Anne Norton: the Rise of the Neocons.

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(Moderators: this entire briefing is going into the Congressional Record. There shouldn't be any copyright issues, posting in full. -r.)

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.

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The entire 9/11 Commission Briefing is scheduled to air on c-span:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4338697&mesg_id=4338697