Then, with many Americans believing that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMD and was sharing them with al-Qaeda, Bush and the neocons found it easy to stampede the Congress into passing a use-of-force resolution. The few people who did speak up against the rush to war were either ignored or ridiculed in venues like the Washington Post.
Bush launched the Iraq invasion on March 19, 2003, and the neocons were thrilled when the U.S. military was able to defeat the Iraqi army in only three weeks. Cable pundit Chris Matthews spoke for many Washington insiders when he declared in awestruck tones, "we're all neocons now."
With their confidence unbridled, the neocons chose to make the ancient land of Iraq a test tube for free-market nation-building. The neocons rejected plans for a quick election, favoring instead a U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and a long U.S. military stay. The goal was to ensure that the new Iraq would be a reliable ally of the United States and Israel in the heart of the Arab world.
Through their chosen viceroy, Paul Bremer, the neocons also cashiered the Iraqi army and fired government bureaucrats who had belonged to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Young American neocons arrived to lecture Iraqis on how to form a new government.
But the occupation didn't go as smoothly as the neocons had expected. Before long, Iraq was torn by a bloody insurgency and was split along bitter sectarian lines. The ultimate cost of the neocon folly has been more than 4,300 U.S. soldiers dead, along with estimates of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, and $1 trillion or so of taxpayer money squandered.
Because of the Iraq calamity, other elements of the neocon vision of remaking the Middle East were put on hold, though the neocons enthusiastically supported Israel's military assaults on Hezbollah inside Lebanon in 2006 and on Hamas-ruled Gaza in late 2008. The neocons also haven't yet given up on the idea of a military strike against Iran.
Yet, looking back at the failures of the Bush administration's Middle East policies, two troubling characteristics about the neocons stand out a lack of empathy for people not like them (i.e. the Iraqis, Afghanis, etc.) and a stunning lack of realism.
Like classic armchair warriors, they act as if their theoretical constructs don't have to be measured against empirical evidence, nor tempered by practicality, nor moderated by concerns about the loss of human life.
Central American Carnage
This also was a characteristic of the neocons who first emerged as important players during the Reagan administration's brush-fire wars in Central America.
In those conflicts, tens of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans and others perished at the hands of U.S.-backed military forces and again Elliott Abrams, as assistant secretary of state for human rights and later for Latin America, was at the center of the carnage.
In the early 1980s, as a reporter for The Associated Press, I had a get-to-know-you meeting with Abrams at his State Department human rights office. At the time, a right-wing military government in El Salvador was slaughtering hundreds of workers, peasants and students a month, often dumping their mutilated bodies in trash heaps or along roads.
When I pressed Abrams about these human rights crimes being committed by a regime that was getting U.S. military assistance, Abrams responded that he considered the human rights conditions worse in Nicaragua although the leftist Sandinista government had engaged in nothing like the political killings underway in El Salvador.
Abrams argued that the Sandinistas' infringements on freedom of the press in restricting La Prensa, a Managua-based newspaper that was known to be collaborating with U.S. efforts to destabilize Nicaragua, was a far worse human rights crime than what was occurring in El Salvador.
I left Abrams's office stunned that the Reagan administration's point man on human rights had such a callous disregard for the butchery in El Salvador.
Abrams's hawkish zeal eventually led him to engage in outright lying about the secret operations that became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. He ultimately pled guilty to misleading Congress, but had his slate wiped clean when President George H.W. Bush pardoned him on Christmas Eve 1992.
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