Those Who Sought War Are Now Pushing Peace

From the people who most enthusiastically promoted the war in Iraq, the message now is peace.

Or at least a pause in hostilities.

Even as President Bush and his aides are talking tough about Syria, the neoconservative foreign policy thinkers who provided much of the intellectual justification for the war with Iraq are talking down the possibility of further military action in the Middle East -- at least in the near term.

“I just don’t think there is a tremendous appetite on the part of most people for endless military operations, even among people who think things turned out reasonably well in Iraq,” said Aaron L. Friedberg, a neoconservative professor of international affairs at Princeton University.

This restrained tone has surprised some because almost all of the leading neoconservative intellectuals have portrayed the Iraq war as just one chapter in a larger struggle against Islamic extremism. But in a flurry of articles and statements since the fall of Baghdad, many of those same thinkers are contending that the next steps should involve diplomatic and economic pressure, not military force.

“We are in a regional struggle and ... it is impossible to win the war on terrorism so long as the regimes in Syria and Iran remain in power,” Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, wrote earlier this week. “The good news is that both are vulnerable to political attack.”

Force Still a Factor

Even so, most leading neoconservatives argue that the United States cannot rule out the use of force if Iran and Syria don’t reform, and critics argue that such views will eventually produce a drumbeat for more wars in the region.

“The logic of their position suggests there will come a time where military force becomes the means to achieve the end they seek because as you threaten regimes -- and we are certainly threatening the Syrians -- the credibility of that threat depends on your willingness to fulfill it,” said Ivo Daalder, a national security aide under President Bill Clinton.

The neoconservatives are a loose, but distinctive, network of hawkish foreign policy thinkers active in Republican circles. Those outside the administration tend to cluster at the American Enterprise Institute, the Weekly Standard, a magazine edited by GOP strategist Bill Kristol, and the Project for the New American Century, another think tank Kristol organized in 1997.

There is a Web site, www.neoconservatism.com, devoted to advancing their political perspective. The site defines neoconservatism as being “committed to cultural traditionalism, democratic capitalism, and a foreign policy promoting freedom and American interests around the world.”

Neoconservatives with top jobs inside the administration include Paul D. Wolfowitz, deputy Defense secretary; John R. Bolton, undersecretary of State; Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney; and Elliot Abrams and Zalmay Khalilzad, who have key responsibilities for Middle East policy at the National Security Council.

Whether inside or outside of government, the neoconservatives typically argue for aggressive U.S. leadership to shape the international order and confront global threats -- with allies if possible, but alone if necessary.

Long before the 2001 terrorist attacks, the New American Century’s founding statement of principles called for a “Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity” that would promote democracy abroad and “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values.”

Voices of Doubt

Inside the GOP, this approach faces resistance from both moderates committed to international alliances and conservative “realists,” who worry that the neoconservative vision of remaking the world will lead America into unsustainable military and nation-building commitments. The latest issue of the National Review, an outpost of “realist” conservative thinking, noted in a headline, “You can’t spell ‘messianic’ without mess.”

Most observers agree that neoconservative influence inside the administration soared after the Sept. 11 attacks because their long-standing call for aggressive action against hostile regimes -- particularly Iraq -- dovetailed with Bush’s desire to take the offensive against terrorists and states that might support them. Increasingly, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush himself have echoed neocon arguments.

“It’s not a case where the neocons suddenly seized the mind of the president, but rather where the president came to the same conclusion they did because of Sept. 11,” said one senior Republican Senate aide who closely follows these debates.

Since the terrorist attacks, the neoconservatives have framed the security challenge facing the United States in the broadest terms: as a worldwide struggle against “militant Islam.” While the neoconservatives have urged military action against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein for years, as the war approached many made clear they saw it as but the initial step in an ongoing confrontation.

Ledeen, an advisor to the National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan, has described Iraq as just “one battle in a longer war ... a regional war.” Eliot Cohen, a Johns Hopkins University professor of strategic studies highly influential in neoconservative circles, has gone Ledeen one better, arguing that the Sept. 11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan and the overthrow of Hussein may someday all be seen as battles in World War IV -- with the Cold War serving as World War III in his formulation.

Likewise, Kristol and New Republic writer Lawrence Kaplan concluded in their new book “The War Over Iraq”: “The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there.”

From such rhetoric, many liberal critics have argued that the neoconservatives are plotting a succession of wars to topple other regimes hostile to the United States. But despite the martial declarations before the war, almost all of the leading neocons are urging caution now that victory has come in Iraq.

In its editorial this week, for instance, Kristol’s Weekly Standard urges the administration to “use the influence gained from the triumph” by employing “the psychological leverage” that victory has created, not through military means.

“Further countries don’t have to be singled out for invasion,” the magazine wrote.

Of Like Mind

In separate pieces this week, Ledeen and former White House speechwriter David Frum (now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute) also urged the application of diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran and Syria, and the support of indigenous opposition groups, rather than the use of military force.

Richard N. Perle, a neoconservative member of the Pentagon’s advisory Defense Policy Board, took a similar line at an AEI briefing Tuesday. So did Kaplan in a piece on Syria.

In urging nonmilitary means of pressure, the neoconservatives cite both opportunity and constraints. Many see logistical and political barriers to launching another military strike soon.

Many also argue that it would be premature to threaten either Iran or Syria with military action before seeing whether the shock waves of Iraq’s fall will propel changes in those societies through means short of dispatching the 82nd Airborne. Some also worry that the United States doesn’t have enough troops to launch another action while stabilizing Iraq.

Overall, in the aftermath of the Iraq war it appears the neoconservatives believe the confrontation against Islamic extremism will last many years and be fought on many fronts through different means -- some peaceful and some violent.

“So much of this is absolutely not about military action,” said Cohen. “It’s very much a contest of ideas.”

Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, another haven of neoconservative thinking, said the years ahead may blend the U.S. response to Nazism and Communism in the last century. “We have fought totalitarian ideologies twice in the past,” he said. “[The Nazis] we defeated through war.... [Communism] we defeated through complex, nonviolent means in 1991. This will be some mixture of both.”