Stephen Walt: Were the NeoCons a "conspiracy"?
[Stephen Martin Walt is a professor of international affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.]
In May 2003, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman told Ha'aretz's Ari Shavitz that the invasion of Iraq was:
"[T]he war the neoconservatives wanted ... the war the neoconservatives marketed. .. I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at the moment within a five-block radius of this office [in Washington]) who, if you exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened."
Was Friedman advancing a "conspiracy theory" to explain the invasion of Iraq? Is it proper to regard the neoconservative movement -- and especially those neocons who were the loudest cheerleaders for invading Iraq -- as a conspiracy or cabal, as some writers have? I don't think so. I have plenty of disagreements with the neoconservative approach to U.S. foreign policy, and I think there's no question they played a central role in leading the United States into Iraq, but to characterize them as a cabal or conspiracy is misleading, counter-productive, and possibly dangerous.
As we know from a number of important books -- including Richard Hofstader's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, David Aaronovitch's recent Voodoo Histories, and Kathryn Olmsted's Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy -- conspiracy theories have a long and unhappy history in the United States (and elsewhere). Prominent examples include assorted plots involving Freemasons, preposterous claims about secret Jewish influence (such as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious Czarist-era forgery), or the claims that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance, that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA, or that the U.S. government faked the 1969 moon landing. More recent versions are the 9/11 "truther" movement, which portrays the 9/11 attacks as a secret plot by the U.S. government, and virtually any of the claims put forward by Lyndon LaRouche. Glenn Beck's TV show is an equally fertile source of absurd but scary notions about current U.S. politics. (See here for Jon Stewart's lethal lampooning of Beck's style of "reasoning.")
Conspiracy theories take many forms, but they generally have several common features. First, they often claim to expose the secret machinations of a small group of individuals, acting to accomplish some nefarious but largely-hidden purpose. Second, they attribute to the designated group vast and far-reaching powers, including a mysterious ability to control (rather than simply influence) a wide array of institutions. Yet a conspiracy theory (as opposed to a careful institutional analysis) never identifies the precise mechanisms by which this alleged control is achieved and normally fails to provide concrete evidence to justify its far-reaching claims. Alternatively, conspiracy theorists sometimes suggest that "the government" is engaged in some enormously-important but covert activity, like hiding captured alien spacecraft at "Area 51" or arranging to bring down the World Trade Center while getting it blamed on al Qaeda. In virtually all cases, a good conspiracy theory implies that what you think you know about the world is dead wrong, usually because the people responsible for the conspiracy have managed to convince you that up is down and black is white.
In general, conspiracy theories tend to ignore Occam's Razor -- the idea that simple and direct explanations are preferable -- and instead offer convoluted accounts designed to explain away contradictory evidence. They also tend to portray the world as far more organized and consistent than it really is: once you know the real truth, so they claim, then everything falls into place. To do this, conspiracy theorists often squeeze a host of unrelated phenomena into some larger pattern, on the basis of unproven and far-fetched connections. (Again, Glenn Beck is the contemporary master of this sort of dubious reasoning).
Conspiracy theories also tend to be short on definitive, "smoking-gun" evidence, and may even be impossible to disprove. Indeed, the absence of hard evidence can be interpreted as support for the theory, because an all-powerful but secret cabal would have every reason to cover its tracks and obviously be adept at doing so. So the less hard evidence you can find, the more it proves the theory! Senator Joseph McCarthy's accusations about a vast communist conspiracy within the U.S. government took root in part because his assertions were hard to disprove: if we couldn't find any real communists in the State Department, maybe that was because those diabolical Bolsheviks were unusually good at hiding their true affinities.
It should be obvious that the neoconservatives who pushed for war in Iraq do not fit this definition, and the wide array of people who now hold them partly responsible for the decision to invade Iraq are not advancing a very controversial notion. Far from being secretive, the various think tanks, committees, foundations and publications that nurtured the neoconservative movement have courted publicity from the very beginning, just as other policy networks do. Instead of concealing their goals-such as the ouster of Saddam Hussein-they were clear about what they thought the United States should do. It is a pretty weird "conspiracy" whose leaders routinely appear on national television to proclaim their policy goals, and whose members sign their names to open letters advising government officials what to do. And in those heady "Mission Accomplished" days when Iraq seemed like a great success, neoconservatives were quick to claim credit for it. This is not the way a "secret cabal" normally behaves...
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
In May 2003, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman told Ha'aretz's Ari Shavitz that the invasion of Iraq was:
"[T]he war the neoconservatives wanted ... the war the neoconservatives marketed. .. I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at the moment within a five-block radius of this office [in Washington]) who, if you exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened."
Was Friedman advancing a "conspiracy theory" to explain the invasion of Iraq? Is it proper to regard the neoconservative movement -- and especially those neocons who were the loudest cheerleaders for invading Iraq -- as a conspiracy or cabal, as some writers have? I don't think so. I have plenty of disagreements with the neoconservative approach to U.S. foreign policy, and I think there's no question they played a central role in leading the United States into Iraq, but to characterize them as a cabal or conspiracy is misleading, counter-productive, and possibly dangerous.
As we know from a number of important books -- including Richard Hofstader's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, David Aaronovitch's recent Voodoo Histories, and Kathryn Olmsted's Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy -- conspiracy theories have a long and unhappy history in the United States (and elsewhere). Prominent examples include assorted plots involving Freemasons, preposterous claims about secret Jewish influence (such as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious Czarist-era forgery), or the claims that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance, that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA, or that the U.S. government faked the 1969 moon landing. More recent versions are the 9/11 "truther" movement, which portrays the 9/11 attacks as a secret plot by the U.S. government, and virtually any of the claims put forward by Lyndon LaRouche. Glenn Beck's TV show is an equally fertile source of absurd but scary notions about current U.S. politics. (See here for Jon Stewart's lethal lampooning of Beck's style of "reasoning.")
Conspiracy theories take many forms, but they generally have several common features. First, they often claim to expose the secret machinations of a small group of individuals, acting to accomplish some nefarious but largely-hidden purpose. Second, they attribute to the designated group vast and far-reaching powers, including a mysterious ability to control (rather than simply influence) a wide array of institutions. Yet a conspiracy theory (as opposed to a careful institutional analysis) never identifies the precise mechanisms by which this alleged control is achieved and normally fails to provide concrete evidence to justify its far-reaching claims. Alternatively, conspiracy theorists sometimes suggest that "the government" is engaged in some enormously-important but covert activity, like hiding captured alien spacecraft at "Area 51" or arranging to bring down the World Trade Center while getting it blamed on al Qaeda. In virtually all cases, a good conspiracy theory implies that what you think you know about the world is dead wrong, usually because the people responsible for the conspiracy have managed to convince you that up is down and black is white.
In general, conspiracy theories tend to ignore Occam's Razor -- the idea that simple and direct explanations are preferable -- and instead offer convoluted accounts designed to explain away contradictory evidence. They also tend to portray the world as far more organized and consistent than it really is: once you know the real truth, so they claim, then everything falls into place. To do this, conspiracy theorists often squeeze a host of unrelated phenomena into some larger pattern, on the basis of unproven and far-fetched connections. (Again, Glenn Beck is the contemporary master of this sort of dubious reasoning).
Conspiracy theories also tend to be short on definitive, "smoking-gun" evidence, and may even be impossible to disprove. Indeed, the absence of hard evidence can be interpreted as support for the theory, because an all-powerful but secret cabal would have every reason to cover its tracks and obviously be adept at doing so. So the less hard evidence you can find, the more it proves the theory! Senator Joseph McCarthy's accusations about a vast communist conspiracy within the U.S. government took root in part because his assertions were hard to disprove: if we couldn't find any real communists in the State Department, maybe that was because those diabolical Bolsheviks were unusually good at hiding their true affinities.
It should be obvious that the neoconservatives who pushed for war in Iraq do not fit this definition, and the wide array of people who now hold them partly responsible for the decision to invade Iraq are not advancing a very controversial notion. Far from being secretive, the various think tanks, committees, foundations and publications that nurtured the neoconservative movement have courted publicity from the very beginning, just as other policy networks do. Instead of concealing their goals-such as the ouster of Saddam Hussein-they were clear about what they thought the United States should do. It is a pretty weird "conspiracy" whose leaders routinely appear on national television to proclaim their policy goals, and whose members sign their names to open letters advising government officials what to do. And in those heady "Mission Accomplished" days when Iraq seemed like a great success, neoconservatives were quick to claim credit for it. This is not the way a "secret cabal" normally behaves...