Robert Nisbet on U.S. War Preparation

In The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, conservative American sociologist Robert Nisbet wrote his opinions regarding why war and preparation for war have become such powerful influences on American government and on the American people (see my earlier post). He argued first that America's participation in World War I had a large impact upon us. However, when addressing why the defense budget and preparation for war loomed so large in the 1980's when he was writing he noted that the Cold War would not do as a complete explanation even though it was the explanation to which observers most often resorted. He wrote (for a book published in 1988) that there were two forces that "would surely continue to operate even if the Soviet Union were miraculously transformed into a vast religious convent [p. 24]." The first of these forces was the military-industrial complex against which Eisenhower warned us. This included a huge government defense bureaucracy and the "militarization of intellectuals" and "intellectualization of the military." The latter involved the universities which had become so addicted to the money flowing from defense expenditures and the " 'terror experts,' 'strategy analysts,' 'intelligence consultants,'" and others who manned institutes and think tanks and regularly appeared on TV. Nisbet wrote (pp. 28-9) quite presciently:

Even if there were no Soviet Union or its equivalent to justify our monstrous military establishment, there would be, in sum, the whole self-perpetuating military-industrial complex and the technological-scientific elite that Eisenhower warned us against. These have attained by now a mass and an internal dynamic capable of being their own justification for continued military spending.... Take away the Soviet Union as crucial justification, and, under Parkinson's Law, content of some kind will expand relentlessly to fill the time and space left.

This prediction proved true in just 5 years during which the Soviet Union did disappear and 'neo-conservatives' stepped forward to argue that the U.S. must take full advantage of this "unipolar moment" to make sure that no other power would be able to challenge the U.S. again. And, indeed, it was these 'neo-conservatives, the Krauthammers, Kristols, Feiths, Ledeens, et. al. who pushed us to spend yet more on the military and who provided the justification for invading Iraq.

The second force to which Nisbet referred was "the moralization of foreign policy" that began perhaps with Woodrow Wilson but continued up to today. Indeed, the so-called 'neo-conservatives' unite both forces in their rhetoric, they are huge cheerleaders for American military might and perhaps the most extreme moralizers of our foreign policy ever. It is these so-called 'neo-conservatives' who trumpet America's remarkable 'exceptionalism' and virtues and advocate using military might to bring 'democracy', 'freedom' and 'free market capitalism' to the rest of the benighted world. The majority of these individuals are also aggressively pro-Israeli and frequently pro-Zionist, and they support the far-right within Israel as well as in the U.S.

Here Nisbet merits the label 'conservative' because he breaks with pseudo-conservatives like William F. Buckley in noting the swelling of central government by the military and in maintaining some skepticism about "America the Virtuous." You cannot stand for small central government AND huge military budgets and an evangelical foreign policy, as people like Buckley and Reagan tried to do.

What Does the Robert Gates Appointment Mean?

In today's Washington Post James Mann's "Understanding Gates" questions how much of a change Gates will be over Rumsfeld. Mann's caution that we cannot be certain precisely which position Gates will take on Iraq is well taken. Nonetheless, I strongly disagree with Mann on one point: "Rumsfeld was never a neoconservative; he was an obstreperous contrarian, committed not to putting forward any particular philosophy but to aggressively challenging whatever ideas his bureaucratic opponents and critics put forward."

Rumsfeld, as I think a reading of Mann's Rise of the Vulcans shows, was not simply a "contrarian". He was, except for very early in his career, a consistent advocate of 1) suspicion toward and confrontation with the Soviet Union, 2) over-estimates of Soviet military power ("Team B"), and 3) virtually unlimited increases in defense spending to "protect" us from the Soviets; finally, 4) he was the man who strongly advocated and had virtually sole responsibility for executing the Iraq War. Rumsfeld may not have been a "neo-conservative" in precisely the same sense that Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith are, but who hired all three of them for top jobs in his Defense Department? I'm willing to grant that Rumsfeld is not as consistently considered a "card carrying" neo-con but there is precious little light between his positions and those of the usual neo-con suspects; and referring to him as simply a "contrarian" is one of Mann's characteristically overly charitable accounts of the "Vulcans".

Mann's points about Gates' history are definitely worth taking into consideration and only watching Gates' performance and who he allies with will tell us where he stands today on Iraq. Reading the Wikipedia article on Gates suggests additional reasons to worry about how much of a pseudo-conservative he may turn out to be.