Anne Norton, July 22nd, 2005 "The Rise of the Neocons"

Unofficial transcript of Anne Norton’s statement at the July 22nd Congressional Briefing: The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later: A Citizens’ Response – Did They Get It Right?

 
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Anne Norton:

I’m a political theorist, and I hope you will excuse me if my focus is slightly different.

I
want to return to politics and to the political questions which seem to
me to be at the forefront of certain aspects of American policy in the
world after 9/11. Some of these are the rise in executive power, the
expanding tolerance of authoritarianism both home and abroad, and the
changing focus of both foreign and domestic policy.

Central
to this is the change in American conservatism. American conservatism
once had a certain fairly recognizable profile, a commitment to certain
tenets; conservatives reverence custom and tradition, they distrusted
abstract projects and theories, they advocated balanced budgets and
small government, and they were frugal about government spending.

They
were cautious, above all. This disposition and the political positions
that expressed it have a very long history in the United States, but it
has been radically altered in recent years.

Neoconservatives
are not conservatives according to this traditional model. And they
are, as they will tell you, as Tom Delay once told me, they’re
revolutionaries.

Neoconservatives have a rather different
and rather disturbing profile. They want a strong state, a state that
will put its strength to use. That allies itself with, and will
empower, corporations. They have an economic rhetoric that speaks to
the concerns of small business, small property owners, and working
people, but the benefits are given to wealthy individuals and
corporations.

They reject the vulgarity of mass culture,
they deplore the decadence of artists and intellectuals, although often
not religious themselves, they ally themselves with religion and
religious crusades. They encourage family values, for women, a return
to children, cooking, and the church.

They make a romance of
war, arguing that war will restore manliness, private virtue and public
spirit. They favor the expansion of executive power. They admire
authoritarian leaders abroad, especially Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf,
and they argue that America itself would profit from a more
authoritarian Presidency, and what they call a more disciplined
democracy.

A more disciplined democracy as they define it is
one with more surveillance of the people, more secrecy in the
government, and willingness to employ methods earlier conservatives,
and indeed, earlier Americans would have rejected. The curtailment of
Civil Rights, and of course, torture.

Treating 9/11 as an
institutional problem has given them a license to expand executive
power and to employ these previously prescribed methods.
Neoconservative foreign policy centers on a fear of world government
and the international institutions that might lead to it, most notably
the United Nations. A rejection of multilateralism, and, as they say,
above all, the ability to distinguish friends from enemies.

Neoconservatives
are wont to describe this particular ability to distinguish friends
from enemies to Thucydides but it belongs to Carl Schmitt, often
called, ‘the Crown Jurist’ of the Third Reich.

Schmitt
regarded the distinction between friend and enemy as the foundation of
politics, and along with this he argued that sovereignty came not from
the people but from the decision, that is to say, the capacity of the
ruler to decide matters. And that that arbitrary power was the
foundation for sovereignty.

These ideas came to
neoconservatism both directly through Carl Schmitt and through Leo
Strauss who has taught many of the most prominent neoconservatives in
the present administration and indeed in neoconservative think-tanks
throughout the city, and indeed, throughout the country.

Neoconservatives
have employed this ideology as a rationale for the expansion of
executive power. Europeans regard neoconservatives with special
skepticism and they do so, as you might have already realized, because
they know its progenitors all too well. And the desire for the
combination for traditional values, the desire for the expansion of
executive power, the ambition to create a new world order, and the
identification of a providential enemy, are all parts of a very
familiar past.

The shadows of German National Socialism and
nineteenth century European empires fall very heavily on the
neoconservative project.

As the administration responded
to 9/11 this influence became increasingly evident. Before 9/11,
neoconservatives saw America’s military hegemony as an opportunity, as
they argued, national security should no longer be concerned with
defending against threats, rather it should be regarded as an
opportunity, and that opportunity should be seized.

In their
words, America should seek to make trouble in the world. They call this
‘Robust Internationalism’ an avowedly expansionist foreign policy that
aims at a new world order that would rival Rome, and to surpass the
European colonial project of the nineteenth century.

This
vision of America’s role requires considerably more; more power in the
executive branch, particularly stronger police powers, more military
funding, more arms, more money, and a larger executive bureaucracy.

After
9/11 America’s military hegemony, its sort of unipolar character was
cast not merely as an opportunity, but as a civilizational struggle. In
his first term George Bush cautiously but accurately referred to the
global war on terror as a crusade. Casting what conservatives call the
pax Americana as a civilizational struggle identified what Carl Schmitt
had called the ‘providential enemy’, and clarified the policy focus on
the Middle East.

The providential enemy is not an ordinary
enemy, Schmmitt argued, the providential enemy had to be absolutely
annihilated. The promise made after 9/11, to seek the annihilation of
the terrorists, was a dangerous and self-defeating promise. It declared
a war without a clear enemy, with no clear strategic objective, a war
without limits. This did away with the traditional constraints on the
conduct of war, from the ‘just war’ theories of Augusta, Aquinas and
Al-Farabi, to the Geneva Conventions.

Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have shown us the consequences that follow when these traditional restraints are removed.

Neoconservative
policy in the wake of 9/11 installed a new language, a new military,
and a new anti-semitism. The new language is one in which mercenaries
are called ‘Civilian Contractors’, and foreign fighters refers solely
to those not allied with the United States.

The new military
relies heavily on private forces. These old ‘mercenaries’, now called
‘civilian contractors’ who make more for the same activity that
ordinary soldiers perform for little compensation. While soldiers raid
junkyards to fashion ‘hillbilly armor’ corporations are making
increasing amounts of money on these privatized contracts.

The
old phrase in American politics, ‘A rich man’s war and a poor man’s
fight,’ acquired a new salience. The burdens of the war were borne not
by the nation as a whole, but disproportionately by a few and inequity
that reflects neoconservative conceptions of the proper distinction
between the few and the many.

The few who rule, and the many who the few are permitted to deceive.

Moreover
it confirms Tocqueville’s warnings about the dangers of a volunteer
army and the importance of the draft as securing an army in which the
people as a whole bear the burdens of war.

The response to
9/11 showed initially a commendable desire to avoid the immediate
targeting of Muslims or Arabs. One could argue that despite the arrest
of Brandon Mayfield, the detention and deportation of scores of
American Muslims, the explicit rhetorical targeting of Arabs and
Muslims has largely been avoided. Neoconservative foreign policy
however, has been driven by a new form of anti-semitism.

At
the end of the nineteenth century, it was the Jewish anarchist and the
Jewish communist who were portrayed as agents of global terror. Now it
is Muslims who are involved in shadowy global conspiracies, Muslims who
are ‘fellow travelers’. The old language of anti-semitism has found a
new target.

We have licensed this anti-semitism at home and
funded it abroad, on the condition that it takes the Arab and the
Muslim rather than the Jew as its target. This has produced
discrimination against Arabs and Muslims in the United States,
indifference to the growth of democracy in Palestine, and a
counter-productive policy of regime change in the Middle East.

The
targeting of Muslims as a providential enemy is evident throughout the
9/11 Commission Report, I think the most glaring example is near the
conclusion on page 362. Here Islam in general is identified as the
enemy because of its ‘inability to distinguish between religion and
politics’. A curious standard in which American politics in even its
most secular form would not satisfy.

This kind of
‘providentialism’ has led to a misdirection of American military
options, and continued political failure. The blanket condemnation of
Islam hampers the ability to identify true terrorist threats, and
throughout the report, it encourages the focus on institutional

failure, sort of bureaucratic tidiness, rather than attention to
political context.

One of the most remarkable features of
the 9/11 Commission Report is its utter indifference, to politics, or
to history. There are in the whole report probably a total of 3 pages
on political context, an extraordinary void. One would think that this
were an Act of God or a change in the weather, and not a political act,
in a political context, with a long, complex, but indeed, widely known
and widely studied history.

This neoconservative policy in
the wake of 9/11 and more immediately in the wake of the attacks in
London and the continuing news from Iraq, obliges us to conclude that
neoconservative foreign policy has failed; to spread democracy, or
diminish terror. It has succeeded rather well, however, at diminishing
democracy at home, while failing to extend it abroad.

Thank you.