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Is this interpretation of motivation credible? Probably or definitely
true?<br>
<br>
This seems to add to the notion of the transfer of ideals relating to
capitalism, market-drive, and small-"l" libertarianism to the liberals
/ Democrats. Perhaps a tame, beneficial multinational corporation is
less attractive to neo-cons than an empire-building front.<br>
<br>
sdw<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58484-2004May1.html">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58484-2004May1.html</a><br>
<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" size="+1"><b><i><font size="2"><br>
Grand Designs<br>
How 9/11 Unified Conservatives in Pursuit of Empire<br>
<br>
By Corey Robin<br>
<br>
Sunday, May 2, 2004; Page B01</font></i></b></font><font size="2"></font><br>
<p><nitf><br>
In 2000 I spent the
tail end of the summer interviewing conservative patriarchs William F.
Buckley and Irving Kristol. I was writing about the defections to the
left of several younger right-wing intellectuals and wondered what the
conservative movement's founding fathers thought of their wayward sons.
But Buckley and Kristol were less interested in these ex-conservatives
than they were in the sorry state of the movement and the uncertain
fate of the United States as a global imperial power.</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>The end of
communism and the triumph of capitalism, they suggested, were mixed
blessings. Americans now possessed the most powerful empire in history.
At the same time, they were possessed by one of the most anti-political
ideologies in history: belief in the free market as a harmonious
international order of voluntary exchange requiring little more from
the state than the enforcement of laws and contracts. This ideology
promoted self-interest over the national interest -- too bloodless a
notion, Buckley and Kristol argued, upon which to found a national
order, much less a global empire.</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>"The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the
market," Buckley told me, "is that it becomes rather boring. You hear
it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is
horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." Kristol
confessed to a yearning for an American empire: "What's the point of
being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an
imperial role?"</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>But because of its devotion to prosperity, he added,
the United States lacked the fortitude and vision to wield imperial
power. "It's too bad," Kristol lamented. "I think it would be natural
for the United States . . . to play a far more dominant role in world
affairs. . . to command and to give orders as to what is to be done.
People need that. There are many parts of the world -- Africa in
particular -- where an authority willing to use troops can make . . . a
healthy difference." But not with public discussion dominated by
accountants. "There's the Republican Party tying itself into knots.
Over what?" he said. "I think it's disgusting that . . . presidential
politics of the most important country in the world should revolve
around prescriptions for elderly people."</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>Since 9/11, I've had many opportunities to recall these
conversations. Sept. 11, we have been told, has restored to America's
woozy civic culture a sense of depth and seriousness, of things "larger
than ourselves." It has forced Americans to look beyond their borders,
to understand at last the dangers that confront a world power. It has
given the United States a coherent national purpose and a focus for
imperial rule. A country that for a time seemed unwilling to face up to
its international responsibilities is now prepared once again to bear
any burden, pay any price, for freedom. This changed attitude, the
argument goes, is good for the world. It is also good, spiritually, for
the United States. It reminds us that freedom is a fighting faith
rather than a cushy perch.</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>To understand this reaction to 9/11, we must examine
the state of mind of American conservatives after the end of the Cold
War. For neoconservatives, who had thrilled to the crusade against
communism, all that was left of Ronald Reagan's legacy after the Cold
War was a sunny entrepreneurialism, which found a welcome home in Bill
Clinton's America. While neocons favor capitalism, they do not believe
it is the highest achievement of civilization. Like their predecessors
-- from Edmund Burke, Samuel Coleridge and Henry Adams to T.S. Eliot,
Martin Heidegger and Michael Oakeshott -- today's conservatives prize
mystery and vitality over calculation and technology. Such romantic
sensibilities are inspired by questions of politics and, especially, of
war. It is only natural, then, that the neocons would take up the call
of empire, seeking a world that is about something more than money and
markets.</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>Immediately following 9/11, intellectuals, politicians
and pundits seized upon the terrorist strikes as a deliverance from the
miasma Buckley and Kristol had been criticizing. Even commentators on
the left saw the attacks as stirring a sleeping nation; Frank Rich
announced in the New York Times that "this week's nightmare, it's now
clear, has awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decade-long
dream."</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>What was that dream? The dream of prosperity. During
the 1990s, conversative David Brooks wrote in Newsweek, we "renovated
our kitchens, refurbished our home entertainment systems, invested in
patio furniture, Jacuzzis and gas grills." This ethos had terrible
consequences. It encouraged a "preoccupation with one's own petty
affairs," Francis Fukuyama wrote in the Financial Times. It also had
international repercussions. According to Vice President Cheney's chief
of staff, I. Lewis Libby, the cult of peace and prosperity found
expression in President Clinton's weak and distracted foreign policy,
which made it "easier for someone like Osama bin Laden to rise up and
say credibly, 'The Americans don't have the stomach to defend
themselves. They won't take casualties to defend their interests. They
are morally weak.' "</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>But after that day in September, the domestic scene was
transformed. America was now "more mobilized, more conscious and
therefore more alive," wrote Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times
Magazine. Writers welcomed the moral electricity coursing through the
body politic, restoring patriotism and bipartisan consensus.</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>Internationally, 9/11 forced the United States to
reengage with the world, to assume the burden of empire without
embarrassment or confusion. The mission of the United States was now
clear to conservatives: to defend civilization and freedom against
barbarism and terror. As Condoleezza Rice told Nicholas Lemann of the
New Yorker, "I think the difficulty has passed in defining a role. I
think September 11 was one of those great earthquakes that clarify and
sharpen." An America thought to be lulled by the charms of the market
was now willing to sustain casualties on behalf of a U.S.-led global
order.</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>The end of the Cold War unleashed a wave of
triumphalism, but it also provoked among American elites an anxious
uncertainty about U.S. foreign policy. How should the United States now
define its world role? When should it intervene in foreign conflicts?
How big a military should it field? The United States seemed to be
suffering from a surfeit of power, which made it difficult to formulate
principles for its use. As Cheney acknowledged in February 1992, when
he was serving as the first President Bush's secretary of defense,
"We've gained so much strategic depth that the threats to our security,
now relatively distant, are harder to define."</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>When Clinton assumed office, he and his advisers
concluded that the primary concerns of U.S. foreign policy were no
longer military but economic. The great imperative was to organize a
global economy where people could trade across borders. Clinton's
vision reflected a conviction, common in the 1990s, that globalization
had undermined the efficacy of military power and traditional empires.
"Soft power" -- the cultural capital that made the United States so
admired around the world -- was as important to national preeminence as
military power.</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>For some conservatives, Clinton's promotion of free
trade and free markets was anathema. Though conservatives reputedly
favor wealth and prosperity, law and order, stability and routine --
all the comforts of bourgeois life -- they disdained Clinton for his
pursuit of these very virtues. His quest for affluence, they argued,
produced a society that lost its sense of depth and political meaning.
"In that age of peace and prosperity," Brooks would write, "the top
sitcom was 'Seinfeld,' a show about nothing."</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>Clinton's vision of a benign international order,
conservatives argued, betrayed an unwillingness to take on a world of
power and violence, of mysterious evil and unfathomable hatred. Coping
with such a world requires pagan courage and barbaric virtu, qualities
many conservatives embrace over the more prosaic goods of peace and
prosperity. But there was another reason for the neocons'
dissatisfaction. Clinton, they claimed, was reactive and haphazard
rather than proactive and forceful.<br>
</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>Sept. 11 has given the neocons an opportunity to
articulate, without embarrassment, the vision of imperial American
power that they have been harboring for years. Unlike empires past,
this one will be guided by a benevolent goal -- worldwide improvement
-- and therefore will not generate the backlash previous empires have
generated. As Rice told the New Yorker's Lemann, "Theoretically . . .
when you have a great power like the United States it would not be long
before you had other great powers rising to challenge it. And I think
what you're seeing is that there's at least a predilection this time to
move to productive and cooperative relations with the United States,
rather than to try to balance the United States." Thus, imperial
America will no longer have to "wait on events while dangers gather,"
as Bush put it in his 2002 State of the Union address. It will now
"shape the environment." The goal is one Cheney outlined in the early
1990s: that no other power ever arise to challenge American
preeminence.</nitf></p>
<p><nitf>For the
Kristol-Buckley model conservatives, this is a heady moment, when their
ambivalence -- not about capitalism per se, but about the culture of
capitalism, the elevation of buying and selling above political virtues
such as heroism and struggle -- may finally be resolved. No longer
hamstrung by the numbing politics of affluence, they believe they can
count on the public to respond to calls of sacrifice and destiny. With
danger and security the watchwords of the day, the country will be
newly sanctified. The American empire, they hope, will allow America to
have its market without being deadened by it.</nitf>
</p>
<p> <nitf>Though it is still too soon to make any definitive
assessment, mounting evidence suggests that the American empire is
encountering obstacles at home and abroad. Violence against the United
States might not prove to be a problem, at least not in the short term;
after all, other empires have weathered it for a time. </nitf>
</p>
<p> <nitf>But the administration's vision is compelling only so
long as it is successful. Because the neoconservatives' premise is that
the United States can govern events -- and determine the outcome of
history -- their vision cannot sustain the suggestion that events lie
beyond their control. Ironically, insofar as the Bush administration
avoids conflicts in which it might fail, say between the Israelis and
the Palestinians, it forgoes the very logic of imperialism that it
seeks to avow. As former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger has
observed about the Middle East, Bush realizes "that simply to insert
himself into this mess without any possibility of achieving any success
is, in and of itself, dangerous because it would demonstrate that, in
fact, we don't have any ability right now to control or affect events."
This Catch-22 is no mere problem of logic or consistency; it betrays
the essential fragility of the imperial position. </nitf>
</p>
<p> <nitf>On the domestic front, there is little evidence that
the political and cultural renewal imagined by many commentators is
taking place. Even the slightest imposition is rejected in Congress
even in this time of war. In March 2002, for example, 62 senators,
including 19 Democrats, rejected higher fuel-efficiency standards for
automobiles, which would have reduced dependence upon Persian Gulf oil.
Missouri Sen. Christopher Bond (R) declared, "I don't want to tell a
mom in my home state that she should not get an SUV because Congress
decided that would be a bad choice." </nitf>
</p>
<p> <nitf>The fact that the war against terrorism has not yet
imposed the sacrifices on the population that normally accompany
national crusades has provoked occasional bouts of concern among
politicians and cultural elites. "The danger, over the long term,"
wrote the New York Times's R. W. Apple, "is loss of interest. With much
of the war to be conducted out of plain sight by commandos, diplomats
and intelligence agents, will a nation that has spent decades in easy
self-indulgence stay focused?" </nitf>
</p>
<p> <nitf>The Bush administration initially looked for things for
people to do -- not because there was much to be done, but because it
feared that the ardor of ordinary Americans would grow cold. The best
the administration came up with were Web sites and toll-free numbers
that enterprising citizens could contact if they wanted to help the war
effort. But the numbers were for groups such as Freedom Corps, enabling
volunteers to become rural health workers, or Citizen Corps, which
bolstered household emergency preparedness and expanded Neighborhood
Watch groups. Now, with the war in Iraq going awry, the administration
talks less about active involvement from ordinary Americans, happy to
settle for their tacit support instead. </nitf>
</p>
<p> <nitf>We thus face a dangerous situation. On the one hand we
have neoconservative elites whose vision of American power is
recklessly utopian. On the other hand we have a domestic population
that shows little interest in any far-flung empire. The political order
projected by Bush and his supporters in the media and academia is just
that: a projection, which can only last so long as the United States is
able to put down, with minimum casualties, challenges to its power. We
may well be entering one of those Machiavellian moments discussed by
historian J. G. A. Pocock a quarter-century ago, when a republic opts
for the frisson of empire, and is forced to confront the fragility and
finitude of all political forms, including its own.</nitf>
</p>
<p> <nitf> <i>Author's e-mail:</i>
</nitf></p>
<p> <nitf> <a href="mailto:CRobin@brooklyn.cuny.edu">CRobin@brooklyn.cuny.edu</a>
</nitf></p>
<p> <nitf> <i>Corey Robin is an assistant professor of
political science at Brooklyn College at the City University of New
York. This is a shorter version of an essay published in the Boston
Review and in the forthcoming anthology "Cold War Triumphalism" (The
New Press).</i>
</nitf></p>
<p></p>
<br>
sdw<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:swilliams@hpti.com">swilliams@hpti.com</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.hpti.com">http://www.hpti.com</a> Per: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:sdw@lig.net">sdw@lig.net</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://sdw.st">http://sdw.st</a>
Stephen D. Williams 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax 20147-4622 AIM: sdw
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