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WEEKLY
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| Decline of the neocons |
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Thursday, January 15, 2009
Somewhere in the bloody rubble of Iraq and Gaza there is a tattered American flag that bears the legend: 'Well, we can't be right all the time.' America is neither infallible nor omnipotent. It can get things badly wrong; make mistakes and errors of judgment; and nowhere those errors are more obvious than in the wars and foreign policy decisions and strategies of the Bush presidency. With less than a week to go before a changing of the guard in the White House, the vaunted doctrine of neo-conservatism and its practitioners, the Neocons, are disappearing from the scene, their power and influence waning or dissipating. Beyond the American failure in Iraq (and we have yet to feel the full effect of that failure, its echoes will reverberate for generations) and something considerably less than success in Afghanistan, there lies a deeper and more fundamental failure. The Iraq project was intended to have wider consequence, to transform the entire Middle East and to act as a template for a new grand policy concept in the twenty-first century. The Bush doctrine, as it became known, had neo-conservatism at its heart. It held that America was truly all-powerful and could do 'anything' and that it was in possession of a universally desirable set of values and institutions which were universally applicable. In the post 9/11 world this paradigm of America Imperial was required to exercise its power – unilaterally if necessary – to reshape the world in its own image. The neocons had a name for their vision; they called it – perhaps somewhat prematurely – the new American century. We may now come to understand that the neocons belonged to the last century, and that the new American century is going to be shaped by Obama.
Neo-conservatism has had its obituary written before, at the end of the Reagan years, but it re-emerged in the mid-90s. America again began to see the world in terms of 'good' and 'evil', a view consolidated by 9/11. There was - is – a readiness to use unilateral force or blatant arm-twisting and contempt for multilateral institutions such as the UN which, for all its many faults, has its negatives outweighed by its positives. Neocon sacerdotes such as Richard Perle (not for nothing nicknamed 'The Prince of Darkness'), Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams and Douglas Feith and their close ally the vice president Dick Cheney drove the neocon agenda which in the post-9/11 world looked both do-able and attractive. Their Big Project, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was accomplished but their grand designs fell apart in the blood of the Iraqi insurgency, and America found itself a force of occupation rather than liberation. From a high point in 2003 the neocons influence has gradually waned, and now it may indeed be the time for the writing of their obituary. There is going to be a multilateralist in the White House, a man committed to diplomacy and seemingly willing to talk to those who have not been talked to in recent years, with Cuba and Iran on the 'to call' list. Obama looks like he might actually care about the Geneva Convention, and will give house-guest status to the Kyoto Protocols. We may in the next week see the beginnings of a new world order, and it is going to be very different to that of the old.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
