Lew Rockwell why the neocons started the 2003 Iraq War

Why did the United States get involved? 

One of the key reasons was pressure from a group that has come to exercise more and more influence on American foreign policy — the neocons. Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and a number of others were not satisfied with American foreign policy. They disclosed their plans in an important book by Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan, The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission, published in 2003. These neocon authors said that foreign policy must avoid “realism.” The realists favored working within the balance-of-power tradition of European diplomacy. “This in turn led to the realists’ key recommendation: A state must limit itself to the protection of its ‘vital interests,’ lest it disrupt the balance of power.” 

A foreign policy realist will not hesitate to ally, if conditions require it, with an undemocratic state, but this strikes at the heart of Kaplan and Kristol’s ideas.  The key to their approach is that America should embark on a worldwide crusade for democracy.  To do so, they claim, will result in a world at peace.

They contend that the “strategic value of democracy is reflected in a truth of international politics: Democracies rarely, if ever, wage war against one another.”  Given this premise, isn’t the conclusion obvious?  If only we establish democracy everywhere, the millennium is at hand. 

Democracy should be spread worldwide, but one area is the most important for the neocons — the Middle East. Kaplan and Kristol hate all of the political systems of the Arab world, and they propose to replace them: “There is today not a single Arab state that qualifies as a democracy. ...  But promoting democracy in the Middle East is not a matter of national egoism.  It has become a matter of national well-being, even survival.”

In particular, the royalist government of Saudi Arabia must go.  Why not replace it as an American ally with a democratic Iraq?  “Iraq’s experience of liberal democratic rule in turn could increase the pressure already being felt by Teheran’s mullahs. . . .  Iraq could even replace Saudi Arabia as the key American ally and source of oil in the region.” 

America should therefore strike at Saddam Hussein — remember, they wrote before the invasion began.  Incredibly, Kaplan and Kristol predicted that the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms.  Then we could start preventive wars against other dictatorships.

~ Lew Rockwell, "The War System," Against the State (2014)

2014

 

Lew Rockwell on Hitler's modest plans before 1939

The neocon efforts to demonize the enemy are nothing new, and in what follows, I’m going to discuss a number of examples to show how pervasive this pattern has been in involving America in unnecessary, destructive, and costly wars. 

Let’s begin with the most salient case of all.  For the neocons, it’s always Hitler.  The Munich Conference of 1938 shows what happens when we fail to stand up against evil.  The facts don’t bear out what they say.  Hitler was indeed an evil dictator, but America had no valid reason to go to war against him.  Hitler did not aim to attack the United States, and fighting against him helped Stalin, who killed more people than Hitler did, in taking control of Eastern Europe. 

Furthermore, Hitler’s policies during the 1930s aimed at the peaceful revision of the punitive and unjust Treaty of Versailles.  A European War resulted only after the unwise and unenforceable British and French guarantee of the Western boundary of Poland.  The eastern boundary against Russia was not guaranteed, and Poland lost territory to Russia after the Russians invaded Poland on September 17, 1939. 

The great Murray Rothbard notes that Hitler’s policy before 1939 was improvised, responding to particular circumstances.  He did not have a plan for “world conquest” as the neocons continue to allege today.  “Hitler was not bent on world conquest, for which he had armed Germany to the teeth and constructed a ‘timetable.’  Hitler, in brief, (in foreign affairs) was not a uniquely evil monster or daimon, who would continue to gobble up countries diabolically until stopped by superior force.  Hitler was a rational German statesman, pursuing — with considerable intuitive insight — a traditional, post-Versailles German policy (to which we might add intimations of desires to expand eastward in an attack on Bolshevism).  But basically, Hitler has no ‘master plan’; he was a German intent, like all Germans, on revising the intolerable and stupid Versailles-diktat, and on doing so by peaceful means, and in collaboration with the British and French.  One thing is sure: Hitler had no designs, no plans, not even vague intimations, to expand westward against Britain and France (let alone the United States).”

~ Lew Rockwell, "Good vs. Bad Nations," LewRockwell.com, May 22, 2024

Daniel McAdams on Ron Paul's foreign policy

Jeff Deist: Ron Paul was motivated by two things in deciding to run for Congress: foreign policy and monetary policy.  He was able to dovetail those two things.  He understood that interventionism abroad is a cousin of interventionism at home in the economy.

Daniel McAdams: This is something that the neocons and most conservatives never understand.  Those same people believe that six thousand miles away, all of a sudden the government becomes omniscient and omnipotent, there's a huge disconnect and the reason is very simple.  They never have to live with the consequences of the policies that they promote overseas.

~ Daniel McAdams, "All the Trouble in the World," The Austrian, November-December 2021

Boyd Cathey on the pressure on Fox News to conform

The pressure on Fox pundits and reporters to accept without too much grumbling a Biden administration will only grow, and like at other supposedly conservative news outlets (e.g., The Wall Street Journal), the new Millennial hires and writers, educated at Leftist hothouses called colleges, may well finally vanquish any dissent. 

The Neocons—the slightly more demure wing of Progressivism, broadcasting their message of liberal democratic globalism and post-Christian morality—dominate Fox and have paved the way for what is coming. They have successfully squelched Old Right traditionalist conservative voices, except occasionally on the Carlson program.

~ Boyd Cathey, "The Future of Fox News and the Future of America," My Corner by Boyd Cathey, November 15, 2020

Tom DiLorenzo on Yankees, public schooling and Prohibition

The word "Yankee" gained popularity in the early to mid nineteenth century to describe a particular brand of New Englander: arrogant, hypocritical, unfriendly, condescending, intolerant, extremely self-righteous, and believing that he and his were God’s chosen people.

Yankees have never shied away from using the coercive powers of the state to compel others to be remade in their image. That’s why compulsory government schooling originated in New England, as did prohibitionism.  It’s also why Stalinism took hold in the North (especially in New York City) in the twentieth century, as did its offshoot, neoconservativism, in more recent times. Indeed, many of the more notorious neoconservatives openly admit that they were Stalinists in their youth and have never fully abandoned those beliefs.

At the outbreak of the War to Prevent Southern Independence there was a vigorous secession movement in what were known then as the Middle States — Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, New Jersey. During the war there were thousands of Northern "peace Democrats" who opposed Lincoln and his Yankee cabal. These people, who were essentially Jeffersonians, had one thing in common with the Southern Confederates: they despised the arrogant, pushy, greedy, and insufferably self-righteous Yankees. They were ruthlessly censored and imprisoned by the tens of thousands by the Lincoln government. When they rioted over military conscription, the Yankee army shot them dead in the streets by the hundreds if not thousands (See Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots).

~ Tom DiLorenzo, "The Myth of the Morally Superior Yankee," LewRockwell.com, February 10, 2004

Lew Rockwell on the exaggerated Soviet military threat

As it turns out, by the way, the Soviet threat was grossly exaggerated, as such threats always are. The wickedness of the Soviet regime was never in doubt, but its capabilities and intentions were consistently distorted and overblown.

According to Matthew Evangelista, writing in Diplomatic History, “Despite the fact that the Russian archives have yielded ample evidence of Soviet perfidy and egregious behavior in many other spheres, nothing has turned up to support the idea that the Soviet leadership at any time actually planned to start World War III and send the ‘Russian hordes’ westward.” Some people tried making similar arguments at the time, to no avail.

Pushing the preposterous narrative of a socialist basket case as an overwhelming military threat was a group of neoconservatives who became known as “Team B” (“Team A” being the analysts of the CIA, who were accused by the neocons of being willfully blind to growing Soviet military power). In 1976, CIA director George H.W. Bush gave these neoconservatives extraordinarily access to classified CIA documents as they prepared a report excoriating the agency for its alleged failure to perceive a Soviet military buildup.

Team B claimed, for example, that the Soviets had a non-acoustic antisubmarine system. There was about as much evidence of this as there was years later that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of unmanned drones. When CIA analysts protested that they could find no evidence of such a system, Team B described the lack of evidence as a further indication of just how wily and clever the Soviet adversary was.

“If you go through most of Team B’s specific allegations about weapons systems,” wrote analyst Anne Cahn, “and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong.” So in case you thought bringing ideological pressure to bear on the intelligence community began with Iraq, there you go.

~ Lew Rockwell, "Murray Rothbard Soars, Bill Buckley Evaporates," Mises,org, March 31, 2016

Justin Raimondo on John McCain and his top advisors

McCain and his top advisors are ideologues who care about one thing and one thing only: war. The glory of it, the utility of it, the necessity of it. It's the McCain panacea, like "free silver" was to William Jennings Bryan and socialism was to Eugene Debs. It's his answer to everything: it solves all problems, and, more importantly, stifles all criticism. If you doubt his veracity, question his good intentions, or point out his inconsistencies, you're attacking a war hero, doubting the divine wisdom suffering is supposed to impart.

~ Justin Raimondo, "Sarah Palin: The Xena of the War Party," Antiwar.com, September 5, 2008

Bill Bonner on the historical shift to neoconservatism

After the war [World War II], there was no going back. America was the leading world power. "Isolationism" became a kind of insult. A few of the old conservatives – such as Frank Chodorov, Robert Taft and Warren Buffett's father, a US Congressman – kept wearing their old starched collars. But the fashion had clearly changed. They could vote against government spending programs...and they opposed further military adventures abroad... but they couldn't win national elections and they couldn't participate in the great fun of having an empire – getting to boss people around all over the world. There was no glory in being a conservative. No power. No money. No style.

Then, with the Cold War, even the old die-hards went shopping for new clothes. In their minds, it was a contest between good and evil...freedom and communism...black and white.

Indeed, the Cold War played roughly the same roll as the War on Terror would half a century later – it perverted the old conservative values.

"We are again being told to be afraid," wrote Frank Chodorov. "As it was before the two world wars so it is now; politicians talk in frightening terms, journalists invent scare-lines, and even next-door neighbors are taking up the cry: the enemy is at the city gates; we must gird for battle. In case you don't know, the enemy this time is the USSR."

Few Americans had even met a communist, but they were certain that if they didn't go toe to toe with them in places like Korea, Berlin and Vietnam, they'd soon be stealing the family silver in Dubuque. The urbane, witty, charming and cosmopolitan William F. Buckley:

The "invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union" imminently threatens the United States, he said. "We have to accept Big Government for the duration – for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged...except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores."

And thus was the fabric laid out...cut and sewn...for America's new conservative outfits. Now, they could fight totalitarians by being totalitarians.

~ Bill Bonner, "Listening to Bill Buckley Give a Speech Was a Painful Experience," LewRockwell.com, March 27, 2008

Max Boot on 9/11: "The most realistic response to terrorism is for America to embrace its imperial role"

MANY HAVE SUGGESTED THAT THE September 11 attack on America was payback for U.S. imperialism. If only we had not gone around sticking our noses where they did not belong, perhaps we would not now be contemplating a crater in lower Manhattan. The solution is obvious: The United States must become a kinder, gentler nation, must eschew quixotic missions abroad, must become, in Pat Buchanan's phrase, "a republic, not an empire." In fact this analysis is exactly backward: The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.

~ Max Boot, "The Case for American Empire," The Weekly Standard, October 15, 2001

Giuliani packs foreign policy team with neocons

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

~ The New York Times, "Mideast hawks help to develop Giuliani policy," October 25, 2007, by Michael Cooper and Marc Santora

William Kristol endorses Republican frontrunners on foreign policy

I would say, as a card-carrying member of the neoconservative conspiracy that I think Giuliani, McCain and Thompson are all getting really good advice — and Romney. [None of the leading Republican candidates] buy any of these fundamental criticisms that Bush took us on a radically wrong path, and we have to go to a pre-9/11 foreign policy.

~ William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, "Mideast hawks help to develop Giuliani policy," The New York Times, October 25, 2007