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The -Ism that failed: neoconservatism relies on a history in which it alone won the Cold War. But that''s not what happened. As neocons lead us deeper into holy war, it''s time for a history lesson.

Article Excerpt
THE AFTERMATH OF THE IRAQ WAR WILL SURELY SEE U.S. foreign policy at the forefront of national debates for years to come. Conservatives will claim--as they have been claiming for months--that only they were sufficiently prescient about "the present danger" of Saddam Hussein. And liberals will again find themselves on the defensive.

Sound familiar? Back during the Cold War, neoconservatire intellectuals flattered themselves in their conviction that they carried forward the anti-communist cause that liberals had dropped in the late 1970s and 1980s, and they ran with it as though they had recovered a fumble and headed toward the goal line to win the game and enjoy the glory. The monthly magazine Commentary has basked in that glory, enjoying more influence on recent government foreign policy than any other intellectual journal.

While Commentary influenced the Reagan administration, the newer Weekly Standard has had similar influence with the current Bush administration. But whereas Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz convinced readers that America was losing the struggle against the Soviet Union, Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol seeks to convince us that fundamentalism's days are numbered once Iraq is transformed as the first step in the democratization of the Middle East. One writer desired to see American military power prevail, the other its political ideals. Have either?

Let's look at the record. Commentary's persistent assumptions about communism--who the ultimate enemy really was and why America was going to lose the struggle unless it took its advice did much to help create the perilous post Cold War situation in which we now find ourselves. Kapital is gone now and the Koran has taken its place. But 20 years ago, Commentary dismissed "the Islamic revolution" as little more than a sideshow concealing the movement of the Soviet Union into the Mideast. Thus the fall of the shah in Iran in 1979 was alleged to be as ominous as the fall of the czar in Russia in 1917--not because it presaged a religious fundamentalism that one day would become America's mortal enemy but because it signaled the "prelude" to communism's inevitable march into the oil states. With the stakes so high, Commentary saw nothing wrong with America arming Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and establishing a covert alliance with the House of Saud, which would turn out to be the financial angel of al-Qaeda.

Years earlier, liberals, of course, saw nothing wrong with America shipping arms to Joseph Stalin during World War II. But that effort lasted only a few years, and it was Ambassador George Kennan who warned us of the Soviets' domineering aims as the war drew to a close. In the recent Mideast, however, America's misjudgments lasted for an entire decade with no sense of danger. We are living with the consequences of those decisions today.

On the intellectual cold war in America, Commentary took its stand as a unilateralist long before today's neoconservatires gave the word its cachet. Just as the Bolsheviks once believed that to defeat czarism one must extirpate Menshevism and the liberal Kadets, so, too, did the conservatives of our time believe that to defeat communism one must extirpate radicalism and the liberal democrats. Commentary convinced itself and its readers that in order to fight communism, it had to rid the country of progressive politics and expose its illusions in the name of the hardheaded realpolitik of conservatism. The proliferation of weapons would succeed where the patience of wisdom had failed. With such assumptions, Commentary emerges victorious in the annals of modern American history. It claims to have won without needing any friends on the left.

Why this assumption has caught on is curious. Was it not the compromising disposition of conservatism, from the prudence of Winston Churchill to the pecuniary politics of Henry Kissinger, that proved quite willing to accommodate itself to communism, both in Eastern Europe as an established "sphere of influence" (drawn by Churchill with a blue crayon) and in Asia as a land of economic opportunity? The American presidency remained almost as indifferent as the public when, in Hungary in 1956, the Red Army turned the Budapest uprising into a bloodbath, and when, in China in 1989, a young man stood alone and defiantly halted a tank in Tiananmen Square as others looked up to their jerry rigged Statue of Liberty and sent desperate faxes to an America that shamefully averted its eyes. Struggling to be born behind the Iron Curtain and the Great...