Kristol Balls: Neoconservative Visions of Islam and the Middle East

Kristol Balls: Neoconservative Visions of Islam

and the Middle East

Timothy J. LynchInstitute for the Study of the Americas, School of Advanced Study, University of London,

London, UK.

E-mail: [email protected]

This paper assesses American neoconservative policy prescriptions for democratiz-ing political Islam and considers the sources of the neoconservative understandingof the Arab Muslim world. Neoconservative analyses of the Middle East are almostexclusively normative, arguing what US policy toward the region should be. Theiraims are ambitious and inherently controversial. The paper examines what variousneoconservatives have said and written about Islam and its democratic potential.The paper concerns itself with the neoconservative conceptualization of MiddleEast politics. The paper argues that presently only American neoconservatism,despite its variations, and despite some obvious flaws, offers tenable prescriptionsfor regime destabilization and an attendant political liberalization of Arab politics.International Politics (2008) 45, 182–211. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800227;published online 18 January 2008

Keywords: democratization; Islam; Islamism; knowledgeable ignorance; mediatingstructures; Middle East; neoconservatism; political Islam; regime change; terrorism;US foreign policy

Introduction

Neoconservatism has earned a central and controversial place in Americanpolitical discourse and in the frequently partial European debate aboutAmerican politics. Increasingly, neoconservatism is the analytical preserve oftwo distinct groups: neoconservatives and their detractors. Islamic specialistsare necessarily obliged to deal with this American political phenomenon but doso from a base and grounding in Islamic politics, often reinforcing ‘deepmisgivings’ about the Bush administration approach (see Kepel, 2004; Khalidi,2004, x). Indeed, the substantial weakness of the neoconservative case, aspresented by those in opposition to it, rests on its failure to appreciate themyriad complexities of Islam and the Middle East. This argument is made withclarity and regularity by Islamic scholars (Kepel, 2004; Khalidi, 2004) and byAmericanists and Americans, from both left and right (see Drury, 1999; Halperand Clarke, 2004, 2007; Judis, 2004; Norton, 2004; Holmes, 2007). And yet thesubtleties of neoconservatism must likewise be appreciated to gauge its impact.

International Politics, 2008, 45, (182–211)r 2008 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1384-5748/08 $30.00

www.palgrave-journals.com/ip

Thus, we have two sets of scholars — Americanists and Islamic specialists — whoare obliged to occupy much of the same territory — given President Bush’s waron terror — and yet who do so with an incomplete grasp of each other’sexpertise.My small attempt to redress this state of affairs begins with the insistence

that we treat neoconservatism (as we must treat Islam) with seriousness — ratherthan ridicule or deference, two opposing postures which have (as with Islam)obscured its meaning. Unless quoting from a source, this article avoids use ofthe word ‘neocon’. It is pejorative and serves to conceal complexity andpromote caricature. Likewise, ‘neoconservative’ is not capitalized since this isnot a political party with a campaign team; it has no office or headquarters(beyond assertions of its de facto home; see, e.g., Khalidi, 2004, 49).1 This studyexplores the neoconservative vision for the greater Middle East and whatneoconservatives have said and written about political Islam. The paperconsiders the growing body of literature written in opposition to neoconserva-tive designs but this is secondary to the study’s central concern with theneoconservative understanding of Islam, specifically political Islam, asneoconservatives themselves appreciate it, in their writings and publicstatements. That appreciation, though it varies from thinker to thinker, hasinduced an unusually prescriptive, forceful American foreign policy, one whichis more liberal in its ends (democratization) and supposedly realist in its means(hard power) than previous foreign policy doctrines. As such, this is ultimatelya study of neoconservatism as a theory and as a framework for action. Therecan be few operative ‘isms’ in the world today whose effects are so bold andcontroversial and yet remain so incompletely analysed.

What is Neoconservatism?

As a label, neoconservatism is not self-defining. Two of its more cogent criticsrefer to it as ‘a new political interest group’ and/or an ‘East Coast intellectualphenomenon’ or ‘movement’ (Halper and Clarke, 2004, chapter 1). Theneoconservative Joshua Muravchik refers to a ‘common y mentality’(Muravchik, 2007, 21). James Q. Wilson calls it ‘a mood’ rather than ‘anideology’ (Gerson, 1997, 16). Irving Kristol, widely regarded as the foundingfather of neoconservatism, said it was better understood, like Marvin Meyers’(1957) classic treatment of middle-19th century Jacksonianism, as a ‘persua-sion’ rather than as an organized pressure group or ideology. To adapt andparaphrase Meyers, in speaking of neoconservatism, as of Jacksonianism(c. 1830s) or New Dealism (c. 1930s), historians and political scientists ‘indicatethe presence of a central pattern, however flawed and indistinct, whichdominates a variegated field’ (1957, xi).2 William Kristol (son of Irving) is

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International Politics 2008 45

sceptical of those who would label it in such a way as to create the illusion ofconspiracy: ‘Neoconservatives are as strong as the ideas they promote. Manyoperate at the level of small magazines — with influence accruing fromintellectual cohesion rather than sales’ (W. Kristol, 2004).3 Norman Podhoretz,editor of one such ‘small magazine’ (Commentary) speaks of a ‘tendency’.Neoconservatism, he says, ‘never had or aspired to the kind of centralorganization characteristic of a movement’ (Podhoretz, 1996, 20). PresidentBush, by this estimation, was not to neoconservatism what Andrew Jacksonwas to Jacksonian Democracy or FDR to the New Deal. According to theprolific neoconservative intellectual Max Boot:

The reason why neocons are said to have so much influence is that theirideas are clearly and forcefully articulated — and they were proven rightabout so many things — such as the need to remain engaged in the world inthe 1990s. I do think they have a lot of influence on the foreign policy debatebut that doesn’t mean that even in this [Bush] administration they’re goingto win every argument over policy. (csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/boot.html)

Others disagree. According to Shadia Drury, ‘the ideology’ became‘dominant’ within the Republican party in the 1990s and has subsequentlyinstitutionalized itself (see Drury, 1999, 4; Halper and Clarke, 2004, chapters2–3; Kepel, 2004, chapter 2; Khalidi, 2004, 49–55; Norton, 2004).Irving Kristol represents the left-to-right switch peculiar to the ideology’s

evolution (see Guelke, 2005, 98). ‘I have been a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist,a neo-socialist, a neoliberal, and finally a neoconservative’, wrote Kristol.‘It seems that no ideology or philosophy has ever been able to encompass allof reality to my satisfaction’ (I. Kristol, 1999, 3).4 The understanding ofneoconservatism’s genesis often does not get much beyond Kristol’s folksydefinition: A neoconservative is ‘a liberal who has been mugged by reality’(I. Kristol, 1983). The line captures the evolution of the persuasion, from oldleft to new right. Indeed, suspicion of the neoconservatives is a consistenttheme of both liberals and conservatives. Liberals deplore the turn-coat qualityof Kristol et al. Conservatives (or paleocons) distrust neoconservativemotivations because of their liberal genesis (see, e.g., acuf.org/issues/issue21/040929news.asp; Gold, 2004; Halper and Clarke, 2004; Worsthorne, 2005).5

Kristol, seeking to locate neoconservatism within this ideological frame-work, defines it as:

more a descriptive term than a prescriptive one. It describes the erosion ofliberal faith among a relatively small but talented and articulate group ofscholars and intellectuals, and the movement of this group (which graduallygained many new recruits) toward a more conservative point of view:conservative, but different in certain important respects from the traditional


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conservatism of the Republican party. We were, most of us, from lower-middle-class or working-class families, children of the Great Depression,veterans (literal or not) of World War II, who accepted the New Deal inprinciple, and had little affection for the kind of isolationism that thenpermeated American conservatism. We regarded ourselves as dissidentliberals — dissident because we were sceptical of many of Lyndon Johnson’sGreat Society initiatives and increasingly disbelieving of the liberalmetaphysics, the view of human nature and of social and economic realities,on which those programs were based. (1999, x)

Disaffection with the Democratic party through the 1960s and 1970s forcedKristol and his fellow travellers to seek ‘a home in the Republican party, whichhad always been an alien political entity, so far as we were concerned’. Alien,says Kristol, because until the GOP ‘modernized’ (his word) in the 1970s and1980s, it was isolationist, obsessed with budgetary discipline, anti-New Deal,pro-racial segregation, ‘small-town’ with, perhaps worst of all for Kristol, ‘littletime for intellectuals’. The Republican party was, according to Kristol in 1976,‘the stupid party’ (1999, x–xi, 349–353).6

Religion as a Mediating Structure

The evolution from disaffected Democrats to the purported ‘cabal’ coordinat-ing the post-9/11 war on terror was neither marked by much consideration ofreligion per se nor of Islam in particular. Religion, admits Kristol, ‘is only onrare occasions evident’ in his published work (1999, 6). Neoconservatism is notquite mute on God but it is a long way from being intrinsically Islamophobic— certainly before 9/11. Kristol, like his heroes Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and Reinhold Niebuhr (1894–1962), observes the powerful, positiverole religious faith plays in American democracy but is essentially non-prescriptive where faith is concerned. Neoconservatives are thus ‘strong inpraising the utility of religion and weak in claiming truth for it’ (Dannhauser,1985, 53). Faith that contributes to order and upholds tradition he likes, faithwhich is merely fashionable or ‘liberalized’ (Kristol treats both synonymously)is really no faith at all. ‘[T]he Jewish prophets never much interested me —their religious utopianism was too close to the political utopianism I wasalready becoming disenchanted with’. Kristol gravitated toward Judaism notfor its religious certainty but for its attendant intellectualism. Christiantheologians he had more time for; they ‘placed inherent limitations on humanpossibility’ and thus placed restraints on governmental power (1999, 5).Neoconservatism is not atheistic but neither is it religiously affiliated. Some

neoconservatives are Jewish — the Podhoretzes and Kristols, Charles


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Krauthammer, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz — several are Catholic —Richard John Neuhaus (a priest), Michael Novak, and George Weigel. Somevalue religion’s utility (see Steyn, 2005b), others both its utility and truth.7

Charles Krauthammer expresses the ambiguity of religious faith withinneoconservatism; some faiths lead to liberty, some do not:

Under the benign and deeply humane vision of this pope, the power of faithled to the liberation of half a continent. Under the barbaric and nihilisticvision of Islam’s jihadists, the power of faith has produced terror and chaos.(Krauthammer, 2005b)

Certainly there is a surfeit of self-identifying neoconservatives who believe inthe survival of Israel. This is not sufficient evidence to establish a Jewishconspiracy at the heart of the Bush White House — the president himself is aconfident born-again Christian and leader of a party that commands far fewerJewish American votes than its Democratic rival — arguably loosening theleverage of a Jewish lobby.8

Neoconservatism seeks from religion a guide to political and moral conduct.According to Kristol, the better guide was offered by the Western tradition heknew best: Judeo-Christianity (which by definition does not necessarily excludeIslam — this similarly Abrahamic faith received little attention from Kristolbefore 2001, and not much thereafter). The dominant Western traditionoffered for several neo-conservatives the ‘mediating structure’ essential topublic virtue and good administration. Structures (‘private, voluntaryorganizations such as unions, churches and synagogues, veterans groups,families and schools, charitable associations, trade groups — all manner ofassociations that provide meaning, sustenance, and comfort to individualsoutside government’; Gerson, 1997, 279) mediate between the private and thepublic realms. Liberalism, of course, places much emphasis on an inviolatezone of private conduct, immune to public institutions. For neoconservatives,this zone is only worthy of protection if it is, as Peter Berger (in Gerson, 1997,278–279) argues:

given structure and meaning from other sources — religion, the family, folkor ethnic subcultures or the like. The crisis of modernity, however, isprecisely the fact that these other sources are in danger of drying up.

Localized involvement should nurture qualitative civic engagement at anational level. Good states are thus the product of local strength, not the otherway around. Mediating structures, significantly though not exclusively to befound in religious observance, reduce the necessity for central governmentactivism. Without such structures the central government will find itselfsustaining an increasing number of recipients — welfare via general taxation —without any obligation devolving on the recipient. Mediating structures oblige


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moral behaviour and ‘often serve the social function of government moreeffectively than does the state’ (Gerson, 1997, 280).9 ‘Obligation is not only aright but a need’, wrote Kristol. ‘[P]eople upon whom no obligations areimposed will experience an acute sense of deprivation’ (I. Kristol, 1974, 132; inGerson, 1997, 280) Religion is thus a means of inculcating and sustainingprivate virtues essential to public, national health. Religion of a localized kindis a fundamental building block of democratic society.

Leo Strauss and Islam

At the University of Chicago, Kristol studied under Lionel Trilling and LeoStrauss, ‘two thinkers who had the greatest subsequent impact on my thinking’(Kristol, 1999, 6). Strauss has become a cause celebre for those distrustful ofneoconservative designs. Drury, for example, has spent much of her intellectualoutput on attacking Strauss and the Straussians (see Drury, 1999, 2005; andwww.uregina.ca/arts/CRC/). According to her:

It was not the fact that Strauss attracted a large following but that hisfollowing tended to have the attributes of a cult — its secrecy and faith inthe authority of Strauss and the ancient philosophers he supposedlyfollowed. (Drury, 1999, 2)

Building on her critique, in 2004 the BBC ran a TV documentary thatequated Strauss with the Islamic political theologian Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966)(BBC, 2004).10 What Strauss was to neoconservatives, Qutb was to Al Qaeda.‘Those with the darkest fears [namely Strauss and Qutb] became the mostpowerful’ (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm). The BBC-sponsoredthesis fuelled the suspicions swirling around neoconservatism but actually hadvery little to say about how neoconservatives understood Islam, beyond theinsistence that neoconservatives had created an illusionary Islamic threat — asthey had, extending the thesis backwards, created an illusionary Soviet one:a ‘hidden network of evil run by the Soviet Union that only they could see’(news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm). Even the editor of the con-servative British Spectator magazine suggested that Strauss’s purportedadmonition to tell ‘noble lies’ — so that the masses might be saved from ‘thetruth’ — made him an ideal intellectual anchor for the war on Iraq (Wakefield,2004). Reading Strauss into these conspiracy theories does little to explain hisinfluence on the men — like Kristol — who claimed it.Strauss (1899–1973) was actively politically disengaged. He saw ancient

philosophy as a better prism through which to view modernity. Indeed, his aimwas to understand the ancients with reference to the ancients, before it was evera critique of Western liberalism, let alone a Qutbian-style indictment of it.11


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‘He viewed himself as a friend of liberal democracy’, noted Kenneth R.Weinstein (2004, 208), but ‘In the battle between the ‘‘ancients’’ and the‘‘moderns,’’ said Kristol ‘he was on the side of the ‘‘ancients’’’ (1999, 8).Strauss did not build a political platform, offer policy prescriptions or indulgein public policy research (see Weinstein, 2004, 204). Straussians are studentsfirst and activists rarely. They are contemplative rather than energetic,seemingly more interested to read than to rule. Indeed, the secretive tenor thatDrury and others observe in Strauss and ‘his disciples’ militates as muchagainst the holding of public office as it promotes it. The purported alliancebetween a secret fellowship and a movement of public intellectuals like theneoconservatives is, as Weinstein observes, ‘paradoxical’. Strauss’s writings,says Weinstein, ‘are philosophical inquiries and have nothing of the dogma of apolitical movement’ (Weinstein, 2004, 204).Straussianism, as far as we can arrive a working definition of what this is,

concerns itself largely with method: the ancients must be read ‘with a quasi-‘‘talmudic’’ intensity and care, in order to distinguish between their ‘‘esoteric’’and ‘‘exoteric’’ views’ (Kristol, 1999, 8). Straussians are not philosophicalevangelists. Their ‘focus, instead, is on how to read books’ (Weinstein, 2004,208). For Drury, coming from the left, this makes them suspect in their secrecyand elitist in their character — two deficiencies which, she argues, have led totheir perfectly understandably exclusion from the liberal academy and theirforced relocation in Washington (see Drury, 1999, 2). So successful has beenthis relocation that, according to the New York Times, Leo Strauss was thegodfather of the Republican party’s 1994 Contract with America, several yearsbefore the asserted neoconservative ascendancy in the foreign policy of GeorgeW. Bush (and 21 years after Strauss’s death) (see Drury, 1999, 3).While there are self-identifying neoconservatives in national public office, no

one in the Bush administration studied under Strauss — save its first-termDeputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz (who took two graduate classeswith the German — on Plato and Montesquieu — at Chicago in 1967 butotherwise was not ‘especially close’ to him).12 According to Max Boot(2004, 5), ‘few read him today’ (see also Mann, 2004, 28).13 Despite this,quantifications of Straussian power in Washington are now commonplace.Anne Norton counts them and concludes ‘This is no scattered and disorderlyinfluence. There is a powerful and long-standing Straussian presence at severalsites’ (2004, 17). The accuracy of this assessment remains contentious andoutside the purview offered here (see Hurst, 2005).14 Some neoconservativesdispute the level of power claimed of them. Others, including Irving Kristol(unhappily if unknowingly concurring with Drury) suggest that ‘many’Straussians ‘relocated to Washington, D.C., since the academic world ofpositivist ‘‘political science’’ has become more hostile to [them]’ (1995, 7). Fewpeople who have studied Strauss, whether remaining in academia or entering


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political office, claim membership of an informal Straussian club.15 The label ismore commonly used against neoconservatives than by them.16 Straussian andneoconservative are not cognate. The formal influence of Straussians requiresgreater study and a more rigorous application of several levels of analysis(see, e.g., Haney, 2005).As far as impacting on neoconservative assessments of Islam, Leo Strauss

had essentially nothing to say. Strauss was a serious student of Farabi (ca. 870–950), the founder of Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy, in the Islamic world(see Strauss, 1988, chapter 1). There is no apparent connection between hisinterest in Farabi and the neoconservative interest in bringing democracy to theIslamic world. Strauss was silent on political Islam.

Neoconservativism and American Foreign Policy

Like Strauss himself, identifiable neoconservatives are not significant publicpolicy advocates. They stand against much but there is little in terms of aplatform that might shape American domestic and economic policy. Much ofthe movement’s tenor has been produced by reactions to a perceived liberal,relativist takeover of American social policy. It is only in recent years that suchdomestic concerns have been supplanted by a far more powerful, consistent,and influential prescriptive turn in the neoconservative understanding ofAmerica’s global role. Neoconservative foreign policy, unlike its domesticpolicy forerunner, is explicitly prescriptive and activist. It demands centralgovernment action as much as its domestic policy variant eschews it. Itpostulates that the world can be made better by the correct use ofoverwhelming national government power.Unlike realists and traditional conservatives, neoconservatives connect the

use of power to human progress. Realists ridicule a foreign policy of moralobjectives. Paleocons are sceptical that the world can be much improved andprefer an introverted global role for the United States. In neoconservativism,however, there is a marked preference for using American power to make theworld better. Power is opportunity. The substantial neoconservative contribu-tion to the theory of international relations (see Williams, 2005) lies in theunification of its two dominant, contrary paradigms: realism, with its bluntassessment of power as an end in itself, and liberalism, with its hopefulassertion that we tend towards progress.‘Progress’ (defined in the Bush National Security Strategy of 2002 as

‘political and economic freedom, peaceful relations with other states, andrespect for human dignity’, a word deployed on eight separate occasions in thatdocument) can be only achieved by the application of ‘power’ (cited on 21occasions) (Bush, 2002b).17 Liberal ends by realist means. This provides aworking definition of foreign policy neoconservatism. Progress, because


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progress assumes security, as a product of the application of irresistible — andsupposedly carefully calibrated — force. The ‘measured use of force is all thatprotects us from a chaotic world ruled by force’, declared Bush (2003). Thus,‘[i]t is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength’ (Bush,2002b).Liberals, whose great champion Woodrow Wilson (US President 1913–1921)

argued for an international legal system to negate war, earned the titleneoliberal and neo-Wilsonian when they sought to use American power,especially after the Cold War, to institutionalize international cooperation.Conservatives, persistently cool on the notion of an international community,earned the title neoconservative when they sought to use American power toforce the pace of liberalization around the globe. Both liberals andconservatives share a faith in liberal democracy; neoconservatives purport tohave found a way to globalize it. The animation that surrounds neoconser-vatism stems in large part from its avowedly interventionist prescriptions,constituting, according to the former British Conservative party leader IainDuncan Smith (2004), ‘a radical agenda of hope at home and abroad’.18

Neoconservatives place a primacy on action — once the preserve of thepolitical left — and show a willingness to reduce issue complexity — scornedby their critics — so as to facilitate such action (see Abrams et al., ‘Americanpower — for what? A symposium’, 2000).The Project for the New American Century (PNAC, William Kristol chair)

has attempted to codify a neoconservative foreign policy agenda since itscreation in 1997. ‘We cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of globalleadership’, read the Project’s statement of principles, ‘or the costs that areassociated with its exercise’ (www.newamericancentury.org/).19 Several ofPNAC’s founding fathers went onto serve under George W. Bush. Basic to theProject, and to most neoconservatives, is the belief that American power existsto maintain internally and extend externally universal human values. Suchthinking was not anathema to much liberal theorizing in the 1990s. In 1989,Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History and the triumph, for want ofan alternative, of liberal democracy (Fukuyama, 1989, 1992). Bill Clinton’sfirst attempt to ‘doctrinize’ his foreign policy was built on the apparentlyimmutable logic of ‘democratic enlargement’. Spread democracy, spread peace(see Brinkley, 1997).If Fukuyama is Marx, as Brendan Simms put it, ‘then the neoconservatives

are Leninist vanguardists seeking to accelerate what should be an unstoppableprocess through military force’ (www-hjs.pet.cam.ac.uk/sections/governance/document.2005-06-03.6474702254).20 This vanguard is not monolithic, especiallyas a shaper of American foreign policy. Charles Krauthammer identifies twodistinct strands within foreign policy neoconservatism. He stands for one andscorns the other — and his scorn is reciprocated. According to Krauthammer,


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his neoconservative worldview is better described as ‘democratic realism’. He isclear when and where America should act:

We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood andtreasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity — meaning, placescentral to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that posesa global mortal threat to freedom. (2004)

Those who advocate interventionism without national interest limitations helabels ‘democratic globalists’. This, by Krauthammer’s definition, is a verylarge group indeed. It includes Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and the greatproponent of liberal peace theory, Francis Fukuyama (with whomKrauthammerhas repeatedly clashed since the 2003 Iraq war) (see Fukuyama, 2004, 2004/5,2006; Krauthammer, 2004, 2005a).21 Globalists favour the spread ofdemocracy per se — for what it takes to those to whom it is spread.Democratic realists favour its extension for the security such externaldemocratization brings to the United States, its territory, interests, and allies.Thus, for a democratic realist there is little security pay-off in bringing liberaldemocracy to Zimbabwe; President Mugabe is not an exporter of anti-American terrorism — ignore him. Taking liberal democracy to Iraq, however,is to be supported because of the material benefits to American security of sodoing; Saddam Hussein is a conduit for anti-American terrorism (or might be,we can’t be sure) — destroy him. As Bush (2003) argued in defense of the Iraqwar ‘by advancing freedom in the greater Middle East, we help end a cycle ofdictatorship and radicalism that brings millions of people to misery and bringsdanger to our own people’.22 Granted, the two dominant themes in foreignpolicy neoconservatism will agree on much (such as the 2003 war on Iraq) butwill also disagree about the scope of American ambitions in the post-9/11world. And part company in significant ways on the threat posed by politicalIslam and the Middle East. Indeed, they separate often on the definitions ofsuch concepts.

Neoconservatism and Islam

The realist vs globalist feud within neoconservatism is not much referenced inthe literature of the movement’s detractors. This is especially apparent intreatments of the neoconservative position on Islam. Caricatures of thisunderstanding often dominates analysis of neoconservatives claims. AnneNorton, for example, offers much anecdotal evidence of Straussian (andtherefore neoconservative by association) ‘bigotry’:

From the time I first came to Chicago to the present day, I have seen Arabsand Muslims made the targets of unrestrained persecution, especially among


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the Straussians. At school, Straussian students told me Arabs were dirty,they were animals, they were vermin. Now I read in Straussian books andarticles, in editorials and postings on websites, that Arabs are violent, theyare barbarous, they are the enemies of civilization, they are Nazis. (2004,210–211)

Particular scorn is reserved for David Frum and Richard Perle’sneoconservative manifesto, An end to evil: how to win the war on terror(2003).23 Norton (2004, 211) again:

Scholars familiar with the language of anti-Semitism will find it reminiscentof older, long-dishonored texts. The careful fabrication, the language ofblood libel, the calls for violence in the name of defense, all are present here.Frum and Perle tell us that though others are too timid to say so, the enemyis Islam.

Norton, echoing the analogies and equivalences painted in the BBCdocumentary, goes onto to claim that neoconservatives are jihadists, engagedin ‘a submission to duty and a striving after greatness’ (2004, 188).As far as neoconservatism is concerned, the centrality of the Islamic and/or

Islamist ‘threat’ is far from certain. The Islamophobia attributed to someneoconservatives was at least balanced before 9/11 by a seemingly pervasiveSinophobia. Much neoconservative strategic advocacy in the 1990s called for aharder line on China, a political system as divorced from political Islam as it isperhaps possible to be (see Kagan and Kristol, 2000).24 The emerging divisionswithin neoconservatism again present themselves. Some democratic realistsequate political Islam with a threat to America’s existence. Some do not. Somethink the threat of a rising China is potentially as great (Munro, 2000).Some democratic globalists suggest Islam is ripe for democratization. Othersargue that the religion’s political form is irrelevant to American security.Common to most is a two-tier understanding of Middle Eastern politics — andof Islam — as both threat and opportunity.

The Middle East as Threat

Most neoconservatives depict militant Islam (or at least some extrememanifestation of Middle Eastern politics) as a physical security threat to theUnited States but one capable of remedy (Middle East democratisation) hencetheir optimism. Perle and Frum’s An end to evil can be held as emblematic ofthis approach. This controversial and strong-selling ‘manual for victory’ (Frumand Perle, 2003, 9) presents ‘militant Islam’ (p. 42) as an unalloyed threat toAmerica. The saliency of the threat to the United States is evident in theauthors’ embrace of a war against it — in which, like all wars, there will be


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‘difficulties’, ‘casualties’, ‘reverses’, and ‘defeats’ (p. 4). The enemy is variouslylabelled, both abstractly and concretely, at home and abroad (2003, passim), as:

‘Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas’‘Mullahs’‘militant Islam’‘Terrorists’‘Iran’‘Islamist militants’‘Baghdad’‘Imams’‘misfits and thugs’‘Middle East radicalism of all varieties’

The authors’ first salvo is aimed squarely at ‘appeasers’ and their de factobureaucratic allies at home. It is not until page 6 that the word ‘Muslim’ is usedexplicitly and, despite discussion of ‘Shiites’ and ‘Sunnis’, it is not until page 41that ‘Islam’ is mentioned, and then by way of introducing its intimacy withterrorism. According to the authors, nearly 50% of all ‘foreign terroristorganizations’, as classified by the State Department, ‘purport to act in thename of Islam’. Thereafter, the use of ‘Islamic terrorists’, ‘Islamic terroristgroups’ and ‘militant Islam’ (‘an aggressive ideology of world domination’)becomes ubiquitous in the book’s depiction of threat.25

Analogies

Frum and Perle do not seek to spread the war to all Muslims, only to the‘radical strain within Islam [that] has declared war on us’ (2003, 42). Thiscaveat is diluted however by the chosen analogies — to the greattotalitarianisms of 20th century European history — which had far fewerreasonable elements within them of the kind Frum and Perle hope exist withinIslam:

Like communism, this [militant Islamic] ideology perverts the language ofjustice and equality to justify oppression and murder. Like Nazism, itexploits the injured pride of once-mighty nations. Like both communismand Nazism, militant Islam is opportunistic — it works willingly with allmanner of unlikely allies, as the communists and Nazis worked with eachother against the democratic West. (p. 43)26

The analogy is basic to neoconservatism. While these authors do not quiteswitch the ‘ism’ from ‘commun’ to ‘terror’, they do propose a war of broadsimilarity given what they perceive as the commonality of the enemy in both


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eras: ‘The war against extremist Islam is as much an ideological war as the coldwar ever was’ (2003, 147). For example, like the communists, the Islamists arefar more coordinated than the West realises (pp. 43–44). The Soviet Union andChina, despite splits, were essentially as one in the Cold War (a central tenet ofCold War neoconservatism leading them to decry Nixon’s Chinese rapproche-ment). So too are the Baathists of Syria and Iraq, contend Perle and Frum, asone. Superficially at odds, each continues to facilitate the ebb and flow ofterrorist insurgents across their shared border (pp. 44–45). The title of chapter3, detailing such intrigue, is a direct illusion to America’s 20th century foes:‘The new Axis’.By extension, the analogy is a hopeful one: the USA succeeded in beating the

previous isms by the application of hard, military power, followed by asustained economic subvention of the vanquished nations. And did so withgreat clarity of purpose, rather than ambiguity.27 The threat, as in 1941–1945and 1945–1991, is deadly, this strain of neoconservatism contends, but notimmovable. The neoconservatism of Perle and Frum embodies a doom-sayingoptimism; the threat is real but the solution realizable. It should come as nosurprise that American strategists nurtured in a Cold War context — given theWest’s success in that bi-polar conflict — should look to it for a guide to thepost-9/11 terrain (see Lynch and Singh, 2008). The temptation to equateIslamism with communism and to confront both in similar fashion isirresistible for some neoconservatives. The very great complexity of Arabcivilization is thereby reduced to a monolith capable of being confronted —and transformed. For Charles Krauthammer the Cold War experience has aremarkable contemporary, strategic relevance:

My approach to Islamism is identical to the muscular approach Iconsistently advocated against our previous global challenge, Sovietcommunism. From opposing the nuclear freeze to advocating US supportfor anti-Communist insurgencies in Nicaragua and Afghanistan and aroundthe world, my views on muscularity in confronting existential enemies havenot changed. Given that history has demonstrated, definitively and with rareclarity, the wisdom and success of precisely this approach in our lastexistential struggle, it is entirely logical that I would apply it to the currentone. (2005a, 322)

There are marked differences, however, in America’s Cold War strategy andthat advocated by Perle and Frum et al. The inventor of containment strategy,George F. Kennan (1904–2005), was cool on military power as the Americanweapon of choice in the Cold War. Instead, he called for a vigilant waitinggame. Stay strong, he counselled, and the weaker opponent will collapse. Suchadvice departs markedly from the dominant neoconservative prescription forconfronting Islamist terrorists and the regimes that facilitate or germinate


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them. The following is Kennan’s most famous prescription, adapted for thewar on terror. It fails to capture the central tenets of the neoconservativeapproach and thus invites the conclusion that neoconservative analogies tothe Cold War are misleading and/or in error:

[I]t will be clearly seen that the Islamist pressure against the free institutionsof the western world is something that can be contained by the adroit andvigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shiftinggeographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuversof Islamist terror, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.The Islamists look forward to a duel of infinite duration, and they see thatalready they have scored great successes. It must be borne in mind that therewas a time when terrorism represented far more of a minority in the sphereof Middle Eastern life than Islamic power today represents in the worldcommunity. (Adapted from Kennan, 1947)28

Kennan’s optimism is not that of the neoconservatives. Soviet communismwas rational and therefore responsive to the logic of deterrence. Its possessionof nuclear weapons actually helped to stabilize international relations. TheKremlin was patient, cautious. Compare such characterizations with thoseimputed by neoconservatives to the post-9/11 foe:

The chill comes from knowing that there are, among the terrorists, hundredsand thousands who are ready to die in order to kill. They cannot bedeterred. They cannot be appeased. The terrorists kill and will accept deathfor a cause with which no accommodation is possible. (Frum and Perle,2003, 41)

International Islamofascist barbarians with imperial designs mastermindedthe attack on the children of Beslan, and that has changed everything y.But in the end, these voices of blind bigotry and defeatism won’t prevail,because millions of Russians have learned the same hard lessons most of uslearned on September 11: That we are at war with a vicious global enemy, anIslamist enemy that hates Christians, Hindus, and progressive Muslims asmuch as it hates Jews, an enemy that cannot be appeased, bought off y anenemy we must unite to cut down wherever it rears its ugly head, or have ourown heads and those of our children cut off by it. (Lerner, 2004)

[N]ew threats require new thinking. Deterrence — the promise of massiveretaliation against nations — means nothing against shadowy terroristnetworks with no nation or citizens to defend. (Bush, 2002a)

Not all neoconservatives claim the Cold War as a model for US strategy inthe war on terror. The more obvious parallel for some is to the Anglo-French


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appeasement of Hitler’s Germany. The implicit indictment of Western — readFrench — fear of force in both eras is central to Robert Kagan’s Of Paradiseand Power (2003) and, his father, Donald Kagan’s contribution in PresentDangers (D. Kagan, 2000, 337–362), both of which rely, in the derisory wordsof Halper and Clarke (2004, 36), on the neoconservative ‘mantra of‘‘Munich’’’.29 Norman Podhoretz (2004b, 2007) transcends analogy andillusion by arguing that the war on terror is not like previous wars but israther the next war: ‘World War IV’.30 In each neoconservative assessment ofthe contemporary Middle East, the depiction of threat — which must be met —is constant.

The Middle East as Opportunity

The long-held aversion to moral relativism basic to many neoconservatives —the prototypical liberal belief that all behaviours and cultures are of intrinsicworth and that one should not regard one’s own as superior — has had threemarked effects on their Middle East prescriptions. First, it has produced aclarity of design and of expression which, while it has raised considerableopprobrium, has succeeded in making neoconservatism (and thus the UnitedStates) central to the debate about Middle East democratization. As even theircritics point out (see, e.g., Halper and Clarke, 2004, 35) neoconservatives meanto offer solutions rather than merely advance debates about solutions. Second,it has led neoconservatism to challenge a long-held liberal fear (and even a fearonce far more marked among neoconservatives themselves) that democracy is adiscrete, Western phenomenon, a delicate seed unlikely to grow in the MiddleEast. Third, it has facilitated both indictment and prescription; neoconserva-tives have rejected the do-nothingism of traditional conservatism and realism.They indict Arab civilization so as to remake it. The threat inherent in Islam isto be met by changing its nature rather than wishing it away or destroying it.

Clarity

Clarity enrages the opponents of neoconservatism while simultaneouslydisarming their conspiracy theories of a secret intent. There is very little whichis secret about neoconservative ambitions in the Middle East. Neoconserva-tives tend not to conceal their perceptions of and predictions for Islam. DavidFrum (2002), for example, in a piece entitled ‘America is indeed subverting theMiddle East’, described the region as one ‘of overpopulation and under-employment, where tens of millions of young men waste their lives in economicand sexual frustration’. There is certainly a lack of nuance withinneoconservative prescriptions for exporting democracy to the Middle East(see, for other examples, Sharansky, 2004, xviii–xix and Gaffney, 2006).


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Exportable democracy

I like the idea of people running for office. There’s a positive effect when yourun for office. Maybe some will run for office and say, vote for me, I lookforward to blowing up America. I don’t know, I don’t know if that will betheir platform or not. But I don’t think so. I think people who generally runfor office say, vote for me, I’m looking forward to fixing your potholes, ormaking sure you got bread on the table. (Bush, 2005)

George W. Bush’s folksy defence of the pacification inherent in democracyarticulates a tenet increasingly fundamental to the neoconservatives, if notembraced by all of them: democracy¼ peace. Bush was quick to make theequation central to his 9/11 response and to the subsequent Bush doctrine. Thedemocratic peace hypothesis, not an exclusive preserve of neoconservativethinkers by any means, was further augmented by them to include theimperative to export democracy. The response to ‘terrorism for export’ isdemocracy for export. ‘[T]he spread of liberal democracy’, wrote Max Boot(2004, 49), ‘improves US security’.Bush’s most evocative rhetoric in the years since 9/11 has been deployed in

the defence of the proposition that democracy is the birthright of every humanbeing:

[T]he United States must defend liberty and justice because these principlesare right and true for all people everywhere. No nation owns theseaspirations, and no nation is exempt from them. Fathers and mothersin all societies want their children to be educated and to live free frompoverty and violence. No people on earth yearn to be oppressed, aspire toservitude, or eagerly await the midnight knock of the secret police. (Bush,2002b, 3)

Peoples of the Middle East share a high civilization, a religion of personalresponsibility, and a need for freedom as deep as our own. It is not realismto suppose that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to liberty; it is pessimismand condescension, and we should have none of it. (Bush, 2003)

This latter speech echoed much of the strand in neoconservative thought thathas lost patience with assertions that Arabs are different, not suited todemocratic norms. In support of the first US war against Iraq in 1991, GeorgeWeigel (1991, 121) impugned the notion that ‘the Arabs are fractious childrenwho really don’t know any better, and thus have to be appeased’ (also seeGerson, 1997, 168). The expectation that liberty is a universal human urgemay be naıve but it remains a key component of the neoconservativeworldview.


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Michael Novak’s book, The Universal Hunger for Liberty (2004), represents,as its title suggests, neoconservatism at its most optimistic about the prospectsof Arab democracy. Essentially a manifesto for the liberalization of Islam, itargues that this transformation is both necessary and practicable. Novak, aformer US ambassador, is possessed of an almost religious faith in ‘liberty’ andits power to effect change.31 Whereas ‘liberty is the crimson interpretativethread’ of Western history, ‘the hunger for liberty has only slowly been feltamong Muslims y That hunger is universal, even when it is latent, for thepreconditions for it slumber in every human breast’. Novak is remarkablyupbeat about the ‘hopeful majority’ of Muslims who ‘refuse to concede thatIslam is incompatible with universal human rights, personal dignity, andopportunity’ (2004, xiii, 202).Novak’s analysis of ‘political Islamism’ reflects both his profound

Catholicism and the neoconservative stress on the mediating role of religiousfaith. ‘Majority’ Islam, in contradistinction to ‘political Islamism’, is asignificant source of civic virtue, of ‘amity, hospitality, welcome to thestranger, help for the needy, and respect for unforced conscience’. Its ‘secular’wing, ‘political Islamism (to give the extremist groups a name)’ is a defilementof the transcendental purity of religious, majority Islam:

Its source is neither a deeper and more vigorous study of Islam’s spiritualorigins nor a deeper reappropriation of Islam’s magnificent intellectualresources — from those early centuries when the lost manuscripts of Platoand Aristotle were known to the Muslim world but barely available inChristian Europe. The source of political Islamism is not so much deepstudy and profound inquiry as resentment; not so much transcendentreligion (although religious intensity is intermixed in it) as an itch to inflictinjury on others. (2004, 203)

His prescription? Nurture majority Islam and destroy its perverted secularform. The first is capable of democracy, the second can only retard it. Indeed,it is the secular characteristics of Islam, contend Novak, which set it inopposition to the liberty-hungry religious majority. Thus, ‘the problem lies lessin Islam than in the political propensities of the Arab states’. Non-ArabMuslims nations have begun the transition to electoral democracy — theauthor cites Albania, Bangladesh, Djibouti, Gambia, Malaysia, Maldives,Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, and Turkey — evidence, he suggests,that Islam is more amenable to democratization than the nominally IslamicArab regimes of the Middle East (2004, 217, 259n45).Not all neoconservatives are so cheery. Indeed, pessimism marks out much

neoconservative speculation about Islam’s democratic capacities in the region.James Q. Wilson (2000, 25–28; see also Wilson, 2004) outlines four ‘conditions’


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propitious for the historical development of democracy that the Middle East,he says, does not possess:

1. geographic isolation2. widespread property rights3. homogeneity4. a democratic tradition.

Nations that have not enjoyed such features have still become democraticbut often only ‘at the point of a bayonet’. Indeed, though Wilson is dismissiveof the prospects of Arab democracy (writing in 2000) he nevertheless posits twoways democracy can spread, in the absence of the four conditions, that matchthe broad parameters of Bush’s Middle East strategy: ‘military conquest’ and‘economic globalization’ (Wilson, 2000, 28).Daniel Pipes remains sceptical of both the Novak and Wilson approaches.

Indeed, his pessimism has led him to caution against the ambitions of currentAmerican policy — where both Novak and Wilson have stood behind it. If thecurrent strategy is aimed at retarding terrorism, then democracy is an unlikelymeans to this end. Terrorists are unlikely to lay down bomb for ballot paper.But the problem is deeper, contends Pipes. Democracy will not stop terrorismnor will it transform the nature of the regimes which give rise to it, because, heobserves ‘Islamists [will] manipulate elections to stay in power’ (Pipes, 2005b).The Nazi analogy, basic in neoconservative assessments of the Islamist threat,again presents itself:

When politically adept totalitarians win power democratically, they do fixpotholes and improve schools — but only as a means to transform theircountries in accordance with their utopian visions. This generalizationapplies most clearly to the historical cases (Adolf Hitler in Germany after1933, Salvador Allende in Chile after 1970) but it also appears valid for thecurrent ones. (Khaleda Zia in Bangladesh since 2001, Recep TayyipErdoqan in Turkey since 2002)

Then there is the matter of their undemocratic intentions. Josef Goebbelsexplained in 1935 that the Nazis used democratic methods ‘only in order’ to gainpower. Looking at Islamists, then-assistant secretary of state for the Middle EastEdward Djerejian explained in 1992, ‘While we believe in the principle of ‘‘oneperson, one vote,’’ we do not support ‘‘one person, one vote, one time’’’. (2005b)

The dilemma is not owned by neoconservatives. Clinton’s Balkans envoy,Richard Holbrooke (in Zakaria, 2003, 17), raised a puzzle central to theattempted democratization of the Middle East: ‘Suppose elections are free and


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fair and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists’. Fareed Zakaria (2003, 17)refers to this as ‘illiberal democracy y [a] disturbing phenomenon — visiblefrom Peru to the Palestinian territories, from Ghana to Venezuela’.David Frum, taking his cue from Bernard Lewis (‘the greatest living scholar

of the Middle East’) was similarly sceptical of the compatibility of Islam withdemocracy, before 9/11 forced the Bush administration to attempt to makethem so:

Lewis notes that Islam, in contrast to Christianity, forms a coherent systemof rules for regulating human behavior in this world. Lewis cites a book byone of the first Muslim visitors to England, the 18th century traveller MirzaAbu Talib, and its horror at the sight of the House of Commons in action:‘Unlike the Muslims, (Talib) explains to his readers, the English have notaccepted a divine law revealed from heaven, and were therefore reduced tothe expedient of making their own laws y’ Of course, as Lewisacknowledges, the Islamic world made its own laws too. But ‘the makingof new law, though common and widespread, was always disguised, almostfurtive, and there was therefore no room for legislative councils orassemblies such as formed the starting-point of European democracy’.(Frum, 1997)

The argument that Islam is beyond democratic redemption has been metwith the charge, ‘so what?’ Francis Fukuyama has demonstrated a flexibleneoconservatism — to the point of his repudiation of it (Fukuyama, 2006b) —in this regard. His famous ‘end of history’ thesis dismissed Islam as a viablechallenge to Western liberal democracy (1992, 45–46). The logical import ofsuch a position was that Islam’s capacity to democratize was of negligibleconcern to the West. The argument had some merit until the 9/11 attacksbrought home to neoconservatives the ‘existential threat’ Islam (or at least itsfringe) did pose to the United States. Rather than the non-democratic curiosityof Fukuyama’s 1992 conception, the Middle East, after 2001, became thecentral focus of American national security strategy.

Political Islam’s Capacity to Change

We have observed how, for neoconservatives, religious faith in the West canoperate as a ‘mediating structure’ between public and private spheres. Do theyfind in Islam such utility? Perle and Frum rather duck this issue. Politicalliberalization, they contend, will follow the regeneration of an Arab middleclass. Political Islam is more problematic. Unlike in Judeo-Christianity, therehas been no Reformation and subsequent weakening of religious power in theIslamic world — Islam has never had a centralized structure amenable toreform; there is no Islamic pope. Freedom of religious thought is a basic


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concept in the West, where the very multiplicity of faiths dilutes formalreligious power. James Q. Wilson (2000, 25) cites Voltaire to illustrate thispoint. The French philosopher ‘once said that a nation with one church willhave oppression; with two, civil war; with a hundred, freedom’. Again, thispromotes his scepticism that Islam can become sufficiently diverse so as toembrace rival faiths.Whereas economic determinism has been the preserve of the political left,

political determinism marks out the neoconservative approach to politicalIslam. In the left-liberal conception, but not only here, Islamist terrorism is theproduct of economic despair. Wealth redistribution — from an oil-wealthyelite to the masses — will rob Al Qaeda of recruits. Neoconservatives, while notimmune to such arguments (see Frum and Perle, chapter 6), have stressed thepolitical repression fundamental to Islamic fundamentalism. Indeed, as DanielPipes (2001/2) observes, it is not poverty that leads to militant Islam, buttyranny. Many Islamist terrorists are a product ‘of financial ease and advancededucation’ (2001/2, 16; see also Fielding, 2005). What they appear to lack is‘some prestige-conferring element’ in their education. ‘Or they may just comefrom the wrong background y Islamism is particularly useful to these people’(Kramer in Pipes, 2001/2, 17).32

Pipes derives four propositions from this analysis:

1. ‘Wealth does not inoculate against militant Islam’2. ‘A flourishing economy does not inoculate against radical Islam’3. ‘Poverty does not generate militant Islam’4. ‘A declining economy does not generate militant Islam’ (Pipes, 2001/2,

17–18).

He argues several ‘policy implications follow’:

1. Prosperity cannot be used as the solution to militant Islam and foreign aid istherefore broadly irrelevant in the war against terror.

2. ‘Westernization’ could well worsen the problem of terrorism. Severalkey terrorist leaders are products of exposure to Western culture andnorms.

3. Economic growth does not correlate with improved East–West relations. Infact, increased Middle Eastern wealth ‘might hurt’ those relations.

Pipes suggests that ‘militant Islam results from wealth rather than poverty y

more from success than from failure’. Quite what positive prescriptions thisoffers the White House is unclear. A strategy to further impoverish the MiddleEast is an unlikely basis for an American foreign policy doctrine.


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An Israeli Prism?

The charge that American neoconservatives see the Middle East through anIsraeli lens is made by both conservatives and liberals. Even before theneoconservative ascendancy, in 1991 the arch-isolationist Republican PatBuchanan declared that there were ‘only two groups beating the drums y forwar in the Middle East — the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner inthe United States’ (in Podhoretz, 2004b, 33). The frequency of Jewish-soundingnames among neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration (Perle,Wolfowitz, Cohen) and among its intellectual anchors on the outside (Kagan,Krauthammer, Kristol) was interpreted as a Zionist seizure of America foreignpolicy or, more academically, as evidence of the overbearing influence of ‘theIsrael Lobby’ (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2007). The credibility of such aconspiracy/lobby theory is outside our purview here. What we can seek tounderstand is whether Jewish neoconservatives appreciate the Middle East in asubstantially different way from their non-Jewish colleagues, and one which isconsistent with an Israeli conception of their own neighbourhood.Francis Fukuyama (2004) observes that American neoconservatives do

indeed identify with ‘Israel’s experience dealing with the Arabs’. CharlesKrauthammer has taken exception to this. The shared, as a result of 9/11,experience of Islamist suicide terrorism has not, he argues, led America toadopt an Israeli national security approach:

[Fukuyama’s] assertion is not just unsupported. It is wrong. Israel’sexperience is neither definitive nor particularly instructive. Having pursuedboth hard- and soft-line policies in dealing with its Arab enemies, Israel canhardly be a model for anyone — 57 years of pursuing these policies have leftit mired in conflict and subject to more terrorism than any country on earth.(Krauthammer, 2005a)

Max Boot (2004, 48) concurs. Israel has often been a tertiary concern forneoconservatives:

In the 1980s, they were leading proponents of democratization in places asdisparate as Nicaragua, Poland, and South Korea. In the 1990s, they werethe most ardent champions of interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo —missions designed to rescue Muslims, not Jews. Today neocons agitate fordemocracy in China (even as Israel has sold arms to Beijing!) y

Conclusions

The clarity of the neoconservative ‘solution’ to the Middle East is purchasedat the price of oversimplification. Islamism, militant Islam, Islamicfundamentalism, political Islam, political Islamism — such concepts are not


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cognate and yet much neoconservative writing treats them as such (see, e.g.,Gove, 2006, 12; Ledeen, 2006; at http://hsgac.senate.gov/_files/072006Ledeen.pdf).33 When the neoconservative approach allows for Middle Easterncomplexities its clarity is blurred. But like the ‘isms’ it seeks to retard,neoconservatism itself is not monolithic, neither in its development, itspreoccupations, nor indeed in its prescriptions for US foreign policy. Themovement (and this paper remains neutral on the matter of what descriptorbetter captures neoconservatism) divides significantly on matters such asIslam’s capacity for democratization and the historical analogies mostappropriate for post-9/11 US foreign policy.

Expectations Met?

Neoconservative smiles were barely concealed when events looked to havegone their way. Nominal, electoral democracy in Iraq seems to have generatedwider, if sporadic, Arab disgruntlement with the absence of politicalaccountability across the region. Mark Steyn, the prolific columnist and self-identifying neoconservative, trumpeted that with the holding of elections inIraq (on January 30, 2005) the ‘Arabs’ Berlin Wall has crumbled’ (Steyn,2005a, 20). In its wake came the Saudi government’s announcement ofmunicipal elections. The Egyptian president declared he would run against aserious challenger to his office for the first time in the nation’s history. Theso-called ‘Cedar revolution’ deposed the pro-Syrian government in Lebanonand forced Baathist Syria to remove its troops from that nation (even as itallowed Hezbollah a role in its new government, with bloody but not whollydeleterious consequences in July–August 2006 (see Podhoretz, 2006; Bush,2006)). And, to the delight of Steyn and other neoconservatives, WalidJumblatt, the staunch anti-American leader of the Lebanese Druze Muslims,attributed all this to the Iraqi elections, ‘the start of a new Arab world’, he said(Ignatius, 2005). ‘In the space of a month’, swooned Steyn (2005a), ‘the Iraqelection has become the prism through which all other events in the region areseen’ (see also Boot, 2005).34 This optimism was not confined, tellingly, toneoconservatives alone. In the National Interest, Amr Hamzawy and NathanBrown observed that:

Dreams of democratic openings, competitive elections, the rule of law andwider political freedoms have captured the imagination of clear majorities inthe Arab world. The dominance of the idea of democracy in the public spacehas even forced authoritarian ruling establishments to cast about for newpro-reform language in order to communicate their policies to the populace.Even Islamist and leftist opposition movements have, at least rhetorically,dropped most of their skepticism about political rights, freedoms and


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pluralist mechanisms, developing a strategic commitment to gradualdemocratic reform. (Hamzawy and Brown, 2007)

Prospects

Many neoconservatives, especially those outside the Bush administration, havebeen especially vocal in announcing the beginning of the end of Arab tyranny.Some have not. Daniel Pipes remains pessimistic:

Sadly, Islamists uniquely have what it takes to win elections: the talent todevelop a compelling ideology, the energy to found parties, the devotionto win supporters, the money to spend on electoral campaigns, the honestyto appeal to voters, and the will to intimidate rivals. (Pipes, 2005a)

For him, as not for Michael Novak or Max Boot, the process of Islamicdemocratization is the swapping of a secular tyranny for a religious one — andone empowered to greater excess by the fact of its popular mandate.The latent Arab political renaissance also raises as many difficult questions

about Iran, as it solves. The neoconservative vision for the Republic is far fromclear. Norman Podhoretz thinks a US invasion is ‘difficult though possible’(2006, 30), whereas Kenneth Pollack, the strong advocate of the Iraq invasion(Pollack, 2002), is cool on the invasion option for this larger, non-Arab, nationand more complicated theatre (Pollack, 2004). Regime change will have tobecome a more nuanced objective for US policy toward the Middle East,achievable by overt hard power but also by less costly diplomacy and thenurturing of internal dissent against the regime. This latter option is anespecially problematic one given the perception within Iranian popular cultureof nefarious American plotting (see Ansari, 2006).

Where Do We Go From Here?

As our research on them augments and passions about them wane, a series ofquestions might better guide our assessment of neoconservatism and its MiddleEastern visions. For example, do we have empirical data to justify the linkbetween democracy and the pacification of terrorism (see Dalacoura, 2005a,2005b, 2006)? Does Middle Eastern democracy¼ peace? How do we definesuch terms? Is Daniel Pipes right? Is poverty irrelevant to the growth ofterrorism and wealth actually a facilitator of it? Such questions demandrigorous inquiry and must be detached from the heat that is too oftengenerated when neoconservatism is discussed.This paper has not dealt with the levels of neoconservative influence within

the American foreign policy process but such a consideration seems essentiallest we treat Bush as the mouthpiece for the American Enterprise Institute


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(see Baker, 2004/5; Mann, 2004; Hurst, 2005). The impact of neoconservatismis neither as strong as their critics maintain nor as weak as neoconservatives tellus. In the absence of more precise tools of measurement we are increasinglyforced to rely on assessments that stem from two mutually antagonisticsources: the neoconservatives themselves and those opposed to them. This is allby way of saying we need to demythologize the movement and treat it with astudious dispassion.

From Knowledgeable Ignorance to Functional Ignorance

This paper would like to conclude by adopting a more normative approach.And, without painting its author in neoconservative colours, suggest why the neo-conservative approach to the Middle East has produced positive results. Theargument — offered in brief to open up debate rather than to close it down —rests on the claim that neoconservative ignorance of Middle Eastern culture andpolitics may well be the approach’s greatest strength. It may have produced‘mixed results’ (Dalacoura, 2005b, 978) but it has at least produced results,preferring flux to stasis, turmoil to stagnation. Shibley Telhami (2007) arguesBush has destabilized the Middle East. ‘Quite so’, is the neoconservative response.The concept of ‘knowledgeable ignorance’ is defined as ‘knowing a people,

ideas, civilisations, religions, or histories as something they are not, and couldnot possibly be, and maintaining these ideas even when the means exist toknow differently’ (Norman Daniel in Halper and Clarke, 2004, 268).35

According to two of neoconservative’s most articulate critics, such ‘‘‘knowl-edgeable ignorance’’ emerges as a powerful phenomenon in explaining theapparent disconnect between the United States and Islam’ (Halper and Clarke,2004, 268–269). This paper has highlighted several contradictions, idiosyn-crasies and oversimplifications within the neoconservative approach to theMiddle East and Arabs generally. While this has caused them to misconstrue,exaggerate or mistake phenomenon it has not led them into passivity andinaction. They do not indulge in what Ronald Reagan condemned as the ‘fetishfor complexity’ — the illness afflicting too many Western liberals, he said, inthe face of the Soviet threat (see Hayward, 2004). ‘The statesman’, notedFareed Zakaria, in sympathy with Reagan, ‘unlike the academic, cannot waitfor international relations theory to work itself out. He must have a policy thataddresses the perceived power distribution in the world’ (1990, 392).36

Neoconservatives, wrote the academic/statesman Henry Kissinger despair-ingly, insist ‘on a version of history that lures the United States away from theneed to face complexity’ (Kissinger, 1999). What makes neoconservatism sucha controversial ideological force is its refusal to allow issue complexity toinduce policy impotence. It is perhaps one reason explaining the dearth ofneoconservatives on university faculties.


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Rather than knowledgeable ignorance then we might better understandforeign policy neoconservatism as embodying a functional ignorance, defined asthe dismissal of issue complexity as a reason to do nothing. Theneoconservatives have not fallen victim to a syndrome common among policyexperts and regional specialists: knowing something so well that one isincapable of changing it. The price neoconservatives, and indeed manyinnocent Iraqis, paid for this functional ignorance was the anarchy of post-Saddam Iraq and a vicious insurgency — as several eminent experts on Iraqwarned (see Dodge, 2004, 2005). The reward was the beginning of anunstoppable (at least so far) and remarkable process of regime destabilizationand an attendant, if not always proportional, liberalization of Middle Easterngovernance.

Notes

1 Often given as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank in Washington DC. See

aei.org.

2 Emphasis added. ‘Above all, it seems to me, [such labels] suggest a certain unity of

understanding among contemporaries, concerning their great problems and aspirations’

(1957, xi).

3 The small magazines include theWeekly Standard (edited by William Kristol), Commentary,

National Review, thePublic Interest, and the National Interest (though this last title has been

somewhat schizophrenic in recent years, increasingly split between realists and neoconservatives).

4 The author’s political evolution is further mapped in chapters 1 and 40 (the latter entitled

‘memoirs of a Trotskyist’).

5 Halper and Clarke (2004) is a consistently well-argued conservative critique of neoconservatism.

6 ‘Conservative ‘‘stupidity,’’ properly understood’, he wrote, ‘is intimately connected with

sentiments that are at the root of conservative virtues: a dogged loyalty to a traditional

way of life; an instinctive aversion to innovation based on mere speculation; and a

sense of having a fiduciary relation to the whole nation — past, present and future’

(1995, 349).

7 ‘A religiosity centred on eternal life’, writes Mark Steyn (2005b), ‘will by definition be a more

efficient organising principle for an enduring society than a secularism focused on the here and

now’.

8 In 2004, 74% of Jewish Americans voted for John Kerry, 25% for Bush.

9 See also the classic account of mediating institutions given by Alexis de Tocqueville (2000,

165–235).

10 Qutb is considered at length by Paul Berman (2003).

11 I am indebted to Marc Landy for this clarification. Landy has spent most of his professional life

at Boston College, MA, in the presence of several prominent scholars sympathetic to the

theoretical method and normative concerns of Leo Strauss.

12 Wolfowitz left the White House in 2005 to become president of the World Bank, a post he

resigned in 2007.

13 ‘I don’t much like the label [Straussian]’, Wolfowitz told Mann (2004, 29).

14 Mann cites Strauss on only 11 pages of his 426-page history of Bush’s war cabinet (2004)

suggesting a more limited direct influence than is often asserted. Steven Hurst (2005), hardly a

Bush defender, argues that the neoconservative influence has been significantly overstated.


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15 Norton (2004, 9) makes much of a Boston College student-run website (www.straussian.net),

evidence, she suggests, of the larger network in which Straussians move. ‘Elaborate, well-

maintained, and regularly revised’, she says. At the time of writing, the site was unavailable.

16 The label was coined as an insult by the socialist Michael Harrington in a 1973 Dissent article

(see Gerson, 1997, 6).

17 ‘Power that favors freedom’ is used on five occasions.

18 The recently launched Henry Jackson Society at Cambridge University is animated by a similar

philosophy. See http://www-hjs.pet.cam.ac.uk/.

19 The statement was signed by Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick

Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg,

Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis

Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S.

Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel, and Paul Wolfowitz.

20 Simms is paraphrasing Ken Jowitt. According to Jowitt (2003), at www.policyreview, org/apr03/

jowitt.html), in the aftermath of 9/11, ‘the Bush administration has concluded that Fukuyama’s

historical timetable is too laissez-faire and not nearly attentive enough to the levers of historical

change. History, the Bush administration has concluded, needs deliberate organization,

leadership, and direction’.

21 The split between Fukuyama and Krauthammer was symbolic of the wider rift within realism

which gave birth to The American Interest journal in 2005 and its assumption of a purportedly

more realist, less neoconservative approach. See www.the-american-interest.com/cms/

abstract.cfm?Id¼ 6.

22 Emphasis added.

23 Norton (2004, 211) incorrectly subtitles this work.

24 The editors afford considerably more space for fears about China than they do for fears about

Islam, discussion of which is limited to its Iranian form (2000, 111–144).

25 The tendency to attribute ‘negative value’ to ‘the Arab’ was observed and codified in Edward

Said (2003; see, esp., chapter 3, part IV). Said gets short shrift from several neoconservatives, as

does most of his scholarly and political output (he died in 2002). A distrust of Said’s motives is a

recurrent theme of Commentary magazine. See, for example, Warren (2004).

26 President Bush had similarly compared the enemy with ‘the murderous ideologies of the 20th

century’ (Bush, 2001; see also Bush, 2006) and, in the wake of a failed London bomb plot, said

‘this nation is at war with Islamic fascists’ (http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/08/10/

washington.terror.plot/index.html). For a defence of ‘Islamofascism’ as an appropriate label

for the enemy in the war on terror, see Schwartz, 2006 (at http://www.weeklystandard.com/

Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/593ajdua.asp).

27 ‘[I]t is impressive how often American clarity during the Cold War worked, and how often

ambiguity led to trouble’ (Wolfowitz, 2000, 322).

28 Podhoretz (2004b, 54) adapts another section from Kennan’s article and comes to the opposite

conclusion.

29 Paul Wolfowitz deploys the Munich liberally also (see, e.g., Wolfowitz, 2000, 312–314).

30 The Cold War being, in this conceptualization, World War III.

31 He was Ambassador of the US Delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva,

1981–1982. See http://www.michaelnovak.net/Module/Site/Biography.aspx.

32 Martin Kramer, editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

33 According to Gove (2006, 12), ‘It is only by appreciating that the enemy we face is a seamless

totalitarian movement that we can begin to appreciate the scale of the challenge we must

confront’. ‘[A] lot of nonsense has been written about the theoretically unbridgeable divide

between Sunnis and Shi’ites’, observes Ledeen of the AEI (2006, 1–2), ‘and we should remind

ourselves that the tyrants of the Islamic Republic [of Iran] do not share these theories’ (2006, 1–2).


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President Bush (2006) concurred: ‘Despite their differences, these groups form the outlines of a

single movement, a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the

way of their totalitarian ideology’.

34 Successes in the region are tabulated in Bush (2006).

35 Daniel is a British historian.

36 Somewhat ironically, Reagan’s cabinet was full of academic Ph.D.s: George Schultz, Kenneth

Dam, Fred Ikle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Robert Gates, Paul Wolfowitz, and Chester Crocker. A full

list is given in Zakaria (1990, 393n75).

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