Wafted along by their vaporous good intentions, indifferent to any unintended consequences those intentions might engender, wrapped up in their dizzy notions of the perfectibility of humankind, the liberals (at least, as the neos caricatured them) crafted criminal codes devoid of punishment, welfare programs requiring no work. In the world the liberals made, civic order took a back seat to individual rights, and as order vanished, the urban middle class vanished with it, abandoning once-vibrant neighborhoods for the safety of the suburbs. A neoconservative, the movement’s founding father, Irving Kristol, famously observed, was a liberal who’d been mugged by reality. While liberals dithered, neoconservatives argued first and foremost for more cops.
It’s long been fashionable for Conservatives to pillory Liberals for being clueless, out of touch, and more concerned with the rights of perpetrators than the plight of victims. Neo-Conservatism, while originally a reaction to what many former Liberals viewed as an overly permissive social agenda by the Liberal mainstream, has over the past four decades morphed into a parody of its’ original intentions.
Neo-Conservatives saw themselves as the realistic alternative to a Liberalism that in their minds had lost touch with reality. Fast forward four decades to a time when one of their own is in the White House. Having achieved their dreams of attaining power (though they had to steal the 2000 election to do it), and having installed Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader as titular head of state, Neo-Conservatives finally had the opportunity to make the world over in their own image.
Funny how things have worked out, eh?
Bolsheviks in the cause of their vaporous intentions, so bent on ignoring reality that they dismissed and suppressed all intelligence that prophesied the bloody complexities of the post-Hussein landscape, they conjured from nowhere and guaranteed the world an idealized postwar Iraq.
The sharpest irony was their stunning indifference to the need for civic order. When the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, said that the occupation would require many hundreds of thousands of troops to establish and maintain the peace, he was publicly rebuked by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s foremost neocon, and quickly put out to pasture. When the first U.S. official to take charge in post-invasion-Iraq, Jay Garner, called for a massive effort to train Iraq’s police and restore order, he was summarily dismissed. When looting far more widespread than anything the United States had ever known swept Iraq’s cities after Hussein’s fall, Don Rumsfeld shrugged and said, “Stuff happens” — a two-word death sentence for the possibility of a livable Iraq.
And now, just as middle-class Americans fled the cities in the wake of urban disorder, so middle-class Iraqis are fleeing, too — not just the cities but the nation. In a signally important and devastating dispatch from Baghdad that ran in last Friday’s New York Times, correspondent Sabrina Tavernise reports that fully 7 percent of the country’s population, and an estimated quarter of the nation’s middle class, has been issued passports in the past 10 months alone. Tavernise documents the sectarian savagery that is directed at the world of Iraqi professionals — the murders in their offices, their neighborhood stores, their children’s schools, their homes — and that has already turned a number of Baghdad’s once-thriving upscale neighborhoods into ghost towns.
Iraq was to be the laboratory in which Neo-Conservatives demonstrated that great things can happen when democracy and the rule of law becomes the natural order of things. Then 9.11 provided the perfect lead-in to take out the Neo-Conservative movement’s Public Enemy #1- Saddam Hussein. Not that Hussein was a lovable character, but no reasonable person could convicingly argue that he was a threat to American national security. What 9.11 did was to provide the cover under which Neo-Conservatives could begin to work their magic. That it took lies, fudged intelliggence, and some very poorly-crafted intelligence was, in their eyes, merely a cost of doing business. In the Neo-Conservative ethos, the end (democracy and the rule of law) justifies the means (even if it involves lies and propaganda). Since they saw Saddam Hussein as a direct threat to American security, whatever it took to achieve their ultimate goal of removing Hussein from power was acceptable. That more than 2,500 Americans have died in service of those lies and propaganda seems merely an incovenient talking point.
Iraq was to be the Neo-Conservative movement’s golden opportunity to demonstrate that they could remake the world into a safer, more America-friendly place. So, how’s that working out for y’all so far??
Slaughter is the order of the day, and the police are nowhere to be found. “I have no protection from my government,” Monkath Abdul Razzaq, a middle-class Sunni who has decided to emigrate, told Tavernise. “Anyone can come into my house, take me, kill me, and throw me into the trash.”
So much for the rule of law. Yes, Neo-Conservatives can argue that they have successfully held several democratic elections. The problem, though, is that elections, no matter how fair and free, cannot make a difference if the rule of law is not in force. Iraq has turned into this Administration’s Potemkin Village, a concept which has exposed Neo-Conservatism for the shallow, vapid ideology it is.
The war, and the failure to establish order that led to the barbarism that’s driving Iraqis away, can’t be laid solely on the neocons’ doorstep, of course. These second-generation neos needed a trio of arrogant, onetime CEOs — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld — to actualize their vision. But actualize it they did, and the ideologues whose forebears once argued that the drugged-out Bronx was a monument to liberal folly have now made blood-drenched and depopulating Baghdad the monument to their own neocon obsessions.
In the end, it should seem clear to any thinking person that Neo-Conservatism is little more than an ideological shroud with which those who pursue power and its accoutrements can cloak themselves. To the Neo-Conservative way of thinking (though you’ll never hear it stated in quite this manner), power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and as long as they’re the ones exercising that power, it’s all good. Try telling that to the familes of those American soldiers killed in the service of their lies and propaganda….
WE DESERVE BETTER….
