If Bush wins, neocons win
dpa  Updated: 2004-11-01 09:03

The disputed hawkish foreign policy of the US President George W. Bush was formulated under the influence of neoconservatism and its proponents, like Vice-President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defence Minister Paul Wolfowitz. But conservatives in the United States, like much of the rest of the country, are deeply divided over Bush's politics - particularly the war in Iraq.

After Tuesday's neck-and-neck elections are over, regardless of the outcome, observers were expecting another battle - this one an internal intellectual bloodbath, a sort of "night of the long knives" among right-wing ideologues.

"If Bush loses, the pragmatists will blame it on Iraq," John Pitney, an expert on Republican politics at California's Claremont McKenna College, told US News and World Report.

If Bush wins, The Economist argued, the neoconservatives could be in even bigger trouble if Iraq implodes.

Heated debate has raged for months in the right-wing camp, and traditional conservatives and the neoconservatives, or neocons, are fighting over America's future course.

The neocons "want to be the world's policeman," Richard Viguerie, a leading conservative intellectual and a Bush backer, was quoted as saying in US News and World Report. "We don't feel our role is to be Don Quixote, righting all the wrongs in the world."

Criticism of the neoconservative movement focuses on the war in Iraq.

Francis Fukuyama, who served in Bush's father's administration and is one of the movement's most influential thinkers, surprised onlookers with a lengthy attack on his colleagues' arguments in an article in National Interest.

He criticized the president for failing to build a strong international coalition for the Iraq invasion, echoing Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry's arguments, and said Bush led the country "into Iraq with enormous illusions about how easy the postwar situation would be."

But Wolfowitz, former chairman of the defence policy board Richard Perle, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard magazine and conservative thinker Norman Podhoretz are defending the war.

Podhoretz, a founder of the neoconservative movement in the 1970s, contended not only that the war in Iraq was justified but also that the United States should help liberate other Middle Eastern countries to destroy the seedbed of Islamic radicalism.

"I am not advocating the invasion of Iran at this moment although I wouldn't be heartbroken if it happened," he was quoted as saying by The New York Times.

If Bush was not already on board with the neocons before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, he certainly was afterwards, formulating his "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive strikes. The president sees the United States as being in the midst of World War IV - World War III being the Cold War - against mushrooming radical Islam and asserts that the country must assert its claim to leadership and offensively protect its security.

Bush also adopted the neoconservative idea that the best medicine against the threatening confrontation with radical Islam and terrorism is the spread of democracy and freedom. This path, so the argument goes, will protect Israel and eventually lead to a solution of the Palestinian conflict - two issues that rank at the top of the list of neoconservative priorities.

The arguments have found positive resonance among fundamentalist Protestants and Catholics. Bush was persuaded by the neocons' historic comparisons: Adolph Hitler was only stopped after the world realized that negotiations and concessions would not stop him. The Cold War showed that only a policy of strength would bring down the Soviet empire. And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows that for the Arabic side, only extremists hold sway in the dispute.

But doubts have been growing in Washington about the Bush doctrine. Even the flamboyant but traditional conservative Pat Buchanan has blown the whistle on the neocons.

In his endorsement of Bush for re-election, Buchanan nevertheless pointed out that his publication, The American Conservative, had warned against the Iraq invasion.

"Such a war... on a country that did not attack us, did not threaten us and had no role in 9-11, would be 'a tragedy and a disaster'," he wrote. "And everything we predicted has come to pass. Iraq is the worst strategic blunder in our lifetime. And for it, George W. Bush and the neoconservatives who planned this war for a decade bear full responsibility."

While the volume on policy debates among conservatives is rising, other commentators have warned that if Bush is re-elected, his policies will continue, and the neocons will remain in power for the time being.

Close