July 12, 2008
The Neocon Slur
by Victor Davis Hanson
PajamasMedia.com

Much of my correspondence centers on “neocon,” as in Buchanan’s wrong label “neocon court historian.” I’ve written no biography of any administration official, much less been subsidized or asked to do any particular writing to further an administration goal. I have been to the White House only on 3-4 occasions, always accompanied by a larger group of historians of widely differing views.

Neocon means “new conservative” and I suppose refers to those of the once hard left who, largely in distrust of the Soviet Union and disillusionment with Great Society programs, moved right, most prominently during the Reagan era. Buchanan himself worked with them in the Reagan White House, and I would imagine supported their tough, correct stance on rollback, and the questioning of 1960s entitlements.

The word became a pejorative slur with gusto in 2003 with the lead-up to Iraq. Perhaps some essays by neo-cons questioning the motives and patriotism (wrongly I think) of paleo-cons accentuated the falling out. But the big break came in 2004-6 with the insurgency in Iraq, when neocon became de facto synonymous with “Jew” and there were overt efforts to tie Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and others to a sort of covert cabal that had forced us to go to war for Israel — this despite the fact that Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice were neither Jews nor neocons nor malleable dupes. That Francis Fukuyama, James Woolsey, or Bill Bennet were neocons seemed likewise to have had little effect on the Israel “amen corner” thesis.

I came to support neocon approaches first in the wars against the Taliban and Saddam, largely because I saw little alternative — in a post-9-11 effort to stop radical Islam and state sponsors of terror — to removing such odious enemies, and did not think leaving the defeated in power (as in 1991), or leaving in defeat (as in Lebanon), or installing a postbellum strongman was viable or in U.S. interests.

Few would agree, but I persist in thinking we will prevail in Iraq, and the consensual government there will not only survive, but have a positive effect throughout the region, finally give the Iraqi people hope for a civilized future, stop Iraq’s transference of petrodollars into dangerous arsenals, worry the theocrats in Iran, and remove Iraq as a perennial threat to its neighbors.

I have always detested communism, and have never been a hard-left, disillusioned Trotskyite, but rather a conservative Democrat. In the past, my only real political jousting had been in two areas, academia in which Who Killed Homer?” questioned postmodernism and contemporary leftwing academic theory, and in books on farming such as The Land Was Everything and Letters to an American Farmer, which were defenses of the agrarian tradition and won no support from either corporate agriculture or new-age organic growers who did not like the conservative rural ethos expressed. Much of my speaking in the 1990s was to small audiences of farmers, who were being squeezed by corporate subsidized agriculture and yet were not new-age, organic leftists. Mexifornia reflects that conservative worry about the effects of unchecked illegal immigration — at a time when many or most neo-cons were Wall-Street Journal open-borderites.

I thought the 1998 letter to Clinton asking for regime change and an attack on Saddam was wrong, but, after 9/11, came to the conclusion, like 75% of Americans, that there would never be peace in the region, nor a chance to rollback Islamic radicalism with Saddam’s terrorist-sponsoring regime in power. The 12 years of no-fly-zones, embargo, oil-for-food, and U.N. sanctions were not only weakening and losing support, but playing into the hands of our enemies.

I remember in 1998 being called by a news agency about preemption, given that I had written a book about Sherman and Patton, The Soul of Battle, but replied that I didn’t think starting a war with Saddam was wise or would garner public support. That said, I also remember being in Greece in 1998-9 and losing a number of Greek friends over the Clinton bombing of Belgrade, which I supported on grounds that it was clumsy, but apparently the only way to stop mass killing. Remember at that time, none on the Left damned Clinton for taking us to war without U.N. sanction or a Congressional ratification. And firebrands like Gen. Wesley Clark did and said things far more provocative than anything the sober and judicious Gen. Petraeus has yet uttered.

I disagreed with many of the decisions made about the Iraq war, and voiced them several times in print during the last few years — especially the concentration on WMD rather than on all 23 Congressional writs to go to war, the pull-back from Fallujah, the fiery “bring ‘em on” rhetoric that sometimes was not followed up by equally aggressive action, the mysterious sudden retirement of Tommy Franks as soon as the insurgency started, the inability to find generals who believed they could win the peace, and a number of other issues.

Disbanding the army was a mistake in the short-term, I think, not because purging Saddam’s high officers was unwise (it will eventually pay dividends), but largely due to the failure of finding jobs immediately for military-age soldiers with dangerous skills. I did not think that sending another 100,000 troops was either feasible or even wise in the long term, but supported the much smaller 30,000 surge, largely because it sent a message of determination, came with Gen. Petraeus, and ushered in a change of tactics. We forget that many who were demanding the present surge, were demanding a much larger one, well beyond our force capability.

In the end, Gen. Abezaid’s policy of keeping a light footprint may be proven right, but ironically only by the Petraeus surge of 30,000 more troops to provide a window of Iraqi security. Ironic I say because while the two’s views should be antithetical, they may end up being complementary.

But unlike some other critics, I never thought such lapses were either fatal to our cause, or by any standard unusual in military history. I took issue with those who had supported the war, and then suddenly abandoned it, and with the thinking that a brilliant three-week campaign reflected their views, while a botched occupation could only have belonged to others. Rather, I assumed that the U.S. military would always find a way to win, that the victory would be of enormous importance, and that while observers should point out perceived mistakes in operations, it was easy to do so from the rear and such criticism should never reach a level to cause a loss of morale either here or abroad, especially while soldiers were in the field of fire.