Neo-cons perpetuate foreign policy errors of cold warriors

[RainDog]

http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/11/diggins-j.html


While Commentary influenced the Reagan administration, the newer Weekly Standard has had similar influence with the current Bush administration. But whereas Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz convinced readers that America was losing the struggle against the Soviet Union, Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol seeks to convince us that fundamentalism's days are numbered once Iraq is transformed as the first step in the democratization of the Middle East. One writer desired to see American military power prevail, the other its political ideals. Have either?

( )

On the intellectual cold war in America, Commentary took its stand as a unilateralist long before today's neoconservatives gave the word its cachet. Just as the Bolsheviks once believed that to defeat czarism one must extirpate Menshevism and the liberal Kadets, so, too, did the conservatives of our time believe that to defeat communism one must extirpate radicalism and the liberal democrats. Commentary convinced itself and its readers that in order to fight communism, it had to rid the country of progressive politics and expose its illusions in the name of the hardheaded realpolitik of conservatism. The proliferation of weapons would succeed where the patience of wisdom had failed. With such assumptions, Commentary emerges victorious in the annals of modern American history. It claims to have won without needing any friends on the left.

Why this assumption has caught on is curious. Was it not the compromising disposition of conservatism, from the prudence of Winston Churchill to the pecuniary politics of Henry Kissinger, that proved quite willing to accommodate itself to communism, both in Eastern Europe as an established "sphere of influence" (drawn by Churchill with a blue crayon) and in Asia as a land of economic opportunity? The American presidency remained almost as indifferent as the public when, in Hungary in 1956, the Red Army turned the Budapest uprising into a bloodbath, and when, in China in 1989, a young man stood alone and defiantly halted a tank in Tiananmen Square as others looked up to their jerry-rigged Statue of Liberty and sent desperate faxes to an America that shamefully averted its eyes. Struggling to be born behind the Iron Curtain and the Great Wall of China, freedom died as much from the failure of its friends as from the acts of its foes. World communism had nothing to fear from American conservatism.

In fact, the history of the Republican Party should serve as a cautionary tale of conservatism's limitations for statecraft. With Dwight Eisenhower, communism survived in Korea; with Richard Nixon, it prevailed in Vietnam. Gerald Ford assured the American people that Poland was a "free" country. Ronald Reagan withdrew from Lebanon after terrorists massacred about 400 American and French soldiers. And George Bush Senior had no objections when Chinese officials told him that in crushing the Tiananmen Square movement, they were simply doing what America had done against student demonstrators in the 1960s. The party that Commentary claims won the Cold War was actually the party of pullout and back off. And today The Weekly Standard looks to the party that refused to support democracy in China, and could not even bring it to our neighbor Haiti, as the very party that is ready and willing to establish it in Iraq.

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. as crazy as it sounds our neo cons are

modern Bolsheviks and yes they are former liberals themselves

[RainDog]

2. Neo-cons are not former liberals

They are former Troksyites, according to what I've read about the background that led to the "neo-con manifesto."

No matter if they were once on one side of a debate and switched to the extreme other, their assumptions are based upon errors, as far as what worked in American foreign policy.

Also, as the guy who wrote The Threatening Storm noted, the CIA was trying to tell the cold warriors that they were overstating the economic power of the Soviets, and the cold warriors ignored that assessment.

As the article notes, it was when Reagan, as Reagan himself said in his bio, was able to see the people in the USSR as ordinary people, like those he saw in this country, that Reagan was able to negotiate with Gorbachev to make the fall of the Soviet Union as bloodless as possible.

...Just as Reagan was finally able to achieve some economic sanity when he finally (but surreptiously) raised taxes because his economic policy wasn't working, either.

Neo-cons also constantly lie about the truth of Reagan's achievements in office...that those achievements were based upon conservative ideology. In fact, Reagan succeeded when he applied traditional liberal positions on foreign and economic policy.

[RainDog]

3. Reagan's liberal actions/conservative words

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0301.green.html

January/February 2003

Reagan's Liberal Legacy
What the new literature on the Gipper won't tell you.

By Joshua Green
------------------------------------------------------------------------
...there is an active campaign to nail into place a canonical version of Reagan's life and career... The effort to gild Reagan's legacy also seems to demand that any accomplishment that didn't explicitly advance conservative goals be ex-punged from his record. And so they have been.

Reagan is, to be sure, one of the most conservative presidents in U.S. history and will certainly be remembered as such. His record on the environment, defense, and economic policy is very much in line with its portrayal. But he entered office as an ideologue who promised a conservative revolution, vowing to slash the size of government, radically scale back entitlements, and deploy the powers of the presidency in pursuit of socially and culturally conservative goals. That he essentially failed in this mission hasn't stopped partisan biographers from pretending otherwise. (Noonan writes of his 1980 campaign pledges: "Done, done, done, done, done, done, and done. Every bit of it.")

A sober review of Reagan's presidency doesn't yield the seamlessly conservative record being peddled today. Federal government expanded on his watch. The conservative desire to outlaw abortion was never seriously pursued. Reagan broke with the hardliners in his administration and compromised with the Soviets on arms control. His assault on entitlements never materialized; instead he saved Social Security in 1983. And he repeatedly ignored the fundamental conservative dogma that taxes should never be raised.

All of this has been airbrushed from the new literature of Reagan. But as any balanced account must make clear, Reagan acceded to political compromises as all presidents do once in office--and on many occasions did so willingly. In fact, however often unintentionally, many of his actions as president wound up facilitating liberal objectives. What this clamor of adulation is seeking to deny is that beyond his conservative legacy, Ronald Reagan has bequeathed a liberal one.