Purging the Neocons

It turns out there's a pretty nasty purge of the neocons taking place at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the main conservative think tank providing intellectual backing for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Jacob Heilbrunn has the scoop:

The neocon world has been rocked by recent events at AEI. Numerous neocons told me that a vicious purge is being carried out at AEI, spearheaded by vice-president for foreign and defense policy studies, Danielle Pletka.

There can be no doubting that change is afoot at AEI. Recently, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht have departed AEI. Joshua Muravchik is on the way out as well. Other scholars face possible eviction. Both Muravchik and Gerecht are serious intellectuals who have published prolifically ....

Muravchik has been at AEI for two decades. Gerecht has been there for a much briefer period, but he has written extensively and provocatively on intelligence matters. Gerecht is currently at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which, along with the Hudson Institute, where Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby and Douglas J. Feith are fellows, seems to functioning as something of a safe haven for neocons.

What do these developments actually add up to? They undoubtedly signal a splintering taking place in the neocon world. Pletka has been closely identified with neocon positions on Iraq and Iran. But now there is tremendous hostility toward her among neocons, who allege that, as a former staffer for Jesse Helms, who embodied more traditional Republican foreign-policy precepts, she is out to extirpate neocon influence at AEI. In this version of events, Muravchik was ousted for not being a true Republican. It would be very unfortunate if that were the real cause. What the conservative movement needs is ferment, not an ideological straitjacket—something that neocons have themselves sometimes tried to enforce.

The neocon movement will survive these changes. It will continue to stir up debate. Its real misfortune was to be able to exert power in the Bush administration, where officials such as Paul Wolfowitz and Feith made a hash of things. The notion of a liberated Iraq being the first freedom domino to fall in the greater Middle East was always a pipe dream. The strength of the neocons is to generate ideas, but whether they should actually be implemented is often another matter.

Interestingly, some of those same neocons Heilbrunn mentions - like Reuel Marc Gerecht, in his earlier essay, "A New Middle East, After All" - predict a much more substantial legacy for the Bush administration and its vital agenda of combining American exceptionalism and power in the Mideast.

Also interesting is the notion that neoconservatives - who remain ripe with ideas, while others routinely lament how the broader conservative movement has run out of steam - would be better off not "actually implementing" their intellectual product. Keep in mind that Republicans did not lose the White House because of neoconservative ideas. Alan Greenspan and the Democratic expansion of subprime lending through Fannie and Freddie have taken a lion's share of credit on the collapse of markets. Indeed, the war in Iraq was hardly an issue at all throughout the second half of 2008. Meanwhile the New York Times has recently been making the case that Democrats deserve credit for victory in the war! That's hardly a repudiation of neoconservative ideas.

Heilbrunn's right of course in noting that neocons will survive, and they'll even prosper. Already we're seeing a push for a greater U.S. role in preventing humanitarian crises, and the eventual endorsement of the robust exertion of military power for such missions will take a page right from the neocon playbook. Of course, democracy promotion was never isolated to neconservative thought. Power and purpose always has a role in American foreign policy. It's the stress on the assumed "unilateralism" of this administration, and the "reckless" disregard for the constitution, that's gotten the left all riled up. Don't forget that Bill Clinton never had Security Council support for the airwar over Kosovo, and Janet Reno's Justice Department purged 93 federal prosecutors in 1993, a mass firing that makes the Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' actions look like a summer picnic.

The neocon genie's yet to work it's all of its magic yet, and stuffing the movement back in the bottle is not as good an idea as some might think.