Those pesky neoconservatives-in just six short years, they have demolished democracy in the Middle East and made terrorism far worse than it has ever been before. Their ideologically driven project there has proven to be a total failure.
Or so Mr. Cam Vidler, in his Jan. 11 article, Neocons con themselves, would have you believe. But his article is fraught with gross misunderstandings and gets many things wrong about neoconservatism and the state of world affairs.
Mr. Vidler calls the hallmark of neoconservatism the “na’ve” inculcation of democracy by force. This is far too simplistic a generalization to be true. Only in dire situations-when a dictator has both presented a direct and menacing threat to American security and eliminated all chances of favorable social reform-do neoconservatives unflinchingly advocate military intervention. For the neoconservatives, this was certainly the case in Iraq.
But neocons are not trigger-happy, and they do not support the unfeasible plan of uprooting all dictatorships militarily. Rather, neoconservatives believe that promoting democracy promotion should be an aggressive, but firstly non-violent, project, with ample funding, technical and organizational advice, intellectual dialogue, and diplomatic solidarity-because democracy abroad and security at home are intrinsically linked.
We should ask whether Vidler’s criticism of neoconservative policies in the Middle East is accurate or defensible. Is it indeed na’ve to believe that, under some circumstances, one can establish democracy militarily? A history of military occupations in Japan, Germany, and Italy, and the gradual progress that’s been made in Bosnia, speaks otherwise.
Foreign perceptions of American “imperialism” have also been far less significant than Vidler asserts. In Iraq, the major attacks on American troops were carried out by foreign al-Qaeda infiltrators led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. But al-Qaeda is an exception, for it will always attack the United States, imperialism or no imperialism, due to its radical ideology.
Even so, recent events-the public disowning of Zarqawi in Jordan, the 150,000-strong protest against al-Qaeda in Morocco-have demonstrated al-Qaeda’s declining influence in the Middle East, countering the myth that the war in Iraq has significantly strengthened the world’s predominant terrorist network.
The majority of violence, interestingly enough, has affected Iraqi civilians-so much for resistance to “foreign crusaders” being the only cause of the fighting. And this violence, as many neoconservative critics of Bush’s war tactics have argued, was due to a lack of U.S.-ensured security. The looting on day one of the occupation was evidence of that. Chaos bred fear, and fear allowed the sectarian militias to rise to power in the absence of sufficient American forces. This, and not “imperialism,” is the reason we have an Iraq which now endures Shiite and Sunni death squads.
Vidler’s last point is that liberal democracy in the Middle East has been hurt by neoconservative policies, and he looks to Iran’s recent radicalization as proof. But Iran was pretty radical before the war in Iraq: it has long been national policy to destroy Israel, pursue a nuclear weapons program, and fund groups like Hezbollah. Moreover, current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected with 62 per cent of the vote predominantly on his pledge to eliminate corruption. He was not a member of the Iranian political elite, with whom Iranians were tired. His election really had little to do with “axis of evil” rhetoric or the war in Iraq.
Even so, Ahmadinejad is now waning in popularity precisely because of his isolating rhetoric and his failure to deliver domestic services. Vidler’s example of the defeat of the more moderate president Mohammed Khatami is also shortsighted. First, the ruling clerics had already marginalized the former president to begin with-so much for his “legitimacy.” Second, they stifled any of his efforts for reform for the precise reason that they wanted to stay in power, with or without the war.
Perhaps, then, Iran was a bad example. But Vidler fails to show how any of the other states in the region were affected by Iraq. For example, how did the Islamists in Somalia, who had long been in the country and had long craved power, get a military boost from the war?
On the contrary, one wonders how the two ballots-over-bombs federal elections in Iraq, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, and the incremental reform movements in Egypt and Saudi Arabia are symptomatic of the neoconservative “failure” to promote democracy. If anything, far too little time has elapsed for us to cast a historical verdict on the ideology.
