Francis Fukuyama erklärt Ende des Neoconservatismus! - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[Joerver]

Die Neocons sind an der Realität gescheitert.

Das kann man in Abwandlung des alten Spruches `Neocons sind an der Realität gescheiterte Liberale bzw. Linke` sagen.

"America at the Crossroads" heißt das neue Buch von Francis Fukuyama das diesen Monat in den USA herauskommt und in dem die Politik der Bushregierung, die in den ersten 4 Jahren maßgeblich von den Neocons bestimmt wurde, für gescheitert erklärt wird.

Mit seinem Buch `The End of History and the Last Man` hat Fukuyama das Zeitalter der Neocons eingeleitet, wie oft behauptet wird.

Er erklärt den Begriff `Das Ende der Geschichte` in dem folgenden Artikel anders, als er immer dargestellt wurde:

Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

Das läßt den Kronzeugen für einen Teil des neoconservativen Gedankenguts in einem ganz anderen Licht erscheinen und scheint das Ende der Neocon-Ära einzuläuten und läßt auch das Abschieben der Neocon-Galionsfiguren auf mehr symbolische Posten in einem anderen Licht erscheinen.

Der Artikel lehnt sich an das neue Buch von Fukuyama an und erscheint am Sonntag im NYTimes Magazin.


February 19, 2006
After Neoconservatism
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq`s neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein`s dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.

The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration`s first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America`s perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.

But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy "realists" in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America`s naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The administration`s second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush`s second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt`s parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that "America`s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.

The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy may not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian conservatives — red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are fighting and dying in the Middle East — supported the Iraq war because they believed that their children were fighting to defend the United States against nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don`t want to abandon the president in the middle of a vicious war, but down the road the perceived failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to favor a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. A recent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism; the percentage of Americans saying that the United States "should mind its own business" has never been higher since the end of the Vietnam War.

More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism`s agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.

The Neoconservative Legacy

How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration`s first-term foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives, since those views were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.

The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering — which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare — suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social engineering.

In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930`s and early 1940`s, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called "Arguing the World." The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.

It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930`s and 1940`s came to realize that "real existing socialism" had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life work of many members of this group.

If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson`s extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.

How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East`s lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.

Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall." His assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the "prince of darkness" for this uncompromising, hard-line position; his proposal for a double-zero in the intermediate-range nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the complete elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by the bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war.

And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91. Gorbachev accepted not only the double zero but also deep cuts in conventional forces, and then failed to stop the Polish, Hungarian and East German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within a couple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the West evaporated.

The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration`s incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war`s supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer`s recent book on Iraq, "The Assassins` Gate," the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion.

By the 1990`s, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the "crisis of modernity" brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people. Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear proliferation and the way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left loopholes, in its support for "peaceful" nuclear energy, large enough for countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through.

I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss`s protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony

The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich calls American maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war period, the structural situation of world politics changed in ways that made this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes of even close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power." (Italics added.)

It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that the United States is a hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning signs that things had changed in America`s relationship to the world long before the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world in every dimension of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense spending nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during the Clinton years, American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to an American-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allies who thought the United States was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them.

There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.

Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the American people`s attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society.

Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case that the United States was not getting authorization from the United Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn`t know what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient.

The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq`s W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war`s supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.

What to Do

Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.

The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions of the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.

The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a "multi-multilateral world" of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.

The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most contested in the coming months and years, is the place of democracy promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.

We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11`s Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy`s blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and — yes, unfortunately — terrorism.

But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.

If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can`t "impose" democracy on a country that doesn`t want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.

The Bush administration has been walking — indeed, sprinting — away from the legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral approach it has taken toward the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about "transformational diplomacy" and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of the foreign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document is being rewritten. All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the Bush first-term foreign policy and its neoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming years. The reaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy itself, and such a reaction is an indulgence we cannot afford, given the critical moment we have arrived at in global politics.

Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world — ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.

Francis Fukuyama teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from his book "America at the Crossroads," which will be published this month by Yale University Press.

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

[Heizkessel]

[PrinzValiumNG]

Aus welchem Heya stammt eigentlich Fukuyama? Hatte er ein kachi koshi im letzten Basho? Und gegen wen hat er sein kinboshi erreicht um zu einem solchen Urteil qualifiziert zu sein? Und werde ich jetzt mittels Uwatenage aus dem Thread geworfen weil ich das so hinterfrage?

[Heizkessel]

[posting]20.264.079 von PrinzValiumNG am 17.02.06 21:05:32[/posting]stammt dein amerikaphiler reflex von einem frühkindlichen trauma, oder ist es männlicher beschützerinstinkt deiner über-ich-funktion?

[webmaxx]

[posting]20.264.079 von PrinzValiumNG am 17.02.06 21:05:32[/posting]Fudschijama oder fudschikago ?

Nach gründlicher Manuskriptdurchsicht läßt sich hierauf implizit nur mit einem ganz entschiedenen "perhaps" respondieren....

[PrinzValiumNG]

@Webmaxx:
Schwer zu sagen, ich sehe gerade dass Kollege Heizkessel mit einer Reihe von virtuellen Tsuppari geantwortet hat obwohl er wie gewöhnlich im völlig falschen Dohyo steht.

@Heizkessel:
Ein glatter Matta der Dir hier wiedermal unterlaufen ist, aber wenigstens hat Dein Mawashi gehalten. Für Deinen Beitrag wirst Du aber sicher keinen Sansho erhalten.

[webmaxx]

[posting]20.264.266 von PrinzValiumNG am 17.02.06 21:16:49[/posting]In toto klarer Fall von Browser killing joerverism, Bushidomäßig minimiert !

[Heizkessel]

[posting]20.264.317 von webmaxx am 17.02.06 21:20:04[/posting]webmaxx, daß du mit texten, länger als drei parolen überfordert bist, ist bekannt, aber daß selbst dein browser das handtuch wirft, überrascht jetzt doch.

[Joerver]

[posting]20.264.079 von PrinzValiumNG am 17.02.06 21:05:32[/posting]Werter Prinz,

hast du dich schon mal gefragt, wer dir die Qualifikation gegeben hat dieses hochgeistige Posting abzusetzen.

Dann wenn du das geklärt hast, können wir abklären, was Fukuyama befähigt diese Buch zu schreiben und weshalb dieses Buch eine gewisse Aufmerksamkeit verdient.

Wohl nicht nur weil der Titel seines ersten Buches `Das Ende der Geschichte` den Charakter eines Geflügelten Wortes angenommen hat (zwar nicht den Standard deines `antiamerikanistischen Rassismus`), sondern auch weil seine Gedanken von einem großen Teil deiner Glaubensgenossen begeistert aufgenommen wurden.

Aber vielleicht solltest du den Artikel erst mal lesen, bevor du etwas verreißt.

[webmaxx]

!

Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

[webmaxx]

!

Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

[PrinzValiumNG]

[posting]20.264.474 von Joerver am 17.02.06 21:31:00[/posting]Geschätzter Joerver,

mit ...
hast du dich schon mal gefragt, wer dir die Qualifikation gegeben hat dieses hochgeistige Posting abzusetzen.
..triffst Du den Nagel interessanterweise auf die Oichomage - hast Du schon mal versucht derart mit GlenDingsbums abgefüllt eine derartig lange fremdsprachige Textleiche zu antizipieren? Da kann gewissermaßen nur ein hochgeistiges Posting rauskommen.

Ja, ich gestehe, ich habe mich hinreißen zu lassen. Die Einleitung ("Die Neocons sind an der Realität gescheitert." et al, Aussagen die eigentlich auch Deinen Intellekt beleidigen) haben mich dazu verleitet. Und ein langer Arbeitstag. Und die entsprechende Menge GlenDingsbums. Wer frei von Sünde werfe den ersten Stein.

Im Ernst. Ich bin immer noch davon überzeugt dass es in der Welt genauso viele NeoCons wie Neoliberalismus gibt. Und das Herr Fukuyama (aus welchem Heya er nun stammen mag) aus seinem Elfenbeinturm aus fantasiert. Oder sagen wir neutral - seine Meinung formuliert. Und daß sein Turm so wie der Torre pendente in einer der schönsten Gegenden Italiens eine Schieflage hat. Oder der Torre steht gerade, nur die Stadt rundherum ist schief, je nach Perspektive.

Nimms nicht persönlich, die Verlockung war einfach zu groß für mich. Was die Textleiche betrifft werde ich dann aufmerksam die Joerver-Zusammenfassung lesen.

In diesem Sinne, wie immer respektvoll
^/

[for4zim]

Könnten wir so langsam mal anfangen, über das Ende des Neosozialismus zu reden? Dann können wir gleich noch den Neokatholizismus durchnudeln, ganz im Sinne des obsoleten Neobuddhismus. Mir wird nämlich so langsam langweilig, immer der selbe Schmarrn - Verzeihung, Neoschmarrn.

[Heizkessel]

[posting]20.264.742 von for4zim am 17.02.06 21:47:44[/posting]und der nächste mit ausuferndem über-ich-beschützer-reflex.
... wie die motten das licht...

[PrinzValiumNG]

[posting]20.264.167 von Heizkessel am 17.02.06 21:10:09[/posting]In Wahrheit kämpft hier mein Außers-Ich mit dem Lächerl-Ich (was für gewöhnlich stärker ist), aber es kann auch sein dass ich ein Loch habe in meiner strukturellen Seinsmacht-Matrix, wobei der dafür zuständige Board-Experte sich im Augenblick leider nicht dazu äußern kann...

[webmaxx]

[posting]20.264.918 von PrinzValiumNG am 17.02.06 22:00:14[/posting]klingt irgendwie nach SittingBull...

[PrinzValiumNG]

[posting]20.264.986 von webmaxx am 17.02.06 22:03:29[/posting]Ja, aber das Original war irgendwie besser als Heizkessel, findest Du nicht?

Aber egal, nachdem der Neoconservatism endlich tod ist können wir uns endlich der freien Marktwirtschaft zuwenden. Wer will kann diese mit Webmaxxistischen Modifikationen würzen, je nach Geschmack halt.

Also ich bin schon froh dass die NeoCons endlich weg sind. Keine Threads mehr über diese Bagage, es war ja manchmal schon wirklich lästig. Kann man nur hoffen dass es nicht zuviele Nekrophile gibt, die die NeoCons dann entsprechend immer wieder aus der Gruft holen...

P.S: `Bushido` warn Guter...*zwinker*

[Heizkessel]

ja konzeptionell sind sie am ende, ein grund, ein paar cheney witzchen zu reissen. diese idealistische ideologie hat zwar nur ein paar zehntausend kriegsopfer gefordert, aber das stört hier keinen großen geist.

[webmaxx]

[posting]20.265.082 von PrinzValiumNG am 17.02.06 22:09:18[/posting]

Der Mann hat sich ja schon mal geirrt, also gemach, laßt uns die deutsche Übersetzung abwarten.

Und überhaupt:
Da dräuen doch noch ganz andere Probleme...

Das Stellvertreter- Hänge-Problem zum Beispiel.

Siehe Nachbarthread - wird Münte überleben ? Wird sein Schal halten ? Warum wurde Angie übergangen, was bedeutet dieser Affront ?
Morgen mehr in BILD

[webmaxx]

[posting]20.263.681 von Joerver am 17.02.06 20:42:27[/posting]Wasmacht übrigens die ADAC-Pannenstatistik?

Da ist die deutsche Autoindustrie wohl auch an der Realität gescheitert, umsatzmäßig....

[Joerver]

[posting]20.264.700 von PrinzValiumNG am 17.02.06 21:44:52[/posting]Werter Prinz,

verzeih mir meinen reißerischen Einstieg, aber der Ausspruch des Godfather der [urlNeocons Irving Kristol]http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neokonservatismus_in_den_USA[/url]
"a liberal mugged by reality" verleitete mich zu diesem Kalauer. Es war kein Glendingskalauer, deshalb nicht hochgeistig.

Trotzdem halte ich den Artikel immer noch für lesenswert, auch wenn es eine Textleiche ist.
Denn wenn ein Ziehvater sich von seinen Kinder distanziert, ist das schon eine Meldung wert.

Für den heute etwas ungeordneten @Webmaxx wird es wohl auch bald eine (sinnvolle) deutsche Übersetzung geben.

Für @for4zim die Neocons haben vom Ursprung nicht sehr viel mit den Neoliberalen gemeinsam. Schon eher mit dem Sozialismus/Trotzkismus.

[Joerver]

Ich kann`s einfach nicht sein lassen. Die waren eigentlich im Artikel nicht gemeint.

[Joerver]

Noch eins, was ich gefunden habe. Das Material reicht sicherlich noch für 3 Jahre, auch wenn die Neocons sich verabschiedet haben.

[urlAbu Ghraib leaked report reveals full extent of abuse]http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1711749,00.html[/url]

· 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse
· 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse
· 660 images of adult pornography
· 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees
· 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington

[Joerver]

Ich bin erstaunt wie groß das Unwissen über die Strömungen in der US-Außenpolitik ist, besonders bei den Konservativen.

Neocon(servativ) ist kein Schimpfwort, auch wenn es nach dem Irak-Krieg oft als Schimpfwort benutzt wurde.

Die andere Richtung der US-Politik kann man unter dem Namen Kissinger, die Pragmatiker, zusammenfassen. Und augenblicklich läuft sozusagen der Wettkampf der Systeme.
Ein Stützpunkt der Pragmatiker ist das [urlCouncil on Foreign Relations]http://www.cfr.org/[/url] (CfR), in dem sich die Elite der US-Politik, nicht nur der US-Politik, zusammengefunden hat.
Zu CFR gehört auch die Zeitung [urlForeign Affairs]http://www.foreignaffairs.org/[/url]. Im [url`Rheinischer Merkur`]http://www.rheinischer-merkur.de/393.0.html[/url] werden einige dieser Artikel in deutscher Sprache veröffentlicht.

Ich möchte aber in dem Zusammenhang mit der Entmachtung der Neocons in der Bush-Regierung auf einen anderen Artikel, aus dem `Rheinischer Merkur` hinweisen, der sich auch mit der unterschiedlichen Auffassung in der US-Außenpolitik befasst.

Die Neokonservativen sind in die Defensive geraten. Gut möglich, dass sie sich nun ihrer Wurzeln erinnern

[urlZum Sterben zu jung]http://www.rheinischer-merkur.de/9775.0.html?&no_cache=1[/url]

von MICHAEL KIMMAGE

Bei den Republikanern fallen Richard Perle und Paul Wolfowitz mehr und mehr in Ungnade. Die Realisten aus der Schule Kissingers geben nun den Ton an. Trotzdem werden die Stars der ersten Amtszeit George W. Bushs nicht so schnell aufgeben.

Der Artikel von Fukuyama bietet aber eine umfangreichere Abhandlung über die Entwicklung des Neokonservatismus.

[PrinzValiumNG]

Guten Vormittag werter Joerver,

Ich bin erstaunt wie groß das Unwissen über die Strömungen in der US-Außenpolitik ist, besonders bei den Konservativen.
Neocon(servativ) ist kein Schimpfwort, auch wenn es nach dem Irak-Krieg oft als Schimpfwort benutzt wurde.

Also ich deklariere mich gerne als ungebildet, aber für mich und vor allem für meine Klienten war es bislang nicht wirklich wesentlicher Bestandteil meiner Kompetenz darüber zu bescheid wissen zu welchem Prozentsatz die Amis das Wort NeoCon in unpunzierender Bedeutung verwenden, und wieviel davon dann doch das übliche Gebashe ist, und da rede ich noch gar nicht von den Strolling Bones mit ihrem Sweet Neocon. Mir reicht es zu sehen wer hier im Board mit welchen Attributen über die NeoCons (als abstraktes Feindbild) ablästert.

Aber vielleicht solltest du den Artikel erst mal lesen, bevor du etwas verreißt.
Hand aufs Herz, jemand stellt Dir 5 Liter Lebertran vor die Nase und möchte von Dir eine Beurteilung haben. Trinkst Du die ganzen 5 Liter, oder kann es nicht manchmal im Leben Situationen geben wo ein kurzer Antrunk reicht?

Das Material reicht sicherlich noch für 3 Jahre, auch wenn die Neocons sich verabschiedet haben.
Diese wenn auch faire Drohung war nicht notwendig auszusprechen. Ich denke man kann realistisch davon ausgehen dass Du hier immer noch die schöne Leich` bloggst wenn hier längst die Enkerl und Urenkerl von Webmaxx am posten sind und deren Opi sich schon längst in eine Thailändische Oase des Friedens zurückgezogen haben wird.

Dennoch würde ich was das Ableben der NeoCons betrifft auch hier für ein sittsames de mortuis nihil nisi bene plädieren. Vielleicht noch ein letzter Trauermarsch, dann ein Leichenschmaus (denn könnte man aus Kostengründen mit einem Aschermittwochs-Heringschmaus verknüpfen) und dann sollte man den Toten ihre Ruhe lassen.

Schönen Samstag
Valium

[Joerver]

Dennoch würde ich was das Ableben der NeoCons betrifft auch hier für ein sittsames de mortuis nihil nisi bene plädieren. Vielleicht noch ein letzter Trauermarsch, dann ein Leichenschmaus (denn könnte man aus Kostengründen mit einem Aschermittwochs-Heringschmaus verknüpfen) und dann sollte man den Toten ihre Ruhe lassen.

Werter Prinz, Meister der angespitzen Feder,

Gerne nichts Böses über Tote, aber die Frage ist, ob sie nicht nur totgesagt worden sind und sich noch einmal zum (vor)letzten Gefecht gegen den Iran rüsten.

Was sagte Rummy vor ein paar Tagen vor dem CFR:

"Ultimately, in my view, truth wins out."

Das sieht nicht nach Aufgabe aus.
Aber man kanns auch gegen ihn verwenden:

Bad news for him, and his pal Dick.

Also ich deklariere mich gerne als ungebildet

Wissen und Unwissen hat nicht unbedingt was mit Bildung zu tun. Nur ein wenig mehr Neugier in solchen Fragen wäre auch für eine Hoheit angebracht: Johann lesen sie mir mal den Artikel von Fukuyama vor!

Enkerl und Urenkerl von Webmaxx am posten sind und deren Opi sich schon längst in eine Thailändische Oase des Friedens zurückgezogen haben wird.

Bitte keine weiteren Drohungen, ich ergebe mich freiwillig.

[susi_rules]

[posting]20.268.422 von Joerver am 18.02.06 11:42:35[/posting]Die andere Richtung der US Außenpolitik kann man nicht unter dem Namen "Kissinger, die Pragmatiker" zusammenfassen.

Wenn man sich schon des Begriffs " Neokonservative " bedient, dann wären als Gegenstück " Paleokonservative " zu nennen.

Paleokonservative stehen für eine isolationistische Außen und eine protektionistische Wirtschaftspolitik, umwerben aber ansonsten die gleiche konservative Basis.

Als historisches Beispiel wäre da z.b. President Herbert Hoover zu nennen oder heute der ehemalige White House Berater und Journalist Pat Buchanan.

[Joerver]

[posting]20.269.187 von susi_rules am 18.02.06 12:47:27[/posting]Die Isolationisten haben weder bei den Reps noch bei den Dems irgendwelchen Einfluß.
Der einzige der sich durch [url`The American Conservative`]http://www.amconmag.com/[/url] etwas in de Vordergrund schiebt ist Pat Buchanan.

Der Unterschied zwischen den Pragmatikern und den Idealisten liegt nicht im Ziel, sondern in der Vorgehensweise.
Das heißt die Neocons sind Interventionisten nach Wilson, und wollen Demokratie auch mit Gewalt durchzusetzen.
Kissinger und die realistische Gruppe hat immer versucht den Status Quo aufrecht zu erhalten. Die Interventionen sind immer durchgeführt worden, wenn überhaupt offen, um z.B. den amerikanischen Kontinent vom Kommunismus fernzuhalten, genauso auch der Vietnamkrieg.

Nach dem Erfolg der Beendigung des Kalten Krieges, den sich Perle, Cheney u.a. unter Reagan auf ihre Fahnen geschrieben haben, haben, nach einen kurzem Intermezzo unter Bush(41), die Neocons unter Clinton schon mit ihre Nation Building Politik im Kosovo und sonst auf dem Balkan vermeintliche Erfolge erreicht.

Nach dem 9/11 hat man dann diese Politik versucht auf den weiteren Nahen Osten auszudehnen. Und da hat man dann Schiffbruch erlitten.
Auch die Ursprünge der Neocons kommen teilweise aus ganz anderen Denkschulen. Ein Beispiel: Leo Strauss.

Jetzt sind die Realisten oder Pragmatiker wieder da und die Neocons bzw. Idealisten auf dem Abstellgleis.

[PresAbeL]

[posting]20.266.510 von Joerver am 18.02.06 01:10:47[/posting]Entlarvendes Posting, bringt es doch Dein Anliegen auf den Punkt: Es ist das alte Thema ohne neue Perspektive (soviel ich weiss,habt Ihr mit diesem sozial gerechten Ansatz wieder eine satte 0 zustande gebracht und streikt gerade fuer ein tiefrotes Minus!): (Verteilungs)Gerechtigkeit statt Freiheit. Bei Euch weist allenfalls die Lebergroesse eines Langzeitarbeitslosen dynamische Wachstumsraten auf. Haeltst Du das fuer gerecht? Ich nicht. Ich halte das fuer zutiefst zynisch und menschenverachtend!!!

[PresAbeL]

Noch etwas, lieber Joerver, zu Deiner geliebten NYTimes: als vielseitig Intressierter habe ich kuerzlich die Sonntagsausgabe subscribed. Was meinst du wohl was kam? Eine Rechnung in der mail box, aber keine Zeitung! Diesen neosozialistischen Altpapierproduzenten kannst Du getrost himmeln!!

[webmaxx]

Also bestätigt die bisherige "Diskussion" meine dumpfe Ahnung, daß es so etwas wie Kontinuität in der US-Außenpolitik nicht gibt, aber auch keine Richtungen...

Das wird alles im Nachhinein hineininterpretiert. Die haben Falken/Hardliner und Tauben, wie wir hier auch. Und demnächst auch Vogelgrippe

Übrigens schön, daß man sich hier meiner abschreckenden Wirkung bewußt ist

Und: Mein Alterssitz und Unruhestand wird sehr wahrscheinlich doch anders aussehen als von hoheitlicher Warte vermutet.

Zu FF und seinem letzten Buch "Ende derGeschichte":

"Kritiker in der Tradition des Historischen Materialismus stimmen zwar mit Fukuyamas Vorstellung einer historischen Zwangsläufigkeit überein, sie teilen aber nicht seine Meinung, dass die neoliberale Marktwirtschaft die Gegensätze auflösen wird. Die Annahme eines immanenten Krisenzyklus des Kapitalismus widerspricht nicht direkt Fukuyamas These vom Ende der Geschichte. Das Ende könnte auch als sich wiederholender Zyklus gedacht werden.

Fukuyama hat zwischenzeitlich zugegeben, dass er das Erstarken des islamistischen Gesellschaftsystems gegen den Gewinner des Kalten Krieges, das liberale christliche Bürgertum, nicht vorhersah. So müssten seine weiterhin optimistischen Prognosen nach hinten verschoben werden. Das Ende der Geschichte bestehe nun in der dynamischen Integration und Assimilation von nicht-westlichen Kulturen in die westliche Kultur, unter Preisgabe derer Grundsätze zugunsten von Freiheit und Menschenrechten.

Die Fragen nach dem Ende der Geschichte sind also die Fragen nach dem historischen Zeitpunkt der Wende zum Ende und ob das Ende zyklisch, dynamisch oder statisch gedacht werden kann. Diese Fragen kann Fukuyama nicht abschließend beantworten. Er bewahrt sich dennoch seinen Optimismus, dass das Ende der Geschichte keine dröge Verhaftung in Langeweile werde. Vielmehr, und damit zutiefst hegelianisch und marxistisch, werde das Ende der Geschichte zusammen mit der Freiheit des Menschen kommen. wikipedia

Ist also nicht soo wichtig, was der Mann für politische Strömungen zu erkennen glaubt... Lebertran bleibt Lebertran

[Joerver]

[posting]20.269.547 von PresAbeL am 18.02.06 13:36:10[/posting]Ich habe keine Lieblingspostille.

Du als Fast-US-Bürger müßtest doch die Aufteilung der US-Zeitungen in einen Meinungsteil mit Artikel, für den der Schreiber die volle Verantwortung trägt und in den redaktionellen Teil kennen.

Und im Meinungsteil bietet die NYTimes ein breites Spektrum von dem Neocon David Brooks, der manchmal sehr kluge Artikel schreibt bis zu dem Liberalen Bob Herbert.

Der redaktionelle Teil ist wie bei den meisten anderen US-Zeitungen auf Linie und bedarf einiger Vorsicht.

Den Rest deines Posting kann ich nicht einordnen in seinem Bezug auf den Thread!

[susi_rules]

[posting]20.269.525 von Joerver am 18.02.06 13:32:03[/posting]Ist das nicht etwas verwegen die Intervention im Kosovo , amerikanischen Neocons zuzuschreiben ?

War es nicht vielmehr so, daß diese Intervention auf Wunsch der Europäer stattgefunden hat ? Die Amerikaner waren da allenfalls ein Erfüllungsgehilfe. Vielleicht waren die Neocons williger als andere Konservative und eher für diese Idee zu begeistern, ändert aber nichts daran, daß die Europäer die Initiatoren waren.

Das zeigt aber auch das Grundproblem, man erwartet von den Amerikaneren außenpolitisches Engagement als militärische Ordnungsmacht, versucht ihnen aber gleichzeitig den Führungsanspruch abzusprechen.

Wie erfolgreich die europäische Außenpolitik im Nahen Osten ist, konnte man gerade in den letzten Wochen bewundern. Mit ein paar Karikaturen in einer Provinzzeitung haben sie es geschafft mehr Feuer im Nahen Osten zu entfachen als die Amerikaner mit dem Irakkrieg.

Eigentlich ist diese Region nämlich ein europäisches Problem und eigentlich sollten die Europäer dankbar dafür sein, daß es neokonservative Idealisten ( deine Bezeichnung ) in den USA gibt, die es sich in den Kopf gesetzt haben diese Region zu demokratisieren.

Die Pragmatiker und Realisten könnten irgendwann auf die Idee kommen, sich lieber um ihre eigenen Probleme zu kümmern und außenpolitisch um die vor ihrer Haustür z.b. um die aufstrebenden Neokommunisten in Lateinamerika.

Die Europäer dürfen sich dann um den Nahen Osten kümmern, jene Europäer die nicht einmal in der Lage waren die Probleme im Kosovo ohne US Unterstützung zu lösen.

[Joerver]

[posting]20.269.686 von webmaxx am 18.02.06 14:05:13[/posting]`The End of History and the Last Man` stammt aus 1993 und ist durch die damaligen Veränderungen geprägt.

Seitdem hat er fünf weitere Bücher veröffentlicht, in denen er selbst manche seiner Thesen in Frage stellt.

Ist es für dich ungewöhnlich, wenn ein Mensch seine Gedanken weiterentwickelt?

[Joerver]

[posting]20.269.740 von susi_rules am 18.02.06 14:20:23[/posting]Die Zuordnung des Kosovo stammt nicht von mir.

Den Nahen Osten haben die USA zu ihrem Problem gemacht.

Was wäre der NO ohne das Eingreifen der USA in den letzten Jahrzehnten, nachdem die Franzosen und Briten sich verabschiedet haben?

Sonst habe ich keine Probleme mit deiner Beschreibung, nur zwangsweise Einführung von Demokratie halte ich für kontraproduktiv.

[StellaLuna]

Fukuyama hat auch ein Buch "Das Ende der Menschen" geschrieben, danach sollte man eigentlich keine Veröffentlichung von ihm mehr lesen

[PresAbeL]

[posting]20.269.723 von Joerver am 18.02.06 14:14:44[/posting]Ich habe keine Lieblingspostille.

Deinen wirtschaftlichen Sachverstand leihst Du zu mindestens 90% bei der NYT aus.


Du als Fast-US-Bürger müßtest doch die Aufteilung der US-Zeitungen in einen Meinungsteil mit Artikel, für den der Schreiber die volle Verantwortung trägt und in den redaktionellen Teil kennen.

Und im Meinungsteil bietet die NYTimes ein breites Spektrum von dem Neocon David Brooks, der manchmal sehr kluge Artikel schreibt bis zu dem Liberalen Bob Herbert.

Der redaktionelle Teil ist wie bei den meisten anderen US-Zeitungen auf Linie und bedarf einiger Vorsicht.


Ach so, der Meinungsteil ist also unbedenklich? Im Ernst, Joerver, die Trennung ist bei denen doch schon lang zusammengebrochen. Verwechsle die NYT bitte nicht mit der Washington Post! bei der sitzen immer noch erstklassige Journalisten.


Den Rest deines Posting kann ich nicht einordnen in seinem Bezug auf den Thread!

Ich vermisse den realitaetsnahen Bezug auf die heutige GOP! Weder definieren sich deren Grueppchen nur ueber ihr aussenpolitische Agenda (eine solche hat hier noch niemanden vom Stuhl gerissen), sondern vor allem auch ueber ihre wirtschafts-, finanz,- und sozialpolitische Agenda. Und darauf wollte ich aufmerksam machen. Noch handelt es sich nur um 2, sondern um 5 Gruppierungen wie ich dereinst unter Zuhilfenahme eines Economist Artikels einmal hier ausfuerlich dargelegt habe.

Fukuyama hat sich hier schon oft genug laecherlich gemacht. Mir geht dessen pseudo-wissenschaftliche Nostradamus-Literatur genauso auf die Nerven wie einst die Erguesse des "Futorologen" Herman Kahn. Was soll das Orakel-Geraunze, wenn noch nicht einmal die grundlegenden Parameter einer scharfsinnigen Analyse der gegenwaertigen DC Landschaft mit vernuenftigen Werten belegt sind?

[Joerver]

[posting]20.274.087 von PresAbeL am 19.02.06 08:23:10[/posting]Deinen wirtschaftlichen Sachverstand leihst Du zu mindestens 90% bei der NYT aus.

Meine Hauptquellen sind die Statistikseiten der US-Bundes behörden:
http://www.bea.gov/
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm
http://www.federalreserve.gov/FOMC/BeigeBook/2004/
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/
http://www.cbo.gov/Index.cfm

Dazu kommen noch einige internationale Veröffentlichungen.
Bei den Kolumnisten beachte ich was Krugmam schreibt. (Trotz des etwas unglücklichen Bashing-Versuch aus bestimmten Kreisen.)

Von der Post Robert J. Samuelson.

Ach so, der Meinungsteil ist also unbedenklich?

Wieso meinst du, weshab es Meinungsteil heißt?

die Trennung ist bei denen doch schon lang zusammengebrochen..
Verwechsle die NYT bitte nicht mit der Washington Post! bei der sitzen immer noch erstklassige Journalisten.

Richtig.

Man arbeitet im redaktionellen Teil mit der Masche, ein Mitarbeiter der Regierung hat gesagt. Damit kann man jede Falschmeldung lanzieren.
NYTimes war und ist sehr anfällig für dieserlei Fakes. Aber die gleichen Meldungen findest du auch in der Post, der LATimes u.s.w.

Nur eins kann man der NYTimes nicht abstreiten und das ist, sie hat die umfassende Berichterstattung. Und manches ist immer noch sehr gut. Ich beginne bei meinem Durchblick der US-Presse meist bei der Times und habe dort fast immer alle relevanten Meldungen das Tages gefunden (Eine Schande wie eingeschränkt die deutsche Presse berichtet). Bei der Post und LAtimes gab es dazu ab und zu ein Schmakerl.

Nur eine linksliberale Tendenz kann ich bei keiner der Zeitungen erkennen.

Nur zur WSJ sind natürlich alle US-Zeitungen links.

Ich vermisse den realitaetsnahen Bezug auf die heutige GOP!..
Noch handelt es sich nur um 2, sondern um 5 Gruppierungen wie ich dereinst unter Zuhilfenahme eines Economist Artikels einmal hier ausfuerlich dargelegt habe.

Da hast du genau das Problem solcher Einordnungen erkannt.

Ich habe mal in einem Posting in meinem Thread von 3 übergeordneten Richtungen in der Bushregierung gesprochen. Da habe ich auch die wirtschaftlichen Einstellungen mit einbezogen. (Neoconservatismus, Libertarismus, christl. Fundamentalismus) aber es ist leicht das auch noch weiter aufzuteilen.

Hast du den Economist Artikel noch? Er würde mich interessieren. Genauso die Daten aus der letzten Woche über die Umfrage über D.

Ich habe mich in diesem Thread nur über die These der Neocons in der Außenpolitik ausgelassen.

Fukuyama hat in seinem Essay die Entwicklung der Neocons etwas umfassender angelegt.

Um über Irrtum und Wahrheit dieser Theorien zu entscheiden, ist es noch zu früh.

Mir würde es schon reichen, wenn die preemtive Interventionpolitik der Neocons von der Agenda der USA verschwinden würde.

Diese Theoretiker mit ihren Verzerrungen internationaler Rechtsnormen erinnern mich an die vermeintlichen Darwinisten, die angeben sich auf Darwin zu berufen aber immer nur den Calvinisten [urlHerbert Spencer]http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer[/url] meinen, der den sogenannten Sozial`darwinismus` als Feigenblatt für ein gutes Gewissen bei der Anhäufung von Reichtum entwickelt hat.

Da hätten wir schon zwei Grundpfeiler des augenblicklichen US-Handelns.

[Joerver]

[posting]20.277.434 von Joerver am 19.02.06 14:58:32[/posting]Man sollte seine Postings nach einem gewissen Abstand noch einmal durchlesen.
Einmal heißt es natürlich, der Prinz möge mir verzeihen, Schmankerl!
Dann kaufe ich auch noch ein `p` für `preemptiv`

[CaptainFutures]

Kann man eigentlich das Ende von etwas erklären, das noch gar nicht begonnen hat?

[Joerver]

Die Times hat auf der Seite mit dem Fukuyama-Artikel eine Umfrage gestartet. Leider wird nicht die Anzahl der Teilnehmer angegeben. Der Artikel war Most E-Mailed Artikel der Times der letzten Tage.

Es scheint doch entgegen der Annahme der Philamiisten und besonders der Bushisten, dass Fukuyama doch einigen Leuten bekannt sein dürfte.

Aber Verdrängung von Fakten war schon immer ein bewährtes Mittel, um sich nicht mit Änderungen auseinander setzen zu müßen. Und da haben wir hier im Forum einige ausgewiesene Spezialisten.

Und ihr größter Traum wäre Verbot von Copy und Paste, da Bücherverbrennungen wohl nicht mehr die richtige Wirkung erzielen würden.

Below are the current results:

Has the war in Iraq divided the neoconservative movement?

Yes:
70%

No:
30%

http://www.nytimes.com/ezpoll/20060219mag-neo.html

This informal survey and its results are not scientific and reflect the opinions of only those who have chosen to participate.

[Joerver]

Es soll keiner meinen mit dem Fukuyama-Artikel in der Times wäre die Diskussion über die US-Neocon-Aussenpolitik schon beendet.
Besonders die Leser des `Weekly Standard`, von denen es hier im Forum auch einige gibt, werden sich in der Neocon Hauspostille auf einigen Widerspruch der Angesprochenen, Kristol und Kagan, einrichten können.
Das Wesentliche an der Sache ist aber, dass die Neocons auf dem Abfallhaufen der Geschichte landen, auf den sie schon seit längerem hingehören.
Demokratie und Freiheit mit Waffengewalt durchzusetzen ist und bleibt eine unvergleichbare Perversion von Werten.

POLITICS-US:
"Leninists!" Cries Neo-Con Nabob, Suing for Divorce
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=32248

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 21 (IPS) - Fukuyama, best known for his post-Cold War essay proclaiming the historic inevitability of liberal democracy, "The End of History", argued in the Times article that neo-conservatives so badly miscalculated the myriad costs of the Iraq war that they may have empowered their two foreign policy nemeses -- realists, who disdain democracy promotion; and isolationists, who oppose foreign entanglements of almost any kind.

Even more provocatively, Fukuyama called the Standard`s editor, William Kristol, his ideological sidekick, Robert Kagan, and their neo-conservative comrades who led the drive to war in Iraq "Leninist" in their conviction that liberal democracy can be achieved through "coercive regime change" or imposed by military means.

"(T)he neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was ...Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will," according to Fukuyama. "Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States."

"Neoconservativism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought," he went on, "has evolved into something I can no longer support."

Fukuyama`s break with the neo-conservatives marks the latest -- albeit among the most spectacular -- fracture in the ongoing splintering of the Republican foreign policy elite that has included aggressive nationalists, such as Vice President Dick Cheney; the Christian Right; traditional realists in the mold of former President George H.W. Bush; as well as neo-conservatives.

His divorce from the movement is particularly remarkable given his long and close friendship -- dating back to his college days -- with former deputy defence secretary (and now World Bank President) Paul Wolfowitz, perhaps the neo-conservative movement`s most idealistic luminary. He also played a role in the development of the unilateralist Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an organisation founded in 1997 by Kristol and Kagan and designed to forge an alliance between the neo-conservatives, the Christian Right, and aggressive nationalists in the run-up to the 2000 elections.

Along with Cheney, Wolfowitz and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Fukuyama was one of just two dozen PNAC charter members. He also signed a 1998 PNAC letter to then-President Bill Clinton urging him to "undertake military action" aimed at "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power".

Indeed, as late as Sep. 20, 2001, nine days after 9/11, he signed another PNAC letter to Bush that also called for Hussein`s ouster "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack". Anything less, the letter argued, "will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism".

Despite those hawkish antecedents, Fukuyama had second thoughts even before the Iraq invasion, particularly about the democratic messianism and unilateralism with which the "war on terror" was being conducted.

In a December 2002 Wall Street Journal article, he warned that "the idealist project" of transforming the region may "come to look more like empire pure and simple" and that "it is not at all clear that the American public understand that it is getting into an imperial project as opposed to a brief in-and-out intervention in Iraq".

But by late 2004, he was writing that anyone -- particularly neo-conservatives -- who believed that the situation in Iraq would become sufficiently stable after elections in early 2005 for U.S. troops to begin withdrawing was "living in fantasyland".

And one year later, Fukuyama was already warning that failures in Iraq were paving the way for a return to U.S. isolationism. He believed that the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, coupled with Washington`s failure to marshal international support for its efforts in Iraq and its incompetence in stabilising the country, had largely destroyed its credibility as a "benevolent hegemon" to which the world, Kristol and Kagan confidently predicted, would willingly, if not eagerly, defer.

Fukuyama`s latest article, "After Neoconservatism", is essentially an elaboration of these ideas in a more comprehensive form, as well as a plea for a more modest and classically "conservative" foreign policy that, without abandoning "the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights", will also be conducted "without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about".

To Fukuyama, as to foreign policy realists among both Republicans and Democrats, events of the past few months, particularly the victory of Islamists in elections in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, as well as their strong showing in Egypt, has bolstered his critique of the neo-conservatives` project in the Middle East.

In his view, the way in which the Cold War ended created among neo-conservatives like Kristol and Kagan "an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside" -- and that Hussein`s Iraq would be no different.

"The war`s supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform," according to Fukuyama.

He noted that that expectation helps explain "the Bush administration`s incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq".

The administration and its neo-conservative backers also assumed, mistakenly, that the rest of the world would accept Washington`s unilateralism, including pre-emptive war, because, as a "benevolent hegemon", Washington would be seen as both more virtuous and more competent than other countries.

These delusions have come at a very high cost, according to Fukuyama, who, notwithstanding the sweeping pro-democracy rhetoric in which both Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continue to indulge, "the neo-conservative moment appears to have passed".

But Fukuyama is most concerned that these failures may spur an "anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians".

"What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a `realistic Wilsonianism` that better matches means to ends," he wrote in what appears to be a bid to delineate a new foreign policy consensus -- some already call it "neo-realism -- around which centrist Republicans and Democrats can rally.

Indeed, in the prescriptive part of his essay, he calls for "reconceptuali(sing) …foreign policy in several fundamental ways" that are broadly compatible with ideas put forward by critics in both parties.

These include "demilitaris(ing)" the "global war on terrorism" by focusing more on winning "hearts and minds;" relying less on "coalitions of the willing" and more in multilateral mechanisms "that can confer legitimacy on collective action;" and placing more emphasis on "rule of law and economic development," as well as democracy promotion, which "in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power."

"Neoconservativism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony," according to Fukuyama. "What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world." *****
(FIN/2006)


Copyright © 2006 IPS-Inter Press Service.

[minister.grasser]

DANKE JOERVER FÜR DEINEN LUSTIGEN KARIKATUREN THREAD







Die moralisierende urteilende Betroffenheits-Pose zum Abschluss verstehe ich zwar nicht, aber die gehört in gewissen Lagern offenbar zum guten Ton

[Joerver]

Als Ergänzung zu der vorher beschriebenen Politik der Neocons einen Artikel von David Brooks, der auch als Neocon gilt und auch für `Weekly Standard` schreibt, über die Möglichkeiten für Araber bzw. Moslems mit der Demokratie umzugehen.

Im Augenblick findet in den USA eine Diskussion über den Verkauf einiger großer Häfen an Dubai statt.

Dabei hat sich Bush ganz klar auf die Seite der Araber geschlagen.

Wie auch hier im Forum hat auch in den USA der Rassismus gegen Araber besonders gegenüber moslemischen Arabern überhand genommen.

Deshalb wird versucht, den Verkauf der Häfen mit Sicherheitsargumenten zu verhindern.

Aber viele dieser Argumente sind nichts anderes als ein Alibi für den antiarabischen und antiiislamische Rassismus, der sich nach dem 9/11 hier in Europa wie in den USA ausgebreitet hat.

Dieser Rassismus wird in den USA wie auch hier in Europa durch einige Hassprediger geschürt, wozu in den USA die erzkonservativen Chat-Show-Hosts gehören.

Nun der Artikel. Ich will nicht entscheiden, ob er nicht etwas zu viel Neocon-Gutmenschlike ist.

February 26, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Keeping the Faith in Democracy
By DAVID BROOKS
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/opinion/26brooks.html?p…

It`s like a conference of Kerenskys. I`ve come to Doha, Qatar, to a conference that brought Americans together with some of the leading moderates of the Arab world. These Muslims are democrats, activists and heroes. They`ve spent their lives promoting pluralism, championing elections and sometimes going to jail on behalf of the values we hold dear.

And their project, as they know, has been a failure. There is no mass support in the Arab world for the secular liberal democracies of their dreams. There are no giant rallies on their behalf, no prospects for their success. The urbane moderates at this conference are the short cut that failed.

So now these democrats face a choice: live with the corrupt regimes of the status quo or embrace the rising Islamist parties like Hamas.

Of the two, they prefer the Islamists. "I`ve been dealing with autocrats my whole life. At least these ones are honest," says Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian activist who recently served jail time for his efforts.

In the sessions, in the hallways, over meals, they fill your ears with their new convictions: The Hamas victory in Palestine was a step forward for democracy in the Middle East. Within a year, Hamas will have been transformed into a more moderate organization. The U.S. must now engage with Hamas.

Sure, the Arab moderates allow, the Islamists can sound radical, but so did Ariel Sharon once. There`s already been a "sea change," says Ziad Abu Amr, a Palestinian scholar who was recently elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Not long ago the Islamists insisted that democracy was incompatible with their faith. Now they run in municipal and national elections. Now they have internal primaries to determine party direction. Now they enforce cease-fires and seek "ways to achieve objectives other than violence," Amr says.

Soon they will even make agreements with Israel and, unlike Fatah, they will be disciplined enough to live up to them.

The reformers are betting their lives on Islamist moderation. "We Arab democrats know if the Islamic victories turn out badly, we will be the ones they come after," Ibrahim says. "Nevertheless, we are willing to take that risk. I am willing to take that risk."

The Arab reformers are proud of the elections that were held in the Palestinian territories. And they have faith, now more than ever, in the democratic creed — in the power of the democratic process to erode zealotry and encourage compromise.

It`s said that America is trying to impose democracy on the Middle East, but at this conference the Arabs have more faith in democracy than the Americans do. It`s the Americans who argue, politely, that beliefs, especially religious beliefs, are not malleable; that democracy does not quickly dissolve the granite of divinely inspired conviction. It`s the Americans who point out that the leaders of Hamas are willing to die for their beliefs and that it is condescending not to take their beliefs seriously.

And indeed, the leaders of Hamas are open about their convictions, and they have nothing to do with embracing democracy or peace. "The conflict with Israel is not a matter of land. It`s a matter of ideology," one Hamas supporter told David Remnick of The New Yorker recently. "The truth is on our side. The Israelis have the illusion that truth is on their side, but the Koran is the last revelation," said another.

Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy reminded his reformer friends at this conference that Hamas may be tactically brilliant, but it has never compromised on principle. Hamas, Satloff warns, will take "a difficult but resolvable national dispute and transform it into an irresolvable religious conflict."

And so while the Arab democrats remain upbeat, the Americans are more likely to be grim-eyed. While the Arabs assume that in the Middle East there is always a big gap between what people say and what they believe, the Americans are more likely to take people at their word.

There is one old guy from a famous family in Egypt who doesn`t fit either camp. He spoke in Arabic. He went on at embarrassing length, about the evils of homosexuality, about how the only proper meaning of democracy is obedience to God`s law. Everybody looked uncomfortable as he droned on. He had unpolished conference manners.

But this great contest of creeds — between democracy and orthodox Islam — will be resolved in the breasts of people like him, territory neither the reformers nor the Americans really understand.



* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

[CaptainFutures]

[posting]20.352.247 von minister.grasser am 23.02.06 21:56:51[/posting]Genau wie es ebenso in gewissen Lagern offenbar zum guten Ton gehört die nicht gleichgeschalteten Meinungsabweichler in die Nähe von Nazis und Faschisten zu stellen.

Habe übrigens im Lexikon mal nach neoliberal und Neocon gesucht, aber leider nichts gefunden.

Scheint sich also wiedermal um eine Phantomdiskussion ohne realen Hintergrund als Beschäftigungstherapie für oben genannte Lager zu handeln.

[Joerver]

Für die geistig etwas unterbelichteten.

Es heißt natürlich voll aus geschrieben [urlNeoconservatism]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservative[/url] bei Wikipedia.

So nun geh wieder spielen!

[webmaxx]

Vom gleichen Autor:

" War das erst der Anfang?
von Francis Fukuyama

Ritualmorde, Selbstmordattentate, Straßenschlachten. Was junge Muslime in die Arme des Islamismus treibt, ist vor allem die Frage nach der eigenen Identität. Das neue Zentrum der Ideologie liegt deshalb in Europa.

Im November 2004, vor exakt einem Jahr, wurde dem niederländischen Filmemacher Theo van Gogh von dem in den Niederlanden geborenen und fließend Niederländisch sprechenden Moslem Mohammed Bouyeri auf rituelle Weise die Kehle durchgeschnitten. Das Ereignis hat zu einem vollkommenen Wandel in der niederländischen Politik geführt. Verstärkte Polizeikontrollen haben dort seither jegliche Neuzuwanderung praktisch beendet. Zusammen mit den Anschlägen vom 7. Juli in London (ebenfalls begangen von Moslems, die in der zweiten Generation britische Staatsangehörige waren) sollte dieses Ereignis unser Bild von der Art der vom radikalen Islamismus ausgehenden Gefahr dramatisch verändern. Bislang haben wir den im Namen des Dschihad verübten Terrorismus als das Produkt einer dysfunktionalen Welt gesehen, das aus Ländern wie Afghanistan, Pakistan oder aus dem Nahen Osten in den Westen getragen wurde. Uns davor zu schützen, ist daher eher eine Frage der Abschottung oder, wie in den Augen der Regierung Bush, eine Frage des Anpackens, um das Problem durch die Verbreitung der Demokratie an der Wurzel zu beheben.
....

[webmaxx]

[posting]20.420.240 von webmaxx am 28.02.06 12:35:05[/posting]Fortsetzung:


http://www.cicero.de/97.php?ress_id=1&item=909

[INeedMoney]

!

Dieser Beitrag wurde vom System automatisch gesperrt. Bei Fragen wenden Sie sich bitte an [e-mail]

[INeedMoney]

Cognitive Dissonance & the New Amerikan Reich

von KosmikK - 15.02.2006 18:21

Is much of the world, certainly the occident, suffering from a serious form of cognitive dissonance?
"Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. It therefore occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be necessary for it to develop so that we become `open` to them."

Five years since the stealing of the 2000 US presidential election and nearly two years since a repeated computerized electoral theft in 2004, the vast majority of the US electorate have not yet woken up to the reality that their country has been hijacked by a small cabal of militarists who make Dr Strangelove look a cuddly moderate.

Certainly, the overall responsibility for the concealment of this frightening state-of-affairs must be laid at the door of the international mainstream media (MSM) which since the end of the ideological Cold War of the `eighties found itself lacking a serious contender for replacing the old Soviet Union as the scapegoat for all the evils of western capitalism. The `Red Menace` was a convenient bogeyman for western governments and provided a rationale for the otherwise unjustifiable spending of colossal amounts of public monies on a parasitical Military-Industrial complex.

Once the `Red Menace` disappeared over the horizon it had to be replaced with another propaganda big lie: `Terrorism` which quickly morphed into `the Threat from Islamic Terrorism` and which, thanks to utterly cynical political con-men such as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair and Howard, has now become `the threat from Islam` in a so called `clash of civilizations.`

Journalists, too, can be war criminals and many of them, in the US, UK and elsewhere became de facto war criminals by supporting an illegal war against Irak. Having once decided to take that course it was natural that journalists should embrace the `war of civilizations` as a rationale for what would otherwise only be described as psychopathic behaviour.

The behaviour of both politicians and journalists are essentially tribal. And when tribes go to war their leaders need to embellish their belligerence with rationales and big lies in order to mentally bamboozle and bully everyone into going along with them. Hence the use of emotionally coercive words like `threat` and `clash` where, in reality, both the threat and the clash are nothing more than of an artificially manufactured nature. Manufactured to manipulate the lumpen public into doing whatever their `leaders` might wish. Manufacture which leads to the artificial creation of a consensus reality which has no basis of truth outside its own bubble.

In a rapidly-changing world of increasing competition for a finite amount of natural `resources` we find ourselves in a time of Resource Wars with Oil being presently at the very top of the list. Now, there are very few folk around who are dumb enough to believe that the invasion of Irak and the impending attack on Iran are nothing more than a continuation of the current Resource Wars, wars being re-packaged and sold us as a `Perpetual War against Terrorism`. So how is it that so many of them appear to have bought the WMD story, in the case of Irak, and the `Nuclear Threat` story in the case of Iran?

Far from being a nuclear threat, Iran is today in danger of nuclear extinction from the very regimes that project their own belligerence on this non-nuclear country. The US and Israeli regimes, so far, have taken the leading part in threatening Iran. And, as usual, Washington`s quisling, Tony Blair and his cohort Jack Straw, have done so much of the diplomatic machinations required to get others to toe the line in order to use the United Nations as a pretence for what is a fait accompli.

That fait accompli was decided upon by a semi-secret cabal of warmongers described as `neo-conservatives` when they prepared their blueprint for total world domination, the Project for a New American Century. The neocon`s mentor and guru, Leo Strauss, based his machiavellian ideology on the belief that humans are basically evil and need to be governed. In order to govern effectively one has to create an enemy and then focus public attention on that enemy. Through doing so a state of perpetual war can be justified and this, in turn, would ensure that the public remain manipulable and under total control.

When the neocons` puppet, George Bush, Jr describes Americans as "a warlike nation" what he is really saying is that his country has been taken over in a coup d`etat by a cabal of warmongers. Warmongers who despise everything that the US Constitution and Bill of Rights stands for and who have every intention of turning the USA into a totalitarian state. And in five years they have already done most of the work necessary to dismantle the constitutional structures of checks and balances which were deliberately created by the founding fathers of the USA precisely in order to protect it from becoming a dictatorship.

All this has been performed in a lightning blitzkrieg which has left the public stunned into shock and awe, unable to believe that good old Uncle Sam could have so rapidly become a serial-killer gangster out to control and destroy everyone and everything he cannot control. How to reconcile this terrible nightmare with all the assuring fantasies of the American Dream so effectively sold to its own public and the rest of the world over so many decades? Surely we went to Irak to topple an evil dictator. And we might have to use force to stop the Mad Mullahs from developing an evil Islamic bomb.

Cognitive dissonance: "a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation."

Is mass cognitive dissonance leading to the creation of a prison planet ruled by barbarians the kind of which this world has never known before? The mass trance under which so many have been put will not only lead to the creation of a perpetual war culture but to a way of life devoid of humane feelings towards all the other countless human beings who will be cruelly and inevitably sacrificed in order that we might survive.

This is the reality to which we must all wake up and `smell the coffee` now. For if we do not it is only just a very short time before we, too, become the new nazis` blood-sacrifice.

Homepage:: http://chimesofreedom.blogspot.com/ |

http://www.germany.indymedia.org/2006/02/139063.shtml

[INeedMoney]

http://www.zmag.de/artikel.php?id=1744

Tod ist Leben, Niederlage Sieg
von Robert Fisk
The Independent / ZNet 27.02.2006

ZNet > Naher Osten >
In Bezug auf den Mittleren Osten "überarbeitet" so ziemlich jeder die Geschichte. Dennoch hat es wohl noch nie eine US-Administration gegeben, die so bewusst unredlich und rücksichtslos Tragödie zu Erfolg, Niederlage zu Sieg und Tod zu Leben umdeklariert hat, und ich muss hinzufügen, dass die amerikanische Presse hierbei Komplize ist. Dabei fühle ich mich weniger an Vietnam erinnert, vielmehr an jene französischen und britischen Kommandeure im Ersten Weltkrieg, die immer wieder die Lügenmär vom (möglichen) Militärsieg über den deutschen Kaiser verbreiteten, während sie Hunderttausende ihrer Männer durch das Schlachthaus Somme, Verdun und Gallipoli trieben. Im Unterschied dazu treiben wir heute Hunderttausende Araber durch das Schlachthaus - es interessiert uns nicht einmal.

Letzte Woche kam eine von Bushs blindesten Fledermäusen - seine Außenministerin Condoleezza Rice - zu Besuch nach Beirut. Rices Besuch war typisch für jene Grausamkeit, die derzeit in Washington herrscht. Sie sprach kühn von knospenden "Demokratien" im Mittleren Osten. Das Blutbad im Irak ignorierte sie auf ganzer Linie ebenso wie die wachsenden sektiererischen Spannungen im Libanon, in Ägypten und Saudi-Arabien. Der Schlüssel zum Verständnis dieser Art von Gleichgültigkeit dürfte Rices Aussage vor dem Senats-Komitee für Internationale Angelegenheiten sein, wo sie den Iran als "die größte strategische Herausforderung" verurteilte, der sich die USA in der Region gegenübersähen. Der Iran greife zu politischen Mitteln, "die im Widerspruch stehen zu der Art von Mittlerer Osten, wie ihn die Vereinigten Staaten anstreben".

BUSH GLAUBT NUR DANN AN SELBSTBESTIMMUNG, WENN ER DER SELBSTBESTIMMER IST...

Bouthaina Shaaban ist einer der klügsten Köpfe der syrischen Regierung - eine durchaus nicht nur mit klugen Köpfen gesegnete Regierung. Shaaban sagt: "Was soll das für eine Art Mittlerer Osten sein, den die Vereinigten Staaten anstreben? Sollen die Staaten des Mittleren Ostens sich etwa an Vorstellungen anpassen, die jenseits des Ozeans entworfen werden?" Maureen Dowd, die beste und, ehrlich gesagt, auch einzig lesenswerte Kommentatorin der langweiligen New York Times schrieb im Februar, Bush "glaubt nur dann an Selbstbestimmung, wenn er der Selbstbestimmer ist... Die Bushies sind mehr besessen davon, die Amerikaner auszuspionieren, als auszuloten, wie man in anderen Kulturen denkt und reagiert" - und besessen davon, sich mit Schurkenregimen einzulassen, hätte sie noch ergänzen können.

Nehmen wir zum Beispiel Donald Rumsfeld, jenen anzuklagenden Menschen, der mithalf, das "Shock-and-awe"-Fiasko im Irak auszulösen. In der Trümmerlandschaft des Irak sitzen mehr als 100 000 Amerikaner in der Falle fest. Derweil reist Rumsfeld fröhlich durch Nordafrika, um sich mit einigen der hässlichsten Diktatoren auf Amerikas Seite zu konsultieren - unter anderem mit dem tunesischen Präsidenten Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Ben Ali ist der Mann mit dem größten Geheimdienst in der arabischen Welt; seine Polizei hat die Methoden perfektioniert, wie man "Terrorverdächtigen" Informationen entlockt. Die Gefangenen werden nach unten gedrückt, dann stopft man ihnen in Bleichmittel getränkte Lappen in den Mund, bis sie fast ertrinken.

VERGEWALTIGUNG, DANN ENTSORGUNG DURCH EIN HINRICHTUNGSKOMMANDO

Diese Methode haben die Tunesier vom Nachbarn Algerien gelernt - wo man sich übrigens noch kruderer Methoden bedient. Viele der insgesamt 150 000 Opfer im algerischen Krieg gegen die Islamisten gehen auf das Konto der Todesschwadronen der algerischen Regierung. Ich selbst habe einige dieser Algerier in London interviewt (sie hatten Alpträume, also beschlossen sie, in London Asyl zu beantragen). Diese Leute sagten mir, in Algerien würden die Opfer nackt auf einer Leiter festgebunden. Sollte die "Chiffon-"Folter (Folter mit dem Lappen) versagen, stecke man dem Opfer ein Rohr in die Kehle und leite Wasser aus einem Wasserhahn in den Schlund - bis der Gefangene sich aufblähe wie ein Ballon. Es gäbe eine spezielle Abteilung zur Folter von Frauen (in der Polizeistation Chateauneuf, falls es Donald Rumsfeld interessiert). Alle Frauen würden vergewaltigt, bevor man sie den Hinrichtungskommandos zur "Entsorgung" übergebe.

Ich erwähne das alles nur, weil Rumsfeld sich jetzt auch an Algerien anbiedert. Im Februar, bei seinem Besuch in Algier, verkündete Rumsfeld: "Die Vereinigten Staaten und Algerien verbindet eine facettenreiche Beziehung. Diese besteht unter anderem in politischer und wirtschaftlicher Zusammenarbeit sowie (in einer Kooperation) von Militär zu Militär. Wir wissen die Kooperation, die uns auf dem Gebiet des Counterterrorismus zuteil wird, wirklich sehr zu schätzen..." Ich gehe davon aus, die "Chiffon-"Technik ist leicht zu erlernen, ebenso die Misshandlung von Gefangenen - siehe Abu Ghraib, um nur ein Beispiel zu nennen. Derzeit tut man übrigens so, als sei Abu Ghraib der Fehler von ein paar Journalisten und nicht der Fehler von ein paar amerikanischen Schurken.

In seinem jüngsten Statement verteidigte Rumsfeld die Praxis des Pentagons, mittels Bestechung wünschenswerte Nachrichten im Irak einzukaufen. Rumsfeld spricht von einer "unorthodoxen Methode, um akkurate Informationen zu liefern". Das ist sein jüngster, fantasievoller Versuch, den Zusammenbruch, den das amerikanische Regime in Bagdad erleidet, zu kaschieren. Gleichzeitig griff Rumsfeld unsere Art der Berichterstattung über die Folter in Abu Ghraib mit den Worten an: "Überlegen Sie mal kurz, wie enorm viele Zeilen und TV-Stunden sich mit der Gefangenenmisshandlung (!) in Abu Ghraib beschäftigen und vergleichen Sie dies mit dem Umfang der Berichterstattung, sagen wir mal über die gefundenen Massengräber Saddam Husseins beziehungsweise deren Verurteilung, sie (die Gräber) waren gefüllt mit Hunderttausenden unschuldiger Iraker".

Entlarven wir diese freche Lüge: Schon 1983 hatten wir das üble Regime Saddam Husseins bloßgestellt - vor allem den Gaseinsatz. Saddams Schergen hatten mir damals ein Einreisevisum für Irak verweigert, weil ich deren üble Folterpraxis - ausgerechnet in Abu Ghraib - offengelegt hatte. Und was tat Rumsfeld zu der Zeit? Er besuchte Bagdad und katzbuckelte vor Saddam Hussein. Er erwähnte ihm gegenüber nicht die Mörder und nicht die Massengräber - obwohl er durchaus davon wusste. Vielmehr bat er das Biest von Bagdad um Wiedereröffnung der amerikanischen Botschaft im Irak.

Mit den üblichen Höflingen im Schlepptau gibt es allerdings kein Problem für Rumsfeld - siehe George Melloans kürzliches Interview mit dem Biest von Washington in einer Boeing 737: "Großzügig räumt er mir Zeit für einen Plausch ein, der sich um die Verteidigungsstrategie dreht. Helles Sonnenlicht strömt herein, beleuchtet sein Gesicht... Während ich ihm am Tisch gegenübersitze - hoch über den Wolken - frage ich mich, reicht die Macht dieses Blitze auf Gesetzesübertreter schleudernden modernen Jehovas aus für jene Aufgaben, die seiner noch harren?"

Tragödie und Mythenpflege gehen Hand in Hand. Die monumentale Katastrophe im Irak - nur noch Routine. Es ist eine monumentale Katastrophe ohne Konturen, ein sich entwickelnder "Bürgerkrieg". Die Amerikaner haben den Rahmen geliefert für das Desaster, doch heute wird das als Krieg Iraker gegen Iraker dargestellt. Man tut so, als habe Amerikas große, brutale Besatzung nichts mit der schrecklichen Gewalt zu tun, die sich derzeit im Irak abspielt. Sie sprengen sich gegenseitig die Moscheen in die Luft? Sie wollen sich einfach nicht vorwärtsbewegen. Wir sagen ihnen, rauft euch zu einer nicht-sektiererischen Regierung zusammen, aber sie lehnen ab. Letzteres wird meiner Meinung nach die Parole sein, wenn die Amerikaner im Irak von der nächsten großen Welle überrollt werden.

1920 erhoben sich die Iraker gegen die Britenherrschaft im Land. Winston Churchill bezeichnete den Irak damals als "undankbaren Vulkan". Lehnen wir uns zurück, genießen wir die Aussicht: Demokratie für den Mittleren Osten, die Menschen werden mehr Freiheiten genießen. Geschichte zähle nicht, nur die Zukunft. Wie aber sieht die Zukunft der Menschen im Mittleren Osten wirklich aus? Mit jedem Tag düsterer und noch blutiger. Ich denke, alles wird davon abhängen, ob unser "Jehova" seinen Job erledigen kann, während das grelle Sonnenlicht hereinströmt und sein Gesicht blendet.

[Joerver]

Erst mal eine Anzahlung.

Der Rest kommt zum Wochende.*






*Ich will weniger posten

[INeedMoney]

[posting]20.477.998 von Joerver am 03.03.06 00:20:51[/posting]

[Joerver]

Dafür dass es keine Neocons gibt, wird sehr viel über diese geschrieben.
Vielleicht ein Hinweis an deren Anhänger hier im Board:
Ein Satz würde viele Diskusionen beruhigen:
We were wrong.

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/262583_neoconswrong12.…

What the neocons failed to foresee about Iraq
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/262583_neoconswrong12.…

Sunday, March 12, 2006

By RUPERT CORNWELL
THE INDEPENDENT

It has taken more three years, the loss of tens of thousands of Iraqi and American lives, and the expenditure of $200 billion -- all to achieve a chaos verging on open civil war. But finally the neoconservatives who sold the United States on this disastrous war are starting to utter three small words.

We were wrong.

The second thoughts have spread across the conservative spectrum, from William Buckley, venerable editor of the National Review, to Andrew Sullivan, once editor of the New Republic, now influential commentator and blogmeister.

The patrician, conservative, Washington Post columnist George Will was gently skeptical from the outset. He now glumly concludes that all three members of the original "axis of evil" -- not only Iran and North Korea but also Iraq -- "are more dangerous than when that term was coined in 2002."

Neither Buckley nor Sullivan concedes that the decision to topple Saddam Hussein was intrinsically wrong. But "the challenge required more than (President Bush`s) deployable resources," the former sadly recognizes. "The American objective in Iraq has failed."

For Sullivan, today`s mess is above all a testament to American overconfidence and false assumptions, born of arrogance and naiveté. But he, too, asserted, in a column in Time magazine last week, that all may not be lost.

Of all the critiques, however, the most profound is that of Francis Fukuyama, in his forthcoming book "America at the Crossroads." Its subtitle is "Democracy, Power and the Neo-Conservative Legacy," and that legacy, Fukuyama argues, is fatally poisoned.

This is no ordinary thesis, but apostasy on a grand scale. Fukuyama, after all, was the most prominent intellectual who signed the 1997 "Project for the New American Century," the founding manifesto of neoconservatism drawn up by William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, the house journal of the neoconservative movement.

The Project for the New American Century aimed to cement for all time America`s triumph in the Cold War, by increasing defense spending, challenging regimes that were hostile to U.S. interests and promoting freedom and democracy around the world. Its goal was "an international order friendly to our security, prosperity and values." The war on Iraq, spuriously justified by the supposed threat posed by Saddam`s weapons of mass destruction, was the test run of this theory. It was touted as a panacea for every ill of the Middle East.

The road to Jerusalem, the neocons argued, led through Baghdad. And after Iraq, why not Syria, Iran and anyone else who stood in Washington`s way?

All that, Fukuyama now acknowledges, has been a tragic conceit. Like the Leninists of old, he writes, the neoconservatives reckoned that they could drive history forward with the right mixture of power and will. However, "Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States."

But was it not Fukuyama who claimed in his most celebrated work, "The End of History and the Last Man," that the whole world was locked on a glide path to liberal, free market, democracy? Yes indeed. But that book, he points out, argued that the process was gradual, and must unfold at its own pace.

But not only were the neocons too impatient. A second error was to believe that an all-powerful America would be trusted to exercise a "benevolent hegemony." A third was the gross overstatement of the post-9/11 threat posed by radical Islam, in order to justify the dubious doctrine of preventive war.

Finally, there was the blatant contradiction between the neocons` aversion to government meddling at home and their childlike faith in their ability to impose massive social engineering in foreign and utterly unfamiliar countries like Iraq. Thence sprang the mistakes of the occupation period.

Some however are resolutely unswayed. In the latest Weekly Standard Kristol accuses Fukuyama of losing his nerve -- of wanting to "retrench, hunker down and let large parts of the world go to hell in a handbasket, hoping the hand basked won`t blow up in our faces."

Christopher Hitchens, the one-time Trotskyist turned neocon fellow traveler and eternal polemicist, derides Fukuyama for "conceding to the fanatics and beheaders the claim that they are a response to American blunders and excesses," and for yearning for a return of Kissingerian realism in foreign affairs.

The fact, however, remains that future Bush policy-makers who signed the project manifesto nine years ago are now mostly gone. Paul Wolfowitz, the war`s most relentless and starry-eyed promoter, has moved on to the World Bank, silent about the mess he did so much to create. Richard Perle, leader of the resident hawks department at the think tank the American Enterprise Institute, has vanished from the scene. Lewis Libby, meanwhile, has stepped down as Vice President Dick Cheney`s chief of staff, to focus his energy on staying out of jail.

Yet another signatory was Zalmay Khalilzad, now the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Last week even he -- Afghan-born and the one original neocon who had the region in his blood -- admitted that the invasion had opened a Pandora`s box that could see the Iraq conflict spread across the entire Middle East.

Those who are left in the administration -- primarily Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- are not so much neoconservatives as Hobbesian unilateralists, concerned to protect and advance U.S. national interests in a lawless and violent world, whatever it takes.

As for Condoleezza Rice, never a signed-up member of the movement but mostly sympathetic to it when she was the president`s security adviser, she has metamorphosed from hawk into pragmatist with her move from the White House to the State Department.

It is on George W. Bush`s lips that neoconservatism most obviously survives -- in the commitment to spreading freedom and democracy that he proclaims almost daily, and most hubristically in his second inaugural in 2005, which promised to banish tyranny from the Earth.

But even the extravagant oratory of that icy January day cannot obscure the irony of America`s Iraq adventure. The application of a doctrine built upon the supposed boundlessness of U.S. power has succeeded only in exposing the limits of that power.

Thus chastened, Fukuyama now wants to temper the idealism of the neoconservative doctrine with an acceptance that some things are not so easy to change and that the United States must cut its cloth accordingly. He calls it "realistic Wilsonianism." A better description might be neorealism. And if that brings a smile to the face of a certain former U.S. high priest of realism with a pronounced German accent, who can blame him?

Rupert Cornwell writes for The Independent in Britain.

© 1998-2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Joerver]

Hoffnung besteht immer!




http://www.ucomics.com/rallcom/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Rall

[Joerver]

Nun einem Monat nach dem Artikel der NYTimes kommt der Spiegel auch auf den Trichter und bemerkt, dass der ehemalige Vordenker des US-Neokonservativismus der Bush-Regierung den Rücken gekehrt hat.
Nebenbei bemerkt die Diskussion über die Existenz der Neocons erinnert mich sehr an die Diskussion über Bielefeld.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 21. März 2006, 15:09
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/0,1518,407074,00.h…


Francis Fukuyama

Abschied von den Neocons

Von Sebastian Moll, New York

Nach der missglückten Invasion im Irak kehren ehemalige Vordenker des US-Neokonservativismus der Bush-Regierung den Rücken. Vor allem Francis Fukuyama erregt mit einem neuen Buch Aufsehen, das mit der Doktrin vom Unilateralismus der heilsbringenden Nation USA gründlich aufräumt.

Francis Fukuyama hat eine Affinität zu Prozessen, die nicht umkehrbar sind. Es ist ein schon beinahe teutonischer Hang zum Fatalen, der den Vordenker der amerikanischen neokonservativen Bewegung auszeichnet. Seinen Namen machte sich Fukuyama 1992 mit dem Bestseller "The End of History and the Last Man", dem der deutsche Verlag den zugespitzten Titel "Das Ende des Menschen" gab.

Jetzt erregt Fukuyama in den USA Aufsehen mit einem Aufsatz, der wiederum ein Ende proklamiert: "Nach dem Neokonservativismus" hieß sein Elaborat in der "New York Times" Ende Februar - es war nicht weniger als ein Abgesang auf den Neokonservatismus. Vergangene Woche erschien der Aufsatz in Buchform unter dem Titel "America at the Crossroads" - Amerika am Scheideweg.

Die politische Philosophie des Neokonservativismus hatte laut Fukuyama ihre 15 Minuten im Rampenlicht kurz nach dem 11. September 2001. Genauer gesagt im Jahre 2002, als die Bush-Regierung eine nationale Sicherheitsstrategie adaptierte, der eine neokonservative politische Philosophie zugrunde lag: Die sogenannte Bush-Doktrin erhob Unilateralismus, amerikanischen Exzeptionalismus sowie die missionarische Selbstverpflichtung, Demokratie des amerikanischen Typus rund um den Globus zu verbreiten, zum Grundsatz amerikanischer Außenpolitik. Vier Jahre später kommt Fukuyama nun zu dem Schluss, dass George W. Bush es mit seiner Irak-Invasion vermasselt hat. Und dass der Präsident damit das komplette Gedankengut des Neokonservativismus in Misskredit gebracht habe.

Er selbst jedenfalls findet sich von der Außenpolitik der ersten Regierungsperiode von Bush gründlich missverstanden. So habe er in "Das Ende des Menschen" keinesfalls sagen wollen, dass alle Völker dieser Erde demokratische Nationalstaaten werden wollen. Er habe viel mehr argumentiert, dass die meisten Völker der Erde gerne modern wären - mit Zugang zu Wohlstand und zu fortgeschrittener Technologie.

"Ich kann das nicht mehr unterstützen"

Das wirklich entscheidende Missverständnis liege jedoch darin, dass die Bush-Regierung und jene Ideologen, die noch immer die Irak-Invasion verteidigen, glauben, man könne die Geschichte mit Gewalt beschleunigen. "Mein Buch von 1992 war sozusagen marxistisch - es beschrieb einen langfristigen Prozess sozialer Evolution", sagt Fukuyama. Die Position von Neokonservativen wie William Kristol und Robert Kagan (jene Fraktion der neokonservativen Clique, die noch immer zu Bush halten) sei hingegen leninistisch - sie wollen Geschichte übers Knie brechen. "Leninismus aber war eine Tragödie und ist nun als Farce in Amerika wieder geboren worden. Ich kann das nicht mehr unterstützen."

Die schlimmste Folge der für ihn schon fast karikaturhaften Missinterpretation seines Denkens ist laut Fukuyama das andauernde Chaos im Irak. Der Irrglaube, dass menschliche Gesellschaften sich automatisch als Demokratien organisieren, wenn man nur die Diktatoren absetzt, habe die Bush-Regierung dazu verleitet, sich mangelhaft auf die Zeit nach der Invasion vorzubereiten - eine fatale Fehleinschätzung.

Das sei jedoch nicht der einzige Lapsus Bushs und nicht die einzige fehlerhafte Interpretation der neokonservativen Doktrin gewesen. Der Gedanke einer "wohltätigen Hegemonialmacht", die sich über internationale Institutionen hinwegsetzt, funktioniere nicht. Die internationale Staatengemeinschaft sei nicht dazu bereit, der USA einen Sonderstatus einzuräumen, nur weil sie behauptet, den Menschen Freiheit, Demokratie und Reichtum bringen zu wollen. Und der Wille der amerikanischen Bevölkerung, Abenteuer in der ganzen Welt zu unterstützen und zu finanzieren, habe sich ebenfalls als begrenzt erwiesen.

Abkehr der Intellektuellen

Noch nicht alle Neokonservativen in den USA haben wie Francis Fukuyama der Regierung Bush den Rücken gekehrt. Als Fukuyama im Sommer 2004 erstmals in der Neocon-Zeitschrift "The National Interest" seine Kritik am Irak-Krieg formulierte, blies ihm aus dem eigenen Lager heftige Empörung entgegen. Sein Freund und Mentor Charles Krauthammer schrieb in der "Washington Post" eine Erwiderung, in der er Fukuyamas Thesen als "atemberaubend unzusammenhängend" beschimpfte. Norman Podhoertz schrieb eine 40-Seiten lange Verteidigung der Bush-Regierung mit dem Titel "Der Vierte Weltkrieg: Wie er begann, was er bedeutet und warum wir gewinnen müssen."

Allerdings gab selbst Podhoertz zu, dass im Irak einiges schief gelaufen sei. Und auch Jeane Kirkpatrick, die frühere Uno-Botschafterin und ebenfalls Neokonservative in vorderster Front, hat mehrfach Zweifel an der Weisheit der Irak-Invasion angemeldet. Kirkpatrick möchte allerdings die Debatte über den Neokonservativismus und jene über den Irak-Krieg auseinander halten. Sie hofft, dass der Präsident der Bewegung noch nicht allzu viel Schaden zugefügt hat.

Sie möchte außerdem gerade rücken, dass Neokonservativismus eben nicht gleichbedeutend mit amerikanischem Imperialismus ist. Im Kern sei Neokonservativismus vor allem antitotalitär - die jüdischen Intellektuellen, die in den vierziger Jahren in New York als erste neokonservative Ideen formulierten, waren vor allem durch den Widerstand gegen Hitler und Stalin motiviert. Gleichzeitig wende sich die Bewegung gegen jene Form von zynischer Realpolitik im Stile Henry Kissingers, die es Amerika in der Vergangenheit erlaubt hat, sich bisweilen mit üblen Regimes einzulassen.

Besinnung auf die neokonservativen Werte

Diese Werte möchte die gemäßigte Neocon-Fraktion von Leuten wie Fukuyama und Kirkpatrick nun versuchen zu retten. Fukuyama glaubt, dass dazu nach der Irak-Misere ein gründliches Umdenken nötig ist. Statt der alten Alternativen Realpolitik oder Neokonservativismus schlägt er das vor, was er vorsichtig als "Wilsonismus" bezeichnet. Amerika solle sich weiterhin für die Verbreitung von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Demokratie sowie für die Bekämpfung von Armut rund um den Erdball einsetzen, dabei aber doch bitte etwas mehr Vernunft walten lassen, als dies die erste Regierung Bush getan hat.

Das bedeute etwa, die Außenpolitik zu entmilitarisieren und wieder mit multinationalen Institutionen zusammen zu arbeiten. Beides Dinge, die, wie Fukuyama mit vorsichtigem Optimismus bemerkt, die zweite Regierung Bush und vor allem das Außenministerium unter Condoleezza Rice bereits tun. Die Bush-Administration sprintet geradezu von der Politik ihrer ersten Legislatur-Periode weg", schreibt Fukuyama. Der Erz-Neokonservative Paul Wolfowitz ist nicht mehr im Weißen Haus, Donald Rumsfeld scheint an Einfluss zu verlieren und Rice verfolgt, was Iran und Nordkorea angeht, einen vorsichtigen Multilateralismus.

Der neokonservative Moment in der amerikanischen Politik scheint damit erst einmal vorbei zu sein. Zumindest jene kurze Periode, in der hitzige Ideologen einen unheilvollen Einfluss auf die amerikanische Außenpolitik nehmen konnten. Mit Fukuyama und Kirkpatrick meldet sich nun allerdings ein freundlicherer Neokonservativismus zu Wort. Einer gar, gegen den einem lange nach dem Ende der großen Ideologien kaum weltanschauliche Einwände einfallen. Und so wird am Ende ihres großen Auftritts klar, dass die Neocons noch nie eine einheitliche Front waren, keine Art finstere Loge, die nach dem 11. September die Kontrolle über das Gehirn von George W. Bush übernommen hat. Es war wohl eher eine komplexe, differenzierte Denkrichtung, die im Rausch des Augenblicks deutlich über das Ziel hinaus geschossen ist.

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2006

[Joerver]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 20.904.798 von Joerver am 22.03.06 11:38:35

Der Spiegel bringt auch noch ein Interview mit Fukuyama. Und alles über Leute, die es nicht gibt.

Die neue W;O Technik ist gewöhnungsbedürftigt. Viele Möglichkeiten an zusätzlichen Tools für die Gestaltung der Postings werden nicht mehr angeboten. Manch einem User werden diese zusätzlichen Möglichkeiten fehlen.
Aber vielleicht rüstet W;O noch nach.
Soviel Aufwand und es kommt keine Verbesserung zustande. Einen Fortschritt sehe ich nicht.
Es sieht alles so aus, als ob Hühner über ein frischgeharktes Beet gelaufen sind.

SPIEGEL ONLINE - 24. März 2006, 18:30
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,407491,00.html

Gewandelter Wortführer

"Die Neocons zogen die falschen Schlüsse"

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,407491,00.html

Francis Fukuyama war einer der Wortführer der Neokonservativen - bis die Bush-Regierung ins Weiße Haus einzog. SPIEGEL ONLINE sprach mit Fukuyama über die Fehler im Irak, die in Misskredit geratenen Neocons und Europas gefährlichen Anti-Amerikanismus.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In ihrem neuen Buch "Scheitert Amerika? - Supermacht am Scheideweg" verwerfen sie alle politischen Ansichten, die sie während ihrer akademischen Laufbahn vertreten haben. Sie sind kein Neokonservativer mehr. Was ist passiert?

Francis Fukuyama: Irak ist passiert. Schon vor vier Jahren habe ich angefangen, mich vom Neokonservatismus zu distanzieren. Ich hielt den Krieg für keine gute Idee. Das war 2002, als die Invasion des Iraks immer näher rückte.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Warum? Immerhin ist der feste Glaube an die Demokratie und ihre Verbreitung einer der neokonservativen Grundsätze.

Fukuyama: Ich war mir nicht sicher, ob die Vereinigten Staaten den Übergang zu einer demokratischen Regierung im Irak bewältigen könnten. Wenn ich auf den Verlauf der amerikanischen Einmärsche im 20. Jahrhundert zurückblicke, vor allem auf die in der Karibik und in Lateinamerika, dann hatten wir ständig das Problem, unser Demokratieverständnis nicht durchsetzten zu können. Vor dem Irak-Krieg war klar: Wenn wir das ordentlich machen wollen, müssen wir uns dort für mindestens fünf bis zehn Jahre verpflichten. Aber die Bush-Regierung hat die amerikanische Bevölkerung darauf nicht vorbereitet. Stattdessen war deutlich, dass die Leute um Bush den Irak einfach nur billig abhandeln wollten. Sie dachten, sie könnten in weniger als einem Jahr ein- und wieder abmarschieren.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Woher kam dieser Glaube? War es Naivität, Anmaßung oder einfach nur Ignoranz?

Fukuyama: Viele der Neokonservativen haben aus dem Ende des Kalten Krieges und dem Zerfall des Kommunismus die falschen Schlüsse gezogen. Sie haben das verallgemeinert: Ihrer Meinung nach sind alle totalitären Regimes grundsätzlich hohl im Inneren, und wenn man ihnen einen kleinen Schubs von außen gibt, fallen sie in sich zusammen. Vor dem Fall der Berliner Mauer dachten die meisten Leute, dass der Kommunismus noch eine lange Zeit bestehen würde. Aber er verschwand 1989 innerhalb von sieben oder acht Monaten. Das verzerrte die Denkweise über die Natur von Diktaturen, und die Neokonservativen zogen den falschen Vergleich zwischen Osteuropa und dem Nahen Osten.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Es gab mehrere Rechtfertigungen von der Bush-Regierung für die Irak-Invasion. Dazu zählt die Verbreitung von Demokratie, die Angst vor Massenvernichtungswaffen und Terrorismus. Übrig geblieben ist aber nur das Demokratie-Argument. Das scheint in den USA aber nicht viel zu zählen.

Fukuyama: Umfragen weisen darauf hin, dass das Demokratieprojekt nicht viel Sympathie bekommt, vor allen Dingen nicht von den republikanischen Wähler. Wenn Bush den Leuten im Land vor dem Krieg erzählt hätte, wie viele Billionen Dollar wir ausgeben würden und wie viele tausend Tote wir zuliebe der Demokratie opfern würden - im Weißen Haus hätte man ihn ausgelacht.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Wenn man sich den Irak heute anguckt, wäre diese Skepsis durchaus angebracht gewesen.

Fukuyama: Der Irak ist eine Aufzuchtstätte des Terrors geworden. Positive Effekte gibt es dort kaum. Gewalt und Instabilität werden anhalten. Eine Modelldemokratie wird im Irak nicht entstehen und ebenso wenig eine weitere Welle der Demokratisierung im Nahen Osten auslösen.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Die letzten Ergebnisse von demokratischen oder quasi-demokratischen Wahlen in der Region waren nicht besonders vielversprechend. Es gibt die Hamas in den Palästinensischen Autonomiegebieten, Mahmud Ahmadinedschad in Iran, ausgedehnteren Einfluss der Muslimbrüderschaft in Ägypten und pro-iranische Schiiten, die mehr oder weniger das Sagen im Irak haben. Wie kann denn behauptet werden, dass Demokratie dieser Region gut tun würde?

Fukuyama: Das ist eine komplizierte Sache. Ich stimme mit Außenministerin Condoleezza Rice überein, dass es nicht möglich ist, die Kräfte zurückzuhalten, die derzeit auf einen sozialen Wandel im Land drängen, indem wir autoritäre Regime unterstützen. Unglücklicherweise gehören viele der führenden Stimmen zu islamistischen Gruppen. Auf lange Sicht wird ihre Meinung sowieso gehört werden - egal, was man macht. Unsere Aufgabe ist es, sie und ihre Politik in eine demokratische Form zu bekommen.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mit anderen Worten ist die derzeitige Radikalisierung also der erste Schritt in einer Debatte?

Fukuyama: Es ist der erste Schritt in einem sehr, sehr langen Prozess. Aber ich stimme nicht mit der Bush-Regierung überein, dass dies eine nötige Phase ist, um den Krieg gegen den Terrorismus zu gewinnen. Falls das so wäre, würden wir in 30 Jahren immer noch dagegen angehen. Aber es ist Teil einer breiteren Bewegung von politischen Veränderungen im Nahen Osten und ich glaube nicht, dass man das stoppen kann.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Während seiner ersten Amtszeit hat Präsident Bush seine Doktrin präsentiert, die es den Vereinigten Staaten erlaubt, im Notfall präventiv anzugreifen. Warum haben die USA geglaubt, dass die Welt das akzeptieren würde?

Fukuyama: Wir glaubten, dass die Motive der Vereinigten Staaten besser sind als die von anderen Leuten und dass man uns diese Art von Macht anvertrauen kann. Die Neokonservativen haben gedacht, dass Amerika moralischer sei als andere Länder und dass andere Leute verstehen, dass unsere Hegemonie so viel wohlwollender ist als die von vergangenen Imperien. Das haben sie falsch eingeschätzt.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Der Irak-Krieg hat eine Welle des Anti-Amerikanismus in Europa ausgelöst. Ist das vielleicht der größte Schaden, den er angerichtet hat?

Fukuyama: Der Irak-Krieg hat natürlich eine ganze Menge Schaden in allen möglichen Bereichen angerichtet. Es wird mindestens eine Generation dauern, um die vorherige Modellrolle Amerikas und den Respekt, den es genossen hat, in der Welt wieder herzustellen. Wenn wir jetzt von Demokratie sprechen, denken die Leute doch nur an Abu Ghureib und Guantanamo.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Hat Europa es sich zu einfach gemacht, indem es sich einfach zurückgelehnt und die Vereinigten Staaten kritisiert, während es sich kaum um die Brennpunkte in der Welt gekümmert hat?

Fukuyama: Viele Europäer haben einen schon fast maßlosen Anti-Amerikanismus angenommen. Mehr als die meisten Amerikaner schätze ich viele der Kritikpunkte der Europäer. Aber es gibt auch diese krasse Übertreibung, die meiner Meinung nach irrational ist; diese Idee, dass Amerika die Quelle aller Ungerechtigkeiten in der Welt ist. Die Amerikaner sind auch für viele Gutes verantwortlich, wie zum Beispiel auf dem Balkan in den neunziger Jahren. Die Europäer sollten vorsichtig sein. Es fühlt sich gut an, schön locker im Anti-Amerikanismus zu schwelgen, aber es ist nicht vernünftig und auch nicht fair. Auf lange Sicht wird es bei den Amerikaner dazu führen, dass sie sagen: "Zur Hölle mit Europa."

Das Interview führte Charles Hawley, aus dem Englischen übersetzt von Eva Lodde


© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2006

[Joerver]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 20.944.013 von Joerver am 24.03.06 21:54:21

[CaptainFutures]

Fukuyama's Pivot

He urged the liberation of Iraq. Now he claims he had misgivings all along.

In January 1998, a group called the Project for the New American Century issued a public letter to President Clinton on the subject of Iraq. The threat posed by Saddam Hussein, it said, was "more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War." Efforts to contain the dictator were "steadily eroding." If Saddam acquired weapons of mass destruction, "as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course," the whole Middle East would be put at risk.

"The only acceptable strategy," the authors concluded, "is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power."

Among the letter's 18 signatories were Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, John Bolton and the neoconservative political theorist Francis Fukuyama, best known for his 1992 book, "The End of History and the Last Man." And yet, as the invasion of Iraq loomed in 2002, Mr. Fukuyama tells us in "America at the Crossroads," he came to the conclusion that "the war didn't make sense." The book attempts to explain why and to sketch out a new set of principles for a prudent foreign policy.

I'll get to the argument in a moment, but a point of clarification is in order. On April 14, 2003--five days after the fall of Baghdad to U.S. troops--Mr. Fukuyama published an article in The Wall Street Journal (it appeared on this Web site a few days later) in which he noted that Americans have "justly celebrated the downfall of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship" (my emphasis). There is not a word in the article to suggest the misgivings Mr. Fukuyama claims to have been harboring for a year.

The chronology here has no bearing on the validity of Mr. Fukuyama's views. Nor does it count against him that he changed his mind. Credibility is another matter. Mr. Fukuyama is a public intellectual of the first rank, with influence and connections at the highest reaches of the Bush administration. Several thousand U.S. troops have now been killed or injured in a war he gave every appearance of supporting well after the Rubicon was crossed. If Mr. Fukuyama now judges the effort a terrible folly, the least he can do is offer an honest account of the part he played cheering it on.

As for Mr. Fukuyama's objections to the war, most of them are familiar, though they do have the virtue of being put with great clarity, sophistication and nuance. The administration overestimated the threat from Iraq. The risk that Saddam would have passed nuclear material to terrorists was remote. And while a preventive war might have been justified to stop Saddam from acquiring the bomb and dominating the region, the "prevention" took place far too prematurely. Yet these points are speculative and, with the decision to go to war now behind us, essentially moot.





Mr. Fukuyama's more relevant objections are as follows. First, he says, the administration failed to anticipate the extent to which the war would aggravate anti-Americanism and reshape global politics accordingly. Second, it mischaracterized and exaggerated the threat posed by radical Islamism: Jihadism, he writes, is "a byproduct of modernization and globalization, not traditionalism," which is better dealt with by integrating Muslims already living in the West than by " 'fixing' the Middle East." Third, the administration neglected the insight of the founding neoconservatives--intellectuals like Irving Kristol and Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, beginning in the 1960s, wrote critiques of large-scale government programs--that ambitious attempts at social engineering tend to backfire.
On the first point, there's no doubt that the war was deeply unpopular around the world. But it plainly wasn't so unpopular as to create the kind of catastrophic backlash Mr. Fukuyama imagines. Since the war, four of the most prominent members of the "Coalition of the Willing"--Britain's Tony Blair, Australia's John Howard, Denmark's Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Japan's Junichiro Koizumi--have been returned to office by large majorities. Canada's Paul Martin and Germany's Gerhard Schroeder have been cashiered in favor of Stephen Harper and Angela Merkel, both of whom campaigned on the explicit promise of better ties with the U.S. France's Jacques Chirac looks to be politically finished; Nicolas Sarkozy, his likeliest successor, is avowedly pro-American. In the Middle East, where we once had enemies in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, we now have pro-American, democratic governments.

Next there is Mr. Fukuyama's view about the nature of jihadism. It is true that Europe's failure to assimilate its Muslims has helped spawn the likes of Mohamed Atta and the London bombers. Then again, Osama bin Laden is not an alienated child of Europe, nor is Abu Musab al Zarqawi. The religious madrassas through which jihadist ideology spreads are funded by Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah's Al-Manar satellite TV station broadcasts its message of hate from Beirut and gets its funding from Tehran. Iran, in turn, also helps to arm groups such as the Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which is a sister organization of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, from which Ayman al Zawahiri sprang. Before 9/11, most of the jihadists got their "military" training in Afghanistan and possibly also in Saddam's Iraq. Mr. Fukuyama may or may not be right that Islamist radicalism is a "byproduct of modernization," but the idea that the heart of the problem is somewhere other than the Middle East is inane.





Hardly more persuasive is Mr. Fukuyama's argument about social engineering, a term he tends to abuse. Properly understood, social engineering isn't simply a matter of instituting radical change per se. What counts is the kind of change. Imposing price controls, for instance, is a form of social engineering because it upsets the natural balance of supply and demand. But it would be absurd to argue that removing price controls is also a kind of social engineering, even if it entails short-term economic dislocations.
The question then becomes whether removing dictators is an example of the former or the latter. Mr. Fukuyama devotes a chapter to the subject and concludes that solid democratic institutions will take root only when there is strong internal demand for them. True enough. But on what basis should we conclude there is no strong internal demand for democracy in Iraq, or Burma, or Iran?

None of this is to ignore the very real difficulties the U.S. faces in Iraq and the very real possibility of failure. The work of liberators is never easy, and the Bush administration may be faulted for suggesting that it would be. But I'll wager that it's considerably more doable than the delicate concept that Mr. Fukuyama proposes: a world in which the U.S. operates within and between "multiple multilateralisms"; seeks to "downplay its dominance"; reinvents the World Bank (again) to better disburse foreign aid, and so on.

Six months after 9/11, it was noted that "a passive policy that did nothing to clean up festering pockets of instability does not necessarily produce security, and there are times when bolder action is required." One can only wish that Mr. Fukuyama would heed those words, particularly since they are his own.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110008079

[CaptainFutures]

Democracy Angst

What's the alternative to promoting freedom in the Middle East?

In the matter of Middle East elections, the results of which we don't always like: Anyone out there have a better idea?

We ask amid some recent wringing of hands following elections for the Palestinian legislature, in which the terrorist group Hamas won an outright majority; elections in Iraq, where voters cast their ballots along sectarian lines, and a strong showing by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt's parliamentary elections late last year.

"For some, the promotion of democracy promises an easy resolution to the many difficult problems we face," says Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde. "But I believe that great caution is warranted here." And from the man who once gave us the "end of history," we now have the demise of neoconservatism: "Promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East," writes Francis Fukuyama in a new book, "is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse."

The brilliant insight here is that democratic processes don't always lead to liberal outcomes. Actually, that's not an insight: The world has had fair warning on this score at least since Adolf Hitler came to power democratically in 1933. We can be thankful, however, that the experience of Nazism did not deter successive generations of Germans from persevering with the democratic experiment.

Still, the underlying argument deserves thoughtful consideration, and it goes something like this: Contrary to the rhetoric of the Bush Administration, the taste for freedom--and the ability to exercise it responsibly--is far from universal. Culture is decisive. Liberal democracies are the product of long-term trends such as the collapse of communal loyalties, urbanization, the separation of church and state and the political empowerment of the bourgeoisie. Absent these things, say the critics, democratic and liberal institutions are built on foundations of sand and are destined to collapse.





This account more or less describes the rise of liberal democracies in the West. Yet simply because it took centuries to establish a liberal-democratic order in Europe, it does not follow that it must take centuries more to establish one in the Middle East. Japan took about 100 years to transform itself (and be transformed) from a feudal society into a modern industrial democracy. South Korea made a similar leap in about 40 years; Thailand went from quasi-military dictatorships to a genuine constitutional monarchy in about 20. As the practice of liberal democracy has spread, the time it takes nondemocratic societies to acquire that practice has diminished.
But, say the critics, Islamic and particularly Arab countries are uniquely resistant to change. Between 1981 and 2001 the number of non-Islamic countries rated "free"--that is to say, both democratic and liberal--increased by 34, according to Freedom House. By contrast the number of free Islamic countries remained constant at one, in the form of landlocked Mali. During the same period, the number of Islamic countries ranked "not free" increased by 10.

No doubt deep-seated cultural factors go some way toward explaining these statistics. But why seek abstruse explanations? In the same period when the U.S. was encouraging democratic openings in Eastern Europe, East Asia and Latin America--areas previously thought impervious to liberty, often for "cultural" reasons--it was supporting or tolerating undemocratic and illiberal regimes in the Middle East.

That period also coincided with the rise of al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole, the outbreak of the terrorist intifada in Israel, and September 11. Mr. Fukuyama may or may not be right that promoting democracy does not resolve the problem of terrorism in the short-term. What we know for sure is that tolerating dictatorship not only doesn't resolve the terrorist problem but actively nurtures it.





Which brings us back to the question of what American policy should be. One answer is to retreat completely in the hopes of being left alone. This is the formula recently suggested by Osama bin Laden; those who would credit it must also entrust themselves to him.
Another answer is to encourage friendly autocrats to "modernize" their countries without necessarily creating the kinds of democratic openings through which Islamic fundamentalists could come to power. This is what the U.S. has been attempting in Egypt for the past three decades, without success. A related idea is to promote liberal democratic ideals by means of "soft power"--McDonald's, Oprah, USAID, Voice of America, Britney Spears. Soft power has much to recommend it, though generally only as a complement to hard power. Absent the latter, it is powerless to defend the very people it inspires, especially when the tanks are rolling.

Then there is the supposedly failed policy of the Bush Administration. In five years, it has brought four democratic governments to power in the Middle East: by force of arms in Afghanistan and Iraq, and through highly assertive diplomacy in Lebanon and Palestine. Mr. Fukuyama tells us that "by definition, outsiders can't 'impose' democracy on a country that doesn't want it."

Leaving aside the niggling examples of Japan and Germany, exactly how are we to know that country X does not want democracy, except democratically? Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians and Lebanese have all made their democratic preferences plain in successive recent elections. And with the arguable exception of the Palestinians (arguable because Fatah was as undemocratic as Hamas), they have voted to establish considerably more liberal regimes than what existed previously.

This is not to say democracy is a cure-all. It is also not to say that the peril these democracies face, from terrorist insurrection or ethnic or religious feuding, isn't grave. Nor, finally, is it to say that the "Hitler scenario" can be excluded in a democratizing Middle East; that possibility is always present, especially among nascent democracies.

But democracy also offers the possibility of greater liberalism and greater moderation, possibilities that have been opened with the courageously pro-American governments of Hamid Karzai, Jalal Talabani and Saad Hariri. And as we stand with them, it seems to us that America's bets are better placed promoting democracies--even if some of them succumb to illiberal temptations--than acceding to dictatorships, which already have.

Or does someone have a better idea?

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=1100…

[CaptainFutures]

The End of Fukuyama

Why his latest pronouncements miss the mark.

I have a feeling that last week was a disappointing one for Francis Fukuyama, whose essay "After Neoconservatism" (adapted from his upcoming book America at the Crossroads) was awarded seven pages in the Feb. 19 New York Times Magazine. The anti-Danish mayhem that had been dominating the news was surpassed by the fantastic criminality and sacrilege in Samarra, and nobody seemed to have time for the best-advertised defection from the neocon ranks. This, I think, is a pity, since the essay exhibits several points of interest.

However, it must also be said that Fukuyama himself made it hard for people to concentrate on his words. There appears to be an arsenal of clichés and stock expressions located somewhere inside his word processor, so that he has only to touch the keyboard for one of them to spring abruptly onto the page. Thus, in the first paragraph, we are told that Iraq has become "a magnet" for jihadists, later that democracy-promotion has been attacked both from the left and (gasp) the right, later that neocons have issues with "overreaching," and soon after that "it is not an accident" that many neoconservatives started out as "Trotskyites."

Not everyone will appreciate the unironic beauty of those last two formulations; they will appeal most to the few who are connoisseurs of leftist sectarianism. The opening words, "It is no accident, comrades," used to be the dead giveaway of a wooden Stalinist hack (who would also make use of the deliberately diminishing term Trotskyite instead of Trotskyist). And these nuances matter, because Fukuyama now tells us that the book that made him famous, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), "presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism." Alas, the purity of his Marxism was soon to be corrupted by the likes of William Kristol and Robert Kagan, whose position was "by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States." Pause to note, then, that even the advocate of the new foreign-policy "realism" feels compelled to borrow the most overused anti-Hegelian line from Karl Marx's 18th Brumaire.

For all this show of knowledge about the arcana of Marxism and Straussianism, Fukuyama's actual applications of them are surprisingly thin. It is not even a parody of the Trotskyist position to say that the lesson they drew from Stalinism was "the danger of good intentions carried to extremes." Nor is it even half-true to say, of those who advocated an intervention in Iraq, that they concluded "that the 'root cause' of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq."

The first requirement of anyone engaging in an intellectual or academic debate is that he or she be able to give a proper account of the opposing position(s), and Fukuyama simply fails this test. The term "root causes" was always employed ironically (as the term "political correctness" used to be) as a weapon against those whose naive opinions about the sources of discontent were summarized in that phrase. It wasn't that the Middle East "lacked democracy" so much that one of its keystone states was dominated by an unstable and destabilizing dictatorship led by a psychopath. And it wasn't any illusion about the speed and ease of a transition so much as the conviction that any change would be an improvement. The charge that used to be leveled against the neoconservatives was that they had wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein (pause for significant lowering of voice) even before Sept. 11, 2001. And that "accusation," as Fukuyama well knows, was essentially true—and to their credit.

The three questions that anyone developing second thoughts about the Iraq conflict must answer are these: Was the George H.W. Bush administration right to confirm Saddam Hussein in power after his eviction from Kuwait in 1991? Is it right to say that we had acquired a responsibility for Iraq, given past mistaken interventions and given the great moral question raised by the imposition of sanctions? And is it the case that another confrontation with Saddam was inevitable; those answering "yes" thus being implicitly right in saying that we, not he, should choose the timing of it? Fukuyama does not even mention these considerations. Instead, by his slack use of terms like "magnet," he concedes to the fanatics and beheaders the claim that they are a response to American blunders and excesses.

That's why last week was a poor one for him to pick. Surely the huge spasm of Islamist hysteria over caricatures published in Copenhagen shows that there is no possible Western insurance against doing something that will inflame jihadists? The sheer audacity and evil of destroying the shrine of the 12th imam is part of an inter-Muslim civil war that had begun long before the forces of al-Qaida decided to exploit that war and also to export it to non-Muslim soil. Yes, we did indeed underestimate the ferocity and ruthlessness of the jihadists in Iraq. Where, one might inquire, have we not underestimated those forces and their virulence? (We are currently underestimating them in Nigeria, for example, which is plainly next on the Bin Laden hit list and about which I have been boring on ever since Bin Laden was good enough to warn us in the fall of 2004.)

In the face of this global threat and its recent and alarmingly rapid projection onto European and American soil, Fukuyama proposes beefing up "the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like." You might expect a citation from a Pew poll at about this point, and, don't worry, he doesn't leave that out, either. But I have to admire that vague and lazy closing phrase "and the like." Hegel meets Karen Hughes! Perhaps some genius at the CIA is even now preparing to subsidize a new version of Encounter magazine to be circulated among the intellectuals of Kashmir or Kabul or Kazakhstan? Not such a bad idea in itself, perhaps, but no substitute for having a battle-hardened army that has actually learned from fighting in the terrible conditions of rogue-state/failed-state combat. Is anyone so blind as to suppose that we shall not be needing this hard-bought experience in the future?

I have my own criticisms both of my one-time Trotskyist comrades and of my temporary neocon allies, but it can be said of the former that they saw Hitlerism and Stalinism coming—and also saw that the two foes would one day fuse together—and so did what they could to sound the alarm. And it can be said of the latter (which, alas, it can't be said of the former) that they looked at Milosevic and Saddam and the Taliban and realized that they would have to be confronted sooner rather than later. Fukuyama's essay betrays a secret academic wish to be living in "normal" times once more, times that will "restore the authority of foreign policy 'realists' in the tradition of Henry Kissinger." Fat chance, Francis! Kissinger is moribund, and the memory of his failed dictator's club is too fresh to be dignified with the term "tradition." If you can't have a sense of policy, you should at least try to have a sense of history. America at the Crossroads evidently has neither.

http://www.slate.com/id/2137134/nav/tap1/

[Joerver]

Alle Kraft voraus. US-Rechtsaußen von WSJ und dazu noch Christopher Hitchens, der vom Paulus zum Saulus gewandelte Linke, der sich so gerne mit seinem Nichtwissen über die arabische und islamische Welt blamiert, und der meint die Iraner sprechen arabisch.

Dann der ehemalige Chefredakteur der Jerusalem Post Bret Stephens, Israel-Hardliner, der sich gerne mit Naziunterstellungen über deutsche Politiker hervortut.

Die Kanaille schäumt vor Wut, weil ihnen ihr Leitwolf abhandengekommen ist.

[CaptainFutures]

Hoffnung besteht immer!

[Joerver]

Die Diskussion über die Nichtexistierenden geht weiter!
Die Tool-Technik klappt zwar nicht mehr so wie früher, aber es wird von Tag zu Tag besser.
Vielleicht wieder ein wenig Farbe: bgcolor!
width marschiert schon wieder.
Wenn dann auch noch die Tabellenfunktionen wieder funken, dann wird man sich auch an das augenvernichtende Gekraxel beim Schriftbild gewöhnen.
Besonders bei den Threadüberschriften.

March 26, 2006
'America at the Crossroads,' by Francis Fukuyama
Neo No More
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/books/review/26berman.html…

Review by PAUL BERMAN



In February 2004, Francis Fukuyama attended a neoconservative think-tank dinner in Washington and listened aghast as the featured speaker, the columnist Charles Krauthammer, attributed "a virtually unqualified success" to America's efforts in Iraq, and the audience enthusiastically applauded.

[Table align=right]

[/TABLE]
[Table align=right width=300]
AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy.
By Francis Fukuyama.
226 pp. Yale University Press. $25.
Sprache: Deutsch
Gebundene Ausgabe - 200 Seiten - Propyläen
Erscheinungsdatum: März 2006
EUR 20,00
RELATED
After Neoconservatism: [urlAn Essay From the New York Times Magazine Adapted From the Book]http://www.wallstreet-online.de/dyn/community/postingaction.php?post=20263681&action=drucken&post_nr=1
[/url][/TABLE]

Fukuyama was aghast partly for the obvious reason, but partly for another reason, too, which, as he explains in the opening pages of his new book, "America at the Crossroads," was entirely personal. In years gone by, Fukuyama would have felt cozily at home among those applauding neoconservatives. He and Krauthammer used to share many a political instinct. It was Krauthammer who wrote the ecstatic topmost blurb ("bold, lucid, scandalously brilliant') for the back jacket of Fukuyama's masterpiece from 1992, "The End of History and the Last Man."



But that was then.



Today Fukuyama has decided to resign from the neoconservative movement — though for reasons that, as he expounds them, may seem a tad ambiguous. In his estimation, neoconservative principles in their pristine version remain valid even now. But his ex-fellow-thinkers have lately given those old ideas a regrettable twist, and dreadful errors have followed. Under these circumstances, Fukuyama figures he has no alternative but to go away and publish his complaint. And he has founded a new political journal to assert his post-neoconservative independence — though he has given this journal a name, The American Interest, that slyly invokes the legendary neoconservative journals of past (The Public Interest) and present (The National Interest), just to keep readers guessing about his ultimate relation to neoconservative tradition.



His resignation seems to me, in any case, a fairly notable event, as these things go, and that is because, among the neoconservative intellectuals, Fukuyama has surely been the most imaginative, the most playful in his thinking and the most ambitious. Then again, something about his departure may express a larger mood among the political intellectuals just now, not only on the right. For in the zones of liberalism and the left, as well, any number of people have likewise stood up in these post-9/11 times to accuse their oldest comrades of letting down the cause, and doors have slammed, and The Nation magazine has renamed itself The Weekly Purge. Nowadays, if you are any kind of political thinker at all, and you haven't issued a sweeping denunciation of your dearest friends, or haven't been hanged by them from a lamppost — why, the spirit of the age has somehow passed you by.



Fukuyama offers a thumbnail sketch of neoconservatism and its origins, back to the anti-Communist left at City College in the 1930's and 40's and to the conservative philosophers (Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, Albert Wohlstetter) at the University of Chicago in later years. From these disparate origins, the neoconservatives eventually generated "a set of coherent principles," which, taken together, ended up defining their impulse in foreign affairs during the last quarter-century. They upheld a belief that democratic states are by nature friendly and unthreatening, and therefore America ought to go around the world promoting democracy and human rights wherever possible. They believed that American power can serve moral purposes. They doubted the usefulness of international law and institutions. And they were skeptical about what is called "social engineering" — about big government and its ability to generate positive social changes.



Such is Fukuyama's summary. It seems to me too kind. For how did the neoconservatives propose to reconcile their ambitious desire to combat despotism around the world with their cautious aversion to social engineering? Fukuyama notes that during the 1990's the neoconservatives veered in militarist directions, which strikes him as a mistake. A less sympathetic observer might recall that neoconservative foreign policy thinking has all along indulged a romance of the ruthless — an expectation that small numbers of people might be able to play a decisive role in world events, if only their ferocity could be unleashed. It was a romance of the ruthless that led some of the early generation of neoconservatives in the 1970's to champion the grisliest of anti-Communist guerrillas in Angola; and, during the next decade, led the neoconservatives to champion some not very attractive anti-Communist guerrillas in Central America, too; and led the Reagan administration's neoconservatives into the swamps of the Iran-contra scandal in order to go on championing their guerrillas. Doesn't this same impulse shed a light on the baffling question of how the Bush administration of our own time could have managed to yoke together a stirring democratic oratory with a series of grotesque scandals involving American torture — this very weird and self-defeating combination of idealism and brass knuckles? But Fukuyama must not agree.



The criticisms he does propose are pretty scathing. In 2002, Fukuyama came to the conclusion that invading Iraq was going to be a gamble with unacceptably long odds. Then he watched with dismay as the administration adopted one strange policy after another that was bound to make the odds still longer. The White House decided to ignore any useful lessons the Clinton administration might have learned in Bosnia and Kosovo, on the grounds that whatever Bill Clinton did — for example, conduct a successful intervention — George W. Bush wanted to do the opposite. There was the diplomatic folly of announcing an intention to dominate the globe, and so forth — all of which leads Fukuyama, scratching his head, to propose a psychological explanation.



The neoconservatives, he suggests, are people who, having witnessed the collapse of Communism long ago, ought to look back on those gigantic events as a one-in-a-zillion lucky break, like winning the lottery. Instead, the neoconservatives, victims of their own success, came to believe that Communism's implosion reflected the deepest laws of history, which were operating in their own and America's favor — a formula for hubris. This is a shrewd observation, and might seem peculiar only because Fukuyama's own "End of History" articulated the world's most eloquent argument for detecting within the collapse of Communism the deepest laws of history. He insists in his new book that "The End of History" ought never to have led anyone to adopt such a view, but this makes me think only that Fukuyama is an utterly unreliable interpreter of his own writings.



He wonders why Bush never proposed a more convincing justification for invading Iraq — based not just on a fear of Saddam Hussein's weapons (which could have been expressed in a non-alarmist fashion), nor just on the argument for human rights and humanitarianism, which Bush did raise, after a while. A genuinely cogent argument, as Fukuyama sees it, would have drawn attention to the problems that arose from America's prewar standoff with Hussein. The American-led sanctions against Iraq were the only factor that kept him from building his weapons. The sanctions were crumbling, though. Meanwhile, they were arousing anti-American furies across the Middle East on the grounds (entirely correct, I might add) that America was helping to inflict horrible damage on the Iraqi people. American troops took up positions in the region to help contain Hussein — and the presence of those troops succeeded in infuriating Osama bin Laden. In short, the prewar standoff with Hussein was untenable morally and even politically. But there was no way to end the standoff apart from ending Hussein's dictatorship.



Now, I notice that in stressing this strategic argument, together with the humanitarian and human rights issue, and in pointing out lessons from the Balkans, Fukuyama has willy-nilly outlined some main elements of the liberal interventionist position of three years ago, at least in one of its versions. In the Iraq war, liberal interventionism was the road not taken, to be sure. Nor was liberal interventionism his own position. However, I have to say that, having read his book, I'm not entirely sure what position he did adopt, apart from wisely admonishing everyone to tread carefully. He does make plain that, having launched wars hither and yon, the United States had better ensure that, in Afghanistan and Iraq alike, stable antiterrorist governments finally emerge.



He proposes a post-Bush foreign policy, which he styles "realistic Wilsonianism" — his new motto in place of neoconservatism. He worries that because of Bush's blunders, Americans on the right and the left are going to retreat into a Kissinger-style reluctance to promote democratic values in other parts of the world. Fukuyama does want to promote democratic values — "what is in the end a revolutionary American foreign policy agenda" — though he would like to be cautious about it, and even multilateral about it. The United Nations seems to him largely unsalvageable, given the role of nondemocratic countries there. But he thinks that a variety of other institutions, consisting strictly of democracies, might be able to establish and sometimes even enforce a new and superior version of international legitimacy. He wants to encourage economic development in poor countries, too — if only a method can be found that avoids the dreadful phrase "social engineering."



Fukuyama offers firm recommendations about the struggle against terrorism. He says, "The rhetoric about World War IV and the global war on terrorism should cease." Rhetoric of this sort, in his view, overstates our present problem, and dangerously so, by "suggesting that we are taking on a large part of the Arab and Muslim worlds." He may be right, too, depending on who is using the rhetoric. Then again, I worry that Fukuyama's preferred language may shrink our predicament into something smaller than it ever was. He pictures the present struggle as a "counterinsurgency" campaign — a struggle in which, before the Iraq war, "no more than a few thousand people around the world" threatened the United States. I suppose he has in mind an elite among the 10,000 to 20,000 people who are said to have trained at bin Laden's Afghan camps, plus other people who may never have gotten out of the immigrant districts of Western Europe. But the slaughters contemplated by this elite have always outrivaled anything contemplated by more conventional insurgencies — as Fukuyama does recognize in some passages. And there is the pesky problem that, as we have learned, the elite few thousand appear to have the ability endlessly to renew themselves.



HERE is where a rhetoric pointing to something larger than a typical counterinsurgency campaign may have a virtue, after all. A more grandiose rhetoric draws our attention, at least, to the danger of gigantic massacres. And a more grandiose rhetoric might lead us to think about ideological questions. Why are so many people eager to join the jihadi elite? They are eager for ideological reasons, exactly as in the case of fascists and other totalitarians of the past. These people will be defeated only when their ideologies begin to seem exhausted, which means that any struggle against them has to be, above all, a battle of ideas — a campaign to persuade entire mass movements around the world to abandon their present doctrines in favor of more liberal ones. Or so it seems to me. Fukuyama acknowledges that the terrorist ideology of today, as he describes it, "owes a great deal to Western ideas in addition to Islam" and appeals to the same kind of people who, in earlier times, might have been drawn to Communism or fascism. Even so, for all the marvelous fecundity of his political imagination, he has very little to say about this ideology and the war of ideas. I wonder why.



I think maybe it is because, when Fukuyama wrote "The End of History," he was a Hegelian, and he remains one even now. Hegel's doctrine is a philosophy of history in which every new phase of human development is thought to be more or less an improvement over whatever had come before. In "America at the Crossroads," Fukuyama describes the Hegelianism of "The End of History" as a version of "modernization" theory, bringing his optimistic vision of progress into the world of modern social science. But the problem with modernization theory was always a tendency to concentrate most of its attention on the steadily progressing phases of history, as determined by the predictable workings of sociology or economics or psychology — and to relegate the free play of unpredictable ideas and ideologies to the margins of world events.



And yet, what dominated the 20th century, what drowned the century in oceans of blood, was precisely the free play of ideas and ideologies, which could never be relegated entirely to the workings of sociology, economics, psychology or any of the other categories of social science. In my view, we are seeing the continuing strength of 20th-century-style ideologies right now — the ideologies that have motivated Baathists and the more radical Islamists to slaughter millions of their fellow Muslims in the last 25 years, together with a few thousand people who were not Muslims. Fukuyama is always worth reading, and his new book contains ideas that I hope the non-neoconservatives of America will adopt. But neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all — the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them.

Paul Berman is a writer in residence at New York University and the author, most recently, of [url"Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath."]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/002-9992816-1166419?url=index%3Dstripbooks%3Arelevance-above&field-keywords=Power+and+the+Idealists%3A+Or%2C+the+Passion+of+Joschka+Fischer%2C+and+Its+Aftermath&Go.x=5&Go.y=10&Go=Go[/url]
Ab 28.08.06 im Handel
* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Die Nr.1 bei Amazon
[Table align=left]
[url]http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067003486X/ref=pd_ts_b_1/002-9992816-1166419?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
American Theocracy :
The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion,
Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury
by Kevin Phillips [/url]
[/TABLE]

[Joerver]

Wenn noch einer fragt, was ist Neoconservatismus, dann hatte im Februar 04 Charles Krauthammer, der ehemalige NYTimes Kolumnist diese Antwort gegeben:
“We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity—meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.” The new “existential enemy,” is “Arab-Islamic totalitarianism,”
Das ist keine Verbreitung von sogenannten 'westlichen Werten', sondern eine Pervertierung derselben.


BREAKING AWAY
by LOUIS MENAND
Francis Fukuyama and the neoconservatives.
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/060327crbo_books

Issue of 2006-03-27
Posted 2006-03-20

On February 10, 2004, the columnist Charles Krauthammer gave the annual Irving Kristol address at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington. The lecture was called “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World.” It defended the Bush Administration’s policies of unilateralism and preëmption, and proposed that their application be defined by means of a doctrine: “We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity—meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.” The new “existential enemy,” Krauthammer said, is “Arab-Islamic totalitarianism,” and he compared the war that the United States should fight against this entity to the war against Fascist Germany and Japan—a war committed to the eradication of a deadly and evil culture.

Francis Fukuyama was in the audience, and he could not believe the approval with which Krauthammer’s speech was greeted. It seemed to Fukuyama that by the winter of 2004 the policies of unilateralism and preëmption might have been ripe for some reconsideration—they clearly had not performed well in Iraq—but, all around him, people were applauding enthusiastically. Fukuyama had always regarded himself as a neoconservative. He had had close relations with many of the leading figures associated with neoconservatism: Paul Wolfowitz, Albert Wohlstetter, Allan Bloom, Irving and William Kristol. Now he began to wonder if he still shared the world view of neoconservatives who, like Krauthammer, supported the Bush Administration’s war on terror. The day after the lecture, Fukuyama ran into John O’Sullivan, then the editor of the National Interest (a journal founded by Irving Kristol), and told him that he would be writing a response to Krauthammer. That article ran in the summer, 2004, issue. It was called “The Neoconservative Moment,” and in it Fukuyama announced that neoconservatism had evolved into a set of views that he could no longer support. Krauthammer published a response to Fukuyama’s response (“In Defense of Democratic Realism”) in the fall issue of the National Interest. Last spring, Fukuyama delivered the Castle Lectures, at Yale, in which he responded to Krauthammer’s response to his response to Krauthammer’s speech, and expanded his criticism of the Bush Administration. He proposed a new approach to foreign policy, which he called “realistic Wilsonianism.” Those lectures have been expanded, in turn, and published as “America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy” (Yale; $25).

Fukuyama argues that neoconservatism was founded on four principles. The first is “a belief that the internal character of regimes matters.” Until the election of Ronald Reagan, American foreign policy during the Cold War was guided by the doctrine of “realism”—the theory that the national interest is best served by checking and containing existing Communist regimes and preventing the establishment of new ones, not by intervening in the internal affairs of other states. In a strict realist world view, every state is equally in competition with every other state, and that is the primary fact that a foreign policy must confront. Whether a given regime is liberal or oppressive toward its own people is, from a national-security standpoint, of secondary importance. Of course, the United States would like more liberal democracies in the world, because, historically, liberal democracies do not go to war against one another; but we are obliged to play with the cards that are on the table, and not all of them will be hearts. Thus, Richard Nixon, a career anti-Communist, following the instructions of his national-security adviser, the arch-realist Henry Kissinger, went to China.

Neoconservatives are unhappy with this sort of agnosticism, which is why they were excited when Reagan started speaking of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Neoconservatives also supported the Reagan Administration’s attempts to intervene in the internal affairs of Nicaragua, since—and this is Fukuyama’s second principle of neoconservatism—they believe in the use of American power for moral purposes. Cold War liberals also believed in the use of American power; that’s how the United States got stuck in Vietnam. But the Vietnam War (in the minds of the people who directed it) was fought to prevent Communism from expanding, not to roll it back in territories where Communists were already in power; the rationale was “stopping Communist aggression,” not “liberating an oppressed people.” When the Warsaw Pact countries overthrew their Communist regimes, and the Soviet Union dissolved, it seemed to many neoconservatives that the realists had been proved wrong: liberation was a legitimate and attainable goal of foreign policy. After September 11th, the next liberationist mission became clear.

Fukuyama identifies the third principle of neoconservatism as a “distrust of ambitious social engineering projects.” After all, neoconservatism arose not in foreign-policy debates but in criticism by liberals of the programs of the Great Society in the nineteen-sixties. Kristol’s definition is famous: “A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Most neoconservatives of Kristol’s generation had been members of the anti-Stalinist left in the nineteen-thirties and forties, and (Fukuyama says) they tended to see a connection between Great Society liberalism and the blind faith in economic and social planning that once led many leftists to believe that Soviet Communism was a genuinely progressive ideology.

This skepticism about the uses of state money and power to address social problems is paired with another skepticism—the fourth element of neoconservatism—about the “effectiveness of international law and institutions to achieve either security or justice.” Neoconservatives have been especially dismissive of the United Nations, an organization that they regard as a charade kept alive by liberal piety about international coöperation and world peace. Again, there are bad nations and good nations out there. When everyone is obliged to pretend that all states are equally worthy of respect, moral authority becomes impossible. Fukuyama points out that in 2003 the chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights was Libya.

As its provenance suggests, “America at the Crossroads” is a polemic (a mild-mannered one), not a theoretical treatise on statecraft. Fukuyama’s argument is that the war on terror, and, in particular, the invasion of Iraq, is not an application of neoconservative principles as he understood them. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld are not neoconservative intellectuals; they are right-wing messianists, and their prosecution of the war has been disastrous for American interests. They globalized a conflict that they should have sought to contain. “We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and against the international jihadist movement, that we need to win,” Fukuyama writes. He goes on:

But conceiving the larger struggle as a global war comparable to the world wars or the Cold War vastly overstates the scope of the problem, suggesting that we are taking on a large part of the Arab and Muslim worlds. Before the Iraq war, we were probably at war with no more than a few thousand people around the world who would consider martyring themselves and causing nihilistic damage to the United States. The scale of the problem has grown because we have unleashed a maelstrom.

The United States acted as though simple regime change in Iraq, with no adequate plans for reconstruction and economic development, were sufficient reason for declaring “Mission Accomplished.” We now confront an expensive, long-term struggle to keep a fractious society from spinning dangerously out of control, and our unapologetic near-unilateralism has left us without much sympathy, or support, from our nominal allies. Fukuyama thinks that neoconservatives like Krauthammer either have been seduced by the rhetoric of liberation into thinking that deposing Saddam Hussein is the twenty-first-century equivalent of deposing Hitler or have abandoned neoconservative principles and turned into knee-jerk “American exceptionalists” who think that the superiority of our values authorizes us to act toward the rest of the world as benevolent hegemons, and exempts us from the considerations of deference and prudence by which we expect the behavior of other states to be constrained.

Although “America at the Crossroads” is intended, in part, for policy intellectuals—the journal-of-opinion writers and editors, political advisers, and think-tankers who deal with questions of governance from a philosophical point of view—Fukuyama is not, fundamentally, a policy intellectual himself. He is an original and independent mind, and his writings have never seemed to be constructed on a doctrinal foundation. He takes ideas seriously and he tries to see the big picture, and even if you think that he takes ideas too seriously, and that his pictures tend to be too big to help with the practical challenges of political decision-making in the here and now, his views on American policies and their implications deserve thoughtful attention. Such attention might begin, in the case of the present book, with the observation: No duh. It took Fukuyama until February, 2004, to realize that Charles Krauthammer, who has been saying basically the same thing since the end of the Cold War, is the intellectual cheerleader of a politics of American supremacy that appears to recognize no limit to its exercise of power? And that the Bush Administration, to the extent that it has any philosophical self-conception at all, operates on the basis of the crudest form of American exceptionalism? And that neoconservatism, whatever merits it once had as a corrective to liberal wishfulness and the amorality of realpolitik, long ago stiffened into a posture of reflexive moral belligerence about everything from foreign policy to literary criticism?

The present condition of the neoconservative movement is the outcome of a classic case of the gradual sclerosis of political attitudes. All the stages of the movement’s development were based on the primitive psychology of the “break”—the felt need, as one ages, to demonize the exact position one formerly occupied. The enemy is always the person still clinging to the delusions you just outgrew. So—going all the way back to the omphalos, Alcove 1 in the City College cafeteria, where Kristol and his friends fought with the Stalinists in Alcove 2—the Trotskyists hated the fellow-travellers they once had been; the Cold War liberals hated the Trotskyists they once had been; and the neoconservatives hated the liberals they once had been. Now the hardening is complete. Neoconservatism has merged with the politics that its founders, in their youth, held in greatest contempt: the jingoist and capitalist American right. We look from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but it is impossible to say which is which.

This helps explain why Fukuyama, instead of writing a straightforward indictment of the war on terror, apparently felt it necessary to present his position in the form of a “break” with neoconservatism—why Krauthammer, an entirely epiphenomenal figure in the creation and implementation of American policy, was the initial target of his indictment, rather than Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Krauthammer has ideas; Cheney and Rumsfeld—Fukuyama as much as says so—do not. The theory is what went wrong, so the theory is what must be fixed. Fukuyama’s “realistic Wilsonianism” is the repaired version: Wilsonian because he wants to retain the spirit of liberal internationalism that informs neoconservative critiques of foreign-policy realism, but realistic because he recognizes the limits of military power and the need for multilateral coöperation and engagement. Let’s continue to try to shape the world, but let’s not be so stupid about it, is the general idea.

Still, it’s a little strange that Fukuyama ever saw himself as unambiguously in the neoconservative camp. “America at the Crossroads” is not quite a recantation, because Fukuyama was quickly a dissident from the war on terror. His position has been consistent since 2002, when he warned against exaggerating the threat represented by Al Qaeda and other jihadists. But the seeds of his split with neoconservatism started before that. They appear, in fact, in the work that identified him publicly with neoconservatism in the first place. This is the famous article “The End of History?,” which appeared in the National Interest in 1989 and became a book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” in 1992. (A second paperback edition, with a new afterword, has just been published by the Free Press.)

“The End of History and the Last Man” is a deeply interesting book (“scandalously brilliant,” Krauthammer says on the back cover, in a blurb evidently written when the marriage was still good). It is a meditation on world history—via the influential lectures of the French-Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève, given in Paris in the nineteen-thirties—in the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Weber. Because the original article appeared the year the Berlin Wall came down, and because the book appeared right after the formal demise of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama’s thesis about the “end of history” was taken to be a kind of celebratory meta-historical frosting on America’s victory in the Cold War. History (in Hegelian terms) had realized its Idea, and the Idea was us. Fukuyama has spent a great deal of time since 1989 explaining that this was not what he meant. His book was not about America or even about democratic ideals. It was about modernization, a subject on which his take is closer to Marx’s and Weber’s than to John Locke’s or Adam Smith’s.

Modernity, Weber said, is the progressive disenchantment of the world. Superstitions disappear; cultures grow more homogeneous; life becomes increasingly rational. The trend is steadily in one direction. Fukuyama, accordingly, interprets reactionary political movements and atavistic cultural differences, when they flare up, as irrational backlashes against modernization. This is how he understands jihadism: as a revolt, fomented among Muslim émigrés in Western Europe, against the secularism and consumerism of modern life. (This is also how he interprets Fascism and Bolshevism: as backlashes against the general historical tendency.) Jihadism is an antibody generated by our way of life, not a virus indigenous to Islam.

Fascism and jihadism are nihilisms; they cannot be co-opted into the modern system of pluralism, and so they have to be wiped out. But they stand, in a perverse way, for the dark side of disenchantment, which is that, as life becomes more rational and transparent, people lose the sense that there are spiritual forces in the universe greater than themselves. Supernaturalism goes, but so does the idea that anything transcends the biologically human. The “last man” was Nietzsche’s term for the citizen of the completely modern society; “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” was Weber’s description. Fukuyama’s thesis proposes a kind of fatalism that is worth resisting, but it is not an intellectual ornament on the edifice of American hegemony—or a rationale for invasion, occupation, and conversion of the non-Westernized world. The whole world will modernize eventually, Fukuyama believes, though (like Marx) he is not averse to some coaxing and shaping on the part of a cadre of advance-guard intellectuals and benevolent superpowers. He now argues—and, in this respect, “America at the Crossroads” announces a new dimension in his thinking—that economic development and the creation of social capital, “soft power,” are the proper tools of foreign policy, and that regime change by forceful means is a discredited option. He is sliding back toward sixties liberalism. One hopes that others, inspired by his “break,” will start sliding in the same direction. It would certainly be nice to see the independent intellectuals who should have known better when they loudly supported the Bush-Cheney war on terror explain publicly, as Fukuyama has done, where they went wrong. Who did they think was going to run that war, the Committee on Social Thought?

“The End of History” understood the outcome of the Cold War in a spirit quite different from that of the standard neoconservative account, according to which we won the Cold War because Reagan adopted a policy of liberationist interventionism. We changed the political regimes in Russia and its satellites, and the pieces of a liberal society just fell naturally into place there. Fukuyama thinks that we won the Cold War mainly because an unworkable system reached its inevitable point of collapse, helped by the actions and inactions of Mikhail Gorbachev; that, apart from oratory and some funding of pro-democracy groups, we did little in the way of intervention; and that we ought to thank our stars and decline to draw grand policy lessons. Grand lessons were drawn, though, and that is why so many American intellectuals believed that regime change in Iraq was not only readily achievable but cosmically mandated. If they thought that this is a view shared by the author of “The End of History,” they know better now.

[CaptainFutures]

What the Heck Is a 'Neocon'?

Neoconservatives believe in using American might to promote American ideals abroad.

I have been called many names in my career--few of them printable--but the most mystifying has to be "neocon." I suppose I get labeled thus because I am associated, in a small way, with the Weekly Standard, which is known as a redoubt of "neoconservatism."

But what the heck is a neocon anyway in 2003? A friend of mine suggests it means the kind of right-winger a liberal wouldn't be embarrassed to have over for cocktails. That's as good a definition as any, since the term has clearly come unmoored from its original meaning.

The original neocons were a band of liberal intellectuals who rebelled against the Democratic Party's leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s. At first the neocons clustered around Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism. The neocons, in the famous formulation of one of their leaders, Irving Kristol, were "liberals mugged by reality."

Well, I haven't been mugged lately. I haven't even been accosted. I like to think I've been in touch with reality from day one, since I've never been a Trotskyite, a Maoist or even a Democrat. There's no "neo" in my conservatism. I don't deserve much credit for this, I might add, since I grew up in the 1980s, when conservatism was cool. Many of the original neocons, by contrast, grew up in the days when Republicans were derided as "the stupid party." Some of them remain registered Democrats. But I've always identified with the Grand Old Party. The same might be said of the other Standard-bearers, even those (like Bill Kristol and John Podhoretz) who are the offspring of famous neocons. They, too, have been right from the start.





So why do I, and others of my ilk, get tagged as "neocons"? Some of the labelers have obvious ulterior motives. Patrick Buchanan, for one, claims that his views represent the true faith of the American right. He wants to drive the neocon infidels from the temple (or, more accurately, from the church). Unfortunately for Mr. Buchanan, his version of conservatism--nativist, protectionist, isolationist--attracts few followers, as evidenced by his poor showings in Republican presidential primaries and the scant influence of his inaptly named magazine, the American Conservative. Buchananism isn't American conservatism as we understand it today. It's paleoconservatism, a poisonous brew that was last popular when Father Charles Coughlin, not Rush Limbaugh, was the leading conservative broadcaster in America.
When Buchananites toss around "neoconservative"--and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen--it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean is "Jewish conservative." This is a malicious slur on two levels. First, many of the leading neocons aren't Jewish; Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Father John Neuhaus and Michael Novak aren't exactly menorah lighters. Second, support for Israel--a key tenet of neoconservatism--is hardly confined to Jews; its strongest constituency in America happens to be among evangelical Christians.

So is "neoconservatism" worthless as a political label? Not entirely. In social policy, it stands for a broad sympathy with a traditionalist agenda and a rejection of extreme libertarianism. Neocons have led the charge to combat some of the wilder excesses of academia and the arts. But there is hardly an orthodoxy laid down by Neocon Central. I, for one, am not eager to ban either abortion or cloning, two hot-button issues on the religious right. On economic matters, neocons--like pretty much all other Republicans, except for Mr. Buchanan and his five followers--embrace a laissez-faire line, though they are not as troubled by the size of the welfare state as libertarians are.





But it is not really domestic policy that defines neoconservatism. This was a movement founded on foreign policy, and it is still here that neoconservatism carries the greatest meaning, even if its original raison d'être--opposition to communism--has disappeared.
Pretty much all conservatives today agree on the need for a strong, vigorous foreign policy. There is no constituency for isolationism on the right, outside the Buchananite fever swamps. The question is how to define our interventionism.

One group of conservatives believes that we should use armed force only to defend our vital national interests, narrowly defined. They believe that we should remove, or at least disarm, Saddam Hussein, but not occupy Iraq for any substantial period afterward. The idea of bringing democracy to the Middle East they denounce as a mad, hubristic dream likely to backfire with tragic consequences. This view, which goes under the somewhat self-congratulatory moniker of "realism," is championed by foreign-policy mandarins like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker III.

Many conservatives think, however, that "realism" presents far too crabbed a view of American power and responsibility. They suggest that we need to promote our values, for the simple reason that liberal democracies rarely fight one another, sponsor terrorism, or use weapons of mass destruction. If we are to avoid another 9/11, they argue, we need to liberalize the Middle East--a massive undertaking, to be sure, but better than the unspeakable alternative. And if this requires occupying Iraq for an extended period, so be it; we did it with Germany, Japan and Italy, and we can do it again.

The most prominent champions of this view inside the administration are Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Their agenda is known as "neoconservatism," though a more accurate term might be "hard Wilsonianism." Advocates of this view embrace Woodrow Wilson's championing of American ideals but reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish our objectives. ("Soft Wilsonians," a k a liberals, place their reliance, in Charles Krauthammer's trenchant phrase, on paper, not power.) Like Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, "hard Wilsonians" want to use American might to promote American ideals.





This is, in case you haven't guessed, my own view too. So I guess that makes me a neocon. It's a designation I'm willing--nay, honored--to accept, if it comes with a caveat: Neoconservatism--like other political descriptions, such as "liberal" and "conservative"--has entirely lost its original meaning. It no longer means that you're a Johnny-come-lately to the good fight, and--contrary to Mr. Buchanan's aspersions--neocons are no less conservative than anyone else on the right.
Actually that's an understatement. Neocons are closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party today than any competing faction. During the 2000 campaign, President Bush sounded very much like a realist, with his suspicions of "nation building" and his warnings about American hubris. Then along came 9/11. The National Security Strategy that he released in September--which calls for "encouraging free and open societies on every continent"--sounds as if it could have come straight from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible.

I suppose that makes George W. Bush a neocon. If it's good enough for the president, it's good enough for me.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=1100…

[CaptainFutures]

National Review and who is NeoCon?

When I announced last week that I would be doing a series of articles on neoconservatism, a number of readers e-mailed me to complain that conservatives are getting too bogged-down in labels and prefixes and I shouldn't encourage the trend. I agree. My aim here is destroy, or at least pare back, the increasingly ludicrous use of the word "neoconservative" and maybe even a few other silly labels. If none of this is your cup of tea, that's fine. There's plenty of other elsewhere stuff on NRO or even my syndicated column.



Conservatives are accustomed to liberals not understanding the zoology of our movement. But the use and abuse of the term "neoconservative" has exceeded even the high allowance for cliché and ignorance generally afforded to those who write or talk about conservatism from outside the conservative ant farm. In fact, neoconservative has become a Trojan Horse for vast arsenal of ideological attacks and insinuations. For some it means Jewish conservative. For others it means hawk. A few still think it means squishy conservative or ex-liberal. And a few don't even know what the word means, they just think it makes them sound knowledgeable when they use it.

"Hawks Rip Into Mideast Plan; Ex-Speaker Gingrich leads a neoconservative charge against the State Department, alleging efforts to 'undermine the president's policies.'" That was the headline of the page-one story on Newt's now famous broadside. The only other "neoconservative" critic of the State Department mentioned in the article: Famed ex-Trotskyist and Upper West Side polemicist, Tom DeLay (R., Tex.).

"What is a neoconservative by your definition?" Chris Matthews asked the Washington Post's Dana Milbank on his cable program Hardball. "….Give me a formal definition of a neocon, historically speaking."

"Well," answered Milbank, "it's a split going really back to the '70s over detente and how to deal with the Soviet Union. It's essentially the hard-line of the — within the Republican party as opposed to the establishment which had been dominant. Now, Reagan was part of — more of that conservative side and the first President Bush went back to more of the establishment."

"But why do they call them neocons? New cons or conservatives? Why that phrase?"

"Well, because the old kind of conservative is the alternative to that," Milbank replied.

Some definitions are more high-falutin. Michael Lind — widely hailed as a conservative who moved to the Left — channels some of the more feverish paleocons when he writes in the British magazine, The New Statesman, that "Most neoconservative defence intellectuals … are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history." But a recent article in the New York Times says the neocons aren't Trotskyists, they're Straussians: "They are the neoconservatives, or neocons a catchall name for a disparate group of authors, academics, media moguls and public servants who trace their intellectual lineage (accurately or not) to the teachings of a German émigré named Leo Strauss."

Confused? It gets a lot worse. In fact, it's increasingly difficult to find plain-old "conservatives" anywhere these days. National Review, according to a ludicrous article in The New York Observer is a "paleo-conservative magazine" which is "seen as a kind of a relic by the new neocons" but according to The American Conservative, National Review is not only "safely in neocon hands," we actually symbolize the neocon takeover of the conservative movement. Often, the absurdity has become syllogistic: Neoconservatives are conservatives who favor war and if you are a conservative and favor war you are a neoconservative. My own beloved mother perfectly captured the nebulousness of the term. When asked whether she was a neocon by The New York Observer, she jokingly replied, "You mean the people who like to kill people and break things. That's me!"

And then, of course, there's the Jew thing. Neoconservative and Jewish are synonymous for all sorts of people who don't like neocons or Jews or both. But we can get to that later.

First, it's important to point out that this confusion isn't new. In fact, it's baked into the cake. Let me give you an example from personal experience.

I used to work at the American Enterprise Institute, by all accounts the center of the neoconservative universe. In fact, I used to work for Ben Wattenberg, a man I believe The New Republic once called the "Titular Deity of the Neoconservatives." Anyway, when I was a policy peon there AEI was a Reaganite government in exile. One Friday, Joshua Muravchik, Muravchik probably the premiere neocon foreign-policy intellectual of his generation, was giving what used to be called a "brown-bag lecture" (I believe they now call them "Friday Forums") on the current state of neoconservatism. A who's who of Reaganite intellectuals were in attendance. During the Q&A I asked to explain what exactly a neoconservative is. His answer was a surprisingly unsatisfying bit of sophistry — something like "neoconservatism is the body of beliefs held by people who call themselves neoconservative."

However, in the course of his answer, Muravchik said that the Reagan movement was primarily a foreign-policy cause united around defeating Communism. He suggested (and this is largely from my memory) that the foreign-policy neocons permitted the religious and economic neocons to sign on to their cause.

At this assertion, an "au contraire" was offered from Irwin Stelzer, a highly regarded economist, famous neocon, and adviser to Rupert Murdoch. He said that Reaganism — of the neocon variety — was essentially an economic philosophy and while anti-Communism was surely a vital part, foreign-policy activists were simply another wing emanating from the core of the true Reagan coalition. Seconds after Stelzer had made his comments, my friend Michael Novak — one of America's premiere theologians and social thinkers and an NRO contributor — begged to differ. While, of course, fighting for free markets and against the Red menace was vital to Reaganism, these policies were largely outgrowths of a moral and religious vision, which is why the Reagan movement was essentially a religious cause. An intellectual brouhaha ensued — and, I'm proud to say, I started it. Now, one of the things I need to stress is that all of these people spoke of Reaganism as an explicitly neoconservative movement and phenomena.
This points to the Reagan's FDR-like political genius for convincing various factions to each see him as their undisputed standard-bearer. But it also points to the fact that even the leaders of the "neoconservative movement" — whatever that meant or means — could not agree on what neoconservatism is.

http://www.peaceredding.org/National%20Review%20and%20who%20…

[CaptainFutures]

God and Governing

Why do they hate President Bush? In large part for his religious faith.

Among the many faults charged against George W. Bush it is probably his conservative Christian faith that most troubles the people who dislike him--or most infuriates the people who hate him. Kevin Phillips has gone so far as to argue that Mr. Bush has reshaped the Republican Party into a coalition "unprecedentedly grouped around and influenced by Southern evangelical and fundamentalist voters and their wackier leaders." This is one of those truisms that is routinely heard at Blue State cocktail parties.

But what exactly is Mr. Bush's religious belief and is there any way it can be explained without worrying Kevin Phillips even more? In "The Faith of George W. Bush," Stephen Mansfield relates, with obvious sympathy, a story of spiritual awakening whose outline is well-known to Mr. Bush's friends and enemies alike.





Mr. Bush grew up in mainline Protestant churches in Texas: Midland (Presbyterian) and Houston (Episcopal). Graduating from Yale, he returned to Houston, where he "listlessly worked a variety of jobs," reserving his energies "for women, parties and boisterous games of water volleyball." Several years later, working in Midland as an oil-company executive, he married Laura Welch. She took him to her Methodist church.
But Mr. Bush still felt a lack of purpose in his life--and began asking questions. In 1985, a remark of Billy Graham's, made during a Bush family gathering, sparked a change. Mr. Bush decided, as he put it in his autobiography, to "recommit my heart to Jesus Christ. I was humbled to learn that God sent His Son to die for a sinner like me." He started reading the Bible and joined a Bible-study group. Most dramatically, the day after a soggy celebration of his 40th birthday, in 1986, he quit drinking.

Mr. Mansfield writes believably that, because of his faith, Mr. Bush is a "better man." And he is right to say that Mr. Bush's faith helps us to understand his presidency. But Mr. Mansfield goes much too far when he writes approvingly of the "religious renovation" of government. Phrases like that would seem to confirm the worst fears of someone like Kevin Phillips. But Mr. Bush has never proposed any such renovation. Indeed, he took an oath to execute his office and defend the Constitution.

Carrying out that oath, Mr. Bush, like past presidents, must naturally, at times, consider the role of religion in public life. But here Mr. Mansfield's book is thin. He doesn't mention the Justice Department's filings in the Cleveland school-choice case of 2001, defending the use of vouchers at religious schools. Nor does he discuss the administration's argument (made earlier this month in the Supreme Court) on behalf of a college student who was denied a state grant because he planned to major in theology. And Mr. Mansfield's discussion of the president's "faith-based initiative"--government-funded social services that include church-sponsored programs--is superficial. He fails to grasp the principle behind the initiative's defense of "charitable choice": Religious charities applying for social-service grants shouldn't be discriminated against simply because they are religious.

Mr. Bush's commitment to human rights abroad--trying to stop sex trafficking, for example, or fighting AIDS--may derive from his religious conviction. But Mr. Mansfield doesn't mention them. And on the big story of the Bush presidency--the war on terrorism--Mr. Mansfield gets it half right. He grasps that the president draws on his faith to frame the war in moral terms--the word "evil" is not exactly a secular word. But he neglects to note that behind Mr. Bush's foreign policy is, among other things, a desire to spread religious liberty to countries where there has long been none.





Such an impulse is very American. As Alf Mapp Jr. makes clear in "The Faiths of Our Fathers," the Founders were dedicated to the cause of religious freedom. And little wonder, when one considers the variety of their affiliations. Among the 11 figures that Mr. Mapp discusses--including Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, Charles Carroll, Haym Solomon--one may find deists, Anglicans, a Catholic, a Jew and even a Unitarian.
If the Founders were neither atheists nor fundamentalists, neither were they coreligionists. Thus America became the first nation to disestablish religion and to protect the free exercise of religion by law. It is this political tradition, duly informed by religion, that Mr. Bush draws upon in his own governing, for instance when he welcomes people of faiths different from his own, or of no faith at all.

Mr. Bush hasn't used the word "evangelical" to describe his religious convictions, but in some ways it fits. The origins of evangelicalism go back to the Great Awakening--the revivals that began in New England in the 1740s and spread down through the Middle Colonies and the South. The preachers at these revivals (and at later ones) stressed the importance of a "new birth," i.e., a conversion or a commitment to Christ. The great New England theologian Jonathan Edwards called it a new "sense of the heart."

For almost two centuries, such Protestantism did much to shape the American character. But it lost its unified force in the 1920s, when various forms of theological liberalism captured the mainline churches. Evangelicalism re-emerged in the 1950s and has since assumed a higher profile in American society. Billy Graham, whom the president heard that day at a family gathering, has been its leading figure.

So it is that you may draw a line in American history from the Great Awakening to that day four years ago when candidate George W. Bush, asked by a reporter to name his favorite philosopher, replied, "Christ, because he changed my heart." Mr. Bush did not say that Christ was his favorite political adviser. Ye who live in Blue States, please take note.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110004440

[Joerver]

Die Clowns von WSJ werden auch immer amüsanter.
Man haßt Bush wegen seines Glaubens.

[CaptainFutures]

Democracy and Security

The Bush Doctrine is alive and well.

The publication earlier this month of the Bush Administration's National Security Strategy was greeted with a combination of media indifference and contempt. "Bush clings to pre-emptive force," was one news agency's sum-up of the 49-page document. Readers of these columns might prefer to draw their own conclusions by actually reading it: www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006. What they'll find is a strategy that's admirably specific and, in the issues that matter most, broadly right.

This is especially important at a time when countries such as Iran, Syria and Egypt are betting that the Administration's domestic political weakness and its troubles in Iraq will see them safely through the 2008 election and what they hope will be a more pliant U.S. foreign policy. The document may now give those regimes second thoughts. Crucially, it reaffirms the Administration's first-term support of pre-emption: "When the consequences of an attack with [weapons of mass destruction] are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialize."

We'll take that to mean that the Bush Doctrine remains alive and well, despite persistent reports that it had been quietly shelved in favor of . . . well, no one has yet made clear what. Critics of the doctrine have argued that America's intelligence failure and difficulties in Iraq demonstrate the perils of pre-emption. Yet it is precisely because U.S. policy makers will never have perfect information about the capabilities and intentions of our enemies that pre-emption is sometimes needed, particularly when the threats are potentially catastrophic.





What distinguishes this document, however, is the emphasis it places on "effective democracy": that is, nations in which the institutions of democracy--regular and honest elections; representative and accountable government--serve as the armature of basic political, religious and economic freedoms.
Critics have questioned whether promoting democracy really advances U.S. security interests, pointing to the recent victory of Hamas in Palestinian elections. But leaving aside that the former government of Yasser Arafat was no less bloody-minded, the objections fail to appreciate the ways in which effective democracies tend to counteract the very factors that gave rise to Hamas in the first place: Political participation takes the place of exclusion; the free flow of information and a marketplace of ideas replace "sub-cultures of conspiracy and misinformation," and so on.

None of this guarantees that elections will inevitably lead to liberal outcomes. And, yes, there are times and places (Pakistan now) where the diplomatic prod to democracy has to be measured against the help a government is providing against a more urgent enemy (al Qaeda). But the evidence of the past century is that elections usually produce more long-run stability, and they merit a try in the Middle East.

Equally useful is the strategy's clear-eyed account of the connection between the nature of a regime and its behavior. "Governments that honor their citizens' dignity and desire for freedom tend to uphold responsible conduct toward other nations," the document notes, "while governments that brutalize their people also threaten the peace and stability of other nations."

This is directly relevant to Iran, whose nuclear ambitions are mainly a function of the ideological obsessions of its rulers--and not, as is sometimes argued, of Iran's objective national interests. This means the threat Iran poses is unlikely to change as long as the regime remains the same: The "ultimate goal" of U.S. policy, therefore, is rightly an Iran which "[opens] up its political system and [affords] freedom to its people.

How this is done is another matter, and nobody is now arguing for changing the regime in Tehran the way it was changed in Baghdad. But we are heartened that the strategy begins with the declaration that "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture" (our emphasis). This puts us in mind of U.S. support for Russian refuseniks in the 1970s, Poland's Solidarity movement in the 1980s, and Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq in the 1990s--all of which have analogs in modern-day Iran.





There is a great deal more in this document that deserves attention, notably the effort to retool the State Department into an engine of "transformational diplomacy," and not, as it usually is, the defender of every given status quo. It is also good to see the Administration belatedly recognize that Russian democracy is increasingly threatened by its own government.
Best of all is the line that "though tyranny has few advocates, it needs more adversaries." One critique of the President's push for democracy is the idea that the U.S. should not too visibly support the world's democratic dissidents and movements, lest they be tainted by American associations. But we suspect that champions of liberty in places such as Egypt, Iran and China take greater courage from an America that states its purposes boldly than one that fears its own shadow. Since when did the love of liberty become the love that dare not speak its name?

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html

[CaptainFutures]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 20.951.353 von Joerver am 26.03.06 16:12:32

Man haßt Bush wegen seines Glaubens.

Ja, da kann man mal sehen, daß man nur genug Phrasen und Psychosen auf Papier schreiben braucht um ein Buch fertigzustellen.
Dann noch einen reißerischen Titel oben drauf und die ganzen Denkbremsen kaufen wie verrückt.
Ist schon lustig, ja.

[CaptainFutures]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 20.951.402 von CaptainFutures am 26.03.06 16:32:19

Michael Moore hats vorgemacht wie es geht!

[Joerver]

Ich kenn nur wenige Gruppe, die wie die Neocons abstreiten, dass es sie gibt.

Es gibt natürlich auch viele unscharfe Definitionen, aber die originale Definition ist die, die der Spiegel einmal gebracht hat.
Der ein oder andere Clown vom WSJ hat, in den hier eingestellten Artikel versucht, das Bild der Neocons zu vermischen mit verschiedenen anderen Richtungen, die sich in dre Bushregierung tummeln.

Besonders lustig sind die Versuche Bush als Neocon zu verkaufen. Bush ist nicht anderes als ein erfolgloser Narr, der versucht seine Haut zu retten, um vielleicht doch nicht mit dem Titel als schlechtester US-Präsident in die Geschichtsbücher einzugehen oder mindestens sich um diesen Titel zu bewerben.

Die meist mehr komischen als ernst zunehmende Versuche in den Neocon-Hauszeitungen WSJ und Weekly Standard von den verschiedenen Schreibern der Bewegung lassen mehr auf ein Verschwinden in den Mülleimer der Geschichte schließen, als auf eine Diskussion über die zukünftige Rolle der Neocons in der US-Politik und auf ein weiteres Sinken der Auflage des WSJ.

DER SPIEGEL 32/2003 - 04. August 2003
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,259741,00.html
Intellektuelle

Die Leo-Konservativen

Ein geheimnisvoller Zirkel von Beratern und publizistischen Helfern um den US-Präsidenten George W. Bush gibt seit Wochen Anlass zu allerlei Verschwörungstheorien und Debatten - das Idol der Clique, heißt es, sei der deutsch-jüdische Philosoph Leo Strauss.
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,259741,00.html

Der deutsche Philosoph, der da in den USA plötzlich erstaunlich populär ist, war nie ein Linker, sondern immer mit Leib und Seele ein Konservativer. Es handelt sich nicht etwa um Theodor W. Adorno, dessen 100. Geburtstag bevorsteht, oder um Herbert Marcuse, dessen sterbliche Reste gerade von New Haven (Connecticut) nach Berlin umgebettet wurden, sondern um einen von deutschen Intellektuellen bislang wenig beachteten Zeitgenossen der beiden Mitbegründer der Frankfurter Schule: Leo Strauss. Auch Strauss war ein deutscher Jude, auch er emigrierte in die USA, und er blieb dort sein Leben lang. Sein Tod jährt sich im Herbst zum 30. Mal.

Unter denen, die aus Hitlers Deutschland auswandern mussten, bildete Leo Strauss eine bemerkenswerte Ausnahme: Anders als seine Schicksalsgenossen erhielt der kleine, gründliche Denker mit der leisen Stimme frühzeitig eine Professur an der großen, hoch renommierten Universität von Chicago. Außerdem ist er der einzige deutsche Emigrant, der in den Vereinigten Staten eine weit verzweigte Denker-Schule gründete. Ihr Einfluss reicht bis in die inneren Machtzirkel Washingtons.

Was hat es auf sich mit seinen Schülern, den "Straussianern", die seit dem Ende des Irak-Kriegs so häufig beschworen und beschrieben wurden, dass sie fast schon eine Intellektuellen-Legende geworden sind? Sie gelten als eine neokonservative Verschwörergruppe, als kleiner, elitärer Orden, der der Regierung Bush die Wege weist - und wenn es krumme Wege sind, ihr das gute Gewissen besorgt. Sie finden sich unter den Richtern im Supreme Court, sie arbeiten im Weißen Haus und im Pentagon.

Was sie denken, haben sie überwiegend bei Strauss gelernt. Allerdings sind sie machtbewusster als der Meister. Sie wollen Amerika verändern, nicht nur interpretieren.

Der Washingtoner Ableger der "Straussianer" traf sich kürzlich, wie alljährlich im Juli, zum Grillen, Baseballspielen und Plaudern über Vergangenheit und Gegenwart in einem Park der Hauptstadt. Mehr als 60 Leute aus dem inneren und äußeren Kreis der Regierung kamen da zusammen. Paul Wolfowitz, der kriegstreibende Ideenspender der Regierung Bush, war da und auch Abram Shulsky, ein Geheimdienstfachmann im Pentagon, der zusammen mit Francis Fukuyama ein Buch geschrieben hat.

William Kristol, der den "Weekly Standard" - ein Blatt mit einer Auflage von 60 000, aber großem Einfluss in Washington - herausgibt, war mit von der Partie, auch Leon Kass, der im Auftrag des Präsidenten Richtlinien für die Stammzellenforschung erarbeiten soll - auch sie Schüler des Leo Strauss.

Barbecue mit Kind und Kegel im Sonnenschein sind eigentlich unverdächtige Feiertagsvergnügungen. Doch so ziemlich alle Bewegungen der "Straussianer" stehen momentan unter Generalverdacht. Die Bedenken und Befürchtungen kommen von links, sie sind ein Versuch, die kulturelle Hegemonie der "Neocons" zu brechen, die mit der Präsidentschaft George W. Bushs begann und seit den Terroranschlägen am 11. September 2001 das patriotische Amerika durchdrungen hat.

Der zentrale Einwand: Die Strauss-Clique mag der zweiten Machtebene angehören, aber in Wahrheit verficht sie eine Ideologie der Sonderrolle Amerikas im 21. Jahrhundert, nach der dann Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney und Bush handeln.

Wolfowitz und andere Straussianer formieren sich zu einer Avantgarde der konservativen Revolution, die im Grunde genommen die Idee der liberalen Demokratie verachtet.

Die Spinne im Netz ist bei alldem der kleine, exzentrische Professor aus dem Weimar-Deutschland, der ein Verächter der Aufklärung war und den demokratischen Liberalismus für einen Sündenfall der Politik hielt.

Längst ist die Debatte aus der "New York Times" und dem "New Yorker" auch herüber nach Deutschland geschwappt. Hier zu Lande wurde Strauss Zeit seines Lebens - er starb 1973 - kaum wahrgenommen. Erst seit einigen Jahren macht sich Heinrich Meier, der Leiter der Siemens-Stiftung in München, um die Herausgabe und philosophische Einordnung von Strauss` Werk verdient.

Auch Meiers eigene Studien über Strauss, zumal über dessen Verhältnis zu dem katholischen Staatsrechtler Carl Schmitt, sind durch die Debatte über die geistigen Grundlagen des Bushismus schlagartig aktuell geworden*.

Doch wie reiht sich Strauss in die deutsche Ideengeschichte ein? Der Berliner Historiker Heinrich August Winkler zog in der "Zeit" weit reichende Schlüsse aus der Tatsache, dass Strauss freundlichen Umgang mit Carl Schmitt pflegte, dem Kritiker des Parlamentarismus und geistigen Wegbereiter der Nazis: Es gebe Parallelen zwischen der "Konservativen Revolution" vor der Machtergreifung Hitlers und der heutigen Situation in den Vereinigten Staaten.

Die Straussianer hätten "unter Bush dem Jüngeren gefunden, was Carl Schmitt letztlich vergebens gesucht hatte: den ,Zugang zum Machthaber`", so Winkler.

Ganz so leicht ist trotzdem nicht zu klären, ob Leo Strauss wirklich zum dämonisierten "Paten der Bush-Mafia" taugt. Nach den strengen Maßstäben, die er selber anlegte, war Strauss eigentlich kein Philosoph, weil er kein systematisches Werk hinterlassen hat. Seine Stärke lag in der Interpretation der großen philosophischen Literatur von Plato über Sokrates, Spinoza, Machiavelli und Hobbes bis hin zu Martin Heidegger. In seinen frühen Jahren kreiste sein Denken um die Theologie, später um die politische Philosophie, um die "Frage nach dem Richtigen".

Strauss war so gründlich gebildet, wie man sich einen gründlichen deutschen Professor nur vorstellen kann. Weil er klar und verständlich schrieb, lassen sich seine Bücher, im Deutsch der Vorkriegszeit geschrieben, heute noch gut lesen.

Seine Tochter Jenny, die an der Universität von Virginia antike Poetik lehrt, besitzt ein Foto des Elternhauses im hessischen Kirchhain bei Marburg, in dem ihr Vater, 1899 geboren, aufwuchs.

Es zeigt ein einfaches, stattliches Haus ohne gründerzeitliche Ornamentik. Die Familie Strauss war im Getreidehandel tätig und hielt nebenbei Hühner und Geflügel.

Der begabte Sohn Leo übertrug die unpompöse Geradlinigkeit auf seine Philosophie: So viele Brüche es im Leben eines deutschen Juden, der Soldat im Ersten Weltkrieg war, 1932 emigrierte und in Amerika seine Blütejahre erlebte, zwangsläufig geben musste, so folgerichtig entfaltete sich doch sein Denken.

Er promoviert 1921 bei Ernst Cassirer und bleibt auf der Suche nach Autorität und Orientierung. Er lehnt sich vorübergehend an den Neukantianismus an, die herrschende Vorkriegsphilosophie, und ist unzufrieden mit Max Webers Glauben an die Wertfreiheit wissenschaftlicher Urteile. Doch dann trifft er auf den Mann, den diese Generation junger Philosophen, zu der auch Herbert Marcuse, Karl Löwith oder Günther Anders gehören, für den tiefsten Denker ihrer Zeit hielt: Martin Heidegger.

Wie Heidegger zog Strauss eine radikale Konsequenz aus der Erfahrung des Ersten Weltkriegs und der Dauergefährdung der Weimarer Republik: Für ihn war damit geschichtlich bewiesen, dass sich die Aufklärung mit ihrem positiven Menschenbild und Fortschrittsglauben als Illusion erwiesen hatte. Als gleichermaßen hinfällig erwies sich aus seiner Sicht die Hoffnung, dass eine liberale Demokratie die Staats- und Gesellschaftsordnung der Zukunft sei. Daran hat Strauss bis an sein Lebensende festgehalten.

Allerdings missfiel ihm an Heideggers Hauptwerk "Sein und Zeit" (1927) der von aller möglichen Begründung der Moral absehende Existenzialismus, der "den Tod als Gott" (Strauss) verehre - was den Philosophen aus Todtnauberg anfällig für die nihilistische Todessehnsucht des Nationalsozialismus gemacht habe. Strauss hingegen entwickelte in der Auseinandersetzung mit Heidegger eine leicht exzentrische Theorie, die viele Jahre später in Amerika eine verblüffend begierige Rezeption fand.

Religion ist Opium für das Volk, aber ein unerlässliches Opium.

Zwar könnten sich Philosophen, so geht seine Überlegung, im Gefolge Nietzsches der Frage widmen, was der Tod Gottes und die Abkehr von der Religion für das Denken und das Sein bedeute. Aber Staaten könnten ohne den inneren Zusammenhalt, den der Glaube verleiht, nicht existieren. Zu einer stabilen Ordnung gehöre deswegen die Religion als Bindemittel - sie ist zugegeben Opium fürs Volk, aber ein unerlässliches Opium. Liberale Demokratien wie die Weimarer Republik sind aus Strauss` Sicht auf Dauer nicht lebensfähig, weil sie ihren Bürgern keinen geistig-moralischen Halt bieten.

Die praktische Konsequenz daraus ist fatal: Eliten haben demnach das Recht, ja geradezu die Pflicht zur Manipulation der Wahrheit. Sie dürfen zu den "frommen Lügen" und dem selektiven Gebrauch der Wahrheit Zuflucht nehmen, wie es Plato empfiehlt.

Vor allem diese Bausteine einer politischen Theorie, die Strauss Zeit seines Lebens vertrat, tragen ihm heute in Amerika den Vorwurf ein, er habe an den Nazis die Methoden der Massenmanipulation studiert. Und "Straussianer" wie Wolfowitz und die anderen Betreiber des Irak-Krieges stehen jetzt im Verdacht, sie hätten nur die politische Lehre aus Strauss für ihre Zwecke gezogen. Die zum Teil fingierten Gründe für den Krieg gegen Saddam Hussein sind, so gesehen, das philosophische Erbe des Emigranten aus Deutschland.

So entsteht eine Verschwörungstheorie, wonach Strauss der Marionettenspieler ist, an dessen Fäden die Regierung Bush hängt. Dabei sind antisemitische Obertöne - Strauss als "Nazi-Jude" - kaum zu überhören, zumal viele seiner Schüler jüdische Namen - Paul Wolfowitz, Abram Shulsky, Harvey Mansfield, William Kristol - tragen.


Strauss selbst nahm größeren Anteil an der Antike als an der Gegenwart. Hans Jonas, der seit den zwanziger Jahren mit ihm befreundet war, schreibt in seinen "Erinnerungen", Strauss sei "ein ungeheuer weltfremder und ängstlicher Mensch" gewesen. Tatsächlich war er ein tiefer Pessimist und neigte dem Gedanken zu, dass in der Geschichte nur Niedergang und Verfall zu erwarten seien.

Paradoxerweise hatte der Pessimist in entscheidenden Lebensmomenten ausgesprochenes Glück. Er verließ Deutschland schon 1932, vor der Machtergreifung Hitlers. Carl Schmitt, dessen Lehre von der Unterscheidung zwischen Freund und Feind als Ursprung des Politischen Strauss wohlwollend rezensiert hatte, verschaffte ihm ein Stipendium der Rockefeller Stiftung. So kam er erst nach Frankreich und später nach England, wo er sein "Hobbes"-Buch zu Ende schrieb, das noch heute Achtung genießt. 1938 schließlich, ehe der Zweite Weltkrieg ausbrach, kam Strauss in Amerika an.

Er überwinterte zunächst an der New Yorker "Universität im Exil", wie die New School for Social Research genannt wurde, weil sich jüdische Flüchtlinge aus vielen Ländern Europas hier einfanden: Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Arnold Brecht, Adolph Löwe, Kurt Riezler - insgesamt 180 Geistesgrößen. Sarkastisch nannten sie sich "Hitlers Geschenk an die Vereinigten Staaten".

Strauss hatte keine unüberwindbaren Anpassungsprobleme an Amerika, das ihm völlig fremd war. Er sprach viele Sprachen, sein Englisch behielt bis zuletzt einen leichten Akzent. Und als wäre es eine List der - ausgerechnet - Hegelschen Vernunft, sorgte das Glück wieder für ihn vor: 1948 erhielt er den Ruf nach Chicago, um politische Philosophie zu lehren.

Damals war Chicago mehr als heute eine herausragende Universität. Die Rockefeller-Stiftung, deren Geld die Elite-Universitäten an der Ostküste verschmähten, sorgte für die Ausstattung. Zudem hatte der autokratische Universitätspräsident Robert M. Hutchins ein Gespür für Talente. So kam es, dass kurz nach dem Krieg drei Professoren nebeneinander lehrten, die größten Einfluss auf die Eliten bis in die Gegenwart hinein ausüben sollten.

Da war Hans J. Morgenthau, ebenfalls ein Emigrant aus Deutschland, aber anders als Strauss auf die gedankliche Durchdringung der Wirklichkeit ausgerichtet. Die größte Wirkung erzielte er mit seinen Thesen über eine neue realistische Außenpolitik - die Grundlage für eine illusionslose Haltung gegenüber der Sowjetunion im Kalten Krieg, die bald Regierungspolitik war. Der gelehrigste Schüler Morgenthaus war jener Emigrant aus Fürth, der es zum Sicherheitsberater und Außenminister unter Richard Nixon brachte: Henry Kissinger. Seine Variante der Realpolitik - Koexistenz auch mit Autokraten oder Diktatoren, wenn es das Eigeninteresse gebietet - haben erst die Neokonservativen außer Kraft gesetzt: Sie ist ihnen zu wenig moralisch und zu sehr dem Status quo verhaftet.

Der zweite Chicagoer Professor von bleibendem Gewicht war Milton Friedman, der für seine Theorie des Monetarismus 1976 den Nobelpreis für Ökonomie erhielt. Er war ein Schüler Friedrich August von Hayeks, der seit 1950 ebenfalls in Chicago lehrte, aber zu seiner Erbitterung im Schatten von John Maynard Keynes und dessen Lehre von der Staatsintervention in Krisenzeiten des Marktes stand.

Friedman ist eine Doppelbegabung, ein beliebter Universitätslehrer und gesuchter Berater, den Präsidenten von Johnson über Nixon bis Reagan heranzogen. Er empfahl den Rückzug des Staates vom Markt, woraus die Lehre von der angebotsorientierten Wirtschaftspolitik entstand: Der Kapitalismus entwickelt sich dann am besten, wenn der Profit und der Konsum durch Steuerkürzungen wachsen. Diese riskante Wirtschaftspolitik, die unter Reagan schon für ein rasantes Staatsdefizit sorgte, hat der derzeit amtierende Präsident wiederaufgenommen - mit demselben Effekt.

Der Dritte im Bunde ist Leo Strauss, der weder Morgenthaus Gegenwartssinn noch Friedmans Fähigkeit zum Umgang mit den Mächtigen besaß. Dass er über seinen Tod hinaus gehörigen Einfluss auf Politik und Politiker hat, wirkt paradox: Er war ja ein Konservativer, der nicht an die Wendung der Dinge zum Besseren glaubte. Er blieb im Herzen ein Weimarianer, auf der liberalen Demokratie ruhte für ihn kein Segen. Alle Skepsis richtete er gegen den Pluralismus und Relativismus dieser Ordnung. So anders Amerika auch sein mochte, so wenig fasste er Vertrauen zu diesem Projekt der Moderne.

Leo Strauss wollte eigentlich nur ein Lehrer sein, der seine Studenten in die Gedankenwelt der Alten einführt. Schon bei Plato, Sokrates und Xenophon ließen sich, so sah er die Dinge, die ewigen Kraftfelder studieren, in denen Menschen und Staaten zu allen Zeiten stehen, nicht zuletzt in der Gegenwart: Was ist Gerechtigkeit, was ist das gute Leben, was macht den Staat aus, wo liegen die Grenzen unseres Wissens?

In der Gegenwart stellten sich diese Fragen, so argumentierte Strauss, im Wirbel der Ereignisse und blieben schwer durchschaubar. In den großen Texten der Vergangenheit aber werden sie in Reinkultur verhandelt. Der Nachteil bestand jedoch darin, dass der Professor es beim Betrachten der Probleme beließ, weil er nicht an deren Lösbarkeit glaubte.

Doch einige seiner Schüler beseelte mehr Tatendrang. Sie wollten verstehen, um zu handeln. Von der europäischen Theorie gingen sie über auf die Praxis in Amerika.

Strauss` Seminare und Vorlesungen bekamen bald Kult-Charakter. In sie strömten auch katholische Priester oder Vertreter aus dem Chicagoer Establishment. Damit ihn das wachsende Publikum auch wirklich hören konnte, ließ sich der Professor ein Mikrofon umhängen, was damals eine größere Prozedur zu Beginn jeder Vorlesung gewesen sein muss. In den sechziger Jahren nahmen seine Schüler dann auf Tonband auf, was Strauss mittwochs nachmittags, immer ab 15.30 Uhr, vortrug.

So viel Erfolg schuf Neider. Sie stießen sich daran, dass ein Professor der politischen Philosophie in dieser Zeit am liebsten über die Antike las, ohne Rückschlüsse auf die Gegenwart zu ziehen - auf die bipolare Welt, den Kalten Krieg, die neuen Atomwaffen. Ewige Wahrheiten, vorzugsweise gewonnen aus Xenophon, Sokrates, Plato? Widerlegung der Moderne durch Widerlegung von Hobbes? Zum ersten Mal tauchten jene Stichwörter auf, die Strauss auch in der heutigen Debatte anhaften: Nihilismus, Elitismus, Esoterik.

"Ein Neokonservativer ist ein Linker, den die Wirklichkeit überfallen hat."

Seine Schüler waren jedoch fasziniert von der Welt, die er ihnen erschloss. Zu ihm strömten alsbald die Besten und Klügsten ihrer Jahrgänge, viele von ihnen wiederum Juden. Sie seien vom Krieg geprägt gewesen, oft links gestimmt, Leser von Marx und Freud, erzählen Walter Berns und Werner Dannhauser, zwei Straussianer der ersten Stunde, die selber Professoren wurden. Der Mann aus Weimar habe sie denken gelehrt und ihnen Achtung vor großen Philosophen eingeflößt.

So weltabgewandt Strauss auch war, so gegenwartsmächtig wurde er, als der Neokonservativismus Mitte der sechziger Jahre seine Anfänge nahm. Die wirklichen Paten der Neocons sind in der Familie Kristol zu finden. Irving Kristol prägte den klassischen Satz: "Ein Neokonservativer ist ein Linker, den die Wirklichkeit überfallen hat."

Gertrude Himmelfarb, Kristols Frau, hatte Strauss 1950 entdeckt. Von ihr stammt die klassische Streitschrift "Ein Land, zwei Kulturen". Sie kritisiert nicht nur den Verlust an Zivilität und protestantischer Arbeitsethik, die permissive Moral und sexuelle Revolution, sondern sieht in alldem eine Folge des entfesselten Liberalismus im demokratischen Amerika.

Das ist Strauss in Reinkultur, allerdings durch Kulturkämpfer vom Kopf auf die Füße gestellt. Irving Kristol vollendete diese Umkehrung, indem er Strauss` Gedanken aufnahm, Religion sei als Bestandsgarantie einer Staatsordnung unerlässlich.

Der Professor hatte an Amerikas Gründung missbilligt, dass die Glaubensflüchtlinge Staat und Religion trennten, anstatt eine Religion verbindlich zu machen. Kristol, ein blendender Agitator als Journalist, kannte Amerika besser - mindestens 150 Millionen mehr oder minder gläubige Menschen, vorrangig Katholiken oder Protestanten, eine Alltagsfrömmigkeit, die sich auch in zahllosen Sekten organisierte und eine politische Machtbasis für die konservativ erneuerten Republikaner darstellte.

Originell an der neokonservativen Ideologie war die Entdeckung, dass die politisch entscheidenden Schlachten in Amerika um kulturelle Werte geführt werden. Die Linke hatte propagiert, das Private sei politisch. Die "Neocons" nehmen sie beim Wort. Der Staat soll sich - mit Milton Friedman - aus der Wirtschaft heraushalten, aber nicht aus dem Schlafzimmer seiner Bürger.

Die großen Schlachten in Amerika werden seither um Abtreibung und Todesstrafe, um Homosexualität oder Sex vor der Ehe geführt - um die moralischen Werte eines christlich gestimmten Landes, dem Liberalität als Gesinnung verdächtig ist. Deshalb ist es von entscheidender Bedeutung, welche Richter in den Supreme Court gewählt werden, denn sie bestimmen in letzter Instanz über den Grad an Liberalität in Amerika, weil die wichtigsten Streitfälle früher oder später bei ihnen landen. Unter den neun Richtern gilt der erzkonservative Clarence Thomas als Straussianer.

Die erste Phase der neokonservativen Revolution fand unter Ronald Reagan ihre Erfüllung. Die zweite Phase findet nun unter George W. Bush statt, dem wiedergeborenen Christen, der weiß, wie wichtig Religion ist - für den patriotischen Zusammenhalt des Landes und für seine Wiederwahl, für die er unbedingt die Stimmen der wohlorganisierten christlichen Gruppen benötigt.

Zurzeit steht die Außenpolitik im Zentrum der konservativen Revolution. "Für Verschwörungstheoretiker ist die Außenpolitik der Bush-Regierung ganz und gar eine Schöpfung von Strauss", meint die "New York Times". Davon kann allerdings keine Rede sein. Diese Ehre gebührt in erster Linie Paul Wolfowitz und Richard Perle, die schon seit dem Ende des Kommunismus für die volle Machtentfaltung des einzigen Weltregenten und für den Krieg als Mittel der Politik plädieren.

Diese beiden Neocons allerdings sind Schüler eines anderen Professors mit deutschem Namen, der ebenfalls in Chicago lehrte, aber dort erst kurz vor Strauss` Emeritierung ankam: Albert Wohlstetter, geboren in New York, lehrte die Theorie der Sicherheitspolitik und hatte auf Wolfowitz (der bei Strauss lediglich zwei Kurse besucht hatte) und Perle eine bleibende Wirkung. Aggressivität statt Passivität in der Außenpolitik, der Wille zur Veränderung statt des alten Status-quo-Denkens lassen sich auf Wohlstetter zurückführen - die Voraussetzungen der neuen Pax Americana.

Strauss war nach der Emigration nur noch einmal in Deutschland gewesen, in den fünfziger Jahren, eingeladen von seinem Freund Karl Löwith. Am Ende seines Lebens, sagt seine Tochter Jenny, habe sich ihr Vater isoliert gefühlt; er habe Schwierigkeiten gehabt, seine Bücher wiederauflegen zu lassen. Das hat sich jetzt geändert.

GERHARD SPÖRL



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* Heinrich Meier: "Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss und `Der Begriff des Politischen`". Zu einem Dialog unter Abwesenden. Verlag J. B. Metzler, Stuttgart; 192 Seiten; 24,90 Euro. Vom selben Autor erschien soeben im selben Verlag: "Das theologisch-politische Problem". Zum Thema von Leo Strauss. 88 Seiten; 9,95 Euro.




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© DER SPIEGEL 32/2003

[CaptainFutures]

Fukuyama's Fantasy

It was, as the hero tells it, his Road to Damascus moment. There he is, in a hall of 1,500 people he has long considered to be his allies, hearing the speaker treat the Iraq war, nearing the end of its first year, as "a virtually unqualified success." He gasps as the audience enthusiastically applauds. Aghast to discover himself in a sea of comrades so deluded by ideology as to have lost touch with reality, he decides he can no longer be one of them.

And thus did Francis Fukuyama become the world's most celebrated ex-neoconservative, a well-timed metamorphosis that has brought him a piece of the fame that he once enjoyed 15 years ago as the man who declared, a mite prematurely, that history had ended.

A very nice story. It appears in the preface to Fukuyama's post-neocon coming out, "America at the Crossroads." On Sunday it was repeated on the front page of the New York Times Book Review in Paul Berman's review.

I happen to know something about this story, as I was the speaker whose 2004 Irving Kristol lecture to the American Enterprise Institute Fukuyama has now brought to prominence. I can therefore testify that Fukuyama's claim that I attributed "virtually unqualified success" to the war is a fabrication.

A convenient fabrication -- it gives him a foil and the story drama -- but a foolish one because it can be checked. The speech was given at the Washington Hilton before a full house, carried live on C-SPAN and then published by the American Enterprise Institute under its title "Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World." (It can be read at http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.19912,filter.all/pub_d… .) As indicated by the title, the speech was not about Iraq. It was a fairly theoretical critique of the four schools of American foreign policy: isolationism, liberal internationalism, realism and neoconservatism. The only successes I attributed to the Iraq war were two, and both self-evident: (1) that it had deposed Saddam Hussein and (2) that this had made other dictators think twice about the price of acquiring nuclear weapons, as evidenced by the fact that Moammar Gaddafi had turned over his secret nuclear program for dismantling just months after Hussein's fall (in fact, on the very week of Hussein's capture).

In that entire 6,000-word lecture, I said not a single word about the course or conduct of the Iraq war. My only reference to the outcome of the war came toward the end of the lecture. Far from calling it an unqualified success, virtual or otherwise, I said quite bluntly that "it may be a bridge too far. Realists have been warning against the hubris of thinking we can transform an alien culture because of some postulated natural and universal human will to freedom. And they may yet be right."

History will judge whether we can succeed in "establishing civilized, decent, nonbelligerent, pro-Western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq." My point then, as now, has never been that success was either inevitable or at hand, only that success was critically important to "change the strategic balance in the fight against Arab-Islamic radicalism."

I made the point of repeating the problematic nature of the enterprise: "The undertaking is enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It may yet fail."

For Fukuyama to assert that I characterized it as "a virtually unqualified success" is simply breathtaking. My argument then, as now, was the necessity of this undertaking, never its ensured success. And it was necessary because, as I said, there is not a single, remotely plausible, alternative strategy for attacking the root causes of Sept. 11: "The cauldron of political oppression, religious intolerance, and social ruin in the Arab-Islamic world -- oppression transmuted and deflected by regimes with no legitimacy into virulent, murderous anti-Americanism."

Fukuyama's book is proof of this proposition about the lack of the plausible alternative. The alternative he proposes for the challenges of Sept. 11 -- new international institutions, new forms of foreign aid and sundry other forms of "soft power" -- is a mush of bureaucratic make-work in the face of a raging fire. Even Berman, his sympathetic reviewer, concludes that "neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all -- the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them."

Fukuyama now says that he had secretly opposed the Iraq war before it was launched. An unusual and convenient reticence, notes Irwin Stelzer, editor of "The Neocon Reader," for such an inveterate pamphleteer, letter writer and essayist. After public opinion had turned against the war, Fukuyama then courageously came out against it. He has every right to change his mind at his convenience. He has no right to change what I said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03…

[Joerver]

Die Neocons sind im Viertelfinale ausgeschieden, trotz Einsatz aller ihrer Schreiberlinge von den großen Zeitungen, als letzter Mr. [urlNewspeak]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak persönlich Krauthammer von der WaPost [/url]

[Joerver]

BlueMax nervt. (der popup) auch wenn er Geburtstag hat.

[Joerver]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 21.044.338 von Joerver am 02.04.06 12:27:38

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy von Fukuyama scheint nicht besonders bei den US-Lesern anzukommen. Man schließt sich da wohl der Darstellung von Ted Rall an, wer einmal Unsinn shreibt, dem glaubt man nicht, auch wenn er jetzt was Wahres schreibt.

Bush Lieblingsbuch [urlAmerican Theocracy : The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/067003486X/ref=pd_ts_b_4/002-8923296-1916025?v=glance&s=books[/url] hält weiterhin Spitzenplätze bei Amazon und Times.

[Table align=center]

[/TABLE]

Ein neues Buch, dessen Titel ganz interessant klingt. (ich bin beim Lesen der Rezension noch nicht weit gekommen.)

EARTHLY POWERS
The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe From the French Revolution to the Great War.
By Michael Burleigh.
Hier der Link zur Besprechung der Times mit first chapter: [urlGodless Europe]http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/books/review/02lilla.html[/url]

Na, sollten die Tabellenbefehle wieder schreibbar sein?

[CaptainFutures]

The Wrong Time to Lose Our Nerve

A response to Messrs. Buckley, Will and Fukuyama.

A small group of current and former conservatives--including George Will, William F. Buckley Jr. and Francis Fukuyama--have become harsh critics of the Iraq war. They have declared, or clearly implied, that it is a failure and the president's effort to promote liberty in the Middle East is dead--and dead for a perfectly predictable reason: Iraq, like the Arab Middle East more broadly, lacks the democratic culture that is necessary for freedom to take root. And so for cultural reasons, this effort was flawed from the outset. Or so the argument goes.

Let me address each of these charges in turn.

The war is lost. "Our mission has failed," Mr. Buckley wrote earlier this year. "It seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly," saith the man (Mr. Fukuyama) who once declared "the end of history" and in 1998 signed a letter to congressional leaders stating, "U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place."

These critics of the war are demonstrating a peculiar eagerness to declare certain matters settled. We certainly face difficulties in Iraq--but we have seen significant progress as well. In 2005, Iraq's economy continued to recover and grow. Access to clean water and sewage-treatment facilities has increased. The Sunnis are now invested in the political process, which was not previously the case. The Iraqi security forces are far stronger than they were. Our counterinsurgency strategy is more effective than in the past. Cities like Tal Afar, which insurgents once controlled, are now back in the hands of free Iraqis. Al Qaeda's grip has been broken in Mosul and disrupted in Baghdad. We now see fissures between Iraqis and foreign terrorists. And in the aftermath of the mosque bombing in Samarra, we saw the political and religious leadership in Iraq call for an end to violence instead of stoking civil war--and on the whole, the Iraqi security forces performed well. These achievements are authentic grounds for encouragement. And to ignore or dismiss all signs of progress in Iraq, to portray things in what Norman Podhoretz has called "the blackest possible light," disfigures reality.

One might hope our own democratic development--which included the Articles of Confederation and a "fiery trial" that cost more than 600,000 American lives--would remind critics that we must sometimes be patient with others. We are engaged in an enterprise of enormous importance: helping a traumatized Arab nation become stable, free and self-governing. Success isn't foreordained--and neither is failure. Justice Holmes said the mode in which the inevitable comes to pass is through effort.

The freedom agenda is dead. The president's freedom agenda is now "a casualty of the war that began three years ago," according to Mr. Will. The Bush Doctrine is in "shambles," Mr. Fukuyama insists. We cannot "impose" democracy on "a country that doesn't want it," he says.

Why is Mr. Fukuyama so sure people in Iraq and elsewhere don't long for democracy? Just last year, on three separate occasions, Iraqis braved bombs and bullets to turn out and vote in greater numbers (percentage-wise) than do American voters, who merely have to brave lines. Does Mr. Fukuyama believe Iraqis prefer subjugation to freedom? Does he think they, unlike he, relish life in a gulag, or the lash of the whip, or the midnight knock of the secret police? Who among us wants a jackboot forever stomping on his face? It is a mistake of a large order to argue that democracy is unwanted in Iraq simply because (a) violence exists three years after the country's liberation--and after more than three decades of almost unimaginable cruelty and terror; and (b) Iraq is not Switzerland.

Beyond that, the critics of the Iraq war have chosen an odd time to criticize the appeal and power of democracy. After all, we are witnessing the swiftest advance of freedom in history. According to Freedom House's director of research, Arch Puddington, "The global picture . . . suggests that 2005 was one of the most successful years for freedom since Freedom House began measuring world freedom in 1972. . . . The 'Freedom in the World 2006' ratings for the Middle East represent the region's best performance in the history of the survey."

Mr. Will says it is time to "de-emphasize talk about Iraq's becoming a democracy that ignites emulative transformation in the Middle East." Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a democracy activist from Egypt, says different. Mr. Ibrahim, who originally opposed the war to liberate Iraq, said it "has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us."

Cultural determinism. The problem with Iraq, Mr. Will said in a Manhattan Institute lecture, is that it "lacks a Washington, a Madison, a [John] Marshall--and it lacks the astonishingly rich social and cultural soil from which such people sprout." There is no "existing democratic culture" that will allow liberty to succeed, he argues. And he scoffs at the assertion by President Bush that it is "cultural condescension" to claim that some peoples, cultures or religions are destined to despotism and unsuited for self-government. The most obvious rebuttal to Mr. Will's first point is that only one nation in history had at its creation a Washington, Madison and Marshall--yet there are 122 democracies in the world right now. So clearly founders of the quality of Washington and Madison are not the necessary condition for freedom to succeed.

A mark of serious conservatism is a regard for the concreteness of human experience. If cultures are as intractable as Mr. Will asserts, and if an existing democratic culture was as indispensable as he insists, we would not have seen democracy take root in Japan after World War II, Southern Europe in the 1970s, Latin America and East Asia in the '80s, and South Africa in the '90s. It was believed by many that these nations' and regions' traditions and cultures--including by turns Confucianism, Catholicism, dictatorships, authoritarianism, apartheid, military juntas and oligarchies--made them incompatible with self-government.

This is not to say that culture is unimportant. It matters a great deal. But so do incentives and creeds and the power of ideas, which can profoundly shape culture. Culture is not mechanically deterministic--and to believe that what is will always be is a mistake of both history and philosophy.

Americans have debated matters of creed and culture before. John C. Calhoun believed slavery was a cultural given that could not be undone in the South. Lincoln knew slavery had deep roots--but he believed that could, and must, change. He set about to do just that. Lincoln believed slavery could be overcome because he believed human beings were constituted in a particular way. In the "enlightened belief" of the Founders, he said, "nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows." Lincoln believed as well that the self-evident truths in the Declaration were the Founders' "majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man."

What has plagued the Arab Middle East is not simply, or even primarily, culture; it is antidemocratic ideologies and oppressive institutions. And the way to counteract pernicious ideologies and oppressive institutions is with better ones. Liberty, and the institutions that support liberty, is a pathway to human flourishing.

Critics of the Iraq war have offered no serious strategic alternative to the president's freedom agenda, which is anchored in the belief that democracy and liberal institutions are the best antidote to the pathologies plaguing the Middle East. The region has generated deep resentments and lethal anti-Americanism. In the past, Western nations tolerated oppression for the sake of "stability." But this policy created its own unintended consequences, including attacks that hit America with deadly fury on Sept. 11. President Bush struck back, both militarily and by promoting liberty.
In Iraq, we are witnessing advancements and some heartening achievements. We are also experiencing the hardships and setbacks that accompany epic transitions. There will be others. But there is no other way to fundamentally change the Arab Middle East. Democracy and the accompanying rise of political and civic institutions are the only route to a better world--and because the work is difficult doesn't mean it can be ignored. The cycle has to be broken. The process of democratic reform has begun, and now would be precisely the wrong time to lose our nerve and turn our back on the freedom agenda. It would be a geopolitical disaster and a moral calamity--and President Bush, like President Reagan before him, will persist in his efforts to shape a more hopeful world.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=1100…

[Joerver]

Mr. Fukuyama, however, rejects the idea that “the problem stems from Islam itself.” Rather, he says, a political ideology, a virulent form of “modern identity politics,” born out of an opposition to modernization, has made use of Islam “for political purposes.”
Es gibt mehr Gedanken in Francis Fukuyama neuem Buch, die einer Nachbearbeitung bedürfen. Hier seine Thesen über den Islam von einem Blog der Times mit Kommentaren.

Eine Bemerkung, da i.A. das Spammen und Dummposten im Forum überhand nimmt, sollte man die Person(en) einfach auf ignore setzen, dann sieht der Thread schon viel sauberer aus.
Gegen das Threadspamming hilft das zwar nicht, da könnten nur die Mods helfen, aber da werden wohl lieber Poesiealbumsbildchen gepostet.
Wenn niemand auf die Spammpostings mehr eingeht, wird sich das Problem wohl am Schnellsten von alleine lösen.



April
20

8:56 pm
Islam v. ‘Jihadists’
Categories: Religion
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=10

Francis Fukuyama has been thinking again. He has been thinking about his longtime self-identification as a neoconservative (especially in the context of a war he never believed in). And he has been thinking about his influential book “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992) and its famous thesis that after centuries of ideological struggles, “economic and political liberalism” has emerged triumphant, and we can look forward to “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

In his latest book, “America at the Crossroads,” Mr. Fukuyama writes, “I have concluded that neoconservatism…has evolved into something I can no longer support.” And in an afterword added two months ago to “The End of History,” he tells us that he still believes “that there is an overall logic to historical evolution that explains why there should be increasing democracy around the world as our societies evolve.” Nevertheless, Mr. Fukuyama acknowledges, the evolution has been slowed somewhat by developments he did not quite foresee, including the rise of a militant Islam that constitutes “a broad Muslim exception to the overall pattern of democratic development.”

Mr. Fukuyama, however, rejects the idea that “the problem stems from Islam itself.” Rather, he says, a political ideology, a virulent form of “modern identity politics,” born out of an opposition to modernization, has made use of Islam “for political purposes.”

What he means, as it turns out, is that true Islam—an entity that may not have quite emerged—is an Islam that will not be attached to any political ambition, but instead will be what he describes in “America at the Crossroads” as “a matter of personal commitment.” The genius of liberalism, Mr. Fukuyama explains in his afterward to “The End of History,” was its exclusion “of final ends addressed by religion from the realm of politics.” Only by disconnecting religion and political power was “the ground work for modern secular politics” secured. “This is a struggle the West went through, and I believe it is a struggle the Islamic world is now in the process of going through,” he writes.

Get it? In the long run, Islam will be no threat, because in the long run its adherents will be just like us—secular people who might enjoy a discussion of “final ends” now and then, but who will not insist that such metaphysical concerns structure the public realm or form the basis of an aggressive foreign policy. In the short run, however, we will have to deal with a band of disaffected “contemporary jihadists” who are not so much following the dictates of Islam as “following in the footsteps of anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists, and members of the Bader-Meinhof gang in earlier generations.”

That’s a nice list (with most of its members conveniently in the past). And it reassures us that while suicide bombers and the like pose a serious threat, they are not, after all, ideologues; they are criminals. Were they ideologues we would have to think about the ideology impelling them to act and wonder how we could persuade them to abandon it for ours—or at least to relax it so that peaceful coexistence between us might be possible.

And if one claim of their ideology was to be universal, we would have think about how to support the claim that ours was universal too, as Fukuyama certainly believes it to be. Two universals is one too many. Universalism vs. universalism is just not satisfying; it’s too murky. Universal values vs. the actions of thugs, on the other hand, has a nice crisp ring.

Whenever I read arguments like Mr. Fukuyama’s I think of “Die Hard.” In that 1988 movie, you may remember, a Los Angeles skyscraper is taken over just before the end of the working day. For much of the movie we are allowed and even encouraged to think that Alan Rickman’s character Hans Gruber and his not-so-merry crew are doing what they are doing in the name of some cherished cause. But then, sometime after the midpoint, we learn that they are just doing it for the money. They are not ideologues, acting out an allegiance to a creed or to a program of liberation; they’re crooks. And once we know that we can stop thinking about their motivations or anything else and sit back and enjoy what we came to see—Bruce Willis (as John McClane) killing everyone in sight.

That’s a movie you can watch without straining yourself. No faithful warriors calling into question your faith, just a bunch of bad guys. But we are not in a movie.
Link to ThisComments (18)
Comments »

1.

Why waste even one paragraph on Francis Fukuyama?

Comment by Realist — April 21, 2006 @ 1:33 am
2.

Francis Fukuyama’s detailing of the roots of radical Islam misses the historical root of Islamic totalitarianism: nationalism. Nationalism begat Fascism, Nazism, and Communism; Communism begat militant terrorists like Carlos the Jackal, who was trained in Marx and Lenin revolutionary ideology early in life, trained militant Palestinians in the 70s, converted to Islam, and now enthusiastically supports both Bin Laden and Marxist-Leninist ideology from his Paris jail cell. The decay of an organized nationalist totalitarian movement in Europe resulted, not in melting-pot freedom, but in an organized Islamic totalitarian movement.

Comment by Bill Decker — April 21, 2006 @ 7:25 am
3.

Bernard Lewis has pointed out that there is no place in Islam for a secular state. This is a basic tenet of the faith.

Comment by lench — April 21, 2006 @ 9:15 am
4.

I have to disagree strongly with a nearly throwaway comment here: “while suicide bombers and the like pose a serious threat, they are not, after all, ideologues; they are criminals.” Actually, suicide bombers are willing to give their lives for something they believe in, which is about as much of an ideologue as you can be. Their ideology may be reprehensible, it may be obscure, and it may be impossibly far-fetched, but ideology indeed motivates most of these people. It seems to me that accepting this is critical for understanding and dealing with these people.

Comment by Dan DeLuca — April 21, 2006 @ 9:29 am
5.

stanley fish views islamic jihadist with concern…fukuyama not so….what are we left to decide who is closer to the truth……mr. fish takes us to a movie to clinch his point….i doubt if fukuyama can top that ….unless he raises the question of the iraqi war that stanley fish because of good manners never mentions…

Comment by nathan friedman — April 21, 2006 @ 12:04 pm
6.

The question that everybody of good will in the Western Judeo/Christian community who is interested in the subject, Islamism, should ask himself is:

“Is this, the debate on the subject, the search for the system that a majority of Moslems chose for themselves in their belief that it would develop the society they believe is better for THEM or is it a search for the system WE believe is better for THEM and for US?”
Except for the international implications of an Islamist regime, as manifested in its foreign policy, Moslems should be the SOLE community that decides on ITS own mode of governance; be it western style liberal democracy, Islamism or whatever system THEY CHOSE for THEMSELVES.
The foreign policy of such a regime, as for any other regime’s, is a legitimate concern to the international community subject to regulation by international covenants and treaties, International Organizations and alliances etc.
That however should never include telling, or imposing, on any community what others believe is better for her!

Comment by omaribrahim — April 21, 2006 @ 12:50 pm
7.

I wonder what Fukuyama makes of the 25 percent of the american electorate that are religious fundamentalists who elected bush, and who would do to america exactly what the islamic fundamentalists did to the islamic countries of the middle east centuries ago right up to the present. at the pinnacle of their culture’s ascendance they were thrown backwards by religious fundamentalists who rejected Fukuyama’s secular humanism. the same thing is happening now in this country.

Comment by allen greenberg — April 21, 2006 @ 2:40 pm
8.

What defines ideology, like history, is what the winners emphasize. Even crooks, believing in the forced distribution of wealth, certainly to further their idea of tribe or family, may be said to have an ideology, presumably a belief system that transcends mere self-interest. But this is a false distinction: an ideology is what an organized tribe believes in — and the problem today is when the means become violent, not the nature of the belief.

U.S. foreign policy believes control of resources, even opening markets, justifies organized violence, whether pre-emptive, justified, or mistaken. If religious fanatics think they may use unstructured violence to drive the west from their sacred lands, permitting them to create religious states, they have an ideology — rather like other terrorists without a formal state or army.

The war on terrorism has failed not only tactically but strategically, by not pressuring Muslim leaders to reject bin Ladenism as a functional belief system. There is no absolute way to distinguish random violence in the name of a self-serving belief system (radical Islam) from organized state violence in the name of a self-serving belief system (concentrating wealth in an elite). Is Stanley Fish suggesting, by invoking Diehard, it’s fine to kill “bad guys” when you don’t have to deal with their complex humanity and motivations? So much for a defensible universal standard!

Comment by Robert S. Becker — April 21, 2006 @ 2:54 pm
9.

Islam is not the reason for teror and can not be used for a political ambition to reach.It is simply a religion which tells a lot of stories about life. When it comes to democracy or to bring democracy to those who are being ruled by totalitarian regimes, there must not be hypocrisy among the international community.Why? , Because nobody was not disturbed beacuse of these regimes, while they were not creating terror but were serving to international community as a oil provider. As a muslim and as a person who is living in a secular country, when we look at these few who use Islam to create terror, and afterwards, when we look at the whole muslim community, we would realise that how they re tiny and without support.

Comment by umut eren — April 21, 2006 @ 3:18 pm
10.

First there’s the question of oil, oil, oil, oil, oil. And, of course, there’s also the ideology of oil, oil, oil, oil, oil. And the lest we forget, there’s the universal principal of oil, oil, oil, oil, oil. There is no text in this class, there is only OIL.

Comment by Mike Geary — April 21, 2006 @ 6:44 pm
11.

As Stanley Fish’s tone implies throughout (”Get it?”) this put-down is unworthy of Francis Fukuyama’s courageous stance & further thinking, going by his writings variously published in recent newspapers. Ideology may warp the motives & decisions of suicide bombers, I would add, but desperation & exasperation are the incentives, not Islam.
Ernest Werner

Comment by Ernest Werner — April 21, 2006 @ 7:23 pm
12.

The success of Mr. Fukuyama’s treatise had more to do with the enticing title than with the substance of his arguments. It was the equivalent valuing a dotcom based on its ‘with it’ name rather than its business model.

He’s ‘admitting’ the Iraq war led to ‘unforseen’ circumstances such as “…developments he did not quite foresee, including the rise of a militant Islam that constitutes a broad Muslim exception to the overall pattern of democratic development.”

Wow! who woulda thunk? Neither he nor anyone among his (now former necon) colleagues apparently read a history book on Iraq and its formation by the Brits in the 1920’s or for that matter Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 when he uttered: “I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors.” Translated in 2003: “They (Iraqis) are going to welcome us with flowers”.

Get real Francis, if you had bothered to read about the Khilafat movement in India during the 1920’s (yes I know–it’s history), you would have found about the very concept of Islam: One brand of religion–no protestants, no baptists. One brand worldwide–no exceptions. No Ahmedis, no barelvis, no shias-just one one ring to find them and in the darkness bind them.

The reaction to post-invasion Iraq is no surprise to the rest of us who had cracked open a history book.

Saddam probably doesn’t speak French and probably (although more likely than Cheney) hasn’t read a history book, but he doubtless would say: “Apres moi le deluge”.

Comment by Jamshed Pettit — April 21, 2006 @ 8:00 pm
13.

The suicide bombers are not idealists or dying for a cause they “believe in”. The suicide bombers see no future for themselves and in large measure see no future for their families on which they are a burden.

When they commit suicide in the name of Islam, their families get paid. Somewhere between $25K and $100K. That is big money for poor Arabs. So, they remove a mouth to feed and their families get a big infusion of cash.

Comment by Genie-us — April 21, 2006 @ 8:26 pm
14.

Fukuyama’s reason for the ‘disaffected “contemporary jihadists,”‘ that Mr. Fish refers to, is also one that escapes my understanding. Fukuyama invokes Olivier Roy and speaks of an amorphous, alienating struggle with modernity from the view of 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants from Middle Eastern countries. Radical Islamists, to him, are produced by a search for identity in the Western world. That doctrines such as Bin Laden’s are inherently attractive of themselves when faced with an “identity crisis,” is nonsensical.

Comment by Jen Chang — April 21, 2006 @ 9:33 pm
15.

Mr. Fukuyama’s assertion that” true islam” is finding itself is supported by a Muslim Author Resa Aslan in his book No God but God. He argues that the conflict being waged in the Muslim world is really an upheaval in the interepretation of true Islam.

And if one looks at the ” terrorists’ Al Qaida, their primary mission is the overthrow of the Saudi government.

Comment by Demian Barrett — April 21, 2006 @ 10:30 pm
16.

I certainly hold no brief to defend Prof Fukuyama’s views on any topic. And yet the thought that Islam may eventually may change so as to place a person’s relationship with God in the private sphere is perhaps not so far-fetched. Consider what moved Christian religion from the political realm to the private — the wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics in the 15th-17th centuries. It is perhaps still an open question whether the civil war in Iraq may spread to a wider Sunni-Shiite conflict. Something like the 30 Years War is a terrible price to pay for humanity to learn again the lesson that religious belief is best sequestered carefully in the individual conscience. Yet history suggests that we, as a species, are really pretty thick and regularly make the same mistakes again and again.

Comment by Dirk Baltzly — April 22, 2006 @ 4:41 am
17.

Good point. By dismissing Islamist ideology as non-universal (and simultaneously asserting without argument that “liberalism” is in fact universal), Fukuyama avoids the considerable effort it takes to understand or persuade. Rather, he can just war ‘em down or wait ‘em out, both of which are forms of the ad hominem fallacy. Both of which aren’t likely to be terribly effective, either.

It’s rather remarkable how poorly this point is understood by the commenters.

Comment by tristero — April 22, 2006 @ 8:40 am
18.

Mr. Greenberg gets it right — what we are experiencing is not two “universals” in collision, but two religiously premised ideologies in conflict. Bush got it right when he used the word “crusade” in an early response to 9/11. We have, to put it in psychological terms, two irrational mindsets going at each other. Bush demonstrated his pathology when he boasted in a speech last month that we are spending 3 billion to develop ways of combatting Improvised Explosive Devices. 3 billion to solve a problem of Bush’s creation — and he’s proud of that! As during so much of Vietnam, I pause to question my own sanity. And now we face the prospect of nuking Iran to solve a problem that may ensue in 5 or 10 years, but designed to get fools to rally ’round Republicans later this year. We have two versions of insanity in conflict.

Comment by H R Coursen — April 22, 2006 @ 11:11 am

[Joerver]

Rall bringt Fukuyama auf den Punkt!

[Joerver]

Es ist in manchen Kreisen eine Tatsache, das es den Neoconservatismus nicht gibt. Das ist auch kein Problem, denn das Entscheidend ist nicht die Bezeichnung von Dingen, sie vereinfacht nur die Beschreibung, sondern das Denken, was eine bestimmte Gruppe in ihrem Handeln antreibt
Hier nun ein Artikel über Leo Strauss, den Vater der nichtexistierenden Neocons und seine Gedankenkonstruktionen.
Auf der Seite gibt es eine Menge Links.


Straussism: The Philosophy Directing The Age Of Tyranny
Straussism is the philosophy of the obscure University Of Chicago philosophy instructor Leo Strauss.

The students of Leo Strauss left the University in search of political power; these took root in the Republican party, formed neo-conservatism and became known as Neocons

Straussism calls for tyranny -- rule from those above
http://www.globalecho.org/view_article.php?aid=7378&visitID=…

by: Jan Allen on: 17th May, 06

Introduction:

1) A Straussian: a disciple of the philosopher Leo Strauss.

2) Leo Struass (1899-1973) was a student of philosophy in Germany and watched the Weimar Republic dissolve into chaos and then into tyranny. As a Jew, he was forced to flee Germany and he eventually ended up at the University of Chicago , where he developed a cult following from some the brightest students. For Strauss, the demise of the Weimar Republic represented a repudiation of liberal democracy. Liberalism, to Strauss, equals relativism, which necessarily leads to nihilism. Strauss longed to return to a previous, pre-liberal, pre-bourgeois era of blood and guts, of imperial domination, of authoritarian rule, of pure fascism.

These views resonated with Straussian disciples such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol and Harry Jaffa. They took these ideas out of the classroom and translated them into actual political doctrine: the neoconservative manifesto of the Project for a New American Century. Straussian principles would be implemented on a global scale, and 9/11 provided the perfect pretext. Paul Wolfowitz, who attended Strauss's lectures on Plato, became the architect of the Iraq War, using hyped intelligence concerning WMD's as the "noble lie".

As a young man in Germany , Leo Strauss became infatuated with a beautiful and brilliant Jewish scholar, Hannah Arendt, whose impact on American political thought will probably be seen by future historians as greater than any other of the Weimar émigrés. Hannah Arendt spurned Strauss's advances and did not conceal her contempt for his ideas. Arendt died in 1975, but the importance of her work is just beginning to be appreciated. Her brilliant analysis, The Origins of Totalitarianism, remains the standard today, and her categories can help us understand the erosion of democracy since 9/11. Her concept of the "banality of evil" which she developed in Eichmann in Jerusalem is useful in understanding how ordinary individuals can plan and carry out acts of inhumanity.

Strauss and Arendt represent the two poles of the ideological struggle that began in the Weimar Republic and which continues even today in America . http://tinyurl.com/ocj7s

3) So, what is Neo-conservatism (what is relationship to Straussism and how is related to tyranny), and how does it propose to change the world in accordance with Straussian political philosophy? 'Neo' comes from the Greek neos, which means new. And, what's neo about neo-conservatism? Well, for one thing, the old conservatism relied on tradition and history; it was cautious, slow and moderate; it went with the flow. But under the influence of Leo Strauss, the new conservatism is intoxicated with nature. The new conservatism is not slow or cautious, but active, aggressive, and reactionary in the literal sense of the term. Inspired by Strauss's hatred for liberal modernity, its goal is to turn back the clock on the liberal revolution and its achievements.
http://tinyurl.com/of2p4



Twenty Two Characteristics Of Straussism
1) The Few Must Rule The Many
John Locke and the American founding fathers held “the natural law tradition” which holds that man possesses natural rights to life, liberty, and property and that the state is always and everywhere the greatest threat to these God-given rights. To the founders, this meant that government should be "bound by the chains" of the Constitution, to paraphrase Jefferson . If men were angels, there would be no need for government, Madison wrote in defense of the Constitution. But men are not angels, Madison continued, which is why government power must always be limited.

Leo Strauss rejected this view of natural rights in favor of Plato’s “philosopher-king” model of government; the “philosopher kings” exercise the “rule of the wise”

Straussians assign dignity to the few.

The superiority of the “ruling philosophers” is an intellectual superiority and not a moral one.

2) Virtue Is Defined By The Elite: It Is That Which Is “For The Public Good”
The elite few are to have unlimited state power who use it to pursue “virtue” with virtue being, their own vision of "the public good."

Moral virtue had no application to the really intelligent man, the philosopher. Moral virtue only existed in popular opinion, where it served the purpose of controlling the unintelligent majority.

3) The Strong Must Rule The Weak
Strauss taught: “The strong must rule the weak”; this was presented quite well in Jim Lobe's article 'The Strong Must Rule The Weak' http://tinyurl.com/qtlnn

4) Only One Natural Right: The Right To Rule Over The Vulgar Many
Those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.

The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right—the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many.

For the Straussian, the people of the United States are the “vulgar many,” chumps, dupes, and ciphers to be manipulated, poked, and prodded in the direction of the “Long War,” a new Hundred Years’ War, as spelled out by Rumsfeld’s latest Quadrennial Defense Review. “A policy of perpetual war against a threatening enemy is the best way to ward off political decay. And if the enemy cannot be found, then it must be invented.”

Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, is not one of freedom, but of subordination.

Strauss divided the history of political thought into two camps: the ancients (like Plato) are wise and wily, whereas the moderns (like Locke and other liberals) are vulgar and foolish.

5) Justice Is Merely The Interest Of The Stronger
Strauss shares the insights of the wise Plato that justice is merely the interest of the stronger; that those in power make the rules in their own interests and call it justice.


6) “The Rule Of The Wise” is unquestionable, absolute, authoritarian, undemocratic and covert
The rule of the wise is not to be questioned: one is not to raise questions about classic values such as justice or constitutional principles; hence the rule of the wise must be unquestioned.

The rule of the wise is to be absolute, authoritarian and undemocratic: The rule of the wise cannot involve any consideration of the unwise: Leo Strauss said: “It would be equally absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by consideration of the unwise wishes of the unwise; hence the wise rulers ought not to be responsible to the unwise subjects;" the rule of the wise must be absolute and authoritarian; majority-democracy would result in the subjection of what is by nature higher to that which is lower. Strauss’ reading of Plato comes down to this: a majority-democracy is an act against nature and must be prevented at all costs. Under the Straussian autocratic system, dissent is not only dangerous, it is seditious

This rule of the wise must be covert; and this principle is facilitated by the overwhelming stupidity of the gentlemen. The more gullible and unperceptive they are, the easier it is for the wise to control and manipulate them.



7) The Three Classes: The Wise-Few, The Vulgar-Many And The Gentlemen
The wise are the lovers of the harsh, unadulterated truth. They are capable of looking into the abyss without fear and trembling. They recognize neither God nor moral imperatives. They are devoted above all else to their own pursuit of the “higher” pleasures, which amount to consorting with their “puppies” or young initiates.

The vulgar many, are lovers of wealth and pleasure. They are selfish, slothful, and indolent. They can be inspired to rise above their brutish existence only by fear of impending death or catastrophe.

The gentlemen, are lovers of honor and glory. They are the most ingratiating towards the conventions of their society, that is, the illusions of the cave. They are true believers in God, honor, and moral imperatives. They are ready and willing to embark on acts of great courage and self-sacrifice at a moment’s notice.

8) The State Is Omnipotent: It Manifests Militaristic Nationalism
Strauss believed that human aggression could only be restrained by a powerful, nationalistic state. He believed that such an omnipotent state can only be maintained if there is an external threat, "even if one has to be manufactured." This is why Straussians believe in perpetual war and is another reason why they have formed a cult around "the church of Lincoln ," whom they hold up as "the greatest statesman in history." Lincoln manufactured many "threats," including the truly bizarre notion that representative government would perish from the earth if the Southern states were permitted to secede peacefully. In reality, peaceful secession would have been a victory for self-government, keeping in mind that neither Lincoln nor Congress ever said that they were launching an invasion for any reason having to do with liberating the slaves.

Strauss taught that war – any war – will restore our “moral seriousness”, "clear away the fog of unthinking relativism," enable us to see evil, restore virtue, heroism, valor, and a sense of sacrifice, allow us to die for our comrades, country and faith, avoid the "hazards of civilization," make us more thoughtful, force us to "consider our loyalties," make men "decisive", and "place greatness within the reach of ordinary men."

“Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed," he once wrote. "Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people."

The only way a political order can be stable and not deteriorate in hedonistic pleasure is if it is united by an external threat.

Wealth, freedom, and prosperity make people soft, pampered, and depraved. War is an antidote to moral decadence and depravity. Thus war is held to be redemptive

9) Perpetual War Is Necessary
Perpetual War not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in; thus an "aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," of the kind that has been advocated by neocon groups like PNAC and AEI scholars, not to mention Wolfowitz and other administration hawks who have called for a world order dominated by U.S. military power. Strauss' neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a "national destiny", as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983, that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a "myopic national security."

10) Patriotic Fervor Is To Be Rallied
The nation against its external enemies as well as its internal decadence, sloth, pleasure, and consumption, encourages a strong patriotic fervor among the honor-loving gentlemen who wield the reins of power. That strong nationalistic spirit consists in the belief that their nation and its values are the best in the world, and that all other cultures and their values are inferior in comparison.

11) Political Expediency And Murder Become Virtue
Athens, the democracy, weakened by plague, suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of oligarchic Sparta and its allies. Strauss, following Plato, did not grieve for the loss of Athens ; the real city had been no match for the ideal city. In his view, the active life of the citizen of Periclean Athens suffered by comparison with the contemplative life of the philosopher.

The Straussians in the Department of Defense and in the think tanks took this to mean that they could kill on principle. And they did and they do. The first Bush sent his Spartan general to Iraq , and the second sent the same Spartan to the Security Council. The Straussians could not call their work politics, so they called it virtue.

12) Possess And As Necessary Present The “Hidden Meaning” Reject Countervailing Historical Narratives
Straussians routinely claim to possess unique understanding of the "hidden meaning" of history and historical documents, which is often directly at odds with the plain historical facts.

13) Maintain A Culture Of Lying And Carry On A Perpetual Confusion Campaign
Maintain a culture of lying through a compliant media and professional spokes-liars, and carry on a perpetual campaign to confuse the public and keep it ignorant of the elites political designs. The result of this is that Elite operate from a shroud of secrecy; thus their reasonings and logic is nontransparent.

Strauss continually endeavored to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite.

And it does not take much intelligence for them to surmise that they are in a situation of great danger, especially in a world devoted to the modern ideas of equal rights and freedoms. Now more than ever, the wise few must proceed cautiously and with circumspection. So, they come to the conclusion that they have a moral justification to lie in order to avoid persecution.

Yes Strauss goes so far as to say that dissembling and deception – in effect, a culture of lying – is the peculiar justice of the wise.

14) The Many Are Told What They Need To Know And No More.
Deception is to be carried on continually.

Lies are to be both aggressive and perpetual.

While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, the many could not cope; if exposed to anything other than the maintained reality, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy.

15) Lies Are Held To Be Nobel: Develop, Maintain And Present Noble Lies
Strauss believed in the concept of “noble lies”: the conviction that lies, far from being simply a regrettable necessity of political life, are instead virtuous and noble instruments of wise policy to keep the many from the dangers of liberalism and democracy.

Plato himself advised his nobles, men with golden souls, to tell noble lies, that is, political fables, much like the specter of Saddam Hussein with a nuclear bomb: to rally the people, to keep the other levels of human society (silver, iron, brass) in their proper places, loyal to the state and willing to do its bidding.
Strauss defined the modern method of noble lies in the use of esoteric messages within an exoteric text, telling the truth to the wise while at the same time conveying something quite different to the many; thus he advocated an Orwellian double speak http://tinyurl.com/8jxjo
method of communication.



16) Dissemble Democracy
Maintain true democracy that is a leadership-democracy for the Few while at the same time feign majority-democracy to the Many.

Relate the principle of true democracy to the elite: the strong must rule the weak. While at the same time dissemble http://tinyurl.com/rpyod mythical democracy to the populace: the rule of the majority

Strauss had no objections to democracy as long as a wise elite, inspired by the profound truths of the ancients.

Wrap speeches with the American flag giving the appearance of appearance of legitimacy in dissimulation and deceit.

17) Religion Is For The Many
Strauss believed in, and proposed, a state religion as a way of reviving absolutes, countering free thought, and enforcing a cohesive unity. Strauss argued against a society containing a multiplicity of coexisting religions and goals, which would break the society apart.

Religion was primarily a propaganda tool to be used to get the many to acquiesce in state intervention on behalf of aggressive nationalism.

Authority and discipline are key values for Straussians; the many need religion to keep them in line. Marx called religion the opium of the people, Strauss thought the people needed their opium.

Thus, Religion is absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the many who otherwise would be out of control.

Religion was for the many alone; the philosopher kings need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud." Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers.

“Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing,'' because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats or not be available for aggressive nationalism

18) Secrecy Is Essential
The wise must conceal their views for two reasons – to spare the people’s feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals. People will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, and both lies and secrecy are thus necessary to protect the superior few from the persecution of the vulgar many.

19) Nature Abhors A Contract
Long before the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration, goaded on by Wolfowitz, Kristol, The American Enterprise Institute, The Project for the New American Century, and others on the right, had made a decision to oust Saddam Hussein. Bush seems to have had a personal vendetta, but the others had more philosophical reasons.

There was nothing Machiavellian about the attack. It was based on principles the planners derived from natural law. One suspects that President Bush, with his simplistic messianic mind-set, was attracted to this line of reasoning: The natural law in the yew hearts of human beings, the innate ability to know right from wrong, took precedence over mere convention.

And so the Bush regime violated the contract that was agreed to when the United States joined the United Nations; it flouted the U.S. Constitution, which is also a contract, by attacking without the required declaration of war by the Congress; and it disregarded the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in other secret detention camps around the world.

The administration's wise men held up Strauss's version of natural law as the model, dismissing contracts as mere laws of men.

Natural law, interpreted by Bush's "wise counsels," gave the President permission to launch a preemptive war through an appeal to the higher power. Natural-law theory assumes that men seek the good and that by asking the perennial questions--what is virtue? What is justice?--they will come to wisdom.

Straussians, like Kristol, hold that the Founding Fathers espoused natural-law theory, saying that natural law was both divine and self-evident. But the Founders were concerned with inalienable natural rights. After much debate in their convention, they wrote a contract.

20) Intimidate All Opponents
"Professors who had less respect for Leo Strauss . . . were read quotations from [Strauss’s] Natural Right and History." The other faculty and students at Chicago viewed the Straussians as "intellectual brown shirts, engaged in a campaign of deliberate intimidation." This of course is a practice that these same people practice today, rarely engaging in honest intellectual debate but rather attempting to intimidate or censor those who disagree with them. Alan Keyes, for example, typically dismisses his critics as being "incapable of recognizing moral purpose," as though he alone possesses such abilities.

21) Extinguish The Fires of Rabble
Jim Lobe in ‘Strong Must Rule The Weak’ writes: As for what a Straussian world order might look like, (Shadia) Drury said the philosopher often talked about Jonathan Swift's story of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. ''When Lilliput was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect.''

The fires of rabble are the modern licentious doctrines and philosophies; these include such things as individualism, liberty and constitutionalism. The fires of rabble have resulted in great social decay: divorce, delinquency, crime, and abounding creature comforts.

The Vulgar, that is America , is literally on fire; in order for it to be saved, the fires of rabble must be extinguished through the institution of martial law.

22) Ennoble The Many
If the Few were to give the Many, such things as freedom, happiness, and prosperity, in Strauss's estimation, this would turn them into animals.

The goal of the wise is to ennoble the vulgar. But what could possibly ennoble the vulgar? Only weeping, worshipping, and sacrificing ennobles the many.


Concluding Remarks
1) Neo-conservatism is the ultimate stealth weapon of mass destruction whose purpose is to destroy liberty and affluence.

2) It is ironic that American neoconservatives have decided to conquer the world in the name of liberty and democracy, when they have so little regard for either

3) It is helpful to think in terms of opposites
Mother Teresa and Straussians are opposites. Mother Teresa was humble, willing to yield, caring and truthful; whereas, Straussians are exhalative, ruthless, uncaring and deceitful. If Leo Strauss were alive today he might consider the above statement "seditious", one worthy of Ennoblement.

4) Strauss as a nihilist
Strauss is a nihilist in the sense that he believes that there is no rational foundation for morality.

He is an atheist, and he believes that in the absence of God, morality has no grounding. It’s all about benefiting others and oneself; there is no objective reason for doing so, only rewards and punishments in this life.

But Strauss is not a nihilist if we mean by the term a denial that there is any truth, a belief that everything is interpretation.

He does not deny that there is an independent reality. On the contrary, he thinks that independent reality consists in nature and its “order of rank” – the high and the low, the superior and the inferior. Like Nietzsche, he believes that the history of western civilization has led to the triumph of the inferior, the rabble – something they both lamented profoundly. http://tinyurl.com/25bxx



References for this material came from these sources and others:
Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception
http://www.alternet.org/story/15935

The Cult of Leo Strauss: Leo Strauss
http://www.catalystmagazine.net/issues/story.cfm?story=475

Ignoble liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the philosophy of mass deception
http://www.lacosapizza.com/shorris.html

Straussians: Mass Murder at the Mall as Gospel
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=338

Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5010.htm

The Strong Must Rule The Weak
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0305strauss_body.html

Neocons Dance A Straussian Waltz
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EE09Ak01.html

Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6750.htm

source: [urlStraussism: The Philosophy Directing The Age Of T]http://my.opera.com/prosperingbear/blog/show.dml/257642[/url]

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[Joerver]

Wieder mal ist ein neues Buch über Leo Strauss in den USA erschienen und in diesem wird ein andere Sicht auf Strauss dargestellt. Da es in D wohl wenige gibt, die irgendetwas von Strauss gelesen haben, hier die Besprechungung des Buches aus der Times.

June 25, 2006
'Reading Leo Strauss,' by Steven B. Smith
Neocon or Not?
Review by ROBERT ALTER

FOR a scholar who addressed what the general public would regard as abstruse topics in a dry academic fashion, Leo Strauss has become a name that reverberates widely — and, for many, ominously. He is seen as the seminal thinker behind neoconservatism, its intellectual father.
[Table align=left]

Leo Strauss taught at the University of
Chicago in the 1950's and 60's.
[/TABLE]
Born into an Orthodox Jewish home in a small German town in 1899, Strauss was trained in the rigorous discipline of Geistesgeschichte, intellectual history. He began his career in the 1920's in an innovative adult Jewish learning institute. His first book was on Spinoza, and he subsequently devoted scrupulous, often maverick, studies to major figures of political philosophy from Plato and Maimonides to Machiavelli, Hobbes and the framers of the American Constitution. He left Germany in 1932, went to England via Paris, and in 1938 came to the United States. He taught for a decade at the New School in New York and then from 1949 to 1968 at the University of Chicago, where he exerted his greatest influence. He died in 1973.

Strauss was very much caught up in an extraordinary intellectual ferment among German Jews who came of age around the time of World War I. He was friends with Gershom Scholem, the great historian of Jewish mysticism, in the early 1920's. He worked with Franz Rosenzweig, the bold architect of a Jewish existentialist theology. He was admired by Scholem's friend Walter Benjamin, the eminent literary critic and cultural theorist. Like all these thinkers, he was concerned with the tensions between tradition, founded on revelation, and modernity, operating with unaided reason.

How, then, has Strauss come to be viewed as a sinister presence in contemporary politics? Some of his students, or students of his students, went on to become conservative policy intellectuals in Washington. Perhaps the most well known of his disciples, Allan Bloom, remained at the University of Chicago, where he wrote his best-selling book, "The Closing of the American Mind" (1987), a scathing critique of the debasement of American higher education by conformist progressivism. In the mid-1980's, a highly critical article in The New York Review of Books linked Strauss with conservatism, and in the next few years, numerous pieces in other journals followed suit. It has become received wisdom that a direct line issues from Strauss's seminars on political philosophy at the University of Chicago to the hawkish approach to foreign policy by figures like Paul Wolfowitz and others in the Bush administration.

"Reading Leo Strauss," Steven B. Smith's admirably lucid, meticulously argued book, persuasively sets the record straight on Strauss's political views and on what his writing is really about. The epigraph to its introduction, from an essay by the political scientist Joseph Cropsey, sounds the keynote: "Strauss was a towering presence . . . who neither sought nor had any discernible influence on what passes for the politics of the group."

Although it is said that Strauss voted twice for Adlai Stevenson, he appears never to have been involved in any political party or movement. What is more important is that his intellectual enterprise, as Smith's careful exposition makes clear, repeatedly argued against the very idea of political certitude that has been embraced by certain neoconservatives. Strauss's somewhat contrarian reading of Plato's "Republic," for example, proposed that the dialogue was devised precisely to demonstrate the dangerous unfeasibility of a state governed by a philosopher-king.

"Throughout his writings," Smith concludes, "Strauss remained deeply skeptical of whether political theory had any substantive advice or direction to offer statesmen." This view was shaped by his wary observation of the systems of totalitarianism that dominated two major European nations in the 1930's, Nazism in Germany and Communism in the Soviet Union. As a result, he strenuously resisted the notion that politics could have a redemptive effect by radically transforming human existence. Such thinking could scarcely be further from the vision of neoconservative policy intellectuals that the global projection of American power can effect radical democratic change. "The idea," Smith contends, "that political or military action can be used to eradicate evil from the human landscape is closer to the utopian and idealistic visions of Marxism and the radical Enlightenment than anything found in the writings of Strauss."
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Reading Leo Strauss :
Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Hardcover)
by Steven B. Smith
[/TABLE]
Liberal democracy lies at the core of Strauss's political views, and its basis is the concept of skepticism. Since there are no certainties in the realm of politics, perhaps not in any realm, politics must be the arena for negotiation between different perspectives, with cautious moderation likely to be the best policy. At one point, Smith, the Alfred Cowles professor of political science at Yale, describes Strauss's position as "liberalism without illusions." All this may sound a little antiquated, and Smith is right to associate Strauss with cold war liberals like Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Walter Lippmann and Lionel Trilling. But it's a view from the middle of the past century that might profitably be fostered in our own moment of political polarization, when a self-righteous sense of possessing assured truths is prevalent on both the right and the left.

The other general point that Smith makes about Strauss's alleged paternity of neoconservatism is that a considerable part of his work has nothing to do with politics of any sort. Smith divides his book — a collection of previously published essays, inevitably with some repetition among them — into two parts, the first entitled "Jerusalem," the second, "Athens." Strauss used these terms to designate the two poles of Western culture, roughly corresponding to revelation and reason. It is in the "Athens" section that Smith traces Strauss's trajectory through the history of political philosophy. The essays of the "Jerusalem" part, on the other hand, follow his engagement with Maimonides, Spinoza, Scholem and Zionism (a movement that he had embraced from adolescence but that he thought did not alter the metaphysical condition of galut, exile, in which Jews found themselves).

The Jewish-theological side of Strauss certainly had no perceptible effect on his American disciples, most of them Jews and all of them, as far as I know, secular. In these concerns, Strauss was thoroughly the intellectual product of 1920's German Jewry. Like others of that period, including Walter Benjamin, he approached the idea of revealed religion with the utmost seriousness. It does not appear that he remained a believing Jew, yet he was not prepared simply to dismiss the claims of Jerusalem against Athens.

On the contrary, the sweeping agenda of reformist or revolutionary reason first put forth in the Enlightenment worried him deeply, and he saw religion, with its assertion of a different source of truth, as a necessary counterweight to the certitudes of the 18th century. His vision of reality was, to use a term favored by both Scholem and Benjamin, "dialectic." Why some of his most prominent students missed this essential feature of his thought, and why they turned to the right, remains one of the mysteries of his intellectual legacy.

Robert Alter's most recent book is "Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel."

[Joerver]

Antwort auf Beitrag Nr.: 22.262.081 von Joerver am 25.06.06 10:33:02

Ich sehe gerade, ich habe den Link beim vorigen Posting vergessen!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/books/review/25alter.html

[CaptainFutures]

Joining LaRouche In the Fever Swamps

The New York Times and The New Yorker go off the deep end.

"Just weeks after the LaRouche in 2004 campaign began nationwide circulation of 400,000 copies of the Children of Satan dossier, exposing the role of University of Chicago fascist 'philosopher' Leo Strauss as the godfather of the neo-conservative war party in and around the Bush Administration, two major establishment publications have joined the exposé."

So brags an article under the byline Jeffrey Steinberg on Executive Intelligence Review, a Web site devoted to the perennial presidential campaign of Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. This time around, Mr. LaRouche is running on a platform equating the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon with the 1933 Reichstag fire, set by Nazis so they could blame the Communists and take over the German government.

In his part of "Children of Satan," Mr. Steinberg charges that a "cabal of Strauss disciples, along with an equally small circle of allied neo-conservative and Likudnik fellow-travelers" has been hovering around the government for 30 years, "awaiting the moment of opportunity to launch their not-so-silent coup."

It does seem to be true that the LaRouche screed was first in line in thrusting Leo Strauss, author of such volumes as "Natural Right and History," into the middle of the debate over the Iraq war. The theme was later sounded by James Atlas in the New York Times and Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker.

Mr. Atlas's article on "Leo-Cons" included a photo essay with shots of Mr. Strauss and presumed disciples including Edward Shils, Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow, Albert Wohlstetter, on to Clarence Thomas and Leon Kass. It ended with big photos of Richard Perle (along with the howler, later corrected by the Times, that he was married to Wohlstetter's daughter Joan) and Paul Wolfowitz.

Mr. Hersh's "Selective Intelligence" basically aired one side of an intelligence debate, defending dovish (or if you prefer, intellectually conservative) CIA analysts. It described the other side as "the Straussian movement," citing Mr. Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky, head of a special Pentagon shop set up to review intelligence on Iraq. And it included a quote from an academic about "Strauss's idea--actually Plato's--that philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians."

Looking at the striking similarities in these accounts the conspiracy-minded might conclude that the New York Times and New Yorker have been reduced to recycling the insights of Lyndon LaRouche. But it's entirely possible that Mr. Atlas and Mr. Hersh have stumbled into the fever swamps all on their own.

To those of us who have lived this history over the decades, the notion of a Strauss conspiracy is totally unhinged. Leo Strauss, I learned as graduate student in the 1960s, was a champion of ancient philosophers, a critic of attempts at empirical political science if not of modernity itself. While this is centuries and leagues removed from Saddam Hussein, it's true that Mr. Strauss did influence Irving Kristol and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, and through them other neo-conservatives.
It happens that I did a lot to put this term on the intellectual map as the 1970s dawned, with profiles of Mr. Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. The "neo" meant that they were conservative converts from earlier radicalism. I recently asked Mr. Podhoretz whether his son John and Mr. Kristol's son William were neo-conservatives. "No!" he answered. "They were to the manner born."

It also happens that I had a long association with the late Albert Wohlstetter, who was in fact the key intellect in promoting new defense policies, in particular the accurate weapons that dominated Iraq, and also in mentoring Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Perle and others. But his background was as a mathematical logician and advocate of operational research. Despite Mr. Atlas's ludicrous classification of Wohlstetter as a Straussian, the two had nothing in common except the University of Chicago campus.

While Mr. Wolfowitz took two courses from Mr. Strauss, he was in fact a student of Mr. Wohlstetter. He makes all this clear in a remarkable interview with Sam Tanenhaus of Vanity Fair, released by the Defense Department at www.defenselink.mil. The actual article by Mr. Tanenhaus is only now being widely circulated, but various writers, especially in Europe, have grasped fourth-hand accounts to charge that Mr. Wolfowitz had admitted to "deception."

As one of the few people who ran with both neo-conservatives and the Wohlstetter circle, let me testify that they did not appear at each other's conferences or dinner tables. But prominent members of each are Jewish. This is what the recent conspiracy charges are ultimately about.

Sometimes it is overt anti-Semitism; with "Children of Satan," Mr. LaRouche has chosen an Aryan-nation phrase for Jews (descendants of Cain, who was the result of Satan seducing Eve, in this perfervid theology). At other times, often in the hands of accusers who are Jewish themselves, it is a charge of secret loyalties. The Jews, or Israel, or the Likud have conspired to take over American foreign policy.
This is the ugly accusation an alert reader should suspect in encountering the word "Straussian," or these days even "neo-conservative" in the context of the Iraq debate. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle find their Jewish heritage a point of attack. But George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are gentiles. Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell don't look Jewish to me, but they also helped draft the basic statement of the Bush Doctrine, the September 2002 "National Security Policy of the United States."

Clearly, the administration's critics are anxious to seize any straw to discredit its success in Iraq, to leap to the worst possible construction of events. It was a "quagmire" when troops were slowed by a sand storm, now it's "deception" because chemical weapons dumps haven't been found. The impulse is so strong that Leo Strauss gets exhumed, words are twisted from their meaning, and the Times and New Yorker make common cause with Lyndon LaRouche.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/rbartley/?id=110003…

[Joerver]

Es wäre ganz nett, wenn Artikel erst gelesen würden, bevor irgendwelche Pamphlete von 03 aus dem WSJ hier eingstellt werden.
Als Ergänzung zu meinem vorherigen Posting noch das erste Kapitel aus dem Buch über Leo Strauss.

June 25, 2006
First Chapter
'Reading Leo Strauss'
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/books/chapters/0625-1st-sm…

By STEVEN B. SMITH

The essays contained in this volume are all intended as a contribution to the understanding of the philosophy of Leo Strauss. They do not purport to provide a comprehensive overview of Strauss's life and work, much less an evaluation of the influence of his teaching and the creation of a school of political thought bearing his name. They do attempt to examine what I consider the central and most enduring theme of Strauss's legacy, namely, what he called the "theologico-political problem," which he also referred to metaphorically by the names Jerusalem and Athens.

Who was Leo Strauss? Strauss was a German-Jewish émigré, the product of the pre-World War I Gymnasium who studied at several universities, finally taking his doctorate at Hamburg in 1921. He was a research assistant at an institute for Jewish research in Berlin before leaving Germany in 1932 to settle first in England and later in the United States, where he taught principally at the New School for Social Research in New York and later the University of Chicago. It was during his period in Chicago that Strauss had his greatest influence. He was, by most accounts, a compelling teacher, and like all good teachers everywhere he attracted students, many of whom came to regard themselves as part of a distinctive school. By the time of his death in 1973 Strauss had written (depending on how one counts them) more than a dozen books and around one hundred articles and reviews.

Strauss's works were highly controversial during his own lifetime. When he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago he was the author of two books published in Germany that were long out of print: a slim monograph on the political philosophy of Hobbes, and an even briefer commentary on a minor dialogue by Xenophon. The future trajectory of his life's work would by no means have been obvious. In the autumn of 1949 he gave a series of lectures under the auspices of the Walgreen Foundation, titled Natural Right and History, that was to set his work on a new and distinctive path. It was, literally, his way of introducing himself to the world of American social science from the seat of a major university. The book of the same title was published four years later, in 1953. What exactly did Strauss set out to do?

Strauss offered a deliberately provocative account of what might be called the "modernity problem" that had been widely debated in prewar European circles, but which was still relatively unknown to Americans of that era. Prior to Strauss, the most important current of twentieth-century American political thought was John Dewey's "progressivism." Against the view that the advance of science, especially the modern social sciences, was bringing about the progressive triumph of freedom and democracy, Strauss rang an alarm bell. Strauss argued by contrast that the dynamics of modern philosophy and Vertfrei, or value-free social science, were moving not toward freedom and well-being but to a condition he diagnosed as nihilism. In Strauss's counternarrative of decline, the foundations of constitutional government as understood by the American framers were gradually being sapped and eroded by the emergence of German-style historicism according to which all standards of justice and right are relative to their time and place. All of this was presented as the outcome of a densely detailed history of political thought in which all the trappings of German scholarship were on full display. His analysis was bold, audacious, and learned. The ensuing controversy pitted those advocates of American progressivism against Strauss, who regarded modernity as a mixed blessing that required certain premodern classical and biblical teachings to rescue modernity from its own self-destructive tendencies.

People on the outside often think of Straussianism as some kind of sinister cult replete with secret rites of initiation and bits of insider information-much like a Yale secret society. Straussians are often believed only to associate with other Straussians and only to read books written by one another. Some actually believe that Straussianism requires the subordination of one's critical intellect to the authority of a charismatic cult leader. Others regard it as a political movement, often allied with "neo-conservatism," with a range of prescribed positions and ties to conservative think tanks and policy centers. The liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger deplores the influence of what he calls Strauss's "German windbaggery" and compares it to the deleterious influence of Hegel on earlier generations. "Strauss," Schlesinger continues, "taught his disciples a belief in absolutes, contempt for relativism, and joy in abstract propositions. He approved of Plato's 'noble lies,' disliked much of modern life, and believed that a Straussian elite in government would in time overcome feelings of persecution." None of these beliefs could be further from my own experience.

There is no doubt that the influence of Strauss-or at least his purported influence-is greater now than at any time since his death more than thirty years ago. Of course, Strauss is widely regarded today as a founding father, perhaps the Godfather, of neo-conservatism, with direct or indirect ties to the Bush administration in Washington. The last few years have witnessed a virtual hostile takeover of Strauss by the political Right. "The Bush administration is rife with Straussians," James Atlas has written in the New York Times. Never mind that the Bush administration, like all administrations, is rife with people of all sorts. The association of Strauss with neo-conservatism has been repeated so many times that it leaves the mistaken impression that there is a line of influence leading directly from Strauss's readings of Plato and Maimonides to the most recent directives of the Defense Department. Nothing could be more inimical to Strauss's teaching.

Early readers of Natural Right and History like Walter Lippmann saw in the book a support for the belief that the growing debility of modern democracy was due to its loss of faith in the natural law tradition. Straussians have always advocated a strong national government against the crabbed conservatism of "states rights" fundamentalists or the reactionary defenders of a purely federal reading of the Constitution. A textbook on American political thought compiled by two students of Strauss was dedicated to the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Felix Frankfurter and "to the noble employment of the power they once wielded." The editors of the collection commend FDR for expanding the powers of government beyond securing the bare rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to a "higher and grander" conception of the modern welfare state. What distinguished the Straussian approach to politics was the focus on the "philosophic dimension" of statecraft, often at the expense of mass behavior or interest- group politics that attracted the attention of mainstream of political science. Straussians typically studied not only the deeds, but the words of singular political leaders and statesmen, but without any particular ideological pique or animus. Straussians might be either liberal or conservative, although there was a bias toward those who sought to anchor their policies in a reading of the principles of the American founding. Even recently a distinguished student of Strauss served as a prominent member of the first Clinton administration, advising on matters of domestic policy.

The fact is that Strauss bequeathed not a single legacy, but a number of competing legacies. It is a gross distortion to retrofit Strauss's teachings to conform to the agenda of the political Right. His writings on a wide range of subjects continue to spark lively debate among students in a host of fields. New scholarly editions of his work including previously unpublished essays and lectures as well as a voluminous correspondence have all recently appeared, and more are slated for the future. The influence of his ideas on politics and policy-making are continually discussed and debated, and are frequently condemned in leading opinion magazines, journals, and newspapers. To the question "why Strauss, why now?" I would say, "if not now, when"?

What Is a Straussian?

Once when I was in graduate school, at a party where there was probably way too much to drink, a friend of mine-now by coincidence a prominent attorney in New Haven-was asked if he was a Straussian. "If you mean by that do I regard everything that Leo Strauss ever wrote as true," he replied, "then, yes, I am a Straussian." We all laughed because my friend's answer so perfectly captured and parodied the common view of Straussianism. The question, am I a Straussian, is something I have been asked on more than one occasion over the years. Sometimes the question seems prompted by nothing more than the idle desire to know what Straussianism means. At other times it has the vague character of an "are you now or have you ever been ..." kind of accusation. In any case the question has caused me to think about what it is to be a Straussian.

The first point I would make about Straussianism is that it is not all of a single piece. There is rather a set of common problems or questions that characterize Strauss's work: for example, the difference between ancients and moderns, the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, and of course the tension between reason and revelation. None of these problems can be said to have a priority over the others nor do they cohere in anything as crude as a system. Whatever may be alleged, there is hardly a single thread that runs throughout these different interests. Strauss did not bequeath a system, doctrine, or an "ism," despite what may be attributed to him. Rather, he presented a distinctive way of asking questions or posing problems that may have been loosely related but that scarcely derived from a single Archimedean point of view. It is questions that motivate all of Strauss's writings-questions like "Is reason or revelation the ultimate guide to life?" "Has the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns been decided in favor of modernity?" and "Are the philosophers or the poets better educators of civic life?" The point of Strauss's questions is less to provide answers than to make us aware of certain alternatives. In the age-old debate, he was probably more a fox than a hedgehog.

There are many different kinds of Straussians with many and varied interests and perspectives. Some Straussians have devoted themselves entirely to ancient philosophers, while others work on postmodernism; some are deeply religious, while others are proudly secular; some think about politics and policy-making, while others delve into the deepest problems of Being. This diversity reflects, to some degree, the variety of Strauss's own interests. Strauss's writings range from studies of the ancient political philosophy of Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle, to the Judeo-Arabic writers of the Middle Ages, to such early modern political thinkers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke, to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figures like Nietzsche, Weber, and Heidegger, to issues regarding the philosophy of history, hermeneutics, and the nature of the social sciences. In each of these areas Strauss made notable and lasting contributions that are still widely discussed today.

Few people-one might have to go back to Hegel-have written with as much authority on so wide a range of philosophical, literary, and historical topics. Precisely because Strauss's work covers such a broad landscape, there is not one way of being a Straussian. In fact there are considerable differences among his heirs over precisely what is most valuable in his legacy. Strauss regarded himself as taking the first tentative steps toward the reawakening of substantive interest in the permanent or fundamental problems of political philosophy at a time when it was widely argued that political philosophy was dead. More than this, he expanded the repertoire of political philosophy to include a large number of previously neglected thinkers and topics. The major textbooks of his era made no reference to any of the medieval Judeo-Arabic writers or even to the works of the American founders. Strauss's work treated the American founding as an important philosophical moment in the development of modernity and even encouraged a reconsideration of the ideas of philosophically minded statesmen like Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson. His work also inspired a serious engagement with the work of African- American political thinkers from Fredrick Douglass to W.E.B. DuBois to Martin Luther King, Jr. at a time when their writings received little formal recognition in the academy. None of this, however, gets us any closer to an understanding of what a Straussian is.

Careful Readers and Careful Writers

Straussianism is characterized above all by what its practitioners often call the art of "careful reading." When asked what he taught, it is said, Strauss often replied "old books." Strauss paid special attention to reading mainly primary sources, typically in their original languages. This does not sound terribly controversial today except that at the time the idea of actually reading the great works of political theory had fallen out of favor. It was widely believed in many circles that the development of the modern behavioral sciences had put political philosophy on the path to ultimate extinction. It was believed by many that the meaning of writers like Plato, Hobbes, or Rousseau had been more or less established and all that was necessary was to situate them in their place along the historical time line so that the proper burial rites could be given. Political philosophy had become a kind of undertaker's art with little relevance or importance for the living issues of either politics or philosophy.

Strauss helped to change this perception. In the language of the old Westerns, he came to realize that "there's gold in them thar hills." In contrast to the prevailing historicism that regarded the great works of the tradition as a product of their times, Strauss treated these texts not as museum pieces to be labeled and catalogued, but as living and vital contemporaries from which there was still much to learn. The history of political thought was not an end in itself, but a necessary propadeutic to the recommencement of serious political philosophy. Strauss taught that the interpretations that had been ascribed to the great writers of the past were far from settled or obvious, that to understand them it was necessary to bracket our contemporary preconceptions about the path of progress or history and to consider their writings afresh as part of an ongoing conversation in which we, the readers, were invited to take part. It is possible for us to participate in such a conversation precisely because the great thinkers disagree with one another. Is Being one or many? Does it exhibit permanence or change? It thus becomes necessary for us to try to understand and to judge between rival teachings, to determine which among them is closer to the truth. The reader is thus invited to participate in a conversation in which the outcome is far from predetermined, but which remains, in Strauss's term, an open question.

Strauss was, above all, a reader. He taught his students how to read and how careful writers, like himself, wished to be read. Strauss expanded the scope of our reading to include forgotten figures and others who had been overlooked by the canon of political philosophy. Not only did he breathe new life into familiar figures and texts; he introduced new and unfamiliar writers like Al-Farabi, Judah Halevi, Maimonides, and Spinoza to the attention of political philosophers. He pioneered the study of politics and literature by focusing on the literary character of texts and highlighting the "old quarrel" between philosophy and poetry in his reading of thinkers like Plato and Nietzsche. He inquired into the rhetoric in which philosophical arguments are cast long before it became fashionable to talk about "speech acts" and the performative function of language. He paid special attention to ironies, jokes, and puns even in the most serious works and devoted one of his last books to a study of the comedies of Aristophanes. Strauss's most important legacy was teaching his readers how to read. No one can be a Straussian who does not fundamentally love to read.


Excerpted from Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism by Steven B. Smith Copyright © 2006 by University of Chicago Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[Joerver]

Als Ergänzung zu dem ersten Kapitel aus dem Buch über Leo Strauss noch die beiden Artikel von Hersh und aus der NYT aus dem Artikel von WSJ, den unser Board-Narr hier meinte einstellen zu müssen.
Für LaRouche fühle ich mich nicht verantwortlich, und es besteht auch kein Zusammenhang zwischen LaRouche und Hersh und der NYTimes, wie sie der Schreiberling vom WSJ und dessen Lakaien konstruieren wollen.
Kein Wunder, dass der WSJ-Schmierfink seine Unterstellungen nicht verlinkt hat.
Hier erst mal der Hersh-Artikel auch aus 03:


SELECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable?
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/030512fa_fact

Issue of 2003-05-12
Posted 2003-05-05

They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question.

The director of the Special Plans operation is Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Shulsky has been quietly working on intelligence and foreign-policy issues for three decades; he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Com-mittee in the early nineteen-eighties and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration, after which he joined the Rand Corporation. The Office of Special Plans is overseen by Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti, a retired Navy captain. Luti was an early advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the Administration moved toward war and policymaking power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities.

W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the D.I.A., said, “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.”

The hostility goes both ways. A Pentagon official who works for Luti told me, “I did a job when the intelligence community wasn’t doing theirs. We recognized the fact that they hadn’t done the analysis. We were providing information to Wolfowitz that he hadn’t seen before. The intelligence community is still looking for a mission like they had in the Cold War, when they spoon-fed the policymakers.”

A Pentagon adviser who has worked with Special Plans dismissed any criticism of the operation as little more than bureaucratic whining. “Shulsky and Luti won the policy debate,” the adviser said. “They beat ’em—they cleaned up against State and the C.I.A. There’s no mystery why they won—because they were more effective in making their argument. Luti is smarter than the opposition. Wolfowitz is smarter. They out-argued them. It was a fair fight. They persuaded the President of the need to make a new security policy. Those who lose are so good at trying to undercut those who won.” He added, “I’d love to be the historian who writes the story of how this small group of eight or nine people made the case and won.”

According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.

Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction had been a matter of concern to the international community since before the first Gulf War. Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons in the past. At some point, he assembled thousands of chemical warheads, along with biological weapons, and made a serious attempt to build a nuclear-weapons program. What has been in dispute is how much of that capacity, if any, survived the 1991 war and the years of United Nations inspections, no-fly zones, and sanctions that followed. In addition, since September 11th there have been recurring questions about Iraq’s ties to terrorists. A February poll showed that seventy-two per cent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th attacks, although no definitive evidence of such a connection has been presented.

Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. “The agency was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,” the Pentagon adviser told me. “That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.” The goal of Special Plans, he said, was “to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see. Shulsky’s carrying the heaviest part.”

Even before September 11th, Richard Perle, who was then the chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, was making a similar argument about the intelligence community’s knowledge of Iraq’s weapons. At a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing in March, 2001, he said, “Does Saddam now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does. We know he has chemical weapons. We know he has biological weapons. . . . How far he’s gone on the nuclear-weapons side I don’t think we really know. My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we’re able to prove and demonstrate. . . . And, unless you believe that we have uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more than we’re able to report.”

Last October, an article in the Times reported that Rumsfeld had ordered up an intelligence operation “to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists” that might have been overlooked by the C.I.A. When Rumsfeld was asked about the story at a Pentagon briefing, he was initially vague. “I’m told that after September 11th a small group, I think two to start with, and maybe four now . . . were asked to begin poring over this mountain of information that we were receiving on intelligence-type things.” He went on to say, “You don’t know what you don’t know. So in comes the daily briefer”—from the C.I.A.—“and she walks through the daily brief. And I ask questions. ‘Gee, what about this?’ or ‘What about that? Has somebody thought of this?’ ” At the same briefing, Rumsfeld said that he had already been informed that there was “solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members.”

If Special Plans was going to search for new intelligence on Iraq, the most obvious source was defectors with firsthand knowledge. The office inevitably turned to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. The I.N.C., an umbrella organization for diverse groups opposed to Saddam, is constantly seeking out Iraqi defectors. The Special Plans Office developed a close working relationship with the I.N.C., and this strengthened its position in disputes with the C.I.A. and gave the Pentagon’s pro-war leadership added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the I.N.C. to officials in the White House.

There was a close personal bond, too, between Chalabi and Wolfowitz and Perle, dating back many years. Their relationship deepened after the Bush Administration took office, and Chalabi’s ties extended to others in the Administration, including Rumsfeld; Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; and I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. For years, Chalabi has had the support of prominent members of the American Enterprise Institute and other conservatives. Chalabi had some Democratic supporters, too, including James Woolsey, the former head of the C.I.A.

There was another level to Chalabi’s relationship with the United States: in the mid-nineteen-nineties, the C.I.A. was secretly funnelling millions of dollars annually to the I.N.C. Those payments ended around 1996, a former C.I.A. Middle East station chief told me, essentially because the agency had doubts about Chalabi’s integrity. (In 1992, Chalabi was convicted in absentia of bank fraud in Jordan. He has always denied any wrongdoing.) “You had to treat them with suspicion,” another former Middle East station chief said of Chalabi’s people. “The I.N.C. has a track record of manipulating information because it has an agenda. It’s a political unit—not an intelligence agency.”

In August, 1995, General Hussein Kamel, who was in charge of Iraq’s weapons program, defected to Jordan, with his brother, Colonel Saddam Kamel. They brought with them crates of documents containing detailed information about Iraqi efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction—much of which was unknown to the U.N. inspection teams that had been on the job since 1991—and were interviewed at length by the U.N. inspectors. In 1996, Saddam Hussein lured the brothers back with a promise of forgiveness, and then had them killed. The Kamels’ information became a major element in the Bush Administration’s campaign to convince the public of the failure of the U.N. inspections.

Last October, in a speech in Cincinnati, the President cited the Kamel defections as the moment when Saddam’s regime “was forced to admit that it had produced more than thirty thousand liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. . . . This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and is capable of killing millions.” A couple of weeks earlier, Vice-President Cheney had declared that Hussein Kamel’s story “should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself.”

The full record of Hussein Kamel’s interview with the inspectors reveals, however, that he also said that Iraq’s stockpile of chemical and biological warheads, which were manufactured before the 1991 Gulf War, had been destroyed, in many cases in response to ongoing inspections. The interview, on August 22, 1995,was conducted by Rolf Ekeus, then the executive chairman of the U.N. inspection teams, and two of his senior associates—Nikita Smidovich and Maurizio Zifferaro. “You have an important role in Iraq,” Kamel said, according to the record, which was assembled from notes taken by Smidovich. “You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq.” When Smidovich noted that the U.N. teams had not found “any traces of destruction,” Kamel responded, “Yes, it was done before you came in.” He also said that Iraq had destroyed its arsenal of warheads. “We gave instructions not to produce chemical weapons,” Kamel explained later in the debriefing. “I don’t remember resumption of chemical-weapons production before the Gulf War. Maybe it was only minimal production and filling. . . . All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.”

Kamel also cast doubt on the testimony of Dr. Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected in 1994. Hamza settled in the United States with the help of the I.N.C. and has been a highly vocal witness concerning Iraq’s alleged nuclear ambitions. Kamel told the U.N. interviewers, however, that Hamza was “a professional liar.” He went on, “He worked with us, but he was useless and always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver anything. . . . He was even interrogated by a team before he left and was allowed to go.”

After his defection, Hamza became a senior fellow at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington disarmament group, whose president, David Albright, was a former U.N. weapons inspector. In 1998, Albright told me, he and Hamza sent publishers a proposal for a book tentatively entitled “Fizzle: Iraq and the Atomic Bomb,” which described how Iraq had failed in its quest for a nuclear device. There were no takers, Albright said, and Hamza eventually “started exaggerating his experiences in Iraq.” The two men broke off contact. In 2000, Hamza published “Saddam’s Bombmaker,” a vivid account claiming that by 1991, when the Gulf War began, Iraq was far closer than had been known to the production of a nuclear weapon. Jeff Stein, a Washington journalist who collaborated on the book, told me that Hamza’s account was “absolutely on the level, allowing for the fact that any memoir puts the author at the center of events, and therefore there is some exaggeration.” James Woolsey, the former head of the C.I.A., said of Hamza, “I think highly of him and I have no reason to disbelieve the claims that he’s made.” Hamza could not be reached for comment. On April 26th, according to the Times, he returned to Iraq as a member of a group of exiles designated by the Pentagon to help rebuild the country’s infrastructure. He is to be responsible for atomic energy.

The advantages and disadvantages of relying on defectors has been a perennial source of dispute within the American intelligence community—as Shulsky himself noted in a 1991 textbook on intelligence that he co-authored. Despite their importance, he wrote, “it is difficult to be certain that they are genuine. . . . The conflicting information provided by several major Soviet defectors to the United States . . . has never been completely sorted out; it bedeviled U.S. intelligence for a quarter of a century.” Defectors can provide unique insight into a repressive system. But such volunteer sources, as Shulsky writes, “may be greedy; they may also be somewhat unbalanced people who wish to bring some excitement into their lives; they may desire to avenge what they see as ill treatment by their government; or they may be subject to blackmail.” There is a strong incentive to tell interviewers what they want to hear.

With the Pentagon’s support, Chalabi’s group worked to put defectors with compelling stories in touch with reporters in the United States and Europe. The resulting articles had dramatic accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction or told of ties to terrorist groups. In some cases, these stories were disputed in analyses by the C.I.A. Misstatements and inconsistencies in I.N.C. defector accounts were also discovered after the final series of U.N. weapons inspections, which ended a few days before the American assault. Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in political science at Cambridge University, compiled and examined the information that had been made public and concluded that the U.N. inspections had failed to find evidence to support the defectors’ claims.

For example, many newspapers published extensive interviews with Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer who, with the I.N.C.’s help, fled Iraq in 2001, and subsequently claimed that he had visited twenty hidden facilities that he believed were built for the production of biological and chemical weapons. One, he said, was underneath a hospital in Baghdad. Haideri was apparently a source for Secretary of State Colin Powell’s claim, in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council on February 5th, that the United States had “firsthand descriptions” of mobile factories capable of producing vast quantities of biological weapons. The U.N. teams that returned to Iraq last winter were unable to verify any of al-Haideri’s claims. In a statement to the Security Council in March, on the eve of war, Hans Blix, the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector, noted that his teams had physically examined the hospital and other sites with the help of ground-penetrating radar equipment. “No underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far,” he said.

Almost immediately after September 11th, the I.N.C. began to publicize the stories of defectors who claimed that they had information connecting Iraq to the attacks. In an interview on October 14, 2001, conducted jointly by the Times and “Frontline,” the public-television program, Sabah Khodada, an Iraqi Army captain, said that the September 11th operation “was conducted by people who were trained by Saddam,” and that Iraq had a program to instruct terrorists in the art of hijacking. Another defector, who was identified only as a retired lieutenant general in the Iraqi intelligence service, said that in 2000 he witnessed Arab students being given lessons in hijacking on a Boeing 707 parked at an Iraqi training camp near the town of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad.

In separate interviews with me, however, a former C.I.A. station chief and a former military intelligence analyst said that the camp near Salman Pak had been built not for terrorism training but for counter-terrorism training. In the mid-eighties, Islamic terrorists were routinely hijacking aircraft. In 1986, an Iraqi airliner was seized by pro-Iranian extremists and crashed, after a hand grenade was triggered, killing at least sixty-five people. (At the time, Iran and Iraq were at war, and America favored Iraq.) Iraq then sought assistance from the West, and got what it wanted from Britain’s MI6. The C.I.A. offered similar training in counter-terrorism throughout the Middle East. “We were helping our allies everywhere we had a liaison,” the former station chief told me. Inspectors recalled seeing the body of an airplane—which appeared to be used for counter-terrorism training—when they visited a biological-weapons facility near Salman Pak in 1991, ten years before September 11th. It is, of course, possible for such a camp to be converted from one purpose to another. The former C.I.A. official noted, however, that terrorists would not practice on airplanes in the open. “That’s Hollywood rinky-dink stuff,” the former agent said. “They train in basements. You don’t need a real airplane to practice hijacking. The 9/11 terrorists went to gyms. But to take one back you have to practice on the real thing.”

Salman Pak was overrun by American troops on April 6th. Apparently, neither the camp nor the former biological facility has yielded evidence to substantiate the claims made before the war.

A former Bush Administration intelligence official recalled a case in which Chalabi’s group, working with the Pentagon, produced a defector from Iraq who was interviewed overseas by an agent from the D.I.A. The agent relied on an interpreter supplied by Chalabi’s people. Last summer, the D.I.A. report, which was classified, was leaked. In a detailed account, the London Times described how the defector had trained with Al Qaeda terrorists in the late nineteen-nineties at secret camps in Iraq, how the Iraqis received instructions in the use of chemical and biological weapons, and how the defector was given a new identity and relocated. A month later, however, a team of C.I.A. agents went to interview the man with their own interpreter. “He says, ‘No, that’s not what I said,’ ” the former intelligence official told me. “He said, ‘I worked at a fedayeen camp; it wasn’t Al Qaeda.’ He never saw any chemical or biological training.” Afterward, the former official said, “the C.I.A. sent out a piece of paper saying that this information was incorrect. They put it in writing.” But the C.I.A. rebuttal, like the original report, was classified. “I remember wondering whether this one would leak and correct the earlier, invalid leak. Of course, it didn’t.”

The former intelligence official went on, “One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with—to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.” He added, “If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.”

Shulsky’s work has deep theoretical underpinnings. In his academic and think-tank writings, Shulsky, the son of a newspaperman—his father, Sam, wrote a nationally syndicated business column—has long been a critic of the American intelligence community. During the Cold War, his area of expertise was Soviet disinformation techniques. Like Wolfowitz, he was a student of Leo Strauss’s, at the University of Chicago. Both men received their doctorates under Strauss in 1972. Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in the United States in 1937, was trained in the history of political philosophy, and became one of the foremost conservative émigré scholars. He was widely known for his argument that the works of ancient philosophers contain deliberately concealed esoteric meanings whose truths can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses. The Straussian movement has many adherents in and around the Bush Administration. In addition to Wolfowitz, they include William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, and Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who is particularly close to Rumsfeld. Strauss’s influence on foreign-policy decision-making (he never wrote explicitly about the subject himself) is usually discussed in terms of his tendency to view the world as a place where isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad, and face threats that must be confronted vigorously and with strong leadership.

How Strauss’s views might be applied to the intelligence-gathering process is less immediately obvious. As it happens, Shulsky himself explored that question in a 1999 essay, written with Gary Schmitt, entitled “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)”—in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality. In the essay, Shulsky and Schmitt write that Strauss’s “gentleness, his ability to concentrate on detail, his consequent success in looking below the surface and reading between the lines, and his seeming unworldliness . . . may even be said to resemble, however faintly, the George Smiley of John le Carré’s novels.” Echoing one of Strauss’s major themes, Shulsky and Schmitt criticize America’s intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment.

The agency’s analysts, Shulsky and Schmitt argue, “were generally reluctant throughout the Cold War to believe that they could be deceived about any critical question by the Soviet Union or other Communist states. History has shown this view to have been extremely naïve.” They suggested that political philosophy, with its emphasis on the variety of regimes, could provide an “antidote” to the C.I.A.’s failings, and would help in understanding Islamic leaders, “whose intellectual world was so different from our own.”

Strauss’s idea of hidden meaning, Shulsky and Schmitt added, “alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.”

Robert Pippin, the chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago and a critic of Strauss, told me, “Strauss believed that good statesmen have powers of judgment and must rely on an inner circle. The person who whispers in the ear of the King is more important than the King. If you have that talent, what you do or say in public cannot be held accountable in the same way.” Another Strauss critic, Stephen Holmes, a law professor at New York University, put the Straussians’ position this way: “They believe that your enemy is deceiving you, and you have to pretend to agree, but secretly you follow your own views.” Holmes added, “The whole story is complicated by Strauss’s idea—actually Plato’s—that philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians.”

When I asked one of Strauss’s staunchest defenders, Joseph Cropsey, professor emeritus of political science at Chicago, about the use of Strauss’s views in the area of policymaking, he told me that common sense alone suggested that a certain amount of deception is essential in government. “That people in government have to be discreet in what they say publicly is so obvious—‘If I tell you the truth I can’t but help the enemy.’ ” But there is nothing in Strauss’s work, he added, that “favors preëmptive action. What it favors is prudence and sound judgment. If you could have got rid of Hitler in the nineteen-thirties, who’s not going to be in favor of that? You don’t need Strauss to reach that conclusion.”

Some former intelligence officials believe that Shulsky and his superiors were captives of their own convictions, and were merely deceiving themselves. Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counter-terrorism operations and analysis at the C.I.A., worked with Shulsky at a Washington think tank after his retirement. He said, “Abe is very gentle and slow to anger, with a sense of irony. But his politics were typical for his group—the Straussian view.” The group’s members, Cannistraro said, “reinforce each other because they’re the only friends they have, and they all work together. This has been going on since the nineteen-eighties, but they’ve never been able to coalesce as they have now. September 11th gave them the opportunity, and now they’re in heaven. They believe the intelligence is there. They want to believe it. It has to be there.”

The rising influence of the Office of Special Plans has been accompanied by a decline in the influence of the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. One internal Pentagon memorandum went so far as to suggest that terrorism experts in the government and outside it had deliberately “downplayed or sought to disprove” the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. “For many years, there has been a bias in the intelligence community” against defectors, the memorandum said. It urged that two analysts working with Shulsky be given the authority to “investigate linkages to Iraq” by having access to the “proper debriefing of key Iraqi defectors.”

A former C.I.A. task-force leader who is a consultant to the Bush Administration said that many analysts in the C.I.A. are convinced that the Chalabi group’s defector reports on weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda have produced little of value, but said that the agency “is not fighting it.” He said that the D.I.A. had studied the information as well. “Even the D.I.A. can’t find any value in it.” (The Pentagon, asked for comment, denied that there had been disputes between the C.I.A. and Special Plans over the validity of intelligence.)

In interviews, former C.I.A. officers and analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. “George knows he’s being beaten up,” one former officer said of George Tenet, the C.I.A. director. “And his analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he’s been forced to do things their way.” Because the C.I.A.’s analysts are now on the defensive, “they write reports justifying their intelligence rather than saying what’s going on. The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want.”

“They see themselves as outsiders, ” a former C.I.A. expert who spent the past decade immersed in Iraqi-exile affairs said of the Special Plans people. He added, “There’s a high degree of paranoia. They’ve convinced themselves that they’re on the side of angels, and everybody else in the government is a fool.”

More than a year’s worth of increasingly bitter debate over the value and integrity of the Special Plans intelligence came to a halt in March, when President Bush authorized the war against Iraq. After a few weeks of fighting, Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed, leaving American forces to declare victory against a backdrop of disorder and uncertainty about the country’s future. Ahmad Chalabi and the I.N.C. continued to provoke fights within the Bush Administration. The Pentagon flew Chalabi and hundreds of his supporters, heavily armed, into Iraq, amid tight security, over angry objections from the State Department. Chalabi is now establishing himself in Baghdad. His advocates in the Pentagon point out that he is not only a Shiite, like the majority of Iraqis, but also, as one scholar put it, “a completely Westernized businessman” (he emigrated to England with his parents in 1958, when he was a boy), which is one reason the State Department doubts whether he can gain support among Iraqis.

Chalabi is not the only point of contention, however. The failure, as of last week, to find weapons of mass destruction in places where the Pentagon’s sources confidently predicted they would be found has reanimated the debate on the quality of the office’s intelligence. A former high-level intelligence official told me that American Special Forces units had been sent into Iraq in mid-March, before the start of the air and ground war, to investigate sites suspected of being missile or chemical- and biological-weapon storage depots. “They came up with nothing,” the official said. “Never found a single Scud.”

Since then, there have been a number of false alarms and a tip that weapons may have been destroyed in the last days before the war, but no solid evidence. On April 22nd, Hans Blix, hours before he asked the U.N. Security Council to send his team back to Iraq, told the BBC, “I think it’s been one of the disturbing elements that so much of the intelligence on which the capitals built their case seemed to have been so shaky.”

There is little self-doubt or second-guessing in the Pentagon over the failure to immediately find the weapons. The Pentagon adviser to Special Plans told me he believed that the delay “means nothing. We’ve got to wait to get all the answers from Iraqi scientists who will tell us where they are.” Similarly, the Pentagon official who works for Luti said last week, “I think they’re hidden in the mountains or transferred to some friendly countries. Saddam had enough time to move them.” There were suggestions from the Pentagon that Saddam might be shipping weapons over the border to Syria. “It’s bait and switch,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “Bait them into Iraq with weapons of mass destruction. And, when they aren’t found, there’s this whole bullshit about the weapons being in Syria.”

In Congress, a senior legislative aide said, “Some members are beginning to ask and to wonder, but cautiously.” For now, he told me, “the members don’t have the confidence to say that the Administration is off base.” He also commented, “For many, it makes little difference. We vanquished a bad guy and liberated the Iraqi people. Some are astute enough to recognize that the alleged imminent W.M.D. threat to the U.S. was a pretext. I sometimes have to pinch myself when friends or family ask with incredulity about the lack of W.M.D., and remind myself that the average person has the idea that there are mountains of the stuff over there, ready to be tripped over. The more time elapses, the more people are going to wonder about this, but I don’t think it will sway U.S. public opinion much. Everyone loves to be on the winning side.”

Weapons may yet be found. Iraq is a big country, as the Administration has repeatedly pointed out in recent weeks. In a speech last week, President Bush said, “We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.” Meanwhile, if the American advance hasn’t uncovered stashes of weapons of mass destruction, it has turned up additional graphic evidence of the brutality of the regime. But Saddam Hussein’s cruelty was documented long before September 11th, and was not the principal reason the Bush Administration gave to the world for the necessity of war.

Former Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been a strong supporter of the President’s decision to overthrow Saddam. “I do think building a democratic secular state in Iraq justifies everything we’ve done,” Kerrey, who is now president of New School University, in New York, told me. “But they’ve taken the intelligence on weapons and expanded it beyond what was justified.” Speaking of the hawks, he said, “It appeared that they understood that to get the American people on their side they needed to come up with something more to say than ‘We’ve liberated Iraq and got rid of a tyrant.’ So they had to find some ties to weapons of mass destruction and were willing to allow a majority of Americans to incorrectly conclude that the invasion of Iraq had something to do with the World Trade Center. Overemphasizing the national-security threat made it more difficult to get the rest of the world on our side. It was the weakest and most misleading argument we could use.” Kerrey added, “It appears that they have the intelligence. The problem is, they didn’t like the conclusions.”

[Joerver]

Hier der Artikel aus der Times.
Niemand bezeichnet Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld oder auch Rice als Neocons. Der erste ist nichts anderes als ein Dummkopf und die anderen sind Lobbyisten der Rüstung- und Ölindustrie.

The Nation: Leo-Cons; A Classicist's Legacy: New Empire Builders
By JAMES ATLAS (NYT) 1790 words
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30D…

Published: May 4, 2003

ALL right, so weapons of mass destruction haven't yet been found in Iraq. And no firm link has been established between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. So what was the war in Iraq about, then? According to one school of thought, our most recent military adventure turns out to have been nothing less than a defense of Western civilization -- as interpreted by the late classicist and political philosopher Leo Strauss.

If this chain of events seems implausible, consider the tribute President Bush paid in February to the cohort of journalists, political philosophers and policy wonks known -- primarily to themselves -- as Straussians. ''You are some of the best brains in our country,'' Mr. Bush declared in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, ''and my government employs about 20 of you.''

''Employs'' is too weak a verb. To intellectual-conspiracy theorists, the Bush administration's foreign policy is entirely a Straussian creation. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, has been identified as a disciple of Strauss; William Kristol, founding editor of The Weekly Standard, a must-read in the White House, considers himself a Straussian; Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century, an influential foreign policy group started by Mr. Kristol, is firming in the Strauss camp. One is reminded of Asa Leventhal, the hero of Saul Bellow's novel ''The Victim,'' who asks his oppressor, a mysterious figure named Kirby Allbee, ''Wait a minute, what's your idea of who runs things?'' For those who believe in the power of ideas, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to answer: the intellectual heirs of Leo Strauss.

So how did it come to pass that a European-born émigré identified by the Harvard professor of government Harvey Mansfield (also a Straussian) as ''an obscure professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago who died in 1973'' now occupies a position of such disproportionate influence?

The answer starts with Strauss's long and influential tenure at Chicago in the mid-20th century and his teachings, mostly from the classics, about the immutability of moral and social values. His lessons were spurned in the 1960's and 70's, in favor of the moral relativism that his disciples believed was polluting foreign policy, from the post-Vietnam imperial malaise to détente with the Soviet Union. During the Reagan administration, some of Strauss's admirers, like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, emerged as house intellectuals -- favored dinner guests who gave the intellectual justification for policies usually drawn up by more practical political types.

Today's dinner guests are the dominant master strategists in their own right, and the transformation brings us face to face with just how much their intellectual roots influence their exercise of power. It is also reasonable to ask: just what would Leo Strauss think of the policies being carried out in his name?

On the basis of his curriculum vitae, Strauss would seem an unlikely figurehead of the Bush White House, hardly a hotbed of intellectual inquiry, as detailed in a recent book by a former presidential speechwriter, David Frum. The child of middle-class Orthodox Jews, Strauss converted to Zionism while still in his teens, attended Martin Heidegger's lectures at the University of Freiburg, and eventually crossed paths with some of the most influential European intellectual figures of the prewar period: Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojève, Hans-Georg Gadamer. In 1934, Strauss emigrated to Britain, where he wrote ''The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.'' Just before the outbreak of World War II, he joined the faculty of the New School for Social Research, a refuge for European intellectuals. His final home was the University of Chicago, where he taught in the political science department for a quarter of a century.

At first glance, Strauss's work seems remote from the heat of contemporary politics. He was more at home in the world of Plato and Aristotle than in debates about the origins of totalitarianism. His major books included ''Xenophon's Socratic Discourse,'' ''Thoughts on Machiavelli'' and a collection of essays on the ancient Greeks, ''The City and Man.'' But closer scrutiny reveals a mind keenly aware of current events.

Strauss's own experience -- he witnessed Russian pogroms as a child and barely escaped the Holocaust -- alerted him to the perils of history. ''When we were brought face to face with tyranny -- with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past -- our political science failed to recognize it,'' Strauss wrote in his classic ''On Tyranny.'' He believed, as he once wrote, that ''to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations.'' There's a reason that some Bush strategists continue to invoke Strauss's name.

The myth of Strauss derives from a single event: the publication of Allan Bloom's ''Closing of the American Mind'' in 1987. Bloom, who taught with the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, had been a student of Strauss's; his incendiary best seller argued that democracy as practiced by the Greeks represents the highest form of civilization. The free society is the best man has devised. But Bloom's dense and at times inscrutable polemic was not a call to action; it was a celebration of the classics as a civilizing force. ''The open agenda of Straussians is the reading of the Great Books for their own sake, not for a political purpose,'' wrote Harvey Mansfield in The New Republic.

This agenda became politicized when it was appropriated -- some might say hijacked -- by a cohort of ambitious men for whom the university was too confining an arena. Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet, writing in Le Monde two weeks ago, provided a vivid snapshot of these fugitives from the academy. ''They have an 'intellectual,' often New York, often Jewish, profile, and often began on the left. Some of them still call themselves Democrats. They carry around literary or political magazines, not the Bible; they wear tweed jackets, not the petrol blue suits of Southern televangelists. Most of the time, they profess liberal ideas on social and moral questions. They are trying neither to ban abortion nor to impose school prayer. Their ambition lies elsewhere.'' By ''elsewhere'' is meant the world of Washington politics and power.

The most prominent figure singled out by the French journalists was Mr. Wolfowitz, who received his B.A. from Cornell, where he studied with Bloom in his pre-Chicago days, and his Ph. D. in political science and economics from the University of Chicago. Recruited by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Mr. Wolfowitz is widely regarded as a chief architect of foreign policy.

In ''Ravelstein,'' a biography of Bloom in the form of a novel published in 2000, Saul Bellow depicts the information-avid professor Abe Ravelstein fielding calls on his cellphone from former students who have made their way to high places in government. His disciples include Philip Gorman, a Wolfowitz-like official in the first Bush administration who rings up his former professor to show that he's in the loop. ''Powell and Baker,'' Gorman confides, have advised the President to call a halt to the 1991 gulf war without a march on Baghdad: ''They send out a terrific army and give a demonstration of up-to-date high-tech warfare that flesh and blood can't stand up to. But then they leave the dictatorship in place and steal away. . . .'' (Not this time.)

The Bush administration is rife with Straussians. In addition to Mr. Wolfowitz, there is his associate Richard N. Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board and the managing partner in Trireme Partners, a venture-capital company heavily invested in manufacturers of technology for homeland security and defense. Mr. Perle and Mr. Wolfowitz are both disciples of the late Albert Wohlstetter, a Straussian professor of mathematics and military strategist who put forward the idea of ''graduated deterrence'' -- limited, small-scale wars fought with ''smart'' precision-guided bombs.

William Kristol, a former student of Harvey Mansfield's at Harvard, and these days editor of The Weekly Standard, is a highly influential voice in this crowd. ''We need to err on the side of being strong,'' Mr. Kristol said last week on Fox News. ''And if people want to say we're an imperial power, fine.''

How well have Strauss's hawkish disciples understood him? Are high-level officers in the State Department boning up on his critique of Aristotle's ''Politics'' late at night, hunched over his knotty texts like grad students cramming for an exam? Or have they just gotten the gist? ''It's an opaque and difficult question,'' says Mr. Kristol. ''Strauss's kind of conservatism is public-spirited. He taught a great respect for politics and the pursuit of the common good.''

To be sure, Strauss asserted ''the natural right of the stronger'' to prevail: ''The only restraint in which the West can put some confidence is the tyrant's fear of the West's immense military power.'' But he was skeptical of triumphalism, and conscious of the dangers of foreign occupation: ''Even the lowliest men prefer being subjects to men of their own people rather than to any aliens.'' And in his critique of Aristotle's ''Politics,'' he condemned the Spartan Brasidas, whose countrymen ''drew his attention to the fact that he did not promote the liberation of the Greeks from Athenian domination by killing men who had never lifted their hands against the liberating Peloponnesians and were Athenian allies only under duress; if he did not stop his practice he would convert many who were friends of Sparta into enemies.''

For Strauss, defending Western democracy against barbarous enemies was a natural right, but it was a right that entailed responsibility. The victor had the obligation to teach and transmit its values, not to impose them. As long ago as 1964, he recognized the tension that had accumulated ''during the centuries in which Christianity and Islam each raised its universal claim but had to be satisfied with uneasily coexisting with its antagonist.'' Four decades later, nations at the heart of the two civilizations have engaged in a violent clash and -- for the moment -- the Westerners have won.

Next time we might remember to put a tank at the museum door.



Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company