Finally got around to reading, in its entirety, the 10,000 word exchange in the American Prospect between Bernard Henri-Levy and Anaton Lieven. Two well-informed intellectuals exchanging emails sound like it could come up a snoozer, but this is worth it, as they do well synthesizing vast amounts of information into a summary of our current predicament. Here are a few highlights, including the important and often overlooked point that the neo-cons are Johnny-come-latelies to idealism:
You set up a radical opposition between
neoconservative idealism and Kissingerian realpolitik. This is quite
false. What you seem to have forgotten is that the neoconservatives
initially broke with the liberal Democrats, and began their march
toward the Republicans, in large part precisely because of their belief
that the United States should continue to wage war in Vietnam by all
necessary means, however ruthless.
What is more, when the Carter
administration tried to make human rights and democracy the centerpiece
of its international strategy, the neoconservatives were the first to
denounce this as hopelessly naive and to insist that America continue
to support the Shah of Iran against his population and a variety of
bloodstained Central American military regimes against their
“Communist” opponents. Idealism, anyone? How exactly was this different
from Kissinger’s belief that American vital interests, and the defense
of Western democracy, often required support for anti-Communist
dictatorships?
Historical hypocrisy, outdone only by today's right-wing interventionists, who intone about democracy but seem to have no real interest in it:
The problem with emphasizing democratization in
this way is that it is radically incompatible with the actual policies
of the Bush administration in the war on terrorism, as fully encouraged
and supported by the neoconservatives. This contradiction between
ideals and realpolitik was always there in U.S. policy. The
neoconservatives and the Bush administration, however, have raised this
contradiction to surreal, virtually Orwellian heights. They believe in
spreading human rights and the rule of law? So they kidnap suspected
terrorists and have them tortured in illegal U.S. prisons and in those
of Muslim dictatorships whose human-rights records they publicly
profess to despise.
And how that failure is counter-productive to the neo-con's and Bush's "visionary" goals:
And this, in the end, is my most bitter
accusation against the neoconservatives and the Bush administration,
one in which I believe you may well wish to join: that by a whole set
of actions at home and abroad, they have badly damaged the image of
American democracy in the world. By doing so, they have also damaged
the attractiveness of democracy in general, and strengthened the
arguments of democracy's enemies. This has been their fundamental
betrayal of the ideals of which they profess to be the arch-defenders.
For this, I believe, they will be cursed by posterity.
With a nice rhetorical barb at the end -- well put! If only posterity's curse didn't also portend potentially grave consequences for the future of the world.