestic as well as foreign policy, from Democratic presidents Truman and Kennedy to Republican presidents Nixon and Reagan.)[7] That book, written in the flush of victory in the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Communism, argued that we were on the cusp of a historical moment in which history itself – at least “history” in the sense of fundamental arguments over political ideology – was essentially over. Liberal democracy, market capitalism, and the welfare state had won, for the reasons that they are both right in principle and have been proved right in practice, while their 20th century totalitarian, collectivist competitors, Communism, Nazism, and Fascism, have all been seen off. Despite the disdain of some academics, The End of History hit the intellectual zeitgeist of the 1990s in the US perfectly – as perfectly in tune with the post-ideological tenor of the Clinton administration as with conservative celebration of democratic capitalist victory – and Fukuyama eventually became a celebrity professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC.

The Balkans, Somalia, Rwanda, Chechnya, North Korea, Cuba, Haiti, Chinese communism, failed states, authoritarian states, backsliding in Russia, Saddam’s Iraq, the mullahs in Iran, and the Taleban executing women qua women in Kabul – well, okay, everyone understood that progress would only be gradual and there would be setbacks. But the basic institutions and values of democracy, human rights, liberalism, the secular public-private divide, free markets, the emancipation of women, and social protections were accepted worldwide and not really open to question. The nightmare of modernity – 1984 – had been successfully avoided. Fukuyama himself moved on, partly to fleshing out certain of the institutions of cultural values that made liberal capitalism work (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, 1996), partly to working out the problems of failed states (State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, 2004), and partly to arguing how to avoid that other dystopia of modernity – Brave New World – which, while infinitely more pleasant, challenged the underlying premises of being human (Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, 2003).[8]

Alas, as we now know, other intellectuals were also at work in those same years. They too were dreaming their dreams of a politics and history. Theirs, however, were dreams not of the end of history, but instead its re-birth, the re-birth of politics and history on the march, a march long stalled by centuries of Western expansion but reinvigorated by contemporary global demography. A history simultaneously older than old and newer than new, pre-modern in its deployment of ancient Islamic doctrines but post-modern in its highly selective use of them and in its deployment of the cutting edge of the West’s very own anti-Western ideologies of multiculturalism, anti-colonialism, and ressentiment, all at the same time – a distinctly pre-modern, post-modern alternative to modernity and particularly its secular liberal capitalist form. It too conceived of an end-time of ideology – not our polished, commercial, secular, capitalist, democratic civil society writ global, but instead the worldwide umma. Pre-modern and post-modern, yes – but never modern in that term’s formal sense, the way in which we are modern. But they wrote down their visions and grand strategies in languages few of us understood, even as they took full advantage of modernity’s technologies to post their manifestos on the Internet. They lived in grimy, slummy, unglamorous places in the second and third worlds few of us visited as we went about with our Lonely Planet guides, admiring reformed South Africa, its game parks and lovely Cape Town, so full of multicultural promise, went to the beach in Thailand, climbed Kilimanjaro and lamented the loss of primate habitat to war and poaching, hiked from Cuzco to Machu Piccu where we heard stories of the ancient Incas and not-so-ancient Sendero Luminoso, and worried about the decline of the Cloud Forest in Costa Rica. They, meanwhile, organized among modernity’s resentful left-overs in the great cities of Europe where, it is true, many of us also lived, only they lived in neighborhoods few of us ever visited, the banlieues of Paris and the storefront mosques of Bradford and Hamburg, and they, those same intellects, vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.[9] Great believers in praxis as well as Allah, patiently connecting theory to action, umma to jihad, preacher to terrorist, liberation to the burqa, what had they to do with the end of history conceived as the triumph of the complacent bourgeoisie?

The End of History and the Last Man, in other words, is indeed a splendid disquisition on the end of alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism within modernity – Communism, Nazism, Fascism. But what does it offer if the alternative is not genuinely modern? After all, it only briefly, passingly mentions Islam. Much of the anger directed at Fukuyama’s After the Neocons by neoconservatives and by Bush administration intellectuals arises from the perception that Fukuyama intended The End of History, in the rosy glow of the fall of the Wall, to be a universal pronouncement, applicable across the world and history, not limited merely to the ideologies of modernity. That is how they took it and sought to implement it as an Ur-text of neoconservatism. In his new book, however, Fukuyama does not appear to say that he now recognizes that The End of History was in fact limited to the 20th century’s struggle among modernity’s ideologies whereas, post 9-11, we all recognize that something new is in play. Instead he suddenly and unexpectedly appears to believe that neoconservative policymakers and intellectuals misread him, and that he never meant it to be universal after all.[10] (F 53-55) The result being that it is their fault, not his, for not recognizing the limits of what a policy of promoting democracy and liberalism in the Middle East can get you and, more pertinently, what it cannot. The neoconservatives, in the Bush administration and out, on the other hand, accuse Fukuyama of profoundly changing his mind but refusing to admit it. In what Lindberg calls the “Lucy, Charlie Brown, and the football analogy,” the administration faithfully tees up the Fukuyamian football of liberal democracy in Iraq and the Middle East only to have Fukuyama himself snatch the ball away at the last moment.[11] And then, adding insult to injury, Fukuyama goes and denies having done so and says instead that if only he were read properly, it would have been clear that the ideological possibility of liberal democracy was never really there, or anyway so hedged up by the long term Burkean requirements of culture slowly, slowly accreting social preconditions conducive to democracy that it amounts to it not really being there at all.

Notes (this is a draft and they are very incomplete ...):

[1] [Footnote some of the nasty fighting reviews] [be sure to note FF leaving various boards and journals, founding new journal, etc.] See, e.g.,

[2] Charles Krauthammer, “Fukuyama’s Fantasy,” Washington Post (opinion), March 28, 2006, A23, (“It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq war, nearing the end of its first year, as "a virtually unqualified success." He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them. And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world's most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.”).

[3] Charles Krauthammer, “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World,” The Irving Kristol Annual Lecture, 2004, American Enterprise Institute, February 10, 2004, ; the text of the address can be read at []

[4] Tod Lindberg, “In Full Pursuit of Democracy,” Washington Times (opinion), March 21, 2006, at [] (“there's the White House firing back by e-mail quoting Mr. Fukuyama's past statements in contrast to his current ones”).

[5] Fukuyama was not slow to respond to Krauthammer’s Washington Post attack; see [cite].

[6] See, e.g., Martin Jacques, “Critical Thinking: Francis Fukuyama turns on Bush’s foreign policy in his brutal critique,” Guardian, March 25, 2006, at []; Anatol Lieven, “Bookshop: After the Neocons,” New Statesman, March 27, 2006, at []; Paul Berman, New York Times book review; Michiko Kakutani, New York Times; Louis Menand, “Breaking Away: Francis Fukuyama and the Neoconservatives,” The New Yorker, March 27, 2006, []; Perry Anderson, “Inside Man,” Nation, April 6, 2006, at [] .

[7] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man: [] ; cite to original article

[8] [footnote all those books]

[9] H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898) (Dover 1997), at 1.

[10] To be exact: “Many people interpret my book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) as arguing … that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. The End of History is finally an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern society, with its technology, high standards of living, health care, and access to the wider world … Liberal democracy is one of the by-products of the modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.” (F 54) To which neo-conservatives retort, that is how you interpret yourself now, but what you said in The End of History in 1992 is much, much stronger than that. Although, like Lindberg, I regard myself as friendly to both camps, on this point, I believe the neo-conservatives have the more accurate reading of Fukuyama in 1992.

[11] Tod Lindberg, “In Full Pursuit of Democracy,” Washington Times (opinion), March 21, 2006, at [].

A bit from the early middle of my draft essay: Goodbye to All That? A requiem for neoconservatism

A bit from the early middle of my draft essay - full draft available from SSRN, here.

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As a positive political doctrine, Fukuyama says, neoconservatism is one of four principal approaches to American foreign policy. The others are realism in the mold of Kissinger, emphasizing power, stability, and tending to “downplay the internal nature of other regimes”; liberal internationalism, hoping to “transcend power politics altogether and move to an international order based on law and institutions”; and finally, in Walter Russell Meade’s term, “Jacksonian” nationalism, tending to a “narrow, security-related view of American national interests” and distrust of multilateralism. (F 7) What characterizes neoconservatism by comparison to the others in this schema? Fukuyama answers by laying out seven interconnected propositions that, as he says, form neo-conservatism’s fundamental ideological base.[1] It is an unimpeachably intelligent analysis.

First, neo-conservatism arose as a highly specific moralizing doctrine for promoting American security in the ideological struggles of the Cold War. In the late Cold War, it played idealist antagonist to Kissingerian realism and, more precisely, that Kissingerian realism in the days of Nixon and Ford preaching (how quickly we forget) accommodation to the “inevitable” spread, appeal, and success of Communism. This was the doctrine of “declinism,” embraced by the endlessly cynical Nixon and hopelessly naïve Carter alike, and which was only decisively rejected (to the amazement and derision of most of America’s elites, whether cynical or naive) by the great hero of the neoconservative movement, Ronald Reagan. Second, however, although neoconservatism is about ‘security’ in the broad sense of preserving America, both its power and its ideals, it was and is never about power alone, let alone merely the maintenance of state-to-state realist stability. It is, rather, a belief in the power of ideas, ideals, and ideology as necessary conditions of victory in the Cold War, an understanding that the “mere” words of Pope John-Paul II were as necessary to the victory over Communism as Nato’s battalions. Third, neo-conservatism asserts that the internal affairs of states – their attachment to democracy, human rights, and liberal values – are overall indicators of external state behavior; predictors, even if imprecise ones, of their tendencies to war and peace. Fourth, neo-conservatism conjoins simultaneously a belief in the universal validity and appeal of fundamental American ideals with an equally firm belief in American exceptionalism.

After the Cold War, neo-conservatism asserted American exceptionalism as an American legitimacy to hold and wield power – not merely as a fact of American power, but as a legitimate ordering of power in the world, power wielded by a manifestly imperfect yet reasonably just and moral superpower bearing reasonably well the moral responsibility of the powerful to provide a minimum level of order in a messy world. Fifth, therefore, neo-conservatism is unapologetic that American power can and should be used for moral and ideal purposes – sometimes directly involving US security interests, such as the Cold War itself, sometimes in defense of basic propositions of international order, such as the defense of Kuwait’s sovereignty and indeed existence in the First Gulf War, but also sometimes in circumstances where, in the neoconservative view, America should act even from morality alone and even if its security is not directly at stake – neoconservatives made the muscular moral case, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, for armed action in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, East Timor, Kosovo and, today, Darfur. Sixth, neoconservatism shares with American realism an abiding skepticism of international institutions, at least those that go beyond a certain minimum state-centered multilateralism to invoke high minded visions of global governance and the decline of sovereignty. Neo-conservatism not only adopts the realist critique that, whatever countries high-mindedly say about international institutions, it is not in fact how they act – it goes a step further, into the realm of ideals, and says that democratic sovereignty, and America’s democratic sovereignty in particular, is also an ideal, with its own moral legitimacy and that insofar as international institutions seek to undermine sovereign democracy, they are wrong in principle. Seventh, and profoundly different from the six preceding propositions (this being the neo-conservative belief most derived from neo-conservative domestic policy), neo-conservatism holds a profound “distrust of ambitious social engineering projects.” The untoward consequences of ambitious efforts at social planning are a “consistent theme in neoconservative thought that links the critique of Stalinism in the 1940s with … skepticism about the Great Society in the 1960s.” (F 49)

The first six of these propositions roughly hang together as the lessons of victory in the Cold War. One may accept them or reject them, and they exhibit some tensions among themselves, but Fukuyama rightly sees them as a foreign policy vision broadly consistent with one other and in any case what the neoconservatives learned from the Cold War, the collapse of Communism, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union. Instead, he asks another question of these propositions. To what extent are these lessons of the Cold War right in guiding the US to war in Iraq and, more generally, in guiding the conduct of the war on terror? Are these principles perhaps instead the ideological equivalent of the oft-noted tendency of generals to re-fight the last war, all-too-often with disastrous results? And, going further, Fukuyama notes that the seventh proposition, the rejection of ambitious social engineering as usually doomed to failure and ridden with unintended and unanticipated consequences, is quite probably strongly at odds with the others. Fukuyama focuses great attention on what he argues, with considerable merit, is the deep inconsistency within the neoconservative world-view of believing either that the project of social-engineering democracy in Iraq could be achieved easily and in a short period of time by the external device of forcibly removing the wicked dictator or that the project could be pursued without unanticipated negative consequences.

Conjoining the two criticisms, Fukuyama argues that neoconservative principles led the Bush administration to re-fight the last war – the war for the liberation of Eastern Europe from Communism – and mistakenly to believe that the Iraq war would fundamentally be the same thing, a ‘release’ of pent-up social and cultural energy for democracy, liberalism, capitalism, civil society, and the rule of law. Take out the dictator, release the dictatorial check on these social goods, and they would all naturally assert themselves. On the contrary – and putting a Burkean spin on the seventh neoconservative principle – it should have been clear that the social and cultural pressures for democracy, liberalism, capitalism, civil society, and the rule of law in Eastern Europe were the result of very long term cultural pre-conditions that simply are not present in the Arab Middle East. They are not “natural”; they are the result of social forces at play over historically long periods of time and that, in releasing the grip of the dictator, the US opened the door for forces of sectarian, tribal, and other causes of violence and potentially civil war that were not in the lexicon of anticipated neoconservative consequences because they had mistakenly drawn their template from the fundamentally Western cultural examples of Europe and modernity.

Notes:

[1] I come up with seven by analytically taking apart the four basic principles that Fukuyama expounds at pp. 48-49, and combining them with other elements of the book.

A bit from the middle: Goodbye to All That? A requiem for neoconservatism

A bit from the middle of my very much in draft review essay on neoconservatism, available in full draft at SSRN, here.

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... But Fukuyama has a second argument against the Iraq war and transformative politics as a strategy in the war on terror. It is (drawing, as earlier noted, on such writers as Olivier Roy) that democratic regime transformation in the Middle East will not address the problem of Islamist extremism and terrorism, because they are phenomena not principally of the Middle East, but of Muslims confronting the loss of identity once in the West, and Western Europe particularly. Even assuming that the transformative strategy managed to stabilize Iraq, so runs Fukuyama’s argument, the social precursors of terrorism are fundamentally drawn from places we cannot attack with military force – Hamburg, Birmingham, Lyon, Stockholm, Berlin, Amsterdam, Oslo, Madrid, Marseilles, Manchester, Rotterdam, Paris banlieues, Londonistan. The phenomenon of Islamist terror is not precisely a sociological problem – it is, rather, the accumulation of individual psychologies, massed together in shared and yet still highly individual narratives of resentment, exclusion, and the search for universals in ‘blended’ pre-modern and post-modern Islamist religion, rather than in pluralist modernity. Islamism is a syncretic blend of pre-modern and post-modern, of traditional Islam and Western ideology, bathed in resentment – and its petri dish is the West and not the Middle East. Even if the birthplaces of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudi Arabia and Egypt, their jihadist spiritual formation was in Western Europe. The Bush administration launched, on this account, a war that quite missed the point – targeting the wrong region and, indeed, the wrong country – a country that was, for all the evil of its regime, relatively secular.

I do not deny the strength of Fukuyama’s psychological observations. On the contrary, they are an indispensable part of any deep understanding of the esprit de corps of the terrorists we fight. The psychological element is indispensable. Understanding the syncretic nature, the multiple syncretisms, of the enemy’s Islamism is essential to a successful strategy against it. Its psychology and that of the larger Muslim world, as its adherents array themselves in relation to modernity, one person at a time as well as by social group, are keys to long-term counterterrorism policy, as well as the closely linked path of social integration. It is a powerful prescription, in fact, for deep-seated ideological changes in Western societies and their states – although not exactly, perhaps, the ones Fukuyama had in mind. The diagnosis of syncretism is a powerful prescription, in fact, for the explicit, public abandonment of the doctrines of multiculturalism in Western societies that have so damaged them, because they reward resentment, legitimize separation, and fuel a spiraling demand for special social privileges that amount to exemption from society’s rules for the resentful and a constriction of the liberty of the resented. A powerful argument, indeed, for a vigorous reassertion in its stead of traditional liberalism, and above all its guarantees of free expression even – of course, rather – for blasphemy, and the reassertion of a traditional liberal refusal to tolerate the demands of the intolerant that their intolerance be tolerated. Allah Akbar? No, on the contrary, as things stand now, the God of Muslims in the West is not great; his greatness, once brought into Western societies, has deteriorated into merely a move in a game, has become merely the grounds for the assertion of religious privilege wrapped in complaints of discrimination and intolerance by larger secular society, a means of feeding psychological and spiritual ressentiment.[1] The real god of the dialectic of Muslims in the West, alas, the one which confers blessings and answers prayers, turns out to be the state and its multiculturalism.[2]

During a visit to Paris a few months ago, I took my young daughter to the Pantheon. We laid flowers at Voltaire’s tomb. The other visitors, not all of them merely ignorant American tourists, alas gave us funny stares. Voltaire? Why Voltaire? Voltaire who? At some point, Europe and America will have to defend their broadly liberal inheritance (an inheritance which is, in America, liberal religious pluralism, to be precise, rather than the liberal secularism, descended from anti-clericalism, of Europe). The core of that defense is that ‘moderate’ Islam, Islam that can take its place alongside other religions in a pluralistic Western society, can only exist, paradoxically, within a cage of iron and steel that insists without apology or reservation that Islam tolerate the liberal secular order of public life, without special privileges derived from arguments of multiculturalism and asserted through carefully cultivated Western ressentiment – while simultaneously protecting, with force if need be, its ability to be moderate as against the Islamists, the extremists and the terrorists. Only a Muslim community which knows that larger society will not compromise its demands that it be pluralistic and that it respect and embrace the universal values of a liberal society, but also that it will be protected against the demands of extremists that it acquiesce in their Islamism, has even the possibility of being moderate – moderation, that is, as an active religious doctrine, a positive value it teaches to its children, rather resting merely silently and sullenly passive, even as the extremists fantasize and dream, steeped in the unlimited resentments and unlimited field of action that fantasy allows, of war, jihad, and terror.

Notes:

[1] With apologies to Christopher Hitchens.

[2] Compare, by contrast, the wisdom of Martin Luther King, who urged his oppressed followers not to give into resentment, finding in it a certain un-Christian arrogance as well as the psychological condition of permanent spiritual servitude. See the discussion of Martin Luther King’s “spiritual discipline against resentment” in Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (WW Norton 1991), at 369 et seq.

Draft review essay, bit from the conclusion: Goodbye to All That? A requiem for neoconservatism

A bit from the conclusion of my still-in-draft (emphasize, still in draft) review essay on neoconservatism, reviewing Francis Fukuyama, After the Neocons, and Peter Beinart, The Good Fight, full but unfinalized draft posted to SSRN, here.

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Neo-conservatism, let us be absolutely clear, is over as an intellectual and moral movement. The king is dead. Foreign policy idealism is not dead, to be sure, on the right or the left – and by all means let us resist la barbarie a visage humain of the new liberal realism[1] – but neo-conservatism is over. It has died partly from its failures in Iraq, its failure to plan for nation-building and not just liberation, and to anticipate the primacy of ethnicity, religion, tribe, and clan over modernity’s political categories; partly from the new circumstances of hard-headed, hard-hearted war in the Middle East; partly from the exhaustion of its intellectuals trying to hold together the internal contradictions of the theory (as happens eventually, of course, with every paradigm); and partly because its core strengths (despite what its many critics would admit) have actually been absorbed by other paradigms of foreign policy that are not so publicly connected with its failures. Intellectuals edge away from it – too quickly would be unseemly, but the whiff of naiveté that envelops it is deadly to intellectual reputation – even while they carry with them large parts of it into other, newer foreign policy models.[2] The king is dead – nevertheless, long live the king. Neoconservative ideas will live on, in other words, and in some seemingly unlikely places, places where idealists continue to gather, even if under other names.[3]

And it would be a profound mistake – not to mention intellectually dishonest – to write off neo-conservatism’s insights too quickly. Does anyone anymore doubt, for example, that the internal character of a regime matters – often decisively – in assessing the external threats it presents to the world? Does anyone really believe – really believe – that the threat of North Korea’s nuclear and missile program, for example, will ever be finally solved except by what Nicholas Eberstadt called in his eponymous book simply The End of North Korea?[4] Neo-conservatism has many failings, yes, but it does have the virtue of knowing that “containment,” today so beloved as the narrative of What Went Wrong In Iraq, especially in The Good Fight, must mean something more than merely accommodation, permanent accommodation of tyranny and brutality. Otherwise it is merely liberation in theory, never in practice, eschatological liberation, liberation in the end-time, liberation at (shall we say it?) the end of history and the last man.

Where in either Fukuyama or Beinart do we see a hint of criteria for distinguishing one from the other? What in their theories indicates that containment must someday cease to be accommodation and come to an end in transformation? Only when Russia, China, France, and Britain all agree with the US while sitting together at UN headquarters? For otherwise we have arrived at nothing more than Kissingerian realism, declinism, and the endlessly cynical accommodation of dictators, forever Truman and never Reagan.[5] All this intellectual and moral energy, for that? The insight, after all, which neo-conservatism shares with all the other idealisms, is that we are all idealists now. Even the realists among us put their realism at the service of some form of idealism, to temper fatal idealist enthusiasm, yes, but not to deny it altogether.[6] The problem is, the idealism that Fukuyama puts forth – let alone Beinart’s version – this ‘realistic Wilsonianism’ – seems to combine merely the vices of multilateralism and liberal internationalism with the vices of realism. And this is when one can figure out what it actually means in practice, rather than being simply a description of what it is not, viz., neo-conservatism.[7]

It is – and this is a harsh judgment, but no harsher than Fukuyama’s judgment on neo-conservatism – best described as ineffectual internationalism, internationalism taking refuge in its ineffectuality. It is an idealism that seems doomed from the outset to be stalwartly, heroically internationalist in precisely the ways that most ensure its ineffectiveness. Darfur? The New York Times Magazine a few months ago ran perhaps its saddest cover story in years – the international community will not prevent genocide in Darfur, it said, so instead let us get on with preparing criminal trials for the perpetrators we were unwilling to stop in the first place.[8] I say, why? It is morally corrupt, wicked even, to stand and watch genocide go by, but comforting oneself with a stern but vague promise to arrest some people after it is over. It is, however, a stellar example of the vices of internationalism, on the one hand – dithering with much hortatory diplomacy barely concealing great power interests – and realism, on the other – the billiard balls cannot possibly rebound to the good, and trying to make it so will only make it worse. Which is to say, neo-conservatism may be dead, and its autopsy expertly and clinically performed, but neither Fukuyama nor Beinart offers a remotely plausible or attractive alternative to the corpse: theirs, too, are dead on arrival.

A British foreign secretary, so I once read, addressed a Commons debate on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, remarking that there “are two kinds of sanctions – the ineffective, which are not worth putting on, and the effective, which lead to war. Which, gentlemen, do you prefer?” Paraphrasing Churchill, they preferred the first and got the second. Neo-conservatism, by contrast, preferred war in Iraq – naively searching for quick and painless democratic transformation, which it has not found, and not so naively believing that over the long run, the realist strategy of accommodation and containment of corrupt, authoritarian Middle East regimes – stability at all the moral costs of the past thirty years – feeds the beast. Francis Fukuyama has analyzed in exquisite and sobering detail where that vision went wrong, where it is internally contradictory, and where it draws on inapt historical parallels, in effect, erroneously to re-fight the last war, the Cold War. It is sharp and shrewd, although ultimately not so devastating as he believes. The alternative he offers, by contrast, realistic Wilsonianism, merely prefers the ineffective – ineffectual internationalism – and, alas, offers no real alternative at all.

Notes (which are not very complete - this is a draft):

[1] Borrowing from Bernard-Henri Levy, Barbarism with a Human Face (Harper & Row 1979).

[2] Consider the use, for example, to which Timothy Garton Ash – scarcely a neoconservative – puts the pro-Middle East democracy argument in this Guardian column, “A Little Democracy is a Dangerous Thing – So Let’s Have More of It,” Guardian, August 3, 2006. His point is that the “next US president may give up on democratization. But we shouldn’t. It’s still our best hope.” He, however, means that as reason to negotiate with Hamas and Hezbollah, which is not precisely what American neo-conservatives have in mind.

[3] Including, no doubt, the Truman Foreign Policy Project.

[4] Nicholas Eberstadt, The End of North Korea (American Enterprise Institute 1999).

[5] Fukuyama, watching his back, as it were, is careful to argue that, contrary to neo-conservative hagiography, Reagan was not really responsible for winning the Cold War and bringing down Soviet communism. Fukuyama prefers to attribute it to [].

[6] See the discussion of the range of forms of idealism in Kenneth Anderson, “Squaring the Circle: Reconciling Sovereignty and Global Governance Through Global Government Networks,” 118 Harvard Law Review 1255 (February 2005), at 1259-1268.

[7] And if this is true of Fukuyama, it is only that much more true of the far less sophisticated Beinart.

[8] Elizabeth Rubin, “Prosecutor of the World’s Worst,” NY Times Magazine, April 3, 2006, at 42 (“The U.N. is not going to stop the genocide in Darfur. The African Union is not going to stop the genocide in Darfur. The U.S. is not going to stop the genocide in Darfur. NATO is not going to stop the genocide in Darfur. The European Union is not going to stop the genocide in Darfur. But someday, Luis Moreno-Ocampo is going to bring those who committed the genocide to justice.”)

Beyond Paradise and Power, ed. by Tod Lindberg

A year or so ago, Robert Kagan published a slim, elegant essay called Of Paradise and Power, an analysis of relations between Europe and the United States. It was based on a June 2002 essay in the Hoover Institution journal Policy Review, titled "Power and Weakness" (read it here). The article and book became best-sellers on both sides of the Atlantic, widely translated and the topic of many critiques, comments, and responses. The editor of Policy Review, Tod Lindberg, who originally commissed Kagan's essay, has just published an edited volume of essays commenting on Kagan's work, called Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America and the Future of a Troubled Partnership (Routledge 2004). The lofty cross-Atlantic ontributors include (in no particular order) Walter Russell Mead, Timothy Garton Ash, Ivo Daalder, Kalypso Nicolaidis, Anne Applebaum, Peter Berkowitz, Gilles Andreani, Steven Erlanger, Wolfgang Ischinger, Simon Serfaty, and Francis Fukuyama.

The collection of essays deserves wide reading - they are wonderfully sophisticated and remarkably blunt, without ever losing sight of the value of the Atlantic bond and the shared values that underlie it.

The issue that has since come to the fore since these essays were written is the question of an Islamacizing Europe, and what that means for both Europe and the United States. I will comment later on this. Meanwhile, everyone should consult this book as the latest advance in the discussion over the Atlantic relationship.