Neo-Cons and Republicans
I have tended to stay away from speculations about who's in and who's out in the White House. There are a lots of indications that the President makes his own decisions.
Having said that, here is a good discussion of the decades-long struggle between neo-cons and realists within the Republican Party. (Link via Josh Marshall).
The bad news: when the neo-cons convince Republican office-holders that now is the time for action, they have an audience of people who know very little about most of the world, and may be inclined, in the heat of the moment, to take their word for a lot of things. Also: the neo-cons seemed somewhat outside the loop until 9/11. Reagan allowed them to stage Iran-Contra, and that hurt their credibility for a while. Now, however, they are perhaps harder to displace than they have ever been, since they are more or less heroes in the eyes of the fundamentalist Christians and other "hard core" conservatives (many of whom may be "natural" isolationists except on the issue of Israel + Christianity vs. Islam).
The author puts this in a nastier way: "They've acquired a new set of patrons on the populist right--supremely ignorant men like Tom Delay and even (God help us) Rush Limbaugh, men who need a foreign policy world view to go with their crude notions of American supremacy, their loathing of Islam, and their bible-based support for Israel.
"Providing ideological world views to the ignorant is how neocons make their way in the world. And their new customers are the modern center of gravity of the Republican Party. They're the leaders of The Base--that mystical block of true believers the Bush II administration feels it cannot afford to offend in any way."
The better news is that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are not really neo-cons. (See the same author on the question: Who are the neo-cons?)
As I have said, Bush apparently makes his own decisions. Even in the most intense days after 9/11, "The neocons didn't win every battle--the decision to seek a UN Security Council resolution in support of the invasion being the most glaring example." I have suggested that the long process of UN negotiation, followed by an invasion without any agreement, was somewhat incoherent, and may have sent a confusing signal to Saddam.
This author is convinced the neo-cons are now losing influence at the White House, basically because things in Iraq are...er, not going as well as had been confidently predicted in some quarters.
"Providing ideological world views to the ignorant" seems unduly nasty to a group of highly intelligent people, but there are real questions as to whether they see things straight. They focus on an immediate action which they are convinced is necessary, for reasons that may not be at all convincing to most Americans. They persuade the decision-makers to go ahead, partly with almost unbelievable promises that the whole strategic situation is going to change in America's interests. Then they work with these decision-makers to cook up a spin that voters will buy.
Iraq was one of the few countries many Americans had heard a certain amount about in the last ten years or so; Saddam had been on the receiving end of at least one round of "he's the worst tyrant in the world," along with Khaddafi and Khomeini. So the foundation had been laid. The tricky part was cooking up something on WMDs and a link to 9/11, and then acting brave about the post-conflict re-building of Iraq.
Of course, as I have said before, the re-building may go reasonably well--but this will have to be as a result of luck, not the wisdom or influence of Ahmed Chalabi or anyone else involved in the planning for March 2003.
All of this has taken me back to Iran-Contra. I seem to recall a moment in Ollie North's testimony when he was asked about a specific plane ride to Iran. Did anyone on board actually speak Farsi? Yes, one person. So ... that would mean a lot of trust was put in that person--presumably Albert Hakim, an Iranian-born U.S. citizen who worked on arms sales to Iran for his own profit (and that of his partner General Secord).
No one was ever required to make a full accounting of what happened to the proceeds of these arms sales; very few hostages were freed, contrary to some promises that were made, and relatively little of the proceeds actually went to the Contras in Nicaragua, who were supposedly the intended beneficiaries as far as North and Poindexter were concerned.
I have never been convinced that there was a clear-cut constitutional issue here; Congress can pass laws about foreign policy, but that doesn't mean the President has to follow them. It is the stupidity of Iran-Contra that is so striking. Kissinger, the arch-realist, much hated by many moralistic conservatives, apparently said: they were looking for moderates in the Iran of the ayatollahs; That's like looking for a vegetarian in a tank of piranhas.
Update Jan. 10: Not surprisingly, Ahmed Chalabi was involved in Iran-Contra, as well as the fiasco of a "Bay of Pigs" type operation in Iraq in 1996. He is now front and centre in U.S. efforts in Iraq.
Update Jan. 18: Here's an account of another stupid neo-con plan, this time from the Afghan war in the 1980s. Link via Josh Marshall.
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