The great thing about neoconservatism is the way it’s become a universal bogeyman. On the one hand neoconservatives – by which I mean actual neoconservatives – are criticised by the right for their utopian dreams of a better, more liberal, more democratic Arab world; on the other neoconservatives – by which I mean people who generally aren’t neoconservatives at all – are criticised by the left for urging caution in this present Egyptian crisis. Look at these dastardly neocon hypocrites backing Mubarak! It’s a lose-lose moment for neoconservatism. So much so, in fact, that the term has been stripped of almost all meaning and now simply stands for Stuff I Don’t Like.
Nevertheless, neconservatism is neither as monolithic, nor as widespread as often imagined. Not that it’s an important aspect of this week’s tumultuous events, but the demonstrations in Egypt might at least allow a slightly more nuanced understanding of neoconservatism to regain some ground.
In February 2009, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
I took neoconservatism seriously for a long time, because it offered an interesting critique of what’s wrong with the Middle East, and seemed to have the only coherent strategic answer to the savagery of 9/11. I now realize that the answer – the permanent occupation of Iraq – was absurdly utopian and only made feasible by exploiting the psychic trauma of that dreadful day. The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right. That’s the conclusion I’ve been forced to these last few years. And to insist that America adopt exactly the same constant-war-as-survival that Israelis have been slowly forced into. Cheney saw America as Netanyahu sees Israel: a country built for permanent war and the “tough, mean, dirty, nasty business” of waging it (with a few war crimes to keep the enemy on their toes).
But America is not Israel. America might support Israel, might have a special relationship with Israel. But America is not Israel. And once that distinction is made, much of the neoconservative ideology collapses.
This week’s events go some way towards contradicting that. Neoconservatives are hardly the only people who believe in the long-term potential of democratic reform in the Middle East (plenty of liberals think so too) but they are much more likely to believe in it than other conservatives. It’s an intra-mural skirmish more than anything else.
And as Ben Smith and Josh Gerstein report, the Israeli analysis of this revolt differs significantly from the neoconservative diagnosis:
[N]eoconservatives such as Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, Bush National Security Council official Elliott Abrams, and scholar Robert Kagan are essentially saying good riddance to Mubarak and chiding Obama mainly for not making the same sporadic push for democracy as President George W. Bush.
“If [the Israelis] were to say, ‘This is very worrying because we don’t know what the future will bring and none of us trust the [Muslim] Brotherhood’ – we would all agree with that. But then they then go further and start mourning the departure of Mubarak and telling you that he is the greatest thing that ever happened,” said Abrams, who battled inside the Bush administration for more public pressure on Arab allies to reform.
“They don’t seem to realize that the crisis that now exists is the creation of Mubarak,” he said. “We were calling on him to stop crushing the moderate and centrist parties – and the Israelis had no sympathy for that whatsoever.”
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