As I can’t currently comment on the site during the day, I struck up a conversation/debate with Mike at the Big Stick via email about my Dubai assassination post. Mark eventually got in on the act and we thought that the back and forth was good enough to post here for your review.

Scott: I can’t respond to your comments on the site because I no longer have access to the League from work. But if it would be of interest to you, I’d be happy to have a bit of an email exchange to explore things further. I’ve got some work to which I need to attend this morning, but I’d be happy to fire back an initial response to you comment a little later. Let me know if that is of interest.

Mike: Sure Scott – fire away.

Scott: This is less in depth than I had hoped for, but the long and the short of my post can be summed up as follows:

• I’m not condemning Israel, I identified that I was not prepared to forgo the conclusion that Mahmoud al-Mabhouh deserved to die and that the Mossad were the right folks to do it,
• I worry that using tactics like assassination leave us feeling less morally culpable,
• I feel like we ought to be wracked with every bit as much doubt, uncertainty, and moral consternation over the decision to assassinate someone as we are when deciding whether or not to engage in conventional warfare, granted over different dynamics,
• And that a belief that it does as a tactic does leave us less morally culpable in terms of state sanctioned violence can and in this case seems to have lead to an attitude that is counter-rpoductive to actually ending the conflict in question.

In terms of your Hitler example, believing that Hitler should have been assassinated does not absolve us from a critical analysis of the use of assassination as an acceptable tactic in all future instances, which is, really, all I’m calling for.

Mike: I’m more inclined to say that it makes us more morally culpable. When we’re talking about general war quite often the higher-ups are insulated from the decision making. How often does the President or the Sec. of Defense get a call asking permission to fire a rocket at a Taliban position or lob a grenade into a cave where bad guys are hiding? On the flip side, when you arrange for an assassination somebody pretty high up the food chain has to say, “Yes, I want you to kill this man”. To me that’s what makes it real for them.

I also think, as many commenters pointed out, that assassination is actually better because there’s no collateral damage. One target, one dead. If you’re going to wage war, they should all be fought that way.

[Read more →]

I see Br. Matthew has beaten me to the punch* on this one, but Mitt Romney is not dropping foreign policy science in his new book.

From Time’s Alex Altman:

It’s tempting to dismiss the section on foreign policy as an attempt to see how many different formulations Romney can use to profess his belief in American exceptionalism. But the theme is at the heart of the contrast Romney draws between himself and the president: while his prescriptions are designed to preserve American supremacy, Obama espouses American equivalence. “If the president accepts that America is in an irreversible state of decline relative to the world, it may well come to pass under his stewardship,” Romney warns.

It’s a dangerous perspective, Romney argues, at a time when China’s clout is growing, Russia is resurgent and the U.S. remains mired in a grinding war with Islamic extremists. “The truth is that we are at war with a formidable enemy and that nations like Russia and China are intent on neutralizing our military lead,”

I realize there are some potentially very fruitful (if potentially poisoned) political gains for Romney in this attack.  See Br. Matthew’s post at to why.  As further proof, consider how hard it will be for Romney to really distinguish himself substantially from Obama in any presidential campaign.

Nevertheless, for the record, it’s worth stating that Obama is nothing if not an American exceptionalist to the core (at times embarassingly so).  Obama is rallying support for a surge against a localist insurgency by trying to connect that conflict to a broader Global War on Terror which pretty much no one else is buying, he has violated Pakistani airspace/sovereignty all over the place (which, by the way, he said he would do as a Democratic primary candidate!!!), and gives laudatory paeans to America as guiding light of the world.

Depending on your point of view, you might find all of the above sickening or positive (or some combination of the two), but Obama actually seems to believe those things.  In short, he falls squarely within the American exceptionalist camp.

What Obama has realized and is working to accommodate is not US decline, but rather the rise of other powers.

Obama was snapped with a copy of Fareed Zakaria’s Post-American world in his hands during the early phases of the election campaign.  Obama has also consulted extensively with Parag Khann, whose work on second world powers (e.g. Turkey, Indonesia) is an excellent primer on emerging nations.

All of which points to the reality that America is not per se in absolute decline but that others are catching up relative to the United States, though none are anywhere close to taking the lead (Romney’s Chinese Red Dawn hints are laughable).

The Post-American world is not a world after American exceptionalism or after American influence/power.  It’s post American hyperpower status.

There are structural/economic reasons for why this state of affairs exists and is bound to continue.  Economic reasons that Mitt Romney is nothing but a gigantic supporter of, incidentally.  The main one being that there is no revolutionary form of economics with sufficient global influence to challenge capitalism — hence the failure of Fascism and Communism in the 20th century.

If you look at Foreign Policy’s list of 33 conflicts on the planet, notice how they are all local/regional insurgencies, civil wars, ethnic battles, independence movements and the like.  This ought to alert us to something very important–i.e. no more big wars.

Obama is willing to admit this state of affairs (you can call him a realist) and is trying to formulate a strategy to deal with it.  I wouldn’t say that strategy has been super effective to date, but it’s a start.  It’s certainly preferable to The Green Lantern Theory of Foreign Policy advocated by Romney.

In other words, there’s American exceptionalism that leads to increased isolation (Romney) or American exceptionalism that (potentially) leads to greater co-operative action.  But at the end of the day, the world is headed in an increasingly multi-polar/regionalist direction.  When others powers rise (even if only in degrees and not absolutely) they are going to want political buy-ins/recognition.  They are in a kind of adolescent state of nationhood and want independence and to be acknowledged while they learn there are rules in the World’s House they need to abide by.  The US, however, will no longer be The Mommy/Daddy in this case (if it ever was).

–

* Update/Clarification:  The reference to “punch” was not intended as a (in poor taste) er “jab” :) at Romney’s quasi-fight on the plane recently.

I was going to write a longer post on this, but one interesting consequence of Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan (a decision I support, however tentatively) is the ad hoc redrawing of foreign policy battle lines. So you now have a hawkish Republican congressman arguing for withdrawal/some variant of the Biden “counter-terrorism” strategy while the liberal Center for American Progress downplays any disagreement with the President’s renewed military commitment.

It being Veteran’s/Remembrance Day, I thought it would be a good time to write a bit about foreign policy that has been kicking around my head for a few months too long. Of course today, we are to spend the day thinking about the courageous and heroic actions of our respective service man and women, both those who have returned from various excursions in maintaining our security and freedom, as well as those who have lost their lives doing so. We are to remind ourselves to value the lives of those brave souls like our greatest national treasure and treat their contribution with the utmost of respect and care.

The sad fact of the matter, though, is that I think we fail utterly and completely in that charge, day-by-day.

Like many of my fellow Canadians, I have become increasingly pessimistic about our country’s role in Afghanistan. That we get to such recorded levels of pessimism is sometimes cited as evidence of a public that is waking up to the realities of what their government is committing significant blood and treasure. And, I suppose there is a degree to which that is true. But the other, and I would offer far more prevalent, reason for that snapshot of pessimism — notable as it is because it represents a drop from previous levels of support — is that we harbor utterly unrealistic expectations for what we might be able to achieve with military interventionism, humanitarian or otherwise. [Read more →]

Stranger things have happened, but this is still worth noting.  It turns out that a slim majority of Republicans now believe [pdf] that it is not America’s responsibility to “actively promote democracy around the world.”  I’m not sure Republican leadership has quite caught up with this sea change, but the sooner they do the better.  Even George W. Bush, despite his inevitable legacy as nation-builder, began implementing a more realistic foreign policy in his second term.

Apparently Americans are catching up:

According to AEI’s Datapoints:

A bare majority of Republicans (51 percent) and strong majorities of Democrats (63 percent) and independents (62 percent) agree that democracy promotion is not America’s responsibility. Americans have always been reluctant internationalists, aware of the global role that the United States must play, but at the same time, concerned about the costs that come with such responsibility.

So now that the neocon fervor is being supplanted by a more cautious foreign policy both in the oval office and in public opinion, what should we expect?  How do we begin to redefine not only American interests, but our pursuit of those interests?   “Democracy promotion” may be off the table (at least after Afghanistan), but a myriad other reasons to flex our military muscle still exist.  Genocide, natural resources, terror havens, piracy, and a plethora of other conflicts and will continue to test American resolve and restraint. [Read more →]

Of the four or five thinkers who have had the greatest impact on my thinking, I would probably rank Reinhold Niebuhr near or at the top.  I’m not really in the mood to give a full break down of Niebuhr’s influence on my thinking, so I won’t, but it suffices to say that his work has had an incredibly strong influence on my foreign policy views, and my general skepticism regarding the efficacy of American power.  As such, you can imagine how surprised I was to see Robert Kagan – neo-conservative extraordinaire and co-founder of the Project for a New American Century – reference Niebuhr in a column supporting President Obama’s decision to double-down in Afghanistan (via my good man Dylan Matthews):

As Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out long ago, Americans find it hard to acknowledge this moral ambiguity of power. They are reluctant to face the fact that it is only through the morally ambiguous exercise of their power that any good can be accomplished. Obama is right to be prosecuting the war in Afghanistan, and he should do so even more vigorously. But he will not avoid the moral and practical burdens of fighting this war by claiming he has no choice. An action can be right or just without being necessary. Like great presidents in the past, Barack Obama will have to explain why his choice, while difficult and fraught with complexity, is right and better than the alternatives.

It’s pretty clear to me that Kagan is relying on the Niebuhr of The Irony of American History here, and for what it’s worth, I think his reading of Niebuhr’s point is more or less correct.  Americans are uncomfortable with the moral ambiguities associated with the exercise of power, so much so that we are often unwilling to even give weight to those ambiguities, which in turn contributes to our perennial inability to understand the broader impact of our actions.  That said, and at the risk of sounding a little uncharitable, Kagan is basically ignoring Niebuhr’s main point; he wasn’t trying to make Americans comfortable with the exercise of power so much as he wanted Americans to understand the limits of said power.

By Niebuhr’s lights, we should be incredibly skeptical – and even doubtful – of our ability to rebuild a society or a culture in any meaningful way.  Which, broadly, is exactly what we’re trying to accomplish in Afghanistan.  As far as I understand it, the whole point of committing tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan is to provide security in the hopes of strengthening the national government to the point where it both A) has the trust of the bulk of the population and B) can effectively monopolize the use of force within the country.  The problem, of course, is that there really isn’t anything in Afghanistan’s history to suggest that this could be even remotely successful.  And it requires a good deal of arrogance to believe that we – with our relatively limited understanding of the region – could succeed where many folks have failed.

With that in mind, it’s more than a little ridiculous to see Kagan reference Niebuhr.  Not only is Kagan one of the standard-bearers of an intellectual movement which proudly disregards limits in a misguided effort to reshape the world, but he is citing Niebuhr in support of a war which the man would have almost certainly opposed.

I first read The New American Militarism a few years ago for a class in college. Then came Andrew Bacevich’s latest book, The Limits of Power, which I picked up just as soon as it arrived at my local library. As far as foreign policy scholarship is concerned, Bacevich gives voice to a serious and often overlooked school of thought that – in the wake of the disaster we colloquially refer to as the Bush Administration’s foreign policy – deserves a respectful and serious hearing.

In the case of Afghanistan, however, I think Bacevich is wrong. His latest article for Commonweal is a stirring indictment of our conduct and strategic goals in the region, and I’m extremely wary of criticizing someone whose work I hold in such high regard. But at the risk of sounding like Jacob Weisberg (stop me if you’ve heard this one before), I do believe that certain segments of the non-interventionist Right have allowed the Iraq War and a general  aversion to foreign intervention unduly prejudice their views on Afghanistan. Here’s why:

Given our history of flooding the country with arms, equipment and military training, I’m inclined to believe that the United States does have a moral obligation to help restore order in Afghanistan. I don’t think this entails imposing a particular system of governance on the country. I am emphatically in favor of scaling back our strategic objectives to providing basic security and ensuring certain minimal standards of administrative competence. But washing our hands and walking away strikes me as irresponsible and callous, particularly when our actions have contributed to so much turmoil in the region.

Bacevich’s response to the conflict’s moral dimension is almost dismissive. Yes, I suppose we also have an obligation to help Mexico weather its own bout of internal conflict. That’s why I’m in favor of reforming our drug policy. But fulfilling our moral obligations elsewhere and securing a minimal standard of internal stability for a country wracked by violence for much of the past three decades are not mutually irreconcilable goals. Attempting to demonstrate the absurdity of our mission in Afghanistan by comparing it to the plight of our southern neighbor is a non-sequitur – Mexico is not a failed state, and the same prescriptions that apply to a wild and lawless country in Asia have little relevance south of the border.

There’s also some tension between non-interventionists’ laudable concern for avoiding further civilian casaulties at the hands of the U.S. military and their almost cavalier attitude towards the consequences of withdrawal. Bacevich, for example, is in favor of “precision, punitive strikes” to prevent Al Qaeda from reconstituting after we leave. Presumably he refers to the same aerial strikes that have wreaked so much havoc in Pakistan over the past few years. We now know that increased reliance on air power risks greater civilian casualties – does anyone seriously believe that these ‘punitive strikes’ will become more precise post-withdrawal? Or are we in danger of endorsing a ‘risk-management’ strategy that trades the exposure of U.S. troops for even more civilian deaths?

Finally, the pragmatic case for staying. Bacevich seems to endorse some variant of this, acknowledging the need to prevent Al Qaeda from reforming through precision air-strikes and tribal alliances. So our mission becomes a question of means, not ends, and I’m inclined to think that committing a significant peacekeeping force for internal stability is the most appropriate mechanism for achieving these goals. Dramatically scaling back our ambitions in the region would be a welcome development, but I’m loath to abandon Afghanistan entirely to punitive air-strikes, tribal bandits, a Taliban resurgence, and whatever brave NGOs manage to stay the course.

Mark Levin’s response to The Weekly Standard’s Peter Berkowitz is surprisingly good.  I find myself truly befuddled by the apparent twin-personalities of the man who is Mark Levin – the thoughtful, reasonable essayist vs. the talk-radio bloviator.  Perhaps each medium requires its own panache.  Maybe I just don’t get talk-radio.  In any case, I found myself warming a great deal to the man when I discovered that in his book he calls Bill Kristol a neo-Statist.  And in many ways, Levin’s description of neoconservatism as neo-statism is right on the money.  I wonder how he squares his own support for international exuberance in foreign policy – it seems less than “prudent” to me given the inevitable tangles we find ourselves in whenever idealism outdistances pragmatism.  Certainly the Iraq debacle bears this out….

I came across Levin’s response via Stacy McCain, who writes about the Iraq War:

My position on the Iraq war was nuanced, as the liberals would say. Unlike Kerry, I was against the war before I was for it. Basically, from 2002 until the war started, I was very skeptical toward arguments for the invasion and conquest of Mesopotamia. However, the time for arguing ended when the first shot was fired. My attititude about war is, “If you’re in it, win it.”

No nation ever benefitted from losing a war. Military defeat tends to demoralize a nation and, if repeated, can result in absolute decadence. (Cf. France.)

I had a similar take, actually, though I was far more than skeptical.  I was downright appalled – as much by my fellow countrymen who touted the “love it or leave it” faux patriotism, as by the Bush administration’s nonsensical arguments for invasion (and the Democrats’ cowardly compliance).  I was still reeling from the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the advent of the Patriot Act.  The Iraq rhetoric – and the broader “war on terror” language – seemed only to add to the overall Orwellian spookiness of those days.

Like McCain, once the war began my attitude shifted as well – at least toward the Iraq war in particular.  (The “war on terror” which might “last decades” still scared the hell out of me.  Now that the Obama administration has made the Doublespeak even more glaring by renaming it the Overseas Contingency Operation, I think the chill has in fact deepened.) [Read more →]

Moses Maimonides, the famous Jewish physician and theologian of Medieval Cordoba, had a tendency to refer to the Muslim Prophet Mohammad as “the madman.”  Maimonides had reasons abundant to use this term.  The Jews of Cordoba lived for a long time as dhimis before being forcefully expelled by their Islamic rulers.  Granted, had he lived a few centuries later on the Christian conquerors would have given him much the same choice as the Almohades: conversion, exile, or death.  He traveled across Africa, to the Holy Land, and eventually ended up under the protection of the remarkably tolerant Kurdish Sultan of Egypt, Saladin.

I think Maimonides may have given a similar nickname to the current Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Jeffrey Goldberg has a good round-up of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements on Israel.  The “Madman of Tehran” has a nice ring to it, and Maimonides would be quite correct in leveling at him were he with us today.

October, 2005: “Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine… I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world. But we must be aware of tricks.”

October, 2006: “This regime (Israel) will be gone, definitely…”You (the Western powers) should know that any government that stands by the Zionist regime from now on will not see any result but the hatred of the people…The wrath of the region’s people is boiling… You should not complain that we did not give a warning. We are saying this explicitly now…”

October 5, 2007: “Canada and Alaska have vast lands, why don’t you relocate them over there and keep helping them over there with (aid of) 30 to 40 billion dollars per year for building a new existence over there?”

And there’s much, much more.  Diplomat he is not.  Orator and propagandist, certainly.  His demagoguery, however, is of the blatant and – quite frankly – laughable variety.  Madman, perhaps, but also national buffoon.  He is one of those men who can stir the embers of national discontent but is otherwise generally harmless.  The blustering and bloviating are fit more for conservative talk radio than any substantive national platform.  Like many of his contemporary demagogues, he is mostly boring. [Read more →]

With Obama’s recent Af-Pak announcement, I thought it might be a good time to pull my musings around moral clarity and foreign policy back out of the closet and dust them off to have another look. When last we ruminated on this topic, E.D. had expressed perfectly reasonable concern over basing foreign policy on something as mercurial as moral clarity and said that he would be interested to see how I managed to work some sense of morality back into foreign policy. I’ve had that challenge tumbling around in the back of my head ever since and feel like I might finally have something to say on the matter.

But to begin with, I think we need to clear something up how neoconservatives took the notion of moral clarity and poisoned the foreign policy well with it. As Mark noted in that same post,

In other words, when the neoconservative critique was translated into the public mind, it became an argument that the promotion and defense of liberal democracy was such an important moral virtue that all other moral virtue became irrelevant as long as actions were being taken to promote or defend liberal democracy.  In a sad way, the popular incarnation of neo-conservatism became the very nihilism and moral relativism that it claimed to oppose (and that many/most intellectual neo-conservatives actually DID oppose).  Out went just war doctrine and proportionality; in came waterboarding and Guantanamo Bay.

Indeed, I think Mark is spot on here. Part of the problem with advancing an agenda of foreign policy via robust sense morality is that doing so inevitably conjures up images of how neoconservatives did the exact same thing and the horrible results that have followed. But I would argue that neoconservatives, in fact, did not properly present a proper case for a morally based foreign policy at all, precisely because they ran the calculus ass backwards. [Read more →]

Looking for a glimpse into the conservative foreign policy id? Try National Review’s Rich Lowry, whose latest techno-thriller has just been published:

After learning that an Iranian scientist is in the process of developing nuclear weapons on Iranian soil, all-but-forgotten Spymaster Stewart Banquo initiates a rogue special operation. With the assistance of his most trusted agent, Robert Wallets, Banquo recruits Peter Johnson, a dissolute, morally bankrupt liberal news journalist, to travel to Iran. Johnson poses as a sympathetic reporter writing a piece on the country’s nuclear facilities. His mission: to kill the scientist.

[Read more →]

Attempting to defend neoconservatism these days is a bit like walking out of the house naked, many strange looks and pointing ensues. That reaction is of course not wholly unwarranted, there are many fronts on which neoconservatism has failed miserably and many ways in which it has helped to bring the U.S. to its current state of disrepair. No one can say that neoconservatives’ hands are clean with a straight face, or condescend to attribute the troubles of the country to unforeseeable and unavoidable consequences that would have lay in wait for any administration.

The problem with all of this epitheting is that as Andrew Sullivan has noted of his own blogging, we have come to use the term neoconservative/ism as a sort of short hand to indicate everything that is wrong with country, and in some moments of fanciful hyperbolizing, everything that is wrong with the world. As careful as I try to be with nomenclature, I know that I have been guilty of such meaning dilution, as well. It is not at all clear to me that we have a common and clear lay person definition of what we mean when we speak with condemnation about neoconservatism, though it is commonly understood that our reference tends to be about foreign policy and the  debacle, to put it euphemistically, that was the invasion of Iraq and the larger War on Terror.

In many ways neoconservatism is a victim of its own success, as are most ideologies when the rubber hits the road. Given its influence over the last few decades, we often forget that neoconservatism was originally a dissenting impulse. Left leaning intellectuals who felt that Johnson’s Great Society liberalism had lost its way, the neocons may well have foreseen the destructive end point of the boomer-era culture wars in their disdain for counterculture and its in your face change tactics, actively digging in their heels against that mounting trend. Timing being everything, the neocons found themselves on the wrong side of history in terms of the domestic struggles of the era, but their real politik critiques of the broad and shallow analysis of the anti-war movement foisted them to power with the advent of the Cold War. It was in the decades that followed where the over-zealousness and overreach of their vision was allowed to fester, in some senses truly coming to fruition with George W. Bush. By the lights of a certain perspective, the neocons are not unlike any group of dissenters who come to power. Often times ill-equipped to take their critiques and mold them into prescriptive and coherent policy the temptation to over-correct when the opportunity arises is too great and undermines the very strength of the ideas that have lit the way to power.

And so the sober, realistic assessment of foreign policy provided by neoconservatives has given way to imperialistic, geo-political chess game. The black and white of the players belies the nuance present in the dynamics on the board and the unitary vision of a stable and peaceful world assembled at the barrel of a gun becomes a God project to remake the world in one’s own image. It is, to my mind, in this regard that neoconservatives have most badly warped the tracks in their own journey of discovery, thus informing my own insistent kid gloving of the cultural dynamics that make up the world’s diversity. Preservation of those differences in each element of modernization’s realization, it seems clear now, is not just a preferred course of action, but a vital element to any kind of meaningful success.

But the nagging question at the back of my mind, the one that forces me to walk about of the house naked, is to inquire what useful remnants we might pull from the flaming wreckage of neoconseravtism’s contemporary crash site? Ironically, my own estimation is that it is neoconservatism’s emphasis on moral clarity, the hubris that has spelled its intermediate doom, that offers the greatest strength we might cull from its many wolves (and perhaps not ultimately very ironic at all as circumstances have shown us often enough that an ideology’s Mjöllnir seems ever destined to become its Achilles heel).

While applied in a overzealous and dangerous manner, I don’t think the moral clarity sought by neoconservatives is in itself wrong headed. While it might be true that the diversity of perspectives present in the world require from us a quantum leap in attenuation and sensitivity than we have often offered, this doesn’t mean that we ought to abandon all hope or efforts in the direction of being able to accurately and effectively deliver normative claims about the actions of different geo-political actors. Indeed, we rarely do give up such prescriptive announcements in full, but rather learn to apply a certain cultural and moral relativisms to those analyzes with which we disagree, while sheltering our own prefered pronouncements from the debilitating onslaught of such devices. The logical end result is a morally relative morass that effectively disables us from making any meaningful determinations about right and wrong actions by degrading all such conclusions to mere proclamations of preference.

The audacity of the neoconservtive is to then stand athwart this kaleidoscoping of ethics and yell, “Stop!” The reality to which the neoconservtive adamantly points is that beyond the necessities of cultural sensitivity (and such sensitivity is indeed necessary in the truest sense of the word), there are the banal facts of sincerely detestable actors who, if explained away by the shattering of a coherent moral analysis, will propagate truly horrific acts against innocent people who deserve better in a world where the stable luxury of the American living room is a realized benchmark. In short, where we can act to avoid such tragedy we ought to develop the moral fortitude to act, lest we engage in some kind of tacit abrogation through our lack of action.

Such actors and their corresponding moral requirements persist in no uncertain terms, despite the ensuing horrors of the decision to invade Iraq (and Vietnam before it). Americans wallow in a certain masochistic guilt complex about their role in destabilizing a country that had done nothing to instigate such a misguided overreation, and rightly so. That such a fundaental decisions was allowed to be co-opted by as a crude a barometer as anger and resentment is indeed a damning national pox that demands the kind of self-reflection now under way.

However, at some point that inner turmoil has to come to an end and lessons have to be learned for application in the future. I think one of those lessons ought to be that rather than seeing the struggle for moral clarity in geo-politics as a necessarily flawed form of idolatry, the generation of such clarity is an extremely difficult task  full of pitfalls and the tempatation to subjegate sober assesment to national interests and that it requires much in the way of rigor and honesty. All of that said, such moral clarity may well prove indespensible to us at some point in the future, so our project of rescuing this vital element of neoconservatism from burning to ash with the rest of the fuselodge can’t start soon enough. So as not to leave one with the sense of a whitewashing, a good deal of that project involves understanding how the neocons of recent past have utterly failed in this mission.