Editorial comment.(United States Congress, Democrate majority)(Editorial)

• Position: 155873236
• Pages: 5(3)

AMERICA: NEO-CONS OUT, REALISTS IN

The Republican debacle that was the mid-term U.S. elections has widespread implications for American foreign policy, not in and by itself, but in the context of the unwinnable but definitely losable Iraq war, a war that has now lasted longer for America than their engagement in World War II, and which has turned out to be good for Iranian influence in the region. It was all foreseeable, so who were the blind who led the blind?

The Iraq disaster was the product of a group of self-styled neo-conservative advisers to President Bush. These "neo-cons" were also prominent in the print media where their ideas were widely influential on the right. In fact they were not really conservative at all. They included a number of former Trotskyists (such as Irving Kristol and Christopher Hitchens) whose real loyalty in some cases was, and remained, to a strange form of utopianism that transformed their old Trotskyist notion of the "permanent revolution" into an ongoing "spreading of democracy and freedom" as the solution of the world's woes. The neo-cons, who are mostly materialists with no respect for traditional cultural values and certainly not for religion, used the term "freedom" more or less in the Lockean sense, assuming that such "freedom" was graftable upon any human stock including the entire Muslim world, where of course politics and religion are not easily separable.

Iraq was to have been their great test case. Success there would have a domino effect, promoting regime change in those states actively opposed to Israel, namely Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah and Hamas would be left without backers and Israel would be the big regional winner. This is what the Iraq war was supposed to...