Hothouse Flowers

The reality created by neo-con foreign policy -- a reality which has enjoyed a short, if disastrous run -- has recently been called into question by that other reality, that reality of actual events like the death toll of 2000 U.S. service men and women in Iraq, the estimated 30,000 Iraqi civilians dead, and the botched response to Hurricane Katrina. Hothouse flowers, nurtured in Alcove I, the Rand Corporation, the right wing think-tanks, and the military industrial complex, these ideas and the reality they created have wilted in contact with open air and foreign soils.

Irving Kristol, one of the founders of neo-conservatism, wrote: 'what rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is percieved." (as quoted by Halper & Clarke, AMERICA ALONE, June 2004, Cambridge University Press, page 45). Ideas can be powerful, indeed, especially when deployed against the weak-minded, inexperienced, arrogant sons of former presidents (who we learned this Sunday didn't bother to ask Rumsfeld, his Sec'y of Defense or Colin Powell his Sec'y of State, for their opinions about whether it would be a good idea to invade Iraq.) The spectacular misrule of the Bush adminstration grows directly out of the ruling ideas of neo-conservatism, especially its foreign policies (spoon-fed, incidentally, to George W. by Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby at Camp David in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

For those who may have forgotten what reality was like prior to the current Bush administration, (perfectly understandable given the ear-splitting pro-war propaganda of the past 3 years), the US once had an assortment of pragmatic approaches to international conflict, most of which involved suasion, not invasion. Here's a quick list of the approaches that America once used, as listed in the book cited above, (on a page which I forgot to note): "Past administrations, many of them Republican…successfully employed a range of diplomatic instruments to advance American values and interests, including foreign aid, trade, military agreements of various kinds, and personal relationships, not to mention the closed-door deal making so much a part of decision making within the international institutions such as NATO." (The authors hold up as an example of the success of such tactics the case of terrorism in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland, "where negotiation and compromise turned terrorists in politicians, cast the challenge not in apocalyptic terms but as a "problem management" issue.)

Now compare that to the neo-con ideology, described by Halper and Clarke as a set of "very simple and doctrinaire notions: 1) supporting democratic allies and challenging evildoers who defy American values, 2) America's total responsibility for global order, 3) the promotion of political and economic freedom everywhere, and, (4) increased spending on defense." (pg. 101). Notice the word "doctrinaire." Halper and Clarke consciously chose this word; one of their main claims is that neo-con thinking is inhabited by many of the same intellectual moves as Marxism and Leninism.

Specifically, Halper and Clarke trace the beginnings of the neo-con persuasion to bare-knuckled bull sessions at Alcove I in the City College of New York Cafeteria in the 1930s, where the likes of Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (among others) aggressively debated the finer points of Marxism, where the Trotskyists defended their man against the Stalinists and vice versa. Ideas were the stock in trade of these young thinkers, left-leaning ideas that shifted to the right over time but retained the teleological view of history of Marxism, as well as its cock-sure arrogance and messianism. Over time these polemicisits substituted the inevitability of the American Way for the inevitability of the state's withering away.

Recently, however, the neo-con reality (built and maintained with lavish grants from Richard Mellon Scaife, Adolf Coors and the Bradley and Olin foundations and others) was not able to hold back the flood of images from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. These powerful images at last undermined the manufactured reality of the right wing think tanks, the scores of neo-con apparatchiks in government and media, and made monkeys out of these oh-so-many flacks of the Bush administration. Not even Rupert Murdoch's reporters could spin what looked eerily like a war zone into anything but what it was, a stunning example of this administration's cavalier unconcern for the poor. In this domestic war zone, the reporters were no longer embedded with the troops but rather with the people -- bedraggled, pleading, dying refugees begging for medicine, food, help, mercy. The American people saw their government coddling its imcompetent cronies with one hand and grinding the faces of the poor with the other.

Breached at last one hopes is the neo-con assertion of US invicibility (sole superpower in a unipolar world) and inevitability (because we won against all other 'isms' of the 20th Century -- facism, Stalinism, communism, etc., a US style state is the only viable political and economic arrangement). The neo-con theories of the Kristols, the Podhereztes, and their progeny Perle and Wolfowitz, along with the 'big brain' thinking of men like Albert Wohlstetter at the Rand Corporation, etc., we now discover can only thrive in cloistered environments. These genetically inferior ideas have wilted in the light of day; we can only hope they can be uprooted and destroyed soon.