The Real Axis of Evil

0:00About a week or so ago, there was a report in the newspapers from the CIA that indicated that Saddam Hussein's regime had not, since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, had never had any program of developing weapons of mass destruction. This was hardly a surprise since in the years since the Gulf War, the United States had been engaged on numerous bombing missions that had reduced the country to really a very minor power, but nevertheless, the president in the months before the war had emphasized that there was a plan by the Iraqi regime to develop such weapons, and as a result of that, The US initiated an attack on the Iraqi government. Now, should we say that this was simply a mistake, that the United States government was relying on faulty intelligence, and it turned out they were wrong, but after all, people make mistakes. They thought their sources indicated there were such weapons, perhaps Saddam Hussein wanted to build them. So if it was a mistake, at least

1:23Well, what I would like to suggest is that it wasn't a mistake that in fact there was a group of neoconservative writer publicists and diplomats and officials in the Pentagon who had as their conscious aim a policy of promoting wars as an instrument of policy. and that this, in my view, is the real axis of evil, not the phrase was, I think, given by President Bush in his speech in 1992 to refer to the regimes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, but in fact, much more dangerous than these regimes was the acts of evil that these particular writers have promoted.

2:13I think we can look, we find, I think, the policies of these rights encapsulated in an article that came out in the Foreign Affairs Magazine, which is a very influential publication of Council on Foreign Relations, written by William Kristol, who was one of the leading neoconservatives. His father, Irving Kristol, was really the founder of neoconservatives. William Kristol is perhaps the most important Robert Kagan also has other people in his family, such as Father Donald Kagan, who favors this very aggressive policy.

3:01One sometimes thinks that the neoconservatives are all just part of one or a few families, just like the Randian movement was really a lot of it consisted of one single family. Family, many of the neoconservatives are found in just a few families. In any event, we can see in this article, which is called, Tord and Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy in the July-August 1966 issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine. In this article, the authors quote the famous statement of John Quincy Adams, But America Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy This has been quoted many times. I'm sure you've all heard this. It's a famous quotation that people who favor the non-interventionist foreign policy like to cite.

3:53And Kristol and Kagan respond to this. They say, America Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy. Why not? Why shouldn't we go after the monsters? After all, if we don't, the monsters are going to be around there. And they take the view that it's the duty or the mission of the United States as the most powerful nation in the world to destroy any possible source we might think is a threat to us, and to impose on the world other governments like our own. Since America is the best country with a democratic regime, we ought to establish democracies all over the world.

4:42This would, of course, cost an enormous amount of money, but it's certainly worth doing. Kristol elaborated his views in more detail in a book that came out last year. This one was written with Lawrence Kaplan. It's called War Over Iraq. It was issued just before the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. And what the authors suggest in this, they elaborate on the article that the senior author, Crystal, had given in the article I just mentioned. They say, well, we need to establish democracies all over the world.

5:29One reason for this is that democracies don't go to war with each other. So that if we have all sorts of wars, if we have a lot of wars to establish democracies in all the countries of the world, then we won't have any wars anymore. This is a rather, I must say it's a rather odd logic, even if it were right, it would involve an enormous number of wars allegedly to promote peace. It would seem like the means of achieving the goal of a peaceful world is hardly in accord with the goal, namely to have all sorts of perpetual wars to be achieved by some sort of eventually we achieve a peaceful world.

6:16But the claim that democracies don't go to war with each other is very hard to evaluate because of course it depends what you characterize as a democracy. By most definitions, there weren't all that many democracies until the 20th century. So the generalization, if it's true, isn't very robust. One could think of possible exceptions to it such as the British Declaration of War on Finland in 1941, but even if the generalization is true for certain existing cases, it certainly wouldn't establish any kind of scientific law, it wouldn't have what the philosophers call counterfactual force, it wouldn't say, if we did establish democracies all over the world, they wouldn't go to war with each other.

7:06It doesn't fall from the fact that if it is a fact that democracies for a limited period of Time, haven't gone to war with each other, that if various other countries were democracies, then they wouldn't go to war with each other. It simply doesn't follow at all. And of course, even for democracies who have certainly not been very peaceful when just overall, when they've fought with other democracies, they've certainly fought with other countries. So These considerations aren't of very much importance to Kristol and his co-author, Lawrence Kaplan. But they say, since America is the most powerful nation, then we have to, as I say, go ahead and establish democracies over all the other countries.

7:58That way we'll have a peaceful world. The program of these neoconservatives who've been very influential, the defense department, I think the number two person in the Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz, is very much in accord with these ideas, and he and Kristall are friends. But in another book by David Frum and Richard Pearl called An End to Evil, we find the program, these aggressive neoconservatives, spelled out in more detail. Richard Pearl was one time the chairman of the Defense Planning Board in the Defense Department. He's another one of the most influential of the officials who've been influenced by this program.

8:49Now, what From and Pearl say is they're not satisfied with the invasion of Iraq. They say, well, that was a good start, but why stop with Iraq? They say we also need to overthrow the government of Iran, Syria, and probably Saudi Arabia as well. They say the purpose of going into Iraq is to establish an American presence in the Mideast. Then, once we establish democracy in Iraq, then everyone in the Arab world will see how wonderful things are with this new democratic regime. You can see how they're very enthusiastic already about it.

9:41So then, once they see this, then Iraq will be an alternative supply of oil to Saudi Arabia, So then we don't have to rely on the reactionary Saudi Arabian monarchy anymore, we could get rid of that. Now, one shouldn't think that their plans are confined to the mid-east, they also favor strong action against North Korea, and also China is another country that has to be brought and they're also not too fond of France. Since France didn't go along with US policy in Iraq maybe something should be done about them also, although fortunately they don't say exactly what they have in mind. I guess it would be enough to get rid of all these other countries first.

10:38Now, I want to inquire where do these ideas come from? Where do these very aggressive foreign policies come from? I found here, I find very useful, the book that came out also last year by the political theorist Clive Rinn, who's at Catholic University of America, called America the Virtuous. And he points out that what we have in this type of foreign policy that I've just mentioned is favored by the neoconservatives is a very type of ideological politics in which we have what Edmund Burke called an armed doctrine.

11:25We have the view that there are certain ideas that have to be imposed on the world by force, That politics isn't a matter, between nations isn't a matter, some of the negotiations over interest, but there are certain ideas that have to be imposed that people must, the world must be revolutionized in accordance with a particular program. This notion, although it's favored by people who are called neoconservatives, of course It's not conservative at all, but it's quite identical to that of the people who are the leftist movements.

12:10The notion, say, that the world has to be revamped completely so that we change all the regimes, say, and promote a certain kind of democratic regime, to these people considered democratic is precisely the same as the communist notion that the whole world has to be revolutionized and we have to have communist governments worldwide. This will promote peace, a peaceful and prosperous world. So, this particular group of publicists have simply changed that and they say, well, instead it's not communism but their particular notion of democracy that has to be imposed on the world by force.

12:57So it's exactly the same mentality. Rimm called it the neo-Jacobin mentality, after the Jacobins were the most radical group of French revolutionaries. Actually, the Jacobin isn't the best term for it because the Jacobins tend to be very domestically oriented in foreign policy, the Girondins were really the most aggressive group, not the Jacobins. He points out that many of the neoconservatives really came from a leftist background. We can see this, say, in Irving Kristol, who isn't nearly as revolutionary as his son in wanting to impose, allegedly, democratic regimes all over the world.

13:43of the World. But crystal came out of a Trotskyite background, of course one of the basic doctrines of Trotsky is that of permanent revolution, that the whole world has to be revolutionized in accord with a certain political program, precisely the same ideas we have in the program of the The world has to be revolutionized in a court with certain ideas and that we don't take account of what the local traditions or what people want in the various countries, just we the alleged possessive superior wisdom know best these doctrines have to be imposed because America is the most powerful nation in the world by far.

14:33We think we can impose it on the world. So we can see, I mean, this is not something that William Kristol originated by any means, we can see the same mentality in the later stages of the Cold War. Other publicists who favored this program, such as Norman Potterettes, who's the editor of Commentary, were saying that Ronald Reagan was really an appeaser of the Soviet Union. He was sort of a dangerous softy and that we really had to get tough with Russia. This is just as the Soviet regime was collapsing and said, no, the Cold War is not going to end.

15:50The formation of a revolutionary mindset is really quite similar with just a few changes, the same sort of mentality that the ideological mindset can be imposed on the world. Now there's another influence on this type of foreign policy that I want to mention that's not by any means a leftist revolutionary one. This is a so-called Straussian influence. This comes from the political theorist Leo Strauss, who was taught for many years at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research. Now his own political views are rather hard to figure out, but one thing he emphasized very much is he thought that the life of a philosopher is the best possible life.

16:41of Life. But for people who can't attain that height, the world of great power politics is really also a very good one. He points out in his obituary for his friend, Kurt Rietzler, he reviews Rietzler as a German writer who had been actually the secretary in a very young age to the Chancellor of Germany, The Chancellor, when World War I began, Theodor von Bekmann-Holweg, recently drafted certain memos favoring a very expansionist German policy right after the war began. But Strauss-Borstein is obituary that, as I say, although life and philosophy is the best one, that great power politics is also very good and that this is something that should be practiced.

17:36The people who have been influenced by Strauss, who also include William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and others, would say even if they don't favor so much this universalist ideology of democracy that I mentioned before, they would say, well, what we have to do is just since America is the most powerful nation, we have to engage in great power politics. This goes against George Washington's farewell, just where he said he wants to shun the world of European power politics. They say, no, this is the way we achieve greatnesses by political struggle, by struggle with other nations.

18:22This is one way of attaining greatness. It would seem that a much wiser course than this to adopt is that given by Ludwig von Mises, the mire of Leo Strauss' Black Reversal, but in Human Action he mentions, he said, Hegel had many faults, but we can forgive him much for his phrase, the futility of victory. This seems to me altogether a sounder attitude, and it's one that I think is particular to the point Now, when we recall the context of Hegel's phrase, the futility of victory, he was referring to Napoleon's failure to impose a Bonapartist regime on Spain because of the guerrilla war mounted against his forces during the Peninsular War in Spain from 1808 to 1813.

19:17I think those who are studying the situation in Iraq today will readily see the parallel. Thank you.