From Salon. I admit it, I’m a Talking Points Memo fanboy. I got a chance to watch part of this panel discussion on C-SPAN, and I can assure you that yelling at neocons on TV is every bit as pleasing (and futile) as yelling at sports on TV.
Richard Perle, one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq war, offers
an acerbic defense of his ideology.
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By Michelle Goldberg
Dec. 17, 2003 | WASHINGTON — Neoconservatives are very sensitive people.
Even those who’ve attained stature and power are exquisitely attuned to
insults hurled from obscure quarters of the left as well as the barbs of
French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin. It’s not only bombastic blogger
Andrew Sullivan who trolls Web sites like Indymedia.org, hunting for evidence
of moral relativism. No less a personage than Richard Perle, the neocon
kingpin who sits on the Pentagon’s Defense Advisory Board, bristled with
irritation when mentioning Talking Points Memo, the blog of liberal Washington
journalist Joshua Micah Marshall.
To answer the criticism directed against his movement, Perle appeared with
Marshall at a panel on Monday in Washington called "Is the Neoconservative
Moment Over?" Perle’s answer: Not even close.
"Not only is the neoconservative movement not over, it’s just beginning,"
he said. "Also not over is the left’s obsession with neoconservatism.
If you look at Mr. Marshall’s blog, it seems to occupy his every waking
moment."
The panel was sponsored jointly by the joint supplements for dogs
Hudson Institute, a neoconservative
Washington think tank, and the hawkish, Liebermanesque New Republic magazine,
and it was moderated by neoconservative New Republic writer Lawrence Kaplan.
Besides Perle and Marshall, the speakers included Gary Schmitt, president
of the Project for a New American Century ("The object of many conspiracy
theories," Kaplan said with a chuckle), and Adrian Woolbridge, Washington
bureau chief for the Economist. The audience of 40 or so gray-haired eminences,
packed into a small, fluorescent-lit conference room at the Hudson Institute's
office, included Barbara Ledeen, wife of neocon bomb-thrower Michael Ledeen,
and Michael Barone, a right-wing columnist for U.S. News and World Report.
There was little love in the room for Marshall. He recently co-wrote an
article for the Washington Monthly about the qualifications, or lack thereof,
of members of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. In it, he questioned
whether 29-year-old Simone Ledeen, daughter of Michael and Barbara and advisor
for northern Iraq at the Ministry of Finance in Baghdad, had enough experience
to be charged with reshaping a quarter of Iraq's economy. At the end of
the talk, Barbara Ledeen barreled forward to yell at him, wagging her finger
in his face and shouting, "Shame on you!"
Aside from Marshall, few of the assembled were interested in contemplating
the possible end of the zeitgeist that has empowered them, especially the
day after the triumphant capture of Saddam. The real theme of the conference,
then, wasn't "Is the Neoconservative Moment Over?" It was more
like, "Are Critics of Neoconservatism Paranoid Anti-Semites Who Live
in a Fantasy World?"
In his introduction, Perle ascribed the left's "obsession with neoconservativism"
to its "visceral anti-Americanism." Yet if the left is obsessed
with neoconservatives, neoconservatives are becoming obsessed with that
obsession. In September, Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute (also home to Perle), published a 6,000-word rejoinder
to neoconservatism's critics in Commentary. In it, he attacks the arguments
that the neocons are the intellectual descendents of Leon Trotsky and of
the political philosopher Leo Strauss, finding a whiff of anti-Semitism
in his opponents' analysis.
Noting the profound differences between the two men, Muravchik writes,
"There is, however, one thing that Strauss and Trotsky did have in
common, and that one thing may get us closer to the real reason their names
have been so readily invoked. Both were Jews. The neoconservatives, it turns
out, are also in large proportion Jewish -- and this, to their detractors,
constitutes evidence of the ulterior motives that lurk behind the policies
they espouse."
Of course, the neoconservatives' harshest critics are also in large proportion
Jewish, which Muravchik acknowledged while smearing them as self-haters.
"Michael Lind, for one, has gone out of his way to assert his own Jewish
'descent,' and Tikkun is in some self-professed sense a Jewish magazine,"
he wrote. An hour-long BBC special about the movement had particularly incensed
Muravchik, and he noted, "Even the BBC's assault on the neocons featured
a Jewish critic [lefty journalist Jim Lobe] in the starring role. So passionate
are these Jews in their opposition to neoconservative ideas that they have
not hesitated to pander to anti-Semitism in the effort to discredit them."
Much of the debate Monday proceeded on about this level.
Moderator Kaplan began the proceedings by defining neoconservatism as "a
robust approach to the foreign scene." It's a theory, he said, that
"sees no inherent incompatibility between American interests and American
ideals." Who could disagree with a theory like that?
The answer, according to Perle, is "ideologues investing their hopes
not in the real world but in a fantasy world. These deluded sentimentalists
would make American security dependent on international institutions and
"signatures on pieces of paper." In Perle's view only the neocons,
being hardheaded realists, are willing to do what it takes to keep the country
safe.
And so it went, with Marshall trying, somewhat vainly, to argue that legitimate
alternatives to neoconservatism existed, and a contemptuous Perle treating
him as if he were a cross between Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali. At one point,
Perle mentioned the "execrable" Robert Fisk, the Middle East reporter
for the British Independent newspaper, fierce critic of American foreign
policy and hero to much of the left. Then he turned to Marshall and said:
"I suspect he's a pal of yours."
Woolbridge, a wry man with tousled hair and small round glasses, also tried
to raise questions about the neoconservative project, suggesting that democratizing
Iraq may be insurmountably difficult. Perle, though, wouldn't engage him.
Instead, he proceeded as if all the events of the past three years -- from
Sept. 11 to the capture of Saddam -- have vindicated his beliefs. Despite
Woolbridge's efforts, the question of whether the neoconservatives bear
any responsibility for providing faulty intelligence about Iraq was hardly
debated.
"The fact that we have failed to unearth stockpiles [of weapons of
mass destruction] doesn't change the assessment that had to be made at the
time," said Perle. He was unrepentant about his criticism of the CIA's
intelligence on Iraq, despite the fact that it appears to be more accurate
than what the neocons themselves came up with through the intelligence operations
they set up to bypass the agency. "A number of institutions on which
we depend are badly in need of reform," Perle said. "The CIA is
in terrible shape. The FBI is not much better. The State Department has
always been problematic when it comes to fighting a war." Yet despite
these handicaps, Perle said, "we've done awfully well with the resources
at our disposal.
"Saddam Hussein living in a spider hole is much less capable of conducting
operations against us than if he had a government behind him," said
Perle. "Our goal must be to drive terrorists into spider holes."
It was left to Marshall to point out once again that no one has yet produced
evidence that Saddam was in league with terrorists plotting operations against
America.
At one point, Perle asked Marshall what he might have done differently
than the current administration. Before the war, Marshall had argued that
America needed to take action against Saddam but that the administration
botched the diplomacy necessary to build a winning coalition, and he said
much the same thing Monday. "I don't think we needed to be in that
kind of rush," Marshall said, adding that a more deliberate approach
would have garnered more international support, and with it, more money
and troops for Iraq's reconstruction.
"Mr. Marshall says he would have left Saddam in place, " said
Perle. "He says leave him in place and gather international support."
But that, Perle said, would have been an "unacceptable risk."
The war, like neoconservative doctrine in general, has "nothing to
do with some philosophical predisposition," Perle said. Its only impetus
is pragmatism.
This meme -- that neoconservatism is dictated by the march of history,
not the dreams of theorists -- was repeated by both Perle and Schmitt. When
Marshall made the innocuous assertion that neoconservatives have had an
influence on the Bush administration, Perle retorted: "Reality has
had an influence." Later Schmitt claimed that any other president,
whether a Carter-style liberal or realist like Bush père, would pursue
the same foreign policy as the current administration.
They might try other approaches, he said, but "the logic of the situation,
the reality, is going to pull them towards policies that look like the Bush
administration's."
Put that way, the criticism of the neocons does seem unfair. After all,
whatever the result of their Iraq policy, it's not their fault. The dialectic
made them do it.
