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Kristol Balls: Neoconservative Visions of Islam and the Middle East

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Abstract

This paper assesses American neoconservative policy prescriptions for democratizing political Islam and considers the sources of the neoconservative understanding of the Arab Muslim world. Neoconservative analyses of the Middle East are almost exclusively normative, arguing what US policy toward the region should be. Their aims are ambitious and inherently controversial. The paper examines what various neoconservatives have said and written about Islam and its democratic potential. The paper concerns itself with the neoconservative conceptualization of Middle East politics. The paper argues that presently only American neoconservatism, despite its variations, and despite some obvious flaws, offers tenable prescriptions for regime destabilization and an attendant political liberalization of Arab politics.

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Notes

  1. Often given as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank in Washington DC. See aei.org.

  2. Emphasis added. ‘Above all, it seems to me, [such labels] suggest a certain unity of understanding among contemporaries, concerning their great problems and aspirations’ (1957, xi).

  3. The small magazines include theWeekly Standard (edited by William Kristol), Commentary, National Review, thePublic Interest, and the National Interest (though this last title has been somewhat schizophrenic in recent years, increasingly split between realists and neoconservatives).

  4. The author's political evolution is further mapped in chapters 1 and 40 (the latter entitled ‘memoirs of a Trotskyist’).

  5. Halper and Clarke (2004) is a consistently well-argued conservative critique of neoconservatism.

  6. ‘Conservative “stupidity,” properly understood’, he wrote, ‘is intimately connected with sentiments that are at the root of conservative virtues: a dogged loyalty to a traditional way of life; an instinctive aversion to innovation based on mere speculation; and a sense of having a fiduciary relation to the whole nation — past, present and future’ (1995, 349).

  7. ‘A religiosity centred on eternal life’, writes Mark Steyn (2005b), ‘will by definition be a more efficient organising principle for an enduring society than a secularism focused on the here and now’.

  8. In 2004, 74% of Jewish Americans voted for John Kerry, 25% for Bush.

  9. See also the classic account of mediating institutions given by Alexis de Tocqueville (2000, 165–235).

  10. Qutb is considered at length by Paul Berman (2003).

  11. I am indebted to Marc Landy for this clarification. Landy has spent most of his professional life at Boston College, MA, in the presence of several prominent scholars sympathetic to the theoretical method and normative concerns of Leo Strauss.

  12. Wolfowitz left the White House in 2005 to become president of the World Bank, a post he resigned in 2007.

  13. ‘I don’t much like the label [Straussian]’, Wolfowitz told Mann (2004, 29).

  14. Mann cites Strauss on only 11 pages of his 426-page history of Bush's war cabinet (2004) suggesting a more limited direct influence than is often asserted. Steven Hurst (2005), hardly a Bush defender, argues that the neoconservative influence has been significantly overstated.

  15. Norton (2004, 9) makes much of a Boston College student-run website (www.straussian.net), evidence, she suggests, of the larger network in which Straussians move. ‘Elaborate, well-maintained, and regularly revised’, she says. At the time of writing, the site was unavailable.

  16. The label was coined as an insult by the socialist Michael Harrington in a 1973 Dissent article (see Gerson, 1997, 6).

  17. ‘Power that favors freedom’ is used on five occasions.

  18. The recently launched Henry Jackson Society at Cambridge University is animated by a similar philosophy. See http://www-hjs.pet.cam.ac.uk/.

  19. The statement was signed by Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Iklé, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel, and Paul Wolfowitz.

  20. Simms is paraphrasing Ken Jowitt. According to Jowitt (2003), at www.policyreview,org/apr03/jowitt.html), in the aftermath of 9/11, ‘the Bush administration has concluded that Fukuyama's historical timetable is too laissez-faire and not nearly attentive enough to the levers of historical change. History, the Bush administration has concluded, needs deliberate organization, leadership, and direction’.

  21. The split between Fukuyama and Krauthammer was symbolic of the wider rift within realism which gave birth to The American Interest journal in 2005 and its assumption of a purportedly more realist, less neoconservative approach. See www.the-american-interest.com/cms/abstract.cfm?Id=6.

  22. Emphasis added.

  23. Norton (2004, 211) incorrectly subtitles this work.

  24. The editors afford considerably more space for fears about China than they do for fears about Islam, discussion of which is limited to its Iranian form (2000, 111–144).

  25. The tendency to attribute ‘negative value’ to ‘the Arab’ was observed and codified in Edward Said (2003; see, esp., chapter 3, part IV). Said gets short shrift from several neoconservatives, as does most of his scholarly and political output (he died in 2002). A distrust of Said's motives is a recurrent theme of Commentary magazine. See, for example, Warren (2004).

  26. President Bush had similarly compared the enemy with ‘the murderous ideologies of the 20th century’ (Bush, 2001; see also Bush, 2006) and, in the wake of a failed London bomb plot, said ‘this nation is at war with Islamic fascists’ (http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/08/10/washington.terror.plot/index.html). For a defence of ‘Islamofascism’ as an appropriate label for the enemy in the war on terror, see Schwartz, 2006 (at http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/593ajdua.asp).

  27. ‘[I]t is impressive how often American clarity during the Cold War worked, and how often ambiguity led to trouble’ (Wolfowitz, 2000, 322).

  28. Podhoretz (2004b, 54) adapts another section from Kennan's article and comes to the opposite conclusion.

  29. Paul Wolfowitz deploys the Munich liberally also (see, e.g., Wolfowitz, 2000, 312–314).

  30. The Cold War being, in this conceptualization, World War III.

  31. He was Ambassador of the US Delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, 1981–1982. See http://www.michaelnovak.net/Module/Site/Biography.aspx.

  32. Martin Kramer, editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

  33. According to Gove (2006, 12), ‘It is only by appreciating that the enemy we face is a seamless totalitarian movement that we can begin to appreciate the scale of the challenge we must confront’. ‘[A] lot of nonsense has been written about the theoretically unbridgeable divide between Sunnis and Shi’ites’, observes Ledeen of the AEI (2006, 1–2), ‘and we should remind ourselves that the tyrants of the Islamic Republic [of Iran] do not share these theories’ (2006, 1–2). President Bush (2006) concurred: ‘Despite their differences, these groups form the outlines of a single movement, a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology’.

  34. Successes in the region are tabulated in Bush (2006).

  35. Daniel is a British historian.

  36. Somewhat ironically, Reagan's cabinet was full of academic Ph.D.s: George Schultz, Kenneth Dam, Fred Iklé, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Robert Gates, Paul Wolfowitz, and Chester Crocker. A full list is given in Zakaria (1990, 393n75).

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  1. Institute for the Study of the Americas, School of Advanced Study, University of London, London, UK

    Timothy J Lynch

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Lynch, T. Kristol Balls: Neoconservative Visions of Islam and the Middle East. Int Polit 45, 182–211 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800227

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