Cold War triumphalism and the Iraq War

John Foster Dulles

Two recent pieces discuss how neoconservative and Cheney-style nationalist views of the ending of the Soviet Union and the Cold War played into creating the disaster we know as the Iraq War: Habakkuk on the neocons' use of intelligence Sic Semper Tyrannis blog, and Lessons from the Bloc by Robert English The National Interest (a Nixon Center publication) 09/04/07.

English writes:

In their [neocon] version, the United States prevailed in the Cold War thanks to its "hard power" - we practiced containment (it should have been "rollback," by the way), we met Soviet expansionism with armed force, and in the end we ratcheted up an arms race that left a cash-strapped Gorbachev no choice but to capitulate. End of story.

Nowhere in this tale do there appear the decades of patient diplomacy that engaged the USSR, that doggedly opened a crack in a closed society and courted its young intellectuals, that not only showed ours as a dynamic system that out-competed them abroad but also impressed them with its commitment at home to everything from racial equality and environmental protection to decency and openness in politics. Cold War cultural exchanges, academic cooperation, and painstaking arms control talks (all derided by American hardliners at the time) in fact helped to nurture a post-Stalin generation of intellectuals, scientists, economists and foreign-policy analysts who formed a nascent group of "within system" reformers - in many cases, within the Communist Party itself. And when, in the early-mid 1980s, the Soviet system faltered, these scholars and policy analysts emerged as an influential "Westernizing" lobby that encouraged an open-minded new leader on the path of perestroika, the path of reforming, humanizing, and integrating Soviet society with the rest of the world. (my emphasis)

The "Habakkuk" article deals with neocon triumphalism, and a neocon tendency to freely interpret the facts of history, in a more specific context. He concludes:

As a spoiled British child of the post-war Pax Americana, what staggers me about so many of the neocons is their patently inability to grasp that American success in the Cold War was in very substantial measure due quite precisely to the fact that your country did not behave as the Soviets did. Why then this sudden enthusiasm for Soviet-style thuggery? Allies are 'to be commanded not consulted' - precisely as in the Warsaw Pact. War and violence the 'birthpangs of a new Middle East' - sounds very Leninist, doesn't it? This does not mean that military power was unimportant to the outcome of the Cold War - far from it. But it seems to quite extraordinary that the neoconservatives simply cannot understand that the moral authority of the United States was crucial to the success of the post-war Pax Americana, and also to the retreat and collapse of Soviet Communism.

It is still crucial to the international position of the United States. For one thing, the whole nuclear 'double standard' depends for such acceptability as it has on the belief that the existing nuclear powers can be trusted with nuclear weapons while others cannot be. In the light of the recent performance of the Bush Administration - and the Blair government - it is getting rather difficult to make this case sound persuasive! If people want to have moral authority, they must earn it. And one way of earning it is to insist on standards of intellectual integrity in argument - and here, to be frank, it helps to say clearly that knaves are knaves, and fools are fools.

English does make one odd comment in his article: 'Even today’s emboldened “strategic debate' about Iraq is mainly limited to tactical adjustments in our conduct of the war."

That's true except for, you know, the 60%+ of the American public who have been consistently telling pollsters that they want all American troops pulled out of Iraq within a year.

English apparently means that among those he considers worth listening to, only "tactical adjustments" are being discussed. The dead hand of Establishment conventional wisdom.

Tags: cold war, iraq war, robert english