International Politics, 2008, 45, (182–211) r 2008 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1384-5748/08 $30.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/ip

Kristol Balls: Neoconservative Visions of Islam and the Middle East Timothy J. Lynch Institute 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 democratizing political Islam and considers the sources of the neoconservative understanding of the Arab Muslim world. Neoconservative analyses of the Middle East are almost exclusively normative, arguing what US policy toward the region should be. Their aims are ambitious and inherently controversial. The paper examines what various neoconservatives have said and written about Islam and its democratic potential. The paper concerns itself with the neoconservative conceptualization of Middle East politics. The paper argues that presently only American neoconservatism, despite its variations, and despite some obvious flaws, offers tenable prescriptions for 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; mediating structures; Middle East; neoconservatism; political Islam; regime change; terrorism; US foreign policy

Introduction Neoconservatism has earned a central and controversial place in American political discourse and in the frequently partial European debate about American politics. Increasingly, neoconservatism is the analytical preserve of two distinct groups: neoconservatives and their detractors. Islamic specialists are necessarily obliged to deal with this American political phenomenon but do so from a base and grounding in Islamic politics, often reinforcing ‘deep misgivings’ about the Bush administration approach (see Kepel, 2004; Khalidi, 2004, x). Indeed, the substantial weakness of the neoconservative case, as presented by those in opposition to it, rests on its failure to appreciate the myriad complexities of Islam and the Middle East. This argument is made with clarity and regularity by Islamic scholars (Kepel, 2004; Khalidi, 2004) and by Americanists and Americans, from both left and right (see Drury, 1999; Halper and Clarke, 2004, 2007; Judis, 2004; Norton, 2004; Holmes, 2007). And yet the subtleties of neoconservatism must likewise be appreciated to gauge its impact.

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Thus, we have two sets of scholars — Americanists and Islamic specialists — who are obliged to occupy much of the same territory — given President Bush’s war on terror — and yet who do so with an incomplete grasp of each other’s expertise. My small attempt to redress this state of affairs begins with the insistence that we treat neoconservatism (as we must treat Islam) with seriousness — rather than ridicule or deference, two opposing postures which have (as with Islam) obscured its meaning. Unless quoting from a source, this article avoids use of the word ‘neocon’. It is pejorative and serves to conceal complexity and promote caricature. Likewise, ‘neoconservative’ is not capitalized since this is not 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 study explores the neoconservative vision for the greater Middle East and what neoconservatives have said and written about political Islam. The paper considers the growing body of literature written in opposition to neoconservative designs but this is secondary to the study’s central concern with the neoconservative understanding of Islam, specifically political Islam, as neoconservatives themselves appreciate it, in their writings and public statements. That appreciation, though it varies from thinker to thinker, has induced an unusually prescriptive, forceful American foreign policy, one which is more liberal in its ends (democratization) and supposedly realist in its means (hard power) than previous foreign policy doctrines. As such, this is ultimately a study of neoconservatism as a theory and as a framework for action. There can be few operative ‘isms’ in the world today whose effects are so bold and controversial and yet remain so incompletely analysed.

What is Neoconservatism? As a label, neoconservatism is not self-defining. Two of its more cogent critics refer to it as ‘a new political interest group’ and/or an ‘East Coast intellectual phenomenon’ or ‘movement’ (Halper and Clarke, 2004, chapter 1). The neoconservative Joshua Muravchik refers to a ‘common y mentality’ (Muravchik, 2007, 21). James Q. Wilson calls it ‘a mood’ rather than ‘an ideology’ (Gerson, 1997, 16). Irving Kristol, widely regarded as the founding father of neoconservatism, said it was better understood, like Marvin Meyers’ (1957) classic treatment of middle-19th century Jacksonianism, as a ‘persuasion’ rather than as an organized pressure group or ideology. To adapt and paraphrase Meyers, in speaking of neoconservatism, as of Jacksonianism (c. 1830s) or New Dealism (c. 1930s), historians and political scientists ‘indicate the presence of a central pattern, however flawed and indistinct, which dominates a variegated field’ (1957, xi).2 William Kristol (son of Irving) is International Politics 2008 45

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sceptical of those who would label it in such a way as to create the illusion of conspiracy: ‘Neoconservatives are as strong as the ideas they promote. Many operate at the level of small magazines — with influence accruing from intellectual 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 central organization characteristic of a movement’ (Podhoretz, 1996, 20). President Bush, by this estimation, was not to neoconservatism what Andrew Jackson was to Jacksonian Democracy or FDR to the New Deal. According to the prolific neoconservative intellectual Max Boot: The reason why neocons are said to have so much influence is that their ideas are clearly and forcefully articulated — and they were proven right about so many things — such as the need to remain engaged in the world in the 1990s. I do think they have a lot of influence on the foreign policy debate but that doesn’t mean that even in this [Bush] administration they’re going to 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 subsequently institutionalized itself (see Drury, 1999, 4; Halper and Clarke, 2004, chapters 2–3; 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 all of reality to my satisfaction’ (I. Kristol, 1999, 3).4 The understanding of neoconservatism’s genesis often does not get much beyond Kristol’s folksy definition: A neoconservative is ‘a liberal who has been mugged by reality’ (I. Kristol, 1983). The line captures the evolution of the persuasion, from old left to new right. Indeed, suspicion of the neoconservatives is a consistent theme of both liberals and conservatives. Liberals deplore the turn-coat quality of Kristol et al. Conservatives (or paleocons) distrust neoconservative motivations 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 framework, defines it as: more a descriptive term than a prescriptive one. It describes the erosion of liberal faith among a relatively small but talented and articulate group of scholars and intellectuals, and the movement of this group (which gradually gained many new recruits) toward a more conservative point of view: conservative, but different in certain important respects from the traditional International Politics 2008 45

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conservatism of the Republican party. We were, most of us, from lowermiddle-class or working-class families, children of the Great Depression, veterans (literal or not) of World War II, who accepted the New Deal in principle, and had little affection for the kind of isolationism that then permeated American conservatism. We regarded ourselves as dissident liberals — dissident because we were sceptical of many of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives and increasingly disbelieving of the liberal metaphysics, 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 forced Kristol and his fellow travellers to seek ‘a home in the Republican party, which had 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 and 1980s, it was isolationist, obsessed with budgetary discipline, anti-New Deal, pro-racial segregation, ‘small-town’ with, perhaps worst of all for Kristol, ‘little time 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’ coordinating the post-9/11 war on terror was neither marked by much consideration of religion per se nor of Islam in particular. Religion, admits Kristol, ‘is only on rare occasions evident’ in his published work (1999, 6). Neoconservatism is not quite 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, positive role religious faith plays in American democracy but is essentially nonprescriptive where faith is concerned. Neoconservatives are thus ‘strong in praising the utility of religion and weak in claiming truth for it’ (Dannhauser, 1985, 53). Faith that contributes to order and upholds tradition he likes, faith which 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 was already becoming disenchanted with’. Kristol gravitated toward Judaism not for its religious certainty but for its attendant intellectualism. Christian theologians he had more time for; they ‘placed inherent limitations on human possibility’ 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 International Politics 2008 45

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Krauthammer, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz — several are Catholic — Richard John Neuhaus (a priest), Michael Novak, and George Weigel. Some value religion’s utility (see Steyn, 2005b), others both its utility and truth.7 Charles Krauthammer expresses the ambiguity of religious faith within neoconservatism; some faiths lead to liberty, some do not: Under the benign and deeply humane vision of this pope, the power of faith led to the liberation of half a continent. Under the barbaric and nihilistic vision 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 in the survival of Israel. This is not sufficient evidence to establish a Jewish conspiracy at the heart of the Bush White House — the president himself is a confident born-again Christian and leader of a party that commands far fewer Jewish American votes than its Democratic rival — arguably loosening the leverage 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 he knew best: Judeo-Christianity (which by definition does not necessarily exclude Islam — this similarly Abrahamic faith received little attention from Kristol before 2001, and not much thereafter). The dominant Western tradition offered for several neo-conservatives the ‘mediating structure’ essential to public virtue and good administration. Structures (‘private, voluntary organizations such as unions, churches and synagogues, veterans groups, families and schools, charitable associations, trade groups — all manner of associations that provide meaning, sustenance, and comfort to individuals outside government’; Gerson, 1997, 279) mediate between the private and the public realms. Liberalism, of course, places much emphasis on an inviolate zone 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, folk or ethnic subcultures or the like. The crisis of modernity, however, is precisely the fact that these other sources are in danger of drying up. Localized involvement should nurture qualitative civic engagement at a national level. Good states are thus the product of local strength, not the other way around. Mediating structures, significantly though not exclusively to be found in religious observance, reduce the necessity for central government activism. Without such structures the central government will find itself sustaining an increasing number of recipients — welfare via general taxation — without any obligation devolving on the recipient. Mediating structures oblige International Politics 2008 45

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

Leo Strauss and Islam At the University of Chicago, Kristol studied under Lionel Trilling and Leo Strauss, ‘two thinkers who had the greatest subsequent impact on my thinking’ (Kristol, 1999, 6). Strauss has become a cause ce´le`bre for those distrustful of neoconservative designs. Drury, for example, has spent much of her intellectual output on attacking Strauss and the Straussians (see Drury, 1999, 2005; and www.uregina.ca/arts/CRC/). According to her: It was not the fact that Strauss attracted a large following but that his following tended to have the attributes of a cult — its secrecy and faith in the authority of Strauss and the ancient philosophers he supposedly followed. (Drury, 1999, 2) Building on her critique, in 2004 the BBC ran a TV documentary that equated 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 most powerful’ (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm). The BBC-sponsored thesis fuelled the suspicions swirling around neoconservatism but actually had very little to say about how neoconservatives understood Islam, beyond the insistence that neoconservatives had created an illusionary Islamic threat — as they 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 conservative British Spectator magazine suggested that Strauss’s purported admonition to tell ‘noble lies’ — so that the masses might be saved from ‘the truth’ — made him an ideal intellectual anchor for the war on Iraq (Wakefield, 2004). Reading Strauss into these conspiracy theories does little to explain his influence 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 aim was to understand the ancients with reference to the ancients, before it was ever a critique of Western liberalism, let alone a Qutbian-style indictment of it.11 International Politics 2008 45

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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 indulge in public policy research (see Weinstein, 2004, 204). Straussians are students first and activists rarely. They are contemplative rather than energetic, seemingly more interested to read than to rule. Indeed, the secretive tenor that Drury and others observe in Strauss and ‘his disciples’ militates as much against the holding of public office as it promotes it. The purported alliance between a secret fellowship and a movement of public intellectuals like the neoconservatives is, as Weinstein observes, ‘paradoxical’. Strauss’s writings, says Weinstein, ‘are philosophical inquiries and have nothing of the dogma of a political 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 philosophical evangelists. Their ‘focus, instead, is on how to read books’ (Weinstein, 2004, 208). For Drury, coming from the left, this makes them suspect in their secrecy and elitist in their character — two deficiencies which, she argues, have led to their perfectly understandably exclusion from the liberal academy and their forced relocation in Washington (see Drury, 1999, 2). So successful has been this relocation that, according to the New York Times, Leo Strauss was the godfather of the Republican party’s 1994 Contract with America, several years before the asserted neoconservative ascendancy in the foreign policy of George W. 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-term Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz (who took two graduate classes with the German — on Plato and Montesquieu — at Chicago in 1967 but otherwise 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 disorderly influence. There is a powerful and long-standing Straussian presence at several sites’ (2004, 17). The accuracy of this assessment remains contentious and outside the purview offered here (see Hurst, 2005).14 Some neoconservatives dispute 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 of positivist ‘‘political science’’ has become more hostile to [them]’ (1995, 7). Few people who have studied Strauss, whether remaining in academia or entering International Politics 2008 45

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political office, claim membership of an informal Straussian club.15 The label is more commonly used against neoconservatives than by them.16 Straussian and neoconservative are not cognate. The formal influence of Straussians requires greater 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 his interest in Farabi and the neoconservative interest in bringing democracy to the Islamic world. Strauss was silent on political Islam.

Neoconservativism and American Foreign Policy Like Strauss himself, identifiable neoconservatives are not significant public policy advocates. They stand against much but there is little in terms of a platform that might shape American domestic and economic policy. Much of the 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 such domestic concerns have been supplanted by a far more powerful, consistent, and influential prescriptive turn in the neoconservative understanding of America’s global role. Neoconservative foreign policy, unlike its domestic policy forerunner, is explicitly prescriptive and activist. It demands central government action as much as its domestic policy variant eschews it. It postulates that the world can be made better by the correct use of overwhelming national government power. Unlike realists and traditional conservatives, neoconservatives connect the use of power to human progress. Realists ridicule a foreign policy of moral objectives. Paleocons are sceptical that the world can be much improved and prefer an introverted global role for the United States. In neoconservativism, however, there is a marked preference for using American power to make the world better. Power is opportunity. The substantial neoconservative contribution to the theory of international relations (see Williams, 2005) lies in the unification of its two dominant, contrary paradigms: realism, with its blunt assessment of power as an end in itself, and liberalism, with its hopeful assertion 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, and respect for human dignity’, a word deployed on eight separate occasions in that document) can be only achieved by the application of ‘power’ (cited on 21 occasions) (Bush, 2002b).17 Liberal ends by realist means. This provides a working definition of foreign policy neoconservatism. Progress, because International Politics 2008 45

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progress assumes security, as a product of the application of irresistible — and supposedly carefully calibrated — force. The ‘measured use of force is all that protects 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 title neoliberal 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 to force the pace of liberalization around the globe. Both liberals and conservatives share a faith in liberal democracy; neoconservatives purport to have found a way to globalize it. The animation that surrounds neoconservatism stems in large part from its avowedly interventionist prescriptions, constituting, according to the former British Conservative party leader Iain Duncan Smith (2004), ‘a radical agenda of hope at home and abroad’.18 Neoconservatives place a primacy on action — once the preserve of the political left — and show a willingness to reduce issue complexity — scorned by their critics — so as to facilitate such action (see Abrams et al., ‘American power — 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 its creation in 1997. ‘We cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership’, read the Project’s statement of principles, ‘or the costs that are associated with its exercise’ (www.newamericancentury.org/).19 Several of PNAC’s founding fathers went onto serve under George W. Bush. Basic to the Project, and to most neoconservatives, is the belief that American power exists to maintain internally and extend externally universal human values. Such thinking was not anathema to much liberal theorizing in the 1990s. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama declared The End of History and the triumph, for want of an alternative, of liberal democracy (Fukuyama, 1989, 1992). Bill Clinton’s first attempt to ‘doctrinize’ his foreign policy was built on the apparently immutable 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 unstoppable process through military force’ (www-hjs.pet.cam.ac.uk/sections/governance/ document.2005-06-03.6474702254).20 This vanguard is not monolithic, especially as a shaper of American foreign policy. Charles Krauthammer identifies two distinct strands within foreign policy neoconservatism. He stands for one and scorns the other — and his scorn is reciprocated. According to Krauthammer, International Politics 2008 45

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his neoconservative worldview is better described as ‘democratic realism’. He is clear when and where America should act: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity — meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom. (2004) Those who advocate interventionism without national interest limitations he labels ‘democratic globalists’. This, by Krauthammer’s definition, is a very large group indeed. It includes Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and the great proponent of liberal peace theory, Francis Fukuyama (with whom Krauthammer has repeatedly clashed since the 2003 Iraq war) (see Fukuyama, 2004, 2004/5, 2006; Krauthammer, 2004, 2005a).21 Globalists favour the spread of democracy per se — for what it takes to those to whom it is spread. Democratic realists favour its extension for the security such external democratization brings to the United States, its territory, interests, and allies. Thus, for a democratic realist there is little security pay-off in bringing liberal democracy to Zimbabwe; President Mugabe is not an exporter of antiAmerican terrorism — ignore him. Taking liberal democracy to Iraq, however, is to be supported because of the material benefits to American security of so doing; 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 Iraq war ‘by advancing freedom in the greater Middle East, we help end a cycle of dictatorship and radicalism that brings millions of people to misery and brings danger to our own people’.22 Granted, the two dominant themes in foreign policy neoconservatism will agree on much (such as the 2003 war on Iraq) but will also disagree about the scope of American ambitions in the post-9/11 world. And part company in significant ways on the threat posed by political Islam and the Middle East. Indeed, they separate often on the definitions of such concepts.

Neoconservatism and Islam The realist vs globalist feud within neoconservatism is not much referenced in the literature of the movement’s detractors. This is especially apparent in treatments of the neoconservative position on Islam. Caricatures of this understanding often dominates analysis of neoconservatives claims. Anne Norton, for example, offers much anecdotal evidence of Straussian (and therefore neoconservative by association) ‘bigotry’: From the time I first came to Chicago to the present day, I have seen Arabs and Muslims made the targets of unrestrained persecution, especially among International Politics 2008 45

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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 and articles, in editorials and postings on websites, that Arabs are violent, they are barbarous, they are the enemies of civilization, they are Nazis. (2004, 210–211) Particular scorn is reserved for David Frum and Richard Perle’s neoconservative 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 reminiscent of older, long-dishonored texts. The careful fabrication, the language of blood 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 enemy is Islam. Norton, echoing the analogies and equivalences painted in the BBC documentary, goes onto to claim that neoconservatives are jihadists, engaged in ‘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 some neoconservatives was at least balanced before 9/11 by a seemingly pervasive Sinophobia. Much neoconservative strategic advocacy in the 1990s called for a harder line on China, a political system as divorced from political Islam as it is perhaps possible to be (see Kagan and Kristol, 2000).24 The emerging divisions within neoconservatism again present themselves. Some democratic realists equate political Islam with a threat to America’s existence. Some do not. Some think the threat of a rising China is potentially as great (Munro, 2000). Some democratic globalists suggest Islam is ripe for democratization. Others argue that the religion’s political form is irrelevant to American security. Common to most is a two-tier understanding of Middle Eastern politics — and of Islam — as both threat and opportunity.

The Middle East as Threat Most neoconservatives depict militant Islam (or at least some extreme manifestation of Middle Eastern politics) as a physical security threat to the United States but one capable of remedy (Middle East democratisation) hence their optimism. Perle and Frum’s An end to evil can be held as emblematic of this approach. This controversial and strong-selling ‘manual for victory’ (Frum and Perle, 2003, 9) presents ‘militant Islam’ (p. 42) as an unalloyed threat to America. The saliency of the threat to the United States is evident in the authors’ embrace of a war against it — in which, like all wars, there will be International Politics 2008 45

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‘difficulties’, ‘casualties’, ‘reverses’, and ‘defeats’ (p. 4). The enemy is variously labelled, 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 facto bureaucratic allies at home. It is not until page 6 that the word ‘Muslim’ is used explicitly and, despite discussion of ‘Shiites’ and ‘Sunnis’, it is not until page 41 that ‘Islam’ is mentioned, and then by way of introducing its intimacy with terrorism. According to the authors, nearly 50% of all ‘foreign terrorist organizations’, as classified by the State Department, ‘purport to act in the name of Islam’. Thereafter, the use of ‘Islamic terrorists’, ‘Islamic terrorist groups’ 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). This caveat is diluted however by the chosen analogies — to the great totalitarianisms of 20th century European history — which had far fewer reasonable elements within them of the kind Frum and Perle hope exist within Islam: Like communism, this [militant Islamic] ideology perverts the language of justice and equality to justify oppression and murder. Like Nazism, it exploits the injured pride of once-mighty nations. Like both communism and Nazism, militant Islam is opportunistic — it works willingly with all manner of unlikely allies, as the communists and Nazis worked with each other against the democratic West. (p. 43)26 The analogy is basic to neoconservatism. While these authors do not quite switch the ‘ism’ from ‘commun’ to ‘terror’, they do propose a war of broad similarity given what they perceive as the commonality of the enemy in both International Politics 2008 45

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eras: ‘The war against extremist Islam is as much an ideological war as the cold war ever was’ (2003, 147). For example, like the communists, the Islamists are far more coordinated than the West realises (pp. 43–44). The Soviet Union and China, despite splits, were essentially as one in the Cold War (a central tenet of Cold War neoconservatism leading them to decry Nixon’s Chinese rapprochement). So too are the Baathists of Syria and Iraq, contend Perle and Frum, as one. Superficially at odds, each continues to facilitate the ebb and flow of terrorist insurgents across their shared border (pp. 44–45). The title of chapter 3, 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 a sustained economic subvention of the vanquished nations. And did so with great clarity of purpose, rather than ambiguity.27 The threat, as in 1941–1945 and 1945–1991, is deadly, this strain of neoconservatism contends, but not immovable. The neoconservatism of Perle and Frum embodies a doom-saying optimism; the threat is real but the solution realizable. It should come as no surprise that American strategists nurtured in a Cold War context — given the West’s success in that bi-polar conflict — should look to it for a guide to the post-9/11 terrain (see Lynch and Singh, 2008). The temptation to equate Islamism with communism and to confront both in similar fashion is irresistible for some neoconservatives. The very great complexity of Arab civilization is thereby reduced to a monolith capable of being confronted — and transformed. For Charles Krauthammer the Cold War experience has a remarkable contemporary, strategic relevance: My approach to Islamism is identical to the muscular approach I consistently advocated against our previous global challenge, Soviet communism. From opposing the nuclear freeze to advocating US support for anti-Communist insurgencies in Nicaragua and Afghanistan and around the world, my views on muscularity in confronting existential enemies have not changed. Given that history has demonstrated, definitively and with rare clarity, the wisdom and success of precisely this approach in our last existential struggle, it is entirely logical that I would apply it to the current one. (2005a, 322) There are marked differences, however, in America’s Cold War strategy and that advocated by Perle and Frum et al. The inventor of containment strategy, George F. Kennan (1904–2005), was cool on military power as the American weapon of choice in the Cold War. Instead, he called for a vigilant waiting game. Stay strong, he counselled, and the weaker opponent will collapse. Such advice departs markedly from the dominant neoconservative prescription for confronting Islamist terrorists and the regimes that facilitate or germinate International Politics 2008 45

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them. The following is Kennan’s most famous prescription, adapted for the war on terror. It fails to capture the central tenets of the neoconservative approach and thus invites the conclusion that neoconservative analogies to the Cold War are misleading and/or in error: [I]t will be clearly seen that the Islamist pressure against the free institutions of the western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of 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 that already they have scored great successes. It must be borne in mind that there was a time when terrorism represented far more of a minority in the sphere of Middle Eastern life than Islamic power today represents in the world community. (Adapted from Kennan, 1947)28 Kennan’s optimism is not that of the neoconservatives. Soviet communism was rational and therefore responsive to the logic of deterrence. Its possession of nuclear weapons actually helped to stabilize international relations. The Kremlin was patient, cautious. Compare such characterizations with those imputed by neoconservatives to the post-9/11 foe: The chill comes from knowing that there are, among the terrorists, hundreds and thousands who are ready to die in order to kill. They cannot be deterred. They cannot be appeased. The terrorists kill and will accept death for a cause with which no accommodation is possible. (Frum and Perle, 2003, 41) International Islamofascist barbarians with imperial designs masterminded the 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 us learned on September 11: That we are at war with a vicious global enemy, an Islamist enemy that hates Christians, Hindus, and progressive Muslims as much as it hates Jews, an enemy that cannot be appeased, bought off y an enemy we must unite to cut down wherever it rears its ugly head, or have our own heads and those of our children cut off by it. (Lerner, 2004) [N]ew threats require new thinking. Deterrence — the promise of massive retaliation against nations — means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. (Bush, 2002a) Not all neoconservatives claim the Cold War as a model for US strategy in the war on terror. The more obvious parallel for some is to the Anglo-French International Politics 2008 45

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appeasement of Hitler’s Germany. The implicit indictment of Western — read French — fear of force in both eras is central to Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power (2003) and, his father, Donald Kagan’s contribution in Present Dangers (D. Kagan, 2000, 337–362), both of which rely, in the derisory words of Halper and Clarke (2004, 36), on the neoconservative ‘mantra of ‘‘Munich’’’.29 Norman Podhoretz (2004b, 2007) transcends analogy and illusion by arguing that the war on terror is not like previous wars but is rather the next war: ‘World War IV’.30 In each neoconservative assessment of the 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 intrinsic worth and that one should not regard one’s own as superior — has had three marked effects on their Middle East prescriptions. First, it has produced a clarity of design and of expression which, while it has raised considerable opprobrium, has succeeded in making neoconservatism (and thus the United States) central to the debate about Middle East democratization. As even their critics point out (see, e.g., Halper and Clarke, 2004, 35) neoconservatives mean to offer solutions rather than merely advance debates about solutions. Second, it has led neoconservatism to challenge a long-held liberal fear (and even a fear once far more marked among neoconservatives themselves) that democracy is a discrete, Western phenomenon, a delicate seed unlikely to grow in the Middle East. Third, it has facilitated both indictment and prescription; neoconservatives have rejected the do-nothingism of traditional conservatism and realism. They indict Arab civilization so as to remake it. The threat inherent in Islam is to be met by changing its nature rather than wishing it away or destroying it. Clarity Clarity enrages the opponents of neoconservatism while simultaneously disarming their conspiracy theories of a secret intent. There is very little which is secret about neoconservative ambitions in the Middle East. Neoconservatives tend not to conceal their perceptions of and predictions for Islam. David Frum (2002), for example, in a piece entitled ‘America is indeed subverting the Middle East’, described the region as one ‘of overpopulation and underemployment, where tens of millions of young men waste their lives in economic and sexual frustration’. There is certainly a lack of nuance within neoconservative prescriptions for exporting democracy to the Middle East (see, for other examples, Sharansky, 2004, xviii–xix and Gaffney, 2006). International Politics 2008 45

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Exportable democracy I like the idea of people running for office. There’s a positive effect when you run for office. Maybe some will run for office and say, vote for me, I look forward to blowing up America. I don’t know, I don’t know if that will be their platform or not. But I don’t think so. I think people who generally run for office say, vote for me, I’m looking forward to fixing your potholes, or making sure you got bread on the table. (Bush, 2005) George W. Bush’s folksy defence of the pacification inherent in democracy articulates a tenet increasingly fundamental to the neoconservatives, if not embraced by all of them: democracy ¼ peace. Bush was quick to make the equation central to his 9/11 response and to the subsequent Bush doctrine. The democratic peace hypothesis, not an exclusive preserve of neoconservative thinkers by any means, was further augmented by them to include the imperative to export democracy. The response to ‘terrorism for export’ is democracy 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 human being: [T]he United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere. No nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them. Fathers and mothers in all societies want their children to be educated and to live free from poverty and violence. No people on earth yearn to be oppressed, aspire to servitude, 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 personal responsibility, and a need for freedom as deep as our own. It is not realism to suppose that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to liberty; it is pessimism and condescension, and we should have none of it. (Bush, 2003) This latter speech echoed much of the strand in neoconservative thought that has lost patience with assertions that Arabs are different, not suited to democratic norms. In support of the first US war against Iraq in 1991, George Weigel (1991, 121) impugned the notion that ‘the Arabs are fractious children who really don’t know any better, and thus have to be appeased’ (also see Gerson, 1997, 168). The expectation that liberty is a universal human urge may be naı¨ ve but it remains a key component of the neoconservative worldview. International Politics 2008 45

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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 prospects of Arab democracy. Essentially a manifesto for the liberalization of Islam, it argues that this transformation is both necessary and practicable. Novak, a former US ambassador, is possessed of an almost religious faith in ‘liberty’ and its power to effect change.31 Whereas ‘liberty is the crimson interpretative thread’ of Western history, ‘the hunger for liberty has only slowly been felt among Muslims y That hunger is universal, even when it is latent, for the preconditions for it slumber in every human breast’. Novak is remarkably upbeat about the ‘hopeful majority’ of Muslims who ‘refuse to concede that Islam is incompatible with universal human rights, personal dignity, and opportunity’ (2004, xiii, 202). Novak’s analysis of ‘political Islamism’ reflects both his profound Catholicism and the neoconservative stress on the mediating role of religious faith. ‘Majority’ Islam, in contradistinction to ‘political Islamism’, is a significant source of civic virtue, of ‘amity, hospitality, welcome to the stranger, help for the needy, and respect for unforced conscience’. Its ‘secular’ wing, ‘political Islamism (to give the extremist groups a name)’ is a defilement of the transcendental purity of religious, majority Islam: Its source is neither a deeper and more vigorous study of Islam’s spiritual origins nor a deeper reappropriation of Islam’s magnificent intellectual resources — from those early centuries when the lost manuscripts of Plato and Aristotle were known to the Muslim world but barely available in Christian Europe. The source of political Islamism is not so much deep study and profound inquiry as resentment; not so much transcendent religion (although religious intensity is intermixed in it) as an itch to inflict injury on others. (2004, 203) His prescription? Nurture majority Islam and destroy its perverted secular form. 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 in opposition to the liberty-hungry religious majority. Thus, ‘the problem lies less in Islam than in the political propensities of the Arab states’. Non-Arab Muslims nations have begun the transition to electoral democracy — the author 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 Islamic Arab 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’ International Politics 2008 45

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propitious for the historical development of democracy that the Middle East, he says, does not possess: 1. 2. 3. 4.

geographic isolation widespread property rights homogeneity a democratic tradition.

Nations that have not enjoyed such features have still become democratic but often only ‘at the point of a bayonet’. Indeed, though Wilson is dismissive of the prospects of Arab democracy (writing in 2000) he nevertheless posits two ways democracy can spread, in the absence of the four conditions, that match the 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 current American policy — where both Novak and Wilson have stood behind it. If the current strategy is aimed at retarding terrorism, then democracy is an unlikely means to this end. Terrorists are unlikely to lay down bomb for ballot paper. But the problem is deeper, contends Pipes. Democracy will not stop terrorism nor will it transform the nature of the regimes which give rise to it, because, he observes ‘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 fix potholes and improve schools — but only as a means to transform their countries in accordance with their utopian visions. This generalization applies most clearly to the historical cases (Adolf Hitler in Germany after 1933, Salvador Allende in Chile after 1970) but it also appears valid for the current ones. (Khaleda Zia in Bangladesh since 2001, Recep Tayyip Erdoqan in Turkey since 2002) Then there is the matter of their undemocratic intentions. Josef Goebbels explained in 1935 that the Nazis used democratic methods ‘only in order’ to gain power. Looking at Islamists, then-assistant secretary of state for the Middle East Edward Djerejian explained in 1992, ‘While we believe in the principle of ‘‘one person, 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 the attempted democratization of the Middle East: ‘Suppose elections are free and International Politics 2008 45

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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 — visible from 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 with democracy, before 9/11 forced the Bush administration to attempt to make them so: Lewis notes that Islam, in contrast to Christianity, forms a coherent system of rules for regulating human behavior in this world. Lewis cites a book by one of the first Muslim visitors to England, the 18th century traveller Mirza Abu 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 not accepted a divine law revealed from heaven, and were therefore reduced to the expedient of making their own laws y’ Of course, as Lewis acknowledges, the Islamic world made its own laws too. But ‘the making of new law, though common and widespread, was always disguised, almost furtive, and there was therefore no room for legislative councils or assemblies such as formed the starting-point of European democracy’. (Frum, 1997) The argument that Islam is beyond democratic redemption has been met with the charge, ‘so what?’ Francis Fukuyama has demonstrated a flexible neoconservatism — to the point of his repudiation of it (Fukuyama, 2006b) — in this regard. His famous ‘end of history’ thesis dismissed Islam as a viable challenge to Western liberal democracy (1992, 45–46). The logical import of such a position was that Islam’s capacity to democratize was of negligible concern to the West. The argument had some merit until the 9/11 attacks brought home to neoconservatives the ‘existential threat’ Islam (or at least its fringe) did pose to the United States. Rather than the non-democratic curiosity of Fukuyama’s 1992 conception, the Middle East, after 2001, became the central focus of American national security strategy. Political Islam’s Capacity to Change We have observed how, for neoconservatives, religious faith in the West can operate as a ‘mediating structure’ between public and private spheres. Do they find in Islam such utility? Perle and Frum rather duck this issue. Political liberalization, they contend, will follow the regeneration of an Arab middle class. Political Islam is more problematic. Unlike in Judeo-Christianity, there has been no Reformation and subsequent weakening of religious power in the Islamic world — Islam has never had a centralized structure amenable to reform; there is no Islamic pope. Freedom of religious thought is a basic International Politics 2008 45

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concept in the West, where the very multiplicity of faiths dilutes formal religious power. James Q. Wilson (2000, 25) cites Voltaire to illustrate this point. The French philosopher ‘once said that a nation with one church will have oppression; with two, civil war; with a hundred, freedom’. Again, this promotes his scepticism that Islam can become sufficiently diverse so as to embrace rival faiths. Whereas economic determinism has been the preserve of the political left, political determinism marks out the neoconservative approach to political Islam. In the left-liberal conception, but not only here, Islamist terrorism is the product of economic despair. Wealth redistribution — from an oil-wealthy elite to the masses — will rob Al Qaeda of recruits. Neoconservatives, while not immune to such arguments (see Frum and Perle, chapter 6), have stressed the political repression fundamental to Islamic fundamentalism. Indeed, as Daniel Pipes (2001/2) observes, it is not poverty that leads to militant Islam, but tyranny. Many Islamist terrorists are a product ‘of financial ease and advanced education’ (2001/2, 16; see also Fielding, 2005). What they appear to lack is ‘some prestige-conferring element’ in their education. ‘Or they may just come from 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. 2. 3. 4.

‘Wealth does not inoculate against militant Islam’ ‘A flourishing economy does not inoculate against radical Islam’ ‘Poverty does not generate militant Islam’ ‘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 is therefore broadly irrelevant in the war against terror. 2. ‘Westernization’ could well worsen the problem of terrorism. Several key terrorist leaders are products of exposure to Western culture and norms. 3. Economic growth does not correlate with improved East–West relations. In fact, 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 this offers the White House is unclear. A strategy to further impoverish the Middle East is an unlikely basis for an American foreign policy doctrine. International Politics 2008 45

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An Israeli Prism? The charge that American neoconservatives see the Middle East through an Israeli lens is made by both conservatives and liberals. Even before the neoconservative ascendancy, in 1991 the arch-isolationist Republican Pat Buchanan declared that there were ‘only two groups beating the drums y for war in the Middle East — the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States’ (in Podhoretz, 2004b, 33). The frequency of Jewish-sounding names 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 foreign policy or, more academically, as evidence of the overbearing influence of ‘the Israel Lobby’ (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2007). The credibility of such a conspiracy/lobby theory is outside our purview here. What we can seek to understand is whether Jewish neoconservatives appreciate the Middle East in a substantially different way from their non-Jewish colleagues, and one which is consistent 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’. Charles Krauthammer has taken exception to this. The shared, as a result of 9/11, experience of Islamist suicide terrorism has not, he argues, led America to adopt an Israeli national security approach: [Fukuyama’s] assertion is not just unsupported. It is wrong. Israel’s experience is neither definitive nor particularly instructive. Having pursued both hard- and soft-line policies in dealing with its Arab enemies, Israel can hardly be a model for anyone — 57 years of pursuing these policies have left it 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 for neoconservatives: In the 1980s, they were leading proponents of democratization in places as disparate as Nicaragua, Poland, and South Korea. In the 1990s, they were the most ardent champions of interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo — missions designed to rescue Muslims, not Jews. Today neocons agitate for democracy in China (even as Israel has sold arms to Beijing!) y

Conclusions The clarity of the neoconservative ‘solution’ to the Middle East is purchased at the price of oversimplification. Islamism, militant Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, political Islam, political Islamism — such concepts are not International Politics 2008 45

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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/072006 Ledeen.pdf).33 When the neoconservative approach allows for Middle Eastern complexities its clarity is blurred. But like the ‘isms’ it seeks to retard, neoconservatism itself is not monolithic, neither in its development, its preoccupations, nor indeed in its prescriptions for US foreign policy. The movement (and this paper remains neutral on the matter of what descriptor better captures neoconservatism) divides significantly on matters such as Islam’s capacity for democratization and the historical analogies most appropriate for post-9/11 US foreign policy.

Expectations Met? Neoconservative smiles were barely concealed when events looked to have gone their way. Nominal, electoral democracy in Iraq seems to have generated wider, if sporadic, Arab disgruntlement with the absence of political accountability across the region. Mark Steyn, the prolific columnist and selfidentifying neoconservative, trumpeted that with the holding of elections in Iraq (on January 30, 2005) the ‘Arabs’ Berlin Wall has crumbled’ (Steyn, 2005a, 20). In its wake came the Saudi government’s announcement of municipal elections. The Egyptian president declared he would run against a serious challenger to his office for the first time in the nation’s history. The so-called ‘Cedar revolution’ deposed the pro-Syrian government in Lebanon and forced Baathist Syria to remove its troops from that nation (even as it allowed Hezbollah a role in its new government, with bloody but not wholly deleterious consequences in July–August 2006 (see Podhoretz, 2006; Bush, 2006)). And, to the delight of Steyn and other neoconservatives, Walid Jumblatt, 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 Iraq election has become the prism through which all other events in the region are seen’ (see also Boot, 2005).34 This optimism was not confined, tellingly, to neoconservatives alone. In the National Interest, Amr Hamzawy and Nathan Brown observed that: Dreams of democratic openings, competitive elections, the rule of law and wider political freedoms have captured the imagination of clear majorities in the Arab world. The dominance of the idea of democracy in the public space has even forced authoritarian ruling establishments to cast about for new pro-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 International Politics 2008 45

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pluralist mechanisms, developing a strategic commitment to gradual democratic reform. (Hamzawy and Brown, 2007) Prospects Many neoconservatives, especially those outside the Bush administration, have been 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 to develop a compelling ideology, the energy to found parties, the devotion to win supporters, the money to spend on electoral campaigns, the honesty to appeal to voters, and the will to intimidate rivals. (Pipes, 2005a) For him, as not for Michael Novak or Max Boot, the process of Islamic democratization is the swapping of a secular tyranny for a religious one — and one 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 from clear. 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, nation and more complicated theatre (Pollack, 2004). Regime change will have to become a more nuanced objective for US policy toward the Middle East, achievable by overt hard power but also by less costly diplomacy and the nurturing of internal dissent against the regime. This latter option is an especially problematic one given the perception within Iranian popular culture of 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 of questions might better guide our assessment of neoconservatism and its Middle Eastern visions. For example, do we have empirical data to justify the link between democracy and the pacification of terrorism (see Dalacoura, 2005a, 2005b, 2006)? Does Middle Eastern democracy ¼ peace? How do we define such terms? Is Daniel Pipes right? Is poverty irrelevant to the growth of terrorism and wealth actually a facilitator of it? Such questions demand rigorous inquiry and must be detached from the heat that is too often generated 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 essential lest we treat Bush as the mouthpiece for the American Enterprise Institute International Politics 2008 45

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(see Baker, 2004/5; Mann, 2004; Hurst, 2005). The impact of neoconservatism is neither as strong as their critics maintain nor as weak as neoconservatives tell us. In the absence of more precise tools of measurement we are increasingly forced to rely on assessments that stem from two mutually antagonistic sources: the neoconservatives themselves and those opposed to them. This is all by way of saying we need to demythologize the movement and treat it with a studious 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 neoconservative approach to the Middle East has produced positive results. The argument — offered in brief to open up debate rather than to close it down — rests on the claim that neoconservative ignorance of Middle Eastern culture and politics 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) argues Bush 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 could not possibly be, and maintaining these ideas even when the means exist to know differently’ (Norman Daniel in Halper and Clarke, 2004, 268).35 According to two of neoconservative’s most articulate critics, such ‘‘‘knowledgeable ignorance’’ emerges as a powerful phenomenon in explaining the apparent disconnect between the United States and Islam’ (Halper and Clarke, 2004, 268–269). This paper has highlighted several contradictions, idiosyncrasies and oversimplifications within the neoconservative approach to the Middle East and Arabs generally. While this has caused them to misconstrue, exaggerate or mistake phenomenon it has not led them into passivity and inaction. They do not indulge in what Ronald Reagan condemned as the ‘fetish for complexity’ — the illness afflicting too many Western liberals, he said, in the face of the Soviet threat (see Hayward, 2004). ‘The statesman’, noted Fareed Zakaria, in sympathy with Reagan, ‘unlike the academic, cannot wait for international relations theory to work itself out. He must have a policy that addresses the perceived power distribution in the world’ (1990, 392).36 Neoconservatives, wrote the academic/statesman Henry Kissinger despairingly, insist ‘on a version of history that lures the United States away from the need to face complexity’ (Kissinger, 1999). What makes neoconservatism such a controversial ideological force is its refusal to allow issue complexity to induce policy impotence. It is perhaps one reason explaining the dearth of neoconservatives on university faculties. International Politics 2008 45

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Rather than knowledgeable ignorance then we might better understand foreign policy neoconservatism as embodying a functional ignorance, defined as the dismissal of issue complexity as a reason to do nothing. The neoconservatives have not fallen victim to a syndrome common among policy experts and regional specialists: knowing something so well that one is incapable of changing it. The price neoconservatives, and indeed many innocent Iraqis, paid for this functional ignorance was the anarchy of postSaddam Iraq and a vicious insurgency — as several eminent experts on Iraq warned (see Dodge, 2004, 2005). The reward was the beginning of an unstoppable (at least so far) and remarkable process of regime destabilization and an attendant, if not always proportional, liberalization of Middle Eastern governance. 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. International Politics 2008 45

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207 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, wellmaintained, 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?Id ¼ 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). International Politics 2008 45

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208 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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