In trying to understand why William Kristol went on Fox News this morning and accused the administration of incompetence it is instructive to review Project for a New American Century’s 1997 Statement of Principles (take a long look at the signatories). PNAC was founded with a lot of high-minded rhetoric but, really, their raison d’être is defense spending. This can be seen in their summation, and in how large defense budgets take pride of place over other considerations:
• we need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global
responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future;• we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values;
• we need to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad;
• we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.
In other words, we need huge defense spending and to justify it…blah…blah…blah…
Countless electrons have been spilled writing about the influence of Trostsky, Leo Strauss and other thinkers in influencing the neo-conservative movement. But, for my taxdollar, I think the only important influence was Senator Scoop Jackson and his close relationship with the defense industry. As Vietnam wore down and the country turned against militarism, the Democratic Party fundamentally changed. The previous thirty years had seen Democratic presidencies preside over war in Europe, Japan, Korea, and Indochina. The lone Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower had ended the war in Korea and ended his term by warning against exactly the kind of military-industrial nexus that Scoop Jackson represented.
A year ago the CIA swooped into a University of Washington library and confiscated some of Scoop Jackson’s archival papers. It didn’t surprise me because Jackson employed some of the most notorious present day neo-conservatives on his Senate staff.
• Richard Perle is an adviser to the Defense Department and considered a major influence on Bush administration foreign policy.
• Doug Feith is undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon.
• Elliott Abrams, special assistant to the president focusing on Middle East affairs, worked as special counsel to Jackson.
Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense and one of Bush’s Iraq policy experts, never served directly under Jackson. But they had a long relationship that began when Wolfowitz, then a 29-year-old graduate student, helped Jackson prepare charts when the senator wanted to persuade fellow lawmakers to fund an antiballistic-missile program in 1969.
Nine days after the war in Iraq began, William Kristol was feeling especially overconfident. This is how he characterized liberals lack of enthusiasm for the march on Baghdad.
What of American liberalism? It is in the process of undergoing one of its once-in-a-generation splits. In 1948, the American left divided between Harry Truman’s anti-Communists and Henry Wallace’s fellow travelers. Luckily, the split turned out to be overwhelmingly one-sided, and American liberalism more or less ejected the Henry Wallace faction from its ranks.
Twenty-four years later, a Wallace supporter, George McGovern, captured the Democratic nomination for president. Now, the hawkish Scoop Jackson faction found itself on the losing side. Cold War liberals became an ever smaller minority through the 1970s, eventually departing the Democratic party and the ranks of modern liberalism.
Today, three decades later, after a Clintonian interregnum which papered over ideological differences, American liberalism is in the process of dividing again, into the Dick Gephardt liberals and the Dominique de Villepin left.
The short answer for why Kristol is going on the air and bashing the Bush administration is that William Kristol (and the neo-cons) have always been about enormous military spending. During the Cold War they infiltrated the Pentagon and CIA and hyped Soviet capabilities (see Team B). Today they hype the threat of Islamic terrorism and advocate the violent overthrow of uninvolved states to combat the threat.
For a somewhat self-serving history of the neo-conservative movement, see Francis Fukuyama’s mea culpa. Watch how Fukuyama tries to distance himself from his own movement. He calls on us to rethink our strategy for imperialism. He doesn’t question the immense defense budgets that are required to make our Empire go. And for neo-cons, that will always be the point. It’s about the money. And the neo-cons are scared to death that our overreach in Iraq will result in a new isolationism, and correspondingly appropriate appropriations for defense contracts.
