Imperial Designs:
Neoconservatism and the New
Pax Americana
By Gary Dorrien
Routledge, 298 pages, $42.95
America Alone:
The Neoconservatives
and the Global Order
By Stefan Halper
and Jonathan Clarke
Cambridge University Press,
369 pages, $37.95
Leo Strauss and the Politics
of American Empire
By Anne Norton
Yale University Press,
235 pages, $32.50
Notoriously, right after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush asked his director of counterintelligence, Richard Clarke, for a connection with Iraq. Clarke told him that there was no connection with Iraq; that is what the CIA told him, too. Notwithstanding, although Afghanistan got in the way for a while, Iraq became the main target for Bush's response to 9/11.
Iraq had been contemplated as a highest-priority target for years, in a leaked document (1992) prepared by Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon; then, contemplation turned into urgent recommendation, in various manifestoes and in open letters from other "neoconservatives" who, like Wolfowitz, had academic connections with Leo Strauss, the emigré political theorist who was for years a prophetic presence at the University of Chicago. The letters were to Bill Clinton in 1996 and 1998, and Bush within a week or so of 9/11.
Bush did not need to read his letter, as his demand for a connection with Iraq showed. First, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who had Bush's ear directly, then Bush himself, followed the Straussians in being ready (something Stefan Halper, a Cambridge professor of international relations, and Jonathan Clarke, retired senior British diplomat and fellow of the Cato Institute, emphasize in America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order) to superimpose on the response of the United States to al-Qaeda their aim of attacking Iraq, and perhaps impose some other elements of their grandiose program of "creative destruction" in the Middle East. Bush, with approving comments from the neo-cons, had already set the precedents for unilateral action in refusing to have the United States join the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol, among other matters.
It's a remarkable story. In Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana, U.S. Episcopal priest and religion scholar Gary Dorrien tells it well, in a narrative at once chatty, fair-minded and painstakingly well-informed, personalized by biographical vignettes in which the Straussians and their academic connections frequently figure.
Halper and Clarke tell it well, too. They attack the neo-cons not from Dorrien's theological liberalism, but the point of view of traditional conservatism. They are horrified at having the Republican Party hijacked by ex-leftists and by the loss of moral authority they believe the United States has suffered from policies neo-cons have put in place. Yet Halper and Clarke also offer a more systematic account of the neo-con network, ensconced in certain media, in think tanks and in the government. They go deeper than Dorrien in questioning the very idea of a "war" on terrorism, and the neo-cons' notion that the struggle is to be fought on a state-against-state basis.
A remarkable story. However, it is not, as University of Pennsylvania political scientist Anne Norton's Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire enables us to see, a story of directly applying Leo Strauss's ideas to U.S. policies. Apart from Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush all being capable of recklessness on their own, without much thinking of any kind, the ideas put forward by the Straussians in their program for American imperialism are not Strauss's ideas. They were certainly not his ideas, of mixed merit, about methods in scholarship and teaching. Nor were they his ideas about the canon of texts worth learning from in political theory.
As Norton points out in his favour, Strauss opened up the canon to include medieval Jewish and Muslim authors; he kept out of it (as Norton also notes) current French philosophy, postmodernism there and elsewhere, African-American authors and (I add) Marx, along with ( The Federalist Papers apart) the whole of English-speaking political philosophy from David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, to John Rawls and beyond. His views have not manifested themselves in the neo-cons' incitements to war-making. Nor has the main theme of his own theoretical work, the difference between nature and convention, a subject on which he was in important ways confused.
Norton identifies a number of subjects on which Strauss and the Straussians take opposing stands, one of which may be war-making itself. According to Norton, Strauss was inclined toward the long-standing doctrine of "just war"; Straussian neo-cons favour pre-emption and prevention. Strauss was not an unqualified supporter of Zionism or Israel; Straussian neo-cons have no reservations about supporting Israel even at its most belligerent.
Did Strauss, teaching Plato's doctrine of the "noble lie" and looking for hidden meanings in old books, encourage the Straussian neo-cons to practice duplicity in their incitements to war? Here, as Halper and Clarke, and Dorrien, make clear, a mixed report is called for. The neo-cons deceived themselves about the ease with which U.S. power would displace Saddam Hussein. They were also entirely frank and public about creative destruction, endless war and their target lists of regimes to be changed. In the incessant uproar on TV about soft drinks, cure-alls and adult diapers, none of these things got any attention from the U.S. electorate; it was perfectly safe to be frank and public even about the most hair-raising proposals.
There was some duplicity, nevertheless, as Halper and Clarke charge, in the superimposition of the neo-cons' agenda and its rationale upon the effort to deal with al-Qaeda. No attention was drawn to the fact that the agenda was pre-existing: For years the neo-cons had been looking for a pretext to attack Iraq. They helped incite the furor about weapons of mass destruction, and they insisted, against the evidence, on connecting al-Qaeda with Iraq. Nothing that Strauss offered -- either in what he said or in the example he set -- implies endorsement of any of these things.
There is no endorsement to be had from Strauss for the Straussian neo-cons' naive exultation in the military power of the United States, or the recklessness with which they want it used. Not only did they not foresee the staggering troubles of the military occupation in Iraq, they refused even to consider that troubles might arise. Wolfowitz stopped people with parts to play in the occupation of Iraq from consulting the information about possible troubles that the State Department had worked up. He took steps to thrust off the scene those generals who disdained the plans for war, who held that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed for the ensuing occupation. This recklessness is far from anything that Strauss taught.
Have I laid too much on the shoulders of the Straussian neo-cons, and let Strauss himself off too easily? It cannot be merely a coincidence that all these people have academic connections with Strauss and are more or less ready to be called "Straussians." Some readers of Strauss find that he recommends keeping from the masses the absence of any grounds for following moral principles in international affairs.
Whether he recommended such a strategy or not, it is not a charge that, on the evidence of these books, can be laid against the Straussian neo-cons. Unlike columnist Charles Krauthammer, a neo-con but not a Straussian, they seem to be sincerely devoted to using U.S. power in the service of the moral ideal of spreading democracy. What is Straussian about them, I think, is their elitism and their narrowness: They do not need to listen to critics, or consider detailed empirical accounts of the peoples whose regimes they want to change, because they have straightaway grasped the truth and mean to be resolute in applying it. However, even here they are not so much applying Strauss's thinking as transposing a style of thought from theoretical issues to practical issues of imperial policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Nothing in the old books that preoccupied Leo Strauss anticipated the extraordinary nature of U.S. military power, and not just in respect to size. The United States has the power to blow to bits on a moment's notice any city anywhere in the world -- indeed, all the cities of many countries at once. (It retains the power to usher the whole world into a nuclear winter.)
This, however, is not power -- as the more sanguine Straussians overlooked in their exultation -- that is easily brought to bear against guerrilla warfare or terrorism. For that, you need primarily power of an older kind: foot soldiers, lots of foot soldiers. Guided missiles do not do street patrols, which were needed immediately after Baghdad was taken and the looting began. The Iraqi people quite sensibly lost confidence then and there in the capacity of the United States to keep order. Nor have they since been given any reason to gain confidence. Does the United States yet have enough troops in Iraq to repress the insurgency? If it did, with U.S. patrols on every street, would not the military occupation be even more obtrusive and even more resented?
What more than the mess in Iraq is needed to discredit the neo-cons' agenda or any pretensions they might have to superior wisdom about practical political policy? They did not expect that the United States would begin to lose the war within a day or two of seeming to have won it. Iraq was just the top target on the Straussian neo-cons' list. Had that not proved such a disaster, they would be pushing hard for moving on immediately to "regime changes" in Iran and Syria, then (for some of them) in Saudi Arabia and Egypt -- and on one of their lists, possibly even France.
According to this view, any regime anywhere in the world hostile to the United States (or to the United States and Israel) is bound to be evil; none of them can be left standing, though some may have to wait their turn to be dealt with. This is a recipe for endless war, carried on by an imperial power, and the Straussian neo-cons are eager to have the United States engage in it.
At a recent dinner, four of us, one Japanese, the others having varying degrees of familiarity with Japan and Japanese history, were discussing the intimations of impending national catastrophe in Junichiro Tanizaki's great novel of Japanese family life in the 1920s and '30s, The Makioka Sisters. These are no more than intimations, inserted by Tanizaki into a story he is telling after the war. Whatever corresponding uneasiness the Makiokas may feel, they go on with family activities and preoccupations. (What else could they do?) Meanwhile, a band of zealous patriots, exulting in the military power of Japan, was steering Japan deeper and deeper into imperialism and war-making,
The Japanese zealots miscalculated, of course. Their army was many times more powerful than the army that the United States could then have mustered, but they could not bring their power to bear in a conquest of the United States. Nor did the Japanese succeed in neutralizing the United States Navy by attacking it while they kept a free hand in Asia.
We asked ourselves: Are we not in the same position as the Makiokas, sliding moment by moment into a catastrophe, maybe much worse for the United States and the world than what Japan once ran to embrace? The Straussian neo-cons (and their ideological allies) form a band of zealous patriots who have already helped propel the United States into a military disaster. Unchecked under a president who never admits to making a mistake, they are preparing further disasters and, maybe, learning a lesson from Iraq; they are preparing to conscript the millions of young men and women (other people; other people's children) who will be required for endless wars and endless occupations.
In Japan, the zealots consolidated their power temporarily by physical intimidation. The recent election, in which the U.S. electorate forfeited a chance to save itself from creative destruction, may show that intimidation is not necessary. Doubletalk in the mass media may be enough.
David Braybrooke is a Canadian philosopher, affiliated with Dalhousie University and currently holding the Centennial Commission Chair in the Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent books are Natural Law Modernized and Utilitarianism: Restorations; Repairs; Renovations.