the neo-con motivation for iraq war: economic, moral, both, what?

I think the neo-con motivation for war is based on a few very important assumptions, the most important probably being that liberal democracy (ie the free market capitalist economic model + fairly minimal state + many legally protected rights and freedoms for the individual) is the best that can possibly be designed/imagined, will be a good thing for ALL countries, and should be SPREAD. The US, as the global leader, must aid the spread.

xpost, thanks Cathy. i've seen that site cited in numerous sources, but hadn't taken the time to look before.

No, it's about making more money for the companies that fill the hummers with gas.

Cost of war in Iraq: incalculable, probably between 50 and 100 billion.

People are nuts, indeed.

I think that is very, very dangerously misguided.

Neocon theories about a stabilised middle east are great for people who like to froth at the mouth, but in the meantime, they are raking in the cash. I just don't think people should be discounting the cash and who is raking it in. They are crazy like foxes. They know what they want and how to get it. The 'revolutionary" angle is overplayed. They are just criminals.

People don't want to see their taxes go up to fund expensive, complicated foreign projects. It was much easier to over-emphasise the threat of Saddam than try to persuade the American people on the basis of theories a lot of people just aren't interested in.

People are dead. People are dying. A country is in ruins. For no reason. Rich Americans have gotten richer. I don't CARE what their ideology is.

My main point is, I suppose, that there *are* reasons, and you've got to care about and understand them in order to challenge them, and stop it happening again. I don't think Iraq was *just* the pet project of a few oil companies and mercenary politicians (though I do think it was that too). I think it is part of a wider, ideological plan.

The said the same about the Nazi Party.

Sorry to interject, but STOP GETTING DAWKINS WRONG! HE HAS NEVER ADVOCATED PURE SELF INTEREST AS A MORAL GOOD! EVER!

I met Dawkins once, actually - I wasn't very impressed, so perhaps I'm misinterpreting his theories out of subconscious malice.

Tangential - has Dawkins ever writtena riposte to those on the right who use the concept of the selfish gene as justification for social darwinism and extreme capitalism? Given it used in this way a lot, if he disagrees, then I'd have thoguht he'd have done something.

Neo-cons - it's like a trot sect (no surprise given trot background on many ne-cons) in that the difference between 'reality' and 'what their theories tell them should be happening' doesn't compute. The blindness to uncomfortable truths affects trots badly and so the neo-cons. It's one reason why left trots are stunningly ineffective in normal politics, and why neocons are dangerous being indeed.

Final point - anyone read Andrew Rawnsley last week in the Observer? basically said Blair just doesn't underatdn this whole neocons thing...

Dear Mr Bush (I'd say President Bush if you had actually been elected),

I've been asked to give advice to you on touching down in Britain. It is this. Go home. You aren't wanted here. You aren't wanted anywhere else either, but you may have been misunderinformed that Britain was the one place where you would be welcomified. Wrong. Well, presumably your best pal Tony welcomes you. But that's about it. Your motorcades, your helicopters, your triggerhappy guards will try to protect you from the people of Britain, who would otherwise spoil the photo-ops for the folks back home. But be in no doubt. We despise you here too. After you and Jeb stole the election (by a margin smaller than the number of folks you executed in Texas) you were rightly written off as a one-term president: a fair advertisement for Drunks For Jesus but otherwise an idle nonentity; inarticulate, unintelligent, an ignorant hick. September 11 changed all that. Not that you covered yourself with glory that day. You are said to admire Churchill. Can you imagine Churchill, at such a moment, panicking all around the country from airbase to airbase? Even nasty old Rummy bunkered down where he belonged.

Never mind, your puppeteers from the Project for the New American Century recognised the opportunity they had been waiting for. September 11 was your golden Pearl Harbor. This was how you'd get elected in 2004 (not re-elected, elected). You would announce a War on Terror. American troops would win. And you would be the victorious warlord, swaggering in a flight suit before a Mission Accomplished banner.

It worked in Afghanistan. But then those puppeteers moved on to their long-term project: Iraq. Never mind that you had to lie about weapons of mass destruction. Never mind that Iraq had not the smallest connection with 9/11. The good folks back home would never know the difference between Saddam and Osama. You would ride the paranoid patriotism aroused by 9/11 all the way into Iraq, and hand out oil and reconstruction contracts to Dick Cheney's boys. That escapade is now backfiring horribly, as many of us said it would. No wonder young American travellers are sewing Canadian flags to their rucksacks. What we in Britain won't forgive is that you have dragged us down too. Go home.

Richard Dawkins
Scientist

sorry, i'm a little sour today. I think i ate something last night that disagreed with me.

Yes, repeatedly, in practically every single book he's written since The Selfish Gene. In fact, if your Tory boys were using SG as an argument for social darwinism I would lay money that they've not actually read it.

Kevin, sorry for exploding like that, I semi-misinterpreted what you wrote. After reading your clarification I pretty much agree with you.

People tossing his name round as support for conservative and/or social viewpoints is a bit of a hot button for me. Again, apologies.

2xpost

Cheney had a telling line the other week...lemme see if I can find it...here we go (this is from a Sept. 4 NY Times story):

"A good defense is not enough, so we've gone on offense" in fighting terrorism, Mr. Cheney told hundreds of enthusiastic supporters. "Senator Kerry seems to object. He's even said that by using our strength we are creating terrorists and placing ourselves in greater danger."

Democrats have suggested that the war in Iraq actually destabilized the Mideast by making that country a source of terrorism.

"That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the world works," Mr. Cheney said. "Terrorist attacks are not created by the use of strength. They are a result of the perception of weakness."

Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, I think, really believe this. It's not just a convenient cover for the rest of their agenda, it's part and parcel of their agenda. They buy into the whole dominance-through-fear thing. You could spend a long time psychoanalyzing them individually and collectively, and I think they come at it from different angles, but it is an actual belief about how the world works. A few possible sources of the belief:

-- For the Jewish wing of the neocon group, the combined experiences of the Holocaust and the 50-plus-year fight for the establishment and preservation of Israel still loom large. It's too simplistic to say that the muscularity of current American policy is a direct result of the Holocaust, but it would be stupid to pretend that it's not a factor. A lot of people took a lot of different lessons away from World War II, but it's entirely understandable that, for some people, the lesson was, hit the motherfuckers hard at every turn. And to the extent that the birth of Israel is inevitably tied symbolically to the Holocaust, and that for people of, say, Ariel Sharon's generation, there's never been a moment when they felt safe and secure about Israel's longterm prospects, hawkish pre-emption becomes a moral imperative.

-- Vietnam. For American soldiers of Don Rumsfeld's (and John Kerry's) generation, Vietnam is the original sin. I think for Rumsfeld, Iraq is the culmination of a 30-year effort to prove once and for all that American military force, applied correctly, can shape the world (for the better, theoretically), and that the problem in Vietnam was not the mission itself but the strategies employed, the lack of resolve, the political wavering on the homefront, all the goddamn pussies in the press and Congress and the namby-pamby faggot kids with their stupid signs and Che posters.

-- The Cold War. Some Reaganites -- and I think Cheney is one of them -- actually believe the myth: that their man stared down the Soviet Union and liberated a continent. That the crumbling of the wall was as simple as Reagan calling for it, like Joshua (God on his side being implicit in the whole equation, even if Cheney himself probably doesn't buy into that mumbo-jumbo). If you suggested to these people that the collapse of the Soviet bloc was largely an internal event, the combination of economic self-destruction and persistent political and civic agitation, they would look at you like you were from Mars (or Venus, actually). If Vietnam is the cautionary tale about the lack of resolve, the "victory" in the Cold War is the triumph that confirms the doctrine: force works, "resolve" works, never saying you're sorry, never backing down, all of those things work.

Add to all that a quasi-religious (and largely economically illiterate) faith in what they conceive of as "free markets," plus some evangelical fervor from the Christian warriors, and you've got the Bush administration. That grown people (grown men, mostly, let's be honest) can achieve positions of success and power with such a distorted view of the world is hardly heartening. But also hardly unprecedented.

Like the man says, we're idiots, babe -- it's a wonder we can even feed ourselves.

In this way, I also think they believe what they're saying when they say that Iraq is a vital battle in the war on terrorism. They just can't, at present, openly admit that it's only the first front. Iraq isn't a distraction, it was taken first because it was the easiest one to start with, and makes for a strategic base. Iran has always been next. Though things are not going as well as they'd hoped.

This line of thought is little too Phillip Roth for me. I think the Cold War had the far more important impact on these guys (many of whom are not Jewish) psyches.

otherwise i think g.m.'s post is great and will keep me thinking for weeks.

But the nice idea that you can create such a thing, whole cloth, has never been more than a nice idea. Of course you can't. Liberal democracies are complicated beasts that have come into being through their own sets of circumstances, with any number of false starts and wrong turns and ungodly bloodshed (hello 19th and 20th century Europe). One of the neater parallels between Iraq and Vietnam is the resurgence of the domino theory, just as blinkered and wrongheaded on the Democracy Domino side as it was about the Communist Dominoes. Both theories arise from what seems to me a basic failure of empathy: they're subjecting the world to cod-scientific models, rather than starting from the assumption that most people most places want the same things. Understanding the world in terms of Capitalism and Communism, or Westernism and Easternism, or Islamism and Judeo-Christism, or whatever, leads to thinking in terms of ideologies rather than people. I think that's one reason the Bush guys seized so eagerly on the War on Terror/clash of civilizations idea, it presented an ideological model, and these guys are nothing if not ideological. That's why they're so scornful of treating terrorism like a "law enforcement problem" rather than a "war" -- law enforcement isn't sufficiently ideological.

Of course, the War on Terror does also serve as a distraction and smokescreen for any number of other things. I'm not saying they're only driven by some ideological vision, they're also instinctively power-conscious, and they capitalize on any advantage they can get or weakness they can exploit. But I think the amount to which they're driven by ideology vs. raw power shows up if you contrast them with quasi-fellow traveler Vlad Putin, who says a lot of the same things the Bush guys say, but doesn't really seem remotely interested in ideology. (If you want a real modern Machiavellian, he's at the top of my list.)

But all of that is one reason that I think it's hard for the Democrats -- not to mention the rest of the industrialized, liberal-democracy world -- to mount an effective response. Fighting ideology with ideology is one thing; fighting ideology with a skepticism of the whole idea of ideology is something else. It's like a gunfight where one side wants to debate the morality of gunfighting.

"The Purest Neocon"

Basically sez Hitchens transfers his hopes for world revolution from Soviet Union to USA, from troskyism to neoconservatism. Nuttin new, just lots of it:

What the mutual embrace of Hitchens and the neocons tells us is that Hitchens’s assessment of neoconservatism is essentially correct: the regnant force in American conservatism today is warmed-over Trotskyism, which views America merely as the embodiment of the ideology of global revolution. This is, admittedly, a depressing conclusion. But there is hope. Hitchens spent the first half of his ideological career riding a dying horse. He may have just started riding another one.

(not that I believe in a policy of non-intervention; I'm against unilateral invasions).

I can´t believe I actually said this, just a year ago. How laughable. I am against interventions that are a really bad idea and unnecessary and heavy-handed, full stop. Unilateral/multilateral seems irrelevant now.