What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
Special Investigation:
Have Journalists Been Deliberately Murdered in Iraq by the US
Military?
Our new
CounterPunch newsletter, just out, Christopher Reed examines
the growing body count of journalists in Iraq and documents numerous
incidents where US troops have deliberately targeted reporters.
Charles Glass offers a
stark comparison of the uprooting of Palestians in the Galilee
during the 1948 war to the lush compensation of Israelis living
on the same land who were displaced by the war on Lebanon. Remember, we are funded
solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this
website by buying a
subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you
won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the
cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's envoy
to the UN, died yesterday at 80. She picked a graceful moment
to exit, the day after the Iraqi Study Group announced its recommendations,
signaling, we are told, the return of realist reason to the Republican
Party. In the coming days, expect eulogies that will compare
Kirkpatrick's diplomatic philosophy favorably to the neocon delusion
that convinced Bush to believe he could lead a global crusade
to "rid the world of evil." Kirkpatrick did after
all lambaste Democrats in the early 1980s for believing the US
could be "world's mid-wife" to democracy. "No
idea," she complained, "holds greater sway in the mind
of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to
democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances."
But don't believe the hype, for the righteousness that underwrote
Kirkpatrick-style realism easily bleeds into the kind of blinkered
moralism that so excites the neocons.
Bush's ongoing commitment to Woodrow-Wilson style idealism has
baffled many observers, seeming to stand at odds to the Republican
tradition of diplomatic realpolitik, particularly to the kind
of realism advanced by Kirkpatrick and other top officials in
Ronald Reagan's White House as late as the 1980s. But the realism
that powered the rise of the New Right, which brought Reagan
to power, was of a particular variety, deeply ideological and
committed to a fulfillment of American purpose in the world.
With the Cold War raging however there were few places in the
world where such a robust view of American military and moral
power could be applied. But there was Central America, where
US-funded and trained anti-communist mercenaries in Nicaraguan
and death-squad states in El Salvador and Guatemala slaughtered
300,000 civilians and tortured of hundreds of thousands more.
Kirkpatrick has quite a bit of blood on her hands (as do a lesser
group of civilian militarists, many of them Kirkpatrick acolytes
like John Bolton, Otto Reich, and Robert Kagan who we will undoubtedly
hear testifying over the next couple of weeks about her wisdom
and foresight), having justified this carnage in the name of
national security.
Yet more than just helping
to turn Central America into a graveyard, Kirkpatrick used the
region's conflicts as a form of collective therapy to work through
the crisis of self-confidence provoked by Vietnam and Watergate.
It was Kirkpatrick who provided the moral and intellectual framework
to rationalize Reagan's Central American policy. In so doing,
she began the synthesis of the realist and idealist traditions
of American diplomacy into a new, and highly volatile diplomatic
philosophy.
Kirkpatrick considered herself
a realist when it came to foreign policy, in the tradition of
Hans Morgenthau, Dean Acheson, and George Kennan. Though a lifelong
Democrat, she found herself repulsed by the self-flagellation
that she believed had overcome her party in the wake of Vietnam.
Attracted as a result to Reagan's bid for the White House, Kirkpatrick
met with the candidate early in 1980 and
pronounced his "intuitive grasp" of foreign affairs
"generally correct and very realistic" and soon accepted
his invitation to join his campaign.
Kirkpatrick was a consummate "action intellectual,"
combining practice and theory to rebut the philosophical premises
that underwrote post-Vietnam anti-militarism. Appointed by
Reagan to the position of ambassador to the UN, she served notice
that condemnation of Washington, which had come too easy in the
past, would now have a cost. Her office compiled and distributed
the voting records of each member nation, and, when one or another
country maligned this or that US policy, she called its envoy
into her office and demanded an explanation. In her speeches
and writings, she repeatedly pointed out the hypocrisy of condemning
Israel while praising Libya, say, or censuring Apartheid in South
Africa while ignoring human rights violations in Cuba.
But Kirkpatrick did more than
just point out double standards. Prior to serving as Ambassador
to the UN, which under her tenure was raised to a cabinet-level
position with direct access to the president, she worked as a
Georgetown political scientist who mostly researched the minutia
of the presidential nominating process. She had a broad engagement
with intellectual history, however, and where other New Right
groups offered visceral but not very effective reactions to the
Vietnam Syndrome, Kirkpatrick wrote terse, accessible essays
that updated the conservative tradition to the current moment.
Drawing on Thomas Hobbes' respect for the centrality of power
in human affairs and Edmund Burke's respect for the intractability
of tradition to understand the limits of that power, Kirkpatrick
not only pointed out what she described as the hypocrisy behind
criticisms of countries such as El Salvador and South Africa
but actively defended the institutions of those countries as
important bulwarks of order and stability.
It was in Latin America where
Kirkpatrick's ideas were most fully elaborated and applied.
In a series of articles, she used the region to refute what at
the time seemed like an emerging dominant consensus regarding
what should be the role of America in the world. The US military's
defeat by a poorly armed peasant insurgency in Vietnam led many
in the Democratic foreign policy establishment to rethink the
wisdom of seeing all global conflict through the bifocal lens
of superpower conflict. They began to recommend an acceptance
of "ideological pluralism," that is, the belief that
not all societies will follow the same road to development.
According to this new perspective, third-world nationalism, of
the kind that drove the US out of Southeast Asia, should be dealt
with on its own terms and not as a cat's paw for Soviet Communism.
Proponents of this new forbearance believed that the US should
work with Moscow to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons,
divert money from military to human development (since it was
argued that poverty, not ideology, fed insurgencies), normalize
relations with Cuba, forsake paternalism and intervention, encourage
allies to democratize, and promote trade and development policies
that furthered global equity even to the detriment of US economic
interests. Even Carter's hawkish National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski argued that increased technological and commercial
interdependence had made the world less ideological (foreshadowing
much of the techno-optimistic writing on globalization during
the Clinton years). Old dogmas, Brzezinski suggested, concerning
the relationship of territory to national interests no longer
held, which meant that the US could adopt a "more detached
attitude toward revolutionary processes."
Kirkpatrick responded point by point to this sanguine philosophy
of international relations, while broadly countering it with
an old-fashioned conservative insistence on the dark-side of
human nature. Carter of course either ignored or opposed much
of the new liberal internationalism, yet Kirkpartrick successfully
linked it to his administration to account for the fall of Nicaragua
and Iran, the spread of insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala,
the ongoing influence of Castro, and the emergence of revolutionary
nationalism throughout the Middle East and the Caribbean.
Kirkpatrick provided the Republican
administration with the argument it needed to justify ongoing
support for brutal dictatorships. Autocrats, no matter how premodern
their hierarchies and antimodern their values, allowed, she said,
for a degree of autonomous civil society. By contrast, Marxist
Leninist totalitarians such as the Sandinistas mobilized all
aspects of society, which made war, as a means to maintain such
mobilization, inevitable. Since political liberalization was
more likely to occur under a Somoza than a Marxist regime like
that of the Sandinistas, Kirkpatrick insisted that a foreign
policy that forced allies to democratize was not only bad for
US security but detrimental for the concerned countries as well:
it led in Nicaragua and Iran not to reform but to radical regimes
and was threatening to do the same in Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala,
Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and South Africa. Kirkpatrick's
analysis was not original. It recycled not just dubious distinctions
between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian"
regimes but also well-rehearsed justifications for supporting
Latin American dictators dating back to the beginning of the
Cold War. Yet it did provide the Reagan administration with
a rationale for undoing many of Carter's human rights initiatives.
Kirkpatrick went beyond merely
justifying alliances with unseemly allies. In repudiating the
"rational humanism" of the liberal internationalists
she gave voice to what may be called the Hobbesian impulse in
US foreign policy an insistence that brute power and not
human reason establishes political legitimacy. In a 1980 essay
titled "The Hobbes Problem: Order, Authority and Legitimacy
in Central America," she invoked the seventeenth-century
philosopher to attack Carter's conditioning of military aid to
El Salvador on the implementation of social reforms, including
a land reform, and on the reduction of human rights violations.
Such requirements, she wrote, were wrong-headed because they
ignore the fact that "competition for power" rooted
"in the nature of man" is the foundation of all politics.
Kirkpatrick advised the incoming Republican administration to
abandon Carter's reform program and sanction the Salvadoran military's
effort to impose order through repression, even if it meant the
use of death squads. Such a course of action was justified,
she contended, because Salvador's political culture respects
a sovereign who is willing to wield violence. Proof of this
was that one of the death squads took the name Maximiliano Hernández
Martínez, a dictator who in 1932 slaughtered as many as
30,000 indigenous peasants in the course of a week. Kirkpatrick
described Hernández Martínez as a "hero"
to Salvadorans and argued that by taking his name the assassins
sought to "place themselves in El Salvador's political tradition
and communicate their purpose." (Perhaps a similar logic
explains why a notoriously corrupt and brutal Contra unit in
Nicaragua took the name the "Jeane Kirkpatrick Task Force").
Washington needed to think "more realistically" about
the course of action it pursued in Latin America, Kirkpatrick
argued elsewhere: "The choices are frequently unattractive."
Kirkpatrick also repeatedly attacked what might be called the
Kantian impulse in US foreign policy, after Immanuel Kant, the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher who believed that
human progress would result in a peacefully ordered world government.
Again and again she hammered against the conceit that US power
should and could be used to promote universal, internationalist
abstract goals, such as "human rights," "development"
and "fairness." She warned against trying to be the
"world's mid-wife" to democracy. "No idea,"
she complained, "holds greater sway in the mind of educated
Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize
governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances."
In classic conservative terms, she cautioned that "thought
set free from experience is unlimited by the constraints of experience
or of probability. If history is not relevant then the future
is free from the past. Theories cut loose from experience are
usually blinding optimistic. They begin not from how things are
but how they ought to be, and regularly underestimate the complexities
and difficulties concerning how you get there from here."
But it is important to emphasize
that Kirkpatrick was not arguing against morality in foreign
policy. Far from it, for she believed that a conviction in the
righteousness of US purpose and power was indispensable in the
execution of effective diplomacy. But for America's foreign
policy establishment, Vietnam shook that conviction. The optimism
in which liberal internationalists approached the world, she
charged, was but a thin mask to hide the shame they felt over
American power. The problem, according to Kirkpatrick, was not
idealism as such but Carter's misplaced application of it, which
not only led him and his advisors to doubt American motives but
to abandon the responsibility of power for the abstractions of
history. Carter's White House, Kirkpatrick pointed out, repeatedly
explained foreign policy setbacks in terms of impersonal terms,
as "forces" or "processes." "What can
a US president faced with such complicated, inexorable, impersonal
processes do?" Kirkpatrick asked: "The answer, offered
again and again by the president and his top officials, was,
Not Much."
Setting the stage for today's
neocons, she called for a diplomacy that once again valued human
action, resolve, and will. If America acted with moral certainty
to defend its national interests, the consequence would, by extension,
be beneficial for the rest of the world. "Once the intellectual
debris has been cleared away," she believed, "it should
become possible to construct a Latin American policy that will
protect U.S. security interest and make the actual lives of actual
people in Latin America somewhat better and somewhat freer."
American diplomacy here, even
in the hands of a committed realist such as Kirkpatrick, is an
article of faith, expressed in the self-confident writ of policy
makers that when America acts in the world, even when it is doing
so expressly to defend its own interests, the consequences of
its actions (hundreds of thousands dead and tortured, millions
exiled) will be in the general interest. It is in such assuredness
that the roots of the punitive idealism that drives the new imperialism
can be found, roots which first began to sprout in Reagan's Central
American policy and now are fully bloomed in the desert sands
of Iraq.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
