James Kirchick has a good piece exploring the divide that’s opened between American neoconservatives and many Israelis over the revolutions and protests currently roiling the Middle East — with neocons welcoming the fall of Hosni Mubarak and the promise of democratic change throughout the region, even as the Israeli leadership classes wax more pessimistic about the likely consequences of replacing despots with more popular regimes. “Could there be a starker illustration of just how mistaken the neocon-Israeli conflation always was?” Kirchick asks, and he’s right: The last few weeks should bury, once and for all, the foolish idea that neoconservatism’s rhetorical commitment to democracy promotion is just a smokescreen for Likudnik dual loyalties or U.S. imperialism.
There’s a reasonable case to be made that at least in the short term, the Arab revolutions will reduce American influence in the Middle East, weaken Israel’s strategic position, and empower Iran — which is presumably why the Obama White House has been proceeding with an exquisite caution that’s shaded, at times, into unseemly passivity. Yet from ur-neocons like Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Reuel Marc Gerecht to fellow travelers like Christopher Hitchens and Leon Wieseltier, American neoconservatives have spent the last month united in the conviction that the virtues of toppling tyrants trump whatever perils may come next. Indeed, the responses to the Arab 1848 have showcased neoconservatism at its most idealistic, dismissive of crude machtpolitik concerns and insistent that the aspirations of oppressed peoples should take priority over what may seem at first like the immediate interests of both Israel and the United States.
But while the Likudnik smear deserves to be exploded, it’s still the case that neoconservative idealism has a shadow side — in its unwarranted assumption that our values and interests can always be reconciled, in its tendency to over-identify with foreign political actors whose deepest ambitions may be at cross-purposes with our own (we were not “all Georgians” during the Russo-Georgian conflict of 2008, no matter what John McCain said, and we are not necessarily all Egyptians or all Libyans now), and in its recurring insistence that the spread of democracy deserves the backing not only of American rhetoric but of American military might. And as Tripoli has replaced Tahrir Square as the main theater for Arab revolution, many neoconservatives have passed from making plausible arguments about the long-term benefits of supporting democratic actors in the Middle East to making entirely unpersuasive arguments about the short-term benefits of getting involved in the Libyan civil war. (The blitheness with which this Wieseltier column advocated putting boots on the ground in North Africa was particularly staggering: “Let a multilateral expeditionary force be raised and a humanitarian intervention be launched to free Libya from its tyrant and then leave Libya to the Libyans,” he wrote, as though clean, in-and-out humanitarian interventions were the rule rather than the rare exception.)
All of which is to say that I was pleased to see National Review’s editors offer a different conservative perspective on these matters, and come out against the kind of Libyan intervention that many neoconservatives have been agitating for. Here are NR’s core arguments:
… there are two problems with the proposed no-fly zone. One, Qaddafi’s regime doesn’t appear to be doing much of its murder from the air. If we are serious about limiting his ability to massacre his countrymen, the no-fly zone would have to become a no machine-gun zone, too — in other words an honest-to-goodness military intervention to affect events directly on the ground. Deploying our air power while Qaddafi continued to kill with impunity would make us look more ineffectual rather than less. For now (perhaps this will change if Qaddafi begins to consolidate his position on the strength of his air force), the no-fly zone seems a classic case of looking for lost keys under the streetlight; it’s the handiest way for us to intervene, not the most effective.
Two, the rebels are on the ascendancy. Absent some drastic change in the tide of events, it looks as if they will prevail. Why would we taint what would be the indigenous glory of their ouster of Qaddafi with an almost entirely symbolic Western military action? The reason that the revolts of 2011 have had a dramatic catalyzing effect across the region, when the invasion of Iraq didn’t, is that they are the handiwork of Middle Eastern populations themselves, and thus a much more appealing model of change.
To this it might be added that the last time we imposed a no-fly zone on a weakened Arab tyrant who we hoped would soon be toppled by his own people, the year was 1992 and the tyrant in question was Saddam Hussein — and we have been at war in Iraq, in one sense or another, ever since.
