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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Which brings us to Iraq. Note that "The Neocon Reader" does not focus on Iraq. But those who oppose the war might profit by tracing its intellectual antecedents in this volume, as far back as Margaret Thatcher's 1996 speech proclaiming "the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction" to be "the single most awesome threat of modern times." Her examples of countries that have acquired them? "Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria." But Thatcher did not imagine the extent of neocon dominance just seven years later: "Given the intellectual climate in the West today, it is probably unrealistic to expect military intervention to remove the source of the threat, as for example against North Korea -- except perhaps when the offender invites us to do so by invading a small neighboring country. Even then, as we now know, our success in destroying Saddam's nuclear and chemical weapons capability was limited." Add to that Condoleezza Rice's October 2002 Manhattan Institute speech (notably blander and flabbier than Thatcher's), Tony Blair's April 1999 speech ("Many of our problems have been caused by two dangerous and ruthless men -- Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic") and you have some of the key actors' thoughts. A war for oil? Readers can draw their own conclusions. And although no WMD have been found, politicians and pundits alike have to make choices under imperfect information. The neocons did the best they could with what they had.
In part because politics post-9/11 has mainly meant international politics, neoconservativism is largely perceived as a foreign policy doctrine. This was not always the case, and getting the full flavor of the movement requires understanding that it was born as much in the effort to make sense of the collapse of the inner cities in the '70s and '80s and in the original culture wars of the '60s. The two earliest articles in this anthology are about domestic policy: Irving Kristol's 1971 New York Times Magazine defense of censorship of pornography, and James Q. Wilson's now-legendary 1982 Atlantic Monthly essay on urban decay, "Broken Windows."
This last might be the exemplary piece here, both for its intellectual virtues and for its influence on government policy. Wilson's title refers to a theory that if a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired, all the windows in the building will soon be smashed, and his article is frequently credited with sparking the new approaches to urban order that led to the revival of New York under Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
What is not so often recalled from Wilson's article is that the novel idea of placing officers on foot patrol did not actually reduce the crime rate; it only reduced citizens' perception of the crime rate. But that was enough. That turned out to be what urban vitality was about. Wilson pointed out that in the mid-20th century, the public began to view the police not as the maintainers of public order they had historically been, but as crime fighters. The problem was that they weren't nearly as good at actually apprehending criminals as they had been, in earlier times, at creating the feeling of public safety that allowed neighborhoods of poor and working-class people to flourish. The two police functions were linked, just not in the way people now thought. It wasn't that fingerprinting more and more burglars reduced burglary; it was that "serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked." But the police had more or less stopped trying to punish or prevent such behavior; doing so was now suspected as unfair, racist, judgmental and so on. And the wish to prevent this, and to decriminalize "victimless crimes" (when was the last time you saw that phrase?), led to the collapse of whole neighborhoods.
Wilson's essay represents neocon thinking at its best -- not only innovative, but honest and practical. Wilson raises the inherent conflict between the desire to live in a place perceived as safe with the equally strong desire for fairness. How can we be sure that "the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry"? He admits that he is "not confident that there is a satisfactory answer." He further suggests that the precise balance between individual rights and community strength can only emerge empirically and on a case-by-case basis. This is the second point: practicality. If something doesn't work, neocons think, try something else. (Old-line conservatives are sometimes inclined to go down in noble defeat instead.) If something works, continue doing it. And don't pretend you know more than that, if you don't.
"Broken Windows" is exemplary of neocon thought in another way, one honored recently as often as it is breached. That is the importance of perceptions. Here the Bush administration has fallen down badly. It doesn't matter if Iraqis are freer than they were under Saddam if they don't feel that way. It doesn't matter if the U.S. has upgraded a lot of the crumbling Iraqi infrastructure if the water and power still don't work well. The Bush administration has often been its own worst enemy in the matter of perceptions, even at the start of the war when Cheney could easily have avoided not only evil but also the appearance of evil, in the form of cronyism. Not to mention the inept handling of Abu Ghraib. Part of having respect for the electorate is having respect for perceptions and sensibilities. While I hope that Democrats will learn from neocons, and some day give us a presidential candidate so interesting and outspoken and creative that even I will think about voting for him, I hope still more strongly that Republicans won't forget why they're winning these days.
