Evolution And Mistakes of Neoconservatism

Frank Fukuyama has published a lengthy article on the development of neocon ideology and the errors that have resulted from that movement. Andrew Sullivan has a good summary of the mistakes portion.

In retrospect, neoconservatives (and I fully include myself) made three huge errors in the last few years. The first was to over-estimate the competence of government, especially in extremely delicate areas like WMD intelligence. The shock of 9/11 provoked an understandable but still mistaken over-estimation of the risks we faced. And our fear forced errors into a deeply fallible system. The result was the WMD intelligence debacle, something that did far more damage to the war's legitimacy and fate than many have yet absorbed. Fukuyama's sharpest insight here is into how the near miracle of the end of the Cold War almost certainly lulled many of us into over-confidence about the inevitability of democratic change, and its ease. We got cocky. We should have known better.

Sullivan lists two others: narcissism and not taking culture seriously.

The biggest problem was that the neocons thought in the rosiest of terms, always assuming the best possible outcome and never seeming to consider that things might not work out as well as they thought. The neocons were filled with visions of the Paris liberation, of joyous Iraqis filling the streets in rapturous celebration of their liberation. (Or, as Fukuyama illustrates it, Romania after the fall of the Ceausescus.) It didn't seem to occur to anyone that this might be a tad over optimistic, that after years of economic privation brought on by US-led sanctions of Iraq and relentless propaganda from the Baath regime against the United States, the people of Iraq might be a bit skeptical of their new rulers.

The neocons failed to think ahead. They thought only as far as the joy in the streets, not how groups like al Qaeda might exploit the resultant power vacuum, a vacuum exacerbated by our own incompetent preparation for post-war occupation. After all, if the Iraqis would be so deliriously happy after the fall of Saddam, there would be no vacuum and preparations would be unnecessary. The Iraqi people would simply accept the mantle of responsibility and govern themselves, magically accepting democracy and immediately filling the void left by Saddam. The lack of any organized opposition to Baath rule, of a nascent democratic movement to build on and accept this role was ignored.

The neocons failed to consider the Iraqi and Arab cultures. It was assumed that any democracy that would take root in Iraq would automatically resemble Western democracy in its acceptance of basic rights and its essential secularism. It was not considered that the people, particularly the long oppressed Shi'ites, might embrace their religion and give rise to a more Islamic democracy whose natural tendency would be closer relations with Iran.

And, of course, the neocons refused to believe their own eyes. Every piece of hard data on the ground before the war indicated that Saddam did not have WMDs. We supposedly knew exactly where they were being manufactured, but every time an investigatory team went to those locations, they came up empty. As a scientist, I understand the desire to continue believing your theory, even when experiment is raising questions. But sooner or later, you have to accept what the facts are showing. Not the neocons, who never let facts get in the way. (Reminds me of an MIT professor--tenured, of course--Irving Segal who came up with a theory called chronometrics that challenged general relativity. Astronomers tested his theory against their observations repeatedly, and the theory always came up short. The professor's response? The data and experiments are wrong. If they don't verify the theory, the facts are wrong. I still remember how totally absurd and pathetic it all was when he tried to defend this theory at a conference I attended, claiming the scientists were not analyzing the data right, or understanding the theory correctly. He would have been a good fit in Bush's intelligence community.)