Peculiar Properties of Neo-Conservatism Term Paper

Introduction

Neo-conservatism is a relatively recent categorization of a political ideology that infiltrated the culture and was embraced by the former Bush administration. Commonly thought to be synonymous with the far right-wing of the Republican Party or ultra-conservatism, the expression neo-conservatism, or ‘neo-cons,’ describes a new type of conservatism, one whose roots are actually embedded in the philosophy of the left-wing. Conservatives and neo-cons are generally affiliated with the Republican Party but are often on opposing sides of an issue, the most significant example being the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This discussion examines the concept of neo-conservatism, its history, and the foreign and domestic policies of a U.S. government operated by this ideology.

What is a Neo-Con?

Neo-conservatives have been described as inherently evil, protectionists and self-absorbed capitalists but also by a now weakening minority as the protectors of the American way of life. With regards to foreign policy, neo-cons advocate a strike-first mentality while conservatives promote a ‘hands-off’ policy. The ‘neo’ or ‘new’ is attached to conservatism for two primary reasons. “Most of its architects were new to any kind of right-of-center orientation, having previously identified with the political left; and second, because the formulation of ‘conservatism’ that they produced was noticeably different in content and style from the mainstream American Conservatism that had prevailed since the New Deal-World War II eras” (Atkins & Tartakovsky, 2003).

Vietnam Beginnings

The Domino Excuse

Neo-conservatism originated in the 1930s when East coast socialists rejected the totalitarian views of Stalinism. The term became publicly acknowledged during the 1970s. It described liberals who were dissatisfied with the left-wing agenda, particularly in foreign affairs. It has since been used to define those considered ‘hawkish’ regarding foreign military involvement. During the Vietnam era, the neo-conservatism movement expanded due to the political polarization occurring in the country between the anti-war, anti-American sentiments of the counterculture and neo-cons who championed blind patriotism. Neoconservatives were not collected for the expansion or continuance of the war, but they were united in their fear that communism would spread. The term ‘domino theory’ was used quite often by the neo-cons to justify America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia. If Vietnam fell to the communists, they reasoned, the remainder of the region would be systematically consumed by the ‘Red Menace.’ “Informed by their faith in American power as a force for change, neo-cons are willing to use American military power for more than vital or strategic interests. This is what separates neo-cons from traditional conservatives” (Atkins & Tartakovsky, 2003).

Left-Wing Right-Wing Split

Unlike modern-day neoconservatives, those of the Vietnam era were concerned with the needs of society. They felt that the social programs of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society did not go far enough and, in accordance with their socialists’ roots, advocated the redistribution of wealth to fund welfare programs. Neo-cons of this era promoted organized labor and acknowledged the weaknesses of the capitalist system, concepts that would be unimaginable to the neo-cons of today. The division of the neo-cons of the 1970s and those who fit this characterization now was finalized during the Bill Clinton years in the 1990s. Some drifted toward the left-wing ideology, less hawkish on wars but sympathetic to domestic issues. “Many neoconservatives stayed on the left, and their arguments went on to form Clinton’s centrist ‘third way.’ today, they are often called neo-liberals or New Democrats” (Muravchik, 2007). Some of the Vietnam era neo-cons, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, went to the right opposing domestic spending, advocating tax reductions for the wealthy and an attack-first, ask questions later mentality. Though domestic issues were once a rallying point then abandoned by contemporary neo-cons, foreign-policy matters invoked the most emotion, therefore attention from this group. They reasoned then, as they do now, that foreign affairs were a more important consideration for national discussion because the very survival of the nation was at stake. “If a domestic policy fails, you can try another. If a foreign policy fails, you may find yourself at war” (Muravchik, 2007).

Fear Fuels the Ideological Flames

The Vietnam War sharply divided the country, but neo-cons, even the ones who were less than hawkish, were always on the defensive regarding the consequences of losing to communism. When war opponents voiced the opinion that communism wasn’t the most imperative concern, that American imperialism and expansionistic tendencies were the big issues, neo-cons were quick to rebuke what they thought was unpatriotic rhetoric. They feared the proliferation of communism and argued this fear was not unfounded. President Jimmy Carter believed the neo-cons were overly paranoiac and suffered from an ‘inordinate fear of Communism.’ The leader of the neo-con agenda during the 1980s, Ronald Reagan, won this group’s admiration by calling the former Soviet Union the “evil empire”, a nation to be feared and opposed very much in contradiction with the approach of the Carter administration. Neo-cons of the 1980s as well as today “took the point of George Orwell’s 1984, a book that resurrected the idea of evil as a political category, and they absorbed the cautionary warning of the Russian novelist and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn against yielding ground to the Communists in the vain hope that perhaps at some point the wolf will have eaten enough” (Muravchik, 2007). Reagan successfully brought the conservatives and neo-cons together, which largely accounted for his popularity within the Republican Party. A former Democrat, Reagan inserted many neo-cons, including Elliott Abrams, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Bill Bennett, into key foreign relations and domestic positions within his administration. This group of communist hard-liners is generally credited or credits themselves, depending on who is asked, with accelerating the collapse of the Soviet Union by using strong rhetoric and without using military actions.

Inconsistent Zealotry

The loudest propagandizing voices during the Cold War were the neo-cons who, to some extent, lost that voice during the President George H.W. Bush administration. As an example, neo-cons advocated military intervention in the Bosnian conflict in the early 1990s. Bush gave little notice to the genocide occurring in the former Yugoslavia, claiming that it posed no threat to the U.S. or its allies. According to his Secretary of State James A. Baker, ‘We have no dog in that fight’” (Atkins & Tartakovsky, 2003). Interestingly, the same neo-cons who urged Bush to intervene, reminding the President that this is the same area of the world where WWI began, chose to vilify President Clinton when he did intercede in the conflict. Neo-cons are referred to as anti-communist, imperialist zealots by liberals, and they proudly accept this description. They understand communism only as an immoral philosophical conception that, in practice, oppresses a godless society in addition to being a military and ideological threat to democracy and freedom. Communism must be eliminated at any cost, or it will eventually destroy the American form of democracy that many people had fought to preserve. It is not surprising that a portion of the generation who simultaneously saved the world from two oppressive regimes on two battlefronts during WWII would be for fighting against communism.

The former President Bush (‘W’) spoke against the idea of ‘nation building’ during his first run for office in 2000. However, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 changed his view on foreign policy. His closest advisors, including Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Karl Rove, are all neo-cons who created a neo’ red scare’ by declaring a ‘war on terror.’ The neo-conservative conservative wing of the Republican Party was successful in misleading millions of terrified Americans following 9/11. At the time of the 2004 election, the majority of Americans believed that Iraq, somehow, was to blame for those attacks and that Saddam Hussein was hiding large quantities of weapons of mass destruction despite information from the U.N.’s weapons inspectors (Coleman, 2004).

Neo-Cons with Reigns of Government

A War of Choice

‘W’ Bush and the neo-con infested executive branch’s ‘war on terror included an illegal, immoral, and ill-conceived invasion of a sovereign nation which has resulted in the expansion of terrorist activities and is causing an intensified hatred of Western nations by the entire Middle Eastern region regardless of nationality or ideology and thus has been an effective recruitment tool for Al-Qaeda.

Justifications

During his State of the Union Address on September 20, 2001, former President Bush presented his neo-con position to the American people and the assembled body of Congress. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated” (White House, 2001). On November 13, 2001, on the first such occasion since World War II, Bush signed into law an executive order that allows military tribunals to use any actions they deem necessary. The U.S. military could now imprison for an indefinite period of time and without representation, any person of foreign nationality who is simply alleged to have associations with terrorist activities. For example, when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, legal advisors tied closely to the neo-con ideology of the Bush administration within the Justice Department’s Office advised Bush that the U.S. was not legally bound by the U.N. Charter or international laws with regard to rules of engaging a perceived enemy. These views were echoed by Alberto Gonzales, then-White House legal advisor for the President and now Attorney General of the U.S. He also advised former President Bush that he did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions in the handling of prisoners, or ‘detainees’ in this war on terror (Calame, 2006). This opinion, shared by legal counsels to the President, applied to not only those directly affiliated with al Qa’ida but to the entire ruling party in Afghanistan, the Taliban, because, as they argued, Afghanistan was a ‘failed state.’ The Bush administration chose to follow the advice of this jaded, self-serving legal opinion in spite of strong disagreement by the U.S. State Department, which cautioned against disregarding U.N. and international laws as well as covenants of the Geneva Conventions. The Bush administration was head-strong in its cavalier use of military force, and lack of respect for laws agreed to by the world’s community of nations (Mayer, 2005: 34).

The ultimate culmination of the rhetoric and selective legal reasoning regarding the ‘War on Terror’ was Bush’s order of the U.S. military to invade both Iraq and Afghanistan, an illegal act on many fronts. Bush had constantly maintained that these actions against sovereign countries were legal. First, he argues, because of existing language within the UN Security Council resolutions on Iraq, which is also publicly espoused by the British government, and secondly, the invasions are an act of self-defense which international law permits. However, according to noted neo-con Richard Perle, a top official of the U.S. Defense Policy Board and advisor to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “international law… would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone” (Burkeman & Borger, 2003). Yet, this would have been “morally unacceptable,” according to the Bush administration, which took the neo-con philosophy to its extreme.

Ideology Trumps the Law

Global

The first foreign mission of the U.S. military in its ‘War on Terror, along with the ‘coalition of the willing,’ was Afghanistan and the Taliban terrorist group based in that country. The United Nations Charter, Article 51, Chapter Seven stipulates “nothing shall impair the inherent right of individual or self-defense defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations” (United Nations Charter, 1945). Article 51 grants a country the justification to deter an act or acts of imminent or ongoing violence but only as a temporary solution until the UN Security Council is able to take the necessary actions to ensure the security of the affected region. By a strict interpretation of this Article, the rights of self-defense a country may exercise do not include the right to retaliate once an attack has stopped. In order to initiate the tenants of Article 51, it is first necessary that a nation experience an ‘armed attack’ defined by the explicit meaning of the Charter. The definition of ‘armed attack’ is broad, as established in the Nicaragua case (Maier, 1987) where the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held that the concept covers “the sending by or on behalf of a state of armed bands, groups, irregulars or mercenaries’ and a state’s ‘substantial involvement therein.”

National

The ‘war on terror’ also produced the PATRIOT Act. A close examination of the Act, which the members of Congress did not do prior to voting, confirms that those that champion civil liberties as such are justifiably alarmed. Libertarian organizations such as the Civil Liberties Union claim that the Bush administration had a proclivity for secrecy and rejects the concept of transparency. The PATRIOT Act reproved Bush’s agenda for the “outright removal of checks and balances” (Etzioni, 2004: 9). The Bush administration, the best friend of the neo-con ideology, also justifies the use of torture tactics in secretive prisons so as to extract information from ‘enemy combatants’ as another important tool in the war on terror.

The aftermath of Neo-Con Control

Economic

The Bush administration cut the taxes of the rich while increasing military expenditures on The War on Terror, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rebuilding of those countries. The debt now exceeded even the Reagan administration’s record levels. It has severely hampered America’s ability to continue to defend itself effectively or become involved in other potential conflicts worldwide. “There is a growing concern about what the increasing U.S. national debt will do to the nation’s ability to influence world affairs” (Suter, 2004). This over-expenditure to conquer a regime that contradicted the precepts of democracy is continually justified by the neo-con ideology of the Bush administration.

War Crimes

The Chief Prosecutor of the war criminals at the Nuremberg Trials subsequent to World War Two, U.S. citizen Benjamin B. Ferencz, condemned the Iraq invasion calling it an “aggressive war” and declared that Bush, the war’s architect, should be put on trial for his war crimes (Glantz, 2006). The trial at Nuremberg determined that military aggression is considered the most supreme of international crimes. Following the massive human carnage of the Second World War, the United Nations charter was written so as to prevent this type of action from ever happing again. It contains explicit provisions prohibiting any nation from using military force without the consent of the Security Council (United Nations Charter, 1945). Nelson Mandela, widely renowned as one of the most respected statesmen in the world, also condemned this action as “a threat to world peace. It is clearly a decision that is motivated by George W Bush’s desire to please the arms and oil industries in the United States of America” (“The US Threatens World Peace”, 2002). Mandela was hardly alone in his assessment. The war is unquestionably illegal as defined by the ICJ and the UN, the two most preeminent legal bodies on the globe.

Domestic

On the domestic front, the neo-con ideology of the Bush administration was firmly aligned with the far right-wing religious sect and made it very clear that it is opposed to legal abortions, in at least most circumstances, and had transferred this ideology to its prohibition of embryonic stem cell research. Following the lifting of the stem cell research ban by the Obama administration, the U.S. is finally allowed to participate, but U.S. scientists are now well behind the curve of technological and structural systems. This industry is pumping money into many economies while the U.S. is just starting to catch up. Domestic concerns have taken a backseat to foreign issues. In 2004, Bush made federal education spending cuts in several key educational areas, including $680 million in No Child Left Behind, $393 million in the after-school programs, and $304 million for vocational and adult education. In the same year, public college tuition went up by 14 percent nationally, while Bush proposed cutting Pell Grants by $260 million. In 2005, Congress cut $1 billion from the so-called ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act (Cahoon, 2005).

Environmental

Although warnings about the human-generated causes of an enhanced greenhouse effect and the subsequent catastrophic outcomes have been sounded for over 100 years, global warming only in the last year of his Presidency became an important matter for Bush but only because of political reasons. He and the neo-con ideology he serves continued to ignore the looming problem because the issue does not address their major concern, perceived foreign threats. In 1997, the Kyoto Treaty, which has been signed by more than 160 countries, is, to date, the most comprehensive global effort to decrease CO2 emissions. Though the agreement was signed by the U.S. and then President Clinton consented to decrease greenhouse emissions in the U.S. by 40 percent, it was being dismissed by the Bush administration and still yet to be ratified by the U.S. CO2 greenhouse gases have since increased in the country that produces well more than any other (Melinin, 2005).

Conclusion

Neo-conservatism began as a hawkish yet compassionate branch of the left-wing. Over time, those of a liberal ideology abandoned the neo-cons to the far-right-wing, which has a narrow and rigid view of the government’s role in foreign and domestic affairs. In simplistic terms, neo-cons are in favor of forcefully imposing the will of the U.S. onto other countries and, in essence, ignoring domestic issues. The neo-con take-over of the highest office in the land cost the nation dearly on many fronts. One can only trust that the people of this country have learned a lesson from the myopic and destructive ideology of neo-conservatism.

References

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