[fThis is rom a blog referenced on Juan Cole's page]:
Once Upon a Time
This is a story about the neo-conservative thought process. It is also an answer to the question in what world does George W. Bush live?
Say you have two uninteresting stories. The first about a teen age boy and girl who meet, fall fiercely in love with each other, talk all the time about their love and want to be together forever. The second story is about two families who have been feuding for several generations. Every times members of one family bump into those of the other in the city square, trouble erupts. Now put the two stories together and for interest have the boy be from one family and the girl from another. Suddenly the expectations, values and actions in each story begin to constraint or challenge those in the other. The atoms of each part of the respective stories combine into molecules of a new story. We might get a story of desperate, forbidden love in a world of violence and plans that go awry. In the hands of a good playwright, it could become a very interesting and moving play.
Hollywood has a nifty shorthand for creating or describing a new story as the meld (or interference) of two familiar ones. It is meets, as in ootsie meets Fiddler on the Roof equals Yentl, the Barbra Streisand vehicle also known in the trade as Tootsie on the Roof. Or Romeo and Juliet meets Blackboard Jungle to get West Side Story. In his brilliant book The Political Unconscious, literary critic Frederick Jameson deepens the idea of meets by developing a grammar (rules and constraints) for how conflicting narratives gives rise to novels seeking to resolve or transcend the conflict. Jamesons convincing argument is startling because the novels he analyzes are generally considered to be realistic or naturalistic, e.g., Balzac, Gissing, Conrad. Most people regards them as either simple reflections of a world out there or reflections mediated by the authors approvals and disapprovals of what is in that world. The mediated case gives rise to genre like satire, melodrama. For Jameson, the conflicting narratives can be such reflections. Embedded in their respective socio-economic situations, they reflect its normative expectations, world views and notions of social identities. But the story their interaction generates is not similarly grounded. It is ideological in the sense of being the product of ideas playing against one another rather than against a perception of some reality.
Gilles Kepels magisterial The War for Muslim Minds suggests that a similar process produced the neo-conservatives vision of The New Middle East and the US policies needed to realize it. In the mid-1990s, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Richard Perle and their associates, including Richard Cheney, recognized a basic conflict between the United States commitment to Israels security and to the security of Middle East oil. To secure the oil reserves, the US relied on a series of government and corporate alliances with the traditional rulers of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The neo-conservatives, however, anticipated increasing instability of these regimes, because of their populations economic frustrations and susceptibility to Irans message of radical Islam. Moreover the neo-conservatives judged that the regimes standard way of coping with public unrest was to direct it at Israel, but their doing so would again would be inimical to Israels security.
Their ideological solution story was democratizing the Middle East. There were several key beliefs that developed the story:
market organized, liberal democracies are the only possible outcomes of economic and social development Fukuyamas end of history theory;
development in the Arab world is being blocked by traditional and dictatorial rulers, most notably Saddam Hussein;
smart bombs and other precision guided munitions can enable the United States to surgically remove Saddam and his supporters, and send a message to other rulers to speed reforms;
Most Arabs and Muslims do not deeply care about the Palestinians, but their rulers and clergy use it to divert attention from their real interests.
The neo-conservatives story of the New Middle East has been ridiculed for being simplistic and naieve. It told of an international system composed only of states, ignored the variety in radical Islam, missed completely Saudi Arabias deal with Islamic fundamentalism to bolster its regime, overstated the importance of economic development and understated the accompanying social dislocation and insecurities, etc. These critiques miss the point: The neo-conservatives did not misperceive reality, they did not look at reality at all. Their story was not based on an analysis of the international terrain under some suitable model that would identify forces, trends, challenges, opportunities amid shifts in power distributions. It was the resolution of an intellectual conflict.
The New Middle East story would almost certainly have remained a cult text, except for two events: The Supreme Court awarded George W. Bush the election of 2000, and September 11, 2001. In Bush the neo-cons found a man who experienced existentially the conflict they had resolved theoretically. He had a born-again Christians commitment to Israels security and years of involvement in the oil industry. But 9/11 forced him to take action. The equation of Iraq with Islamic terrorism having already been made, the creation of The New Middle East was on its way.