QandO

January 21, 2004

Bad MoonBat! (smack)
Posted by Jon Henke

Max Boot applies the Clue-Bat to myths about NeoCons.

"...the neocons have no representatives in the administration’s top tier. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice: Not a neocon among them. Powell might be best described as a liberal internationalist; the others are traditional national-interest conservatives who, during Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, derided the Clinton administration for its focus on nation building and human rights. Most of them were highly skeptical of the interventions in the Balkans that neocons championed."

The Realist position simply requires one to manuever when possible, but act when diplomacy can no longer ensure stability. In the Middle East, we'd seen decades of diplomacy seeking one goal....the maintenance of a balance of powers. Saddam might be a bad fellow, but he's got Iran on one side and a few unsympathetic nations on the other. He might be belligerent, but he's not going anywhere.

Similarly, Iran was thwarted by the presence of Iraq and so on and so forth. Nobody could become too powerful - it would distort the balance of powers and the region would simply not allow that to occur. By not interfering too much - and we could do little good if we had - we largely let the Middle East occupy itself with itself.

And after all...we had a bigger fish to fry. But the Soviet Union is no longer with us, and suddenly - we realized on 9/11 - the Middle Eastern problems were.

Just as Reagan realized in the 80s, there's a time for containment and a time for engagement. The Bush administration realized that, and it didn't take a NeoCon to know it.....

But the administration has adopted these policies not because of the impact of the neocons but because of the impact of the four airplanes hijacked on September 11, 2001. Following the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, Bush realized the United States no longer could afford a “humble” foreign policy. The ambitious National Security Strategy that the administration issued in September 2002—with its call for U.S. primacy, the promotion of democracy, and vigorous action, preemptive if necessary, to stop terrorism and weapons proliferation—was a quintessentially neoconservative document.

Yet the triumph of neoconservatism was hardly permanent or complete. The administration so far has not adopted neocon arguments to push for regime change in North Korea and Iran. Bush has cooled on the “axis of evil” talk and has launched negotiations with the regime in North Korea. The president has also established friendlier relations with Communist China than many neocons would like, and he launched a high-profile effort to promote a “road map” for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that most neocons (correctly) predicted would lead nowhere.

The rest of the article debunks myths about NeoCons....it's worth a read.

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