Implications of the Pletka Purge
Lee on Dec 22 2008 at 4:24 am | Filed under: Foreign affairs, Lee's Page, Military Matters
Roland picks up an interesting piece by Jacob Heilbrunn for the National Interest, describing an ongoing purge of neoconservative intellectuals from the American Enterprise Institute, allegedly instigated by Vice President Danielle Pletka. So far Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht are gone, with Joshua Muravchik soon leaving. Others are said to be soon in following.
This could signal the reemergence of an old conflict over machtpolitik and just war doctrine, which used to exist in Republican security policy circles (ie, coercion-for-values vs. coercion-for-interests). If Pletka is indeed purging with intent, we may even expect AEI to shift its attitude toward the Middle East, Asia and Africa, given how much more amenable authoritarian regimes tend to be to interest pressure.
And the idealism of the AEI departed is considerable. Gerecht for instance wrote a fascinating but bizarre book I read in the late 1990s under the pen name Edward Shirley, in which he smuggled himself into Iran in the trunk of a car, essentially for the romance of it.
An emergent conflict between interests and values would be novel after 9-11. From the outside under the old alignment, Ms. Pletka’s hostility to neoconservatives would be a bit surprising, given her political pedigree and published views. To give you the flavor of how important such a Pletka break with the movement ought to be, in 2004 she directly characterized criticism of neoconservatism as an inadequate mask for anti-Semitism. More recently, she described Barack Obama’s desire for diplomatic engagement with Iran and the Taliban as perilous expressions of “naïveté and desperation”. And in October, she argued that a general Democratic preference for conciliation rather than confrontation in conflict scenarios, was a formula for international catastrophe:
America’s enemies see an opportunity to gain ground with a new leader more inclined to “sit down with” rather than confront the world’s rogues.
(AEI)
Despite these hawkish views, her neoconservative accusers say she is now an agent of the realpolitiker Republican establishment, and if interests and values were to decouple, that would be understandable. We’re vaguely familiar with such charges in memory, such as those leveled against the Clinton administration while Mr. Clinton was dining with Richard Nixon seeking foreign policy advice. But for a decade idealistic neoconservative hawks have been in near perfect alignment with their more cynical conservative counterparts, at least with the Iraq war still on the table. As that passes, perhaps so does the occasion for concord.
Speculating a bit, it’s possible that in the future AEI will even be compelled to become a critic of the sovereign Iraq its members once argued most strenuously for. Apart from Iran, the one country likely to prove most resistant to diplomatic pressure to comply with a security policy predicated on American interests, is probably Iraq, which alone possesses a state with democratic legitimacy in the Muslim Middle East.
This also brings to mind the infrequently stated geostrategic argument against the Iraq War mumbled by some Republican realists: Iraq will potentially destabilize and even destroy the tripartite alliance structure the United States has maintained with Israel (military), Egypt (political) and Saudi Arabia (economic) in the Middle East.
A democratic Iraq has the potential to threaten the importance of all three in each area. Her economic potential is considerable from her unexploited resource wealth, militarily she’s already rearming (buying M1 Abrams tanks which are essentially undefeatable on the modern battlefield), and by nature of her constitutional democracy, she will command a voice of legitimacy that no regime has been able to project in the region, save for the ethno-religiously compromised Israel.
Thus the United States may find itself forced into a dependent alliance with Iraq that is as much about her interests as it is about American ones, at the expense of the realist Saudi-Israeli-Egyptian alliance structure and its numerous benefits for diplomatic manipulation. An altered interest-section-only AEI might not be pleased.
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The View From the Bluff: Lance’s Economic and Finance Blog
Trading an Israel-Iraq platform in place of an Israel-Egypt-Saudi Arabia is definitely a trade up, but I worry about the Iraqi government’s political capacity for alignment with Israel.
OTOH, God, could you imagine a ME with Iraq and Israel not only having normal relations with Iraq but also a military alliance? Can you imagine the reaction in the Arab world with an Israel willing to send her sons to war to protect her ally Iraq? What is it you always say? Oh yeah: Ruh-roh!
yours/
peter.
Note that Pletka started out as a staffer for Jesse Helms, someone who, to put it mildly, was not a fan of neocon views on democracy promotion.