| Review of: | The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq edited by Gary Rosen |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Martin Durham |
| Reviewed in: | The Political Quarterly |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 78, Issue 03, Pages 456-466 |
Book Reviews: The neo-con and Iraq
It is difficult to know the best time to review this book. Every day brings new developments, and while rows over Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen have familiarised us with how Iraq has divided the left, too little attention has been given to the fissures it has illuminated on the right. The 2006 proposals of the Iraq Study Group should have reminded us that American conservatism and neo-conservatism are not identical, and this collection helps greatly to explain why this is so.
Support for the war is usually associated with the most (in)famous strand of the American right, neo-conservatism. In this volume's second essay, 'The Right War for the Right Reasons', Robert Kagan and William Kristol insist that the failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction does not invalidate the rightness of the war. Saddam was a tyrant, an aggressor and linked to terrorism, and as such deserved to be toppled. Another author, Max Boot, defends what he describes as US imperialism as the only way in which rogue states can be stopped, while Charles Krauthammer distinguishes between four strands of American foreign policy. One is isolationism, which 'essentially wishes to pull up the drawbridge to Fortress America'. One is liberal internationalism, which, in Krauthammer's view, is willing to subsume 'America's unique unipolar power' in 'a global architecture'. The third approach is realism, which views the international system as a state of nature in which power is what matters. Having set out three approaches, Krauthammer defends a fourth, democratic globalism, which sees the spread of democracy as both means and ends. But where Bush, in his parlance, is a democratic globalist, he favours a more focused policy, in which America only intervenes where its vital interests are endangered.
Kagan and Kristol, Boot and Krauthammer are all neo-conservatives. In part they are arguing against one of their own, Francis Fukuyama, who in his essay 'The Neoconservative Moment' sets out a view in which America should continue to promote democracy, but must be careful not to alienate allies and must avoid trying to remake countries. If Fukuyama has partly broken with neo-conservatism, other contributors are more fundamentally opposed. Andrew Bacevich argues that George Washington, not Woodrow Wilson, is a surer guide to American policy abroad. Iraq, he argues, showed strategy 'uncoupled from reality', and as with Vietnam, the debate over the lessons of the new intervention will be a protracted one. Owen Harries argues that forcing history 'in the direction of democracy' is likely to produce unintended consequences and that it would be more prudent to recognise limits. The best-known conservative critic of the war, Pat Buchanan, argues that despotism should only be overthrown if it threatens America. Over half of Americans believe intervention in Iraq was wrong, he notes, and the current president, like Nixon before him, must realise that the costs of 'a mistaken war' have become too great.
This collection has already been partly overtaken by events. The essays were written before 'the surge' and what neo-conservatives see as the dangerous revival of realism. There are absences too-neo-conservatives claim that others misconducted the occupation, and we get no sense of their critique of Rumsfeld. It is also doubtful that the decision to give leading neo-conservative Norman Podhoretz over a quarter of the book for a single essay was wise. But it is nonetheless a considerable achievement. As the leading war critic Anatole Lieven comments on its cover, it is 'an indispensable guide' to a crucial debate, and deserves to be 'on the shelf of every analyst of contemporary American policy'.