Gerecht's Moral Abacus
Everybody's really snarking the Gerecht piece in TNR that implies that a moral foreign policy would value the lives of foreigners and Americans equally. The links at the beginning of the post do a lot of the necessary (but maddening) leg work of pointing out the flaws in this type of mumbo-jumbo, but I can think of one thing to add that might be a new angle.
There's a weird conflict among neoconnish types between the Bernard Lewis influence and the Paul Wolfowitz influence. Whatever one thinks about either of their arguments, it's fairly clear that the broad thrust of their scholarship and activism on behalf of the Iraq war is pretty clearly different.
Recall that Lewis espouses the "the Arabs only understand brute force; you must smash them, hard, between the eyes to get their attention" line of reasoning that appealed to a lot of Jacksonian Americans after 9/11. After all, we Americans do the Big Stick quite well, and we have a lot of them lying around.
But Wolfowitz, whom I believe equally wrong, was quite the squishy, humanitarian type. He really believed that removing the dictatorship in Iraq would set in motion a chain of events that would lead to a much better outcome for the Iraqis, and this was a primary reason for his support of the invasion in the first place.
Gerecht, at various times, has worn both the Lewis and the Wolfowitz faces of neoconservatism. In the TNR article, it's the Wolfowitz, save-the-world humanitarian guise. But via Doug Bandow, we find that Gerecht was channeling Lewis back in February 2002. Here's Doug, describing the February 2002 vintage Gerecht:
Some silly people, [Gerecht] warns, believe that Muslims and Arabs don't like the U.S. because they perceive America as being at war with them. No, no, he contends--"the virulent anti-Americanism in the Middle East" instead results from "the wholly understandable impression that America was on the run." Because, apparently, Washington was not bombing enough Arab villages and imposing sanctions on enough Arab countries. Or something like that.
Anyway, the answer to this problem, in his view, was ... to attack Iraq! He concludes:
"Only a war against Saddam Hussein will decisively restore the awe that protects Amercan interests abroad and citizens at home. We've been running from this fight for ten years. In the Middle East, everybody knows it. We're the only ones deluding ourselves."
What's pretty clear is that whichever line of reasoning at any given time gets you closest to an imperial foreign policy is the one that gets used: If "a deep concern for the plight of poor foreigners" gets you there, so be it. If "defending ourselves from a deeply threatening world to which we can give no quarter..." gets you there, just use that. But the ultimate goal--or in any event the ultimate outcome--seems in every case to be the belligerent foreign policy. The means seem only instrumental.
It's enough to make you wonder whether the whole business is a bit disingenuous.
