"Regime Rotation" is a term often used by those who observe that John Kerry has been anointed as the US elite's chosen replacement for Bush, should the latter ultimately need to be dumped as a protective measure. Now, the situation grows more complex (and more grim) with prominent neocons indicating that they may keep their position by engaging in "Ideology Rotation"...

NY TIMES April 19, 2004

Lack of Resolution in Iraq Finds Conservatives Divided

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

A growing faction of conservatives is voicing doubts about a prolonged United States military involvement in Iraq, putting hawkish neoconservatives on the defensive and posing questions for President Bush about the degree of support he can expect from his political base.

The continuing violence and mounting casualties in Iraq have given new strength to the traditional conservative doubts about using American military power to remake other countries and about the potential for Western-style democracy without a Western cultural foundation. In in the eyes of many conservatives, the Iraqi resistance has discredited the more hawkish neoconservatives ó a group closely identified with Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard.

Considered descendants of a group of mostly Jewish intellectuals who switched from the political left to the right at the height of the cold war, the neoconservatives are defined largely by their conviction that American military power can be a force for good in the world. They championed the invasion of Iraq as a way to turn that country into a bastion of democracy in the Middle East.

[i.e. they are not just "hawkish", they are utopians. A similar utopian vision of using American might as a shortcut to establishing a global order was once expressed on the left by Bertrand Russell -QQ Ed.]

"In late May of last year, we neoconservatives were hailed as great visionaries," said Kenneth R. Weinstein, chief operating officer of the Hudson Institute, a center of neoconservative thinking. "Now we are embattled, both within the conservative movement and in the battle over postwar planning.

"Those of us who favored a more muscular approach to American foreign policy and a more Wilsonian view of our efforts in Iraq find ourselves pitted against more traditional conservatives, who have more isolationist instincts to begin with, and they are more willing to say, `Bring the boys home,' " Mr. Weinstein said.

Richard A. Viguerie, a conservative stalwart and the dean of conservative direct mail, said the Iraq war had created an unusual schism. "I can't think of any other issue that has divided conservatives as much as this issue in my political lifetime," Mr. Viguerie said.

[Viguerie is a central figure in the Christian Right / CNP / Rev. Moon apparatus. -Ed]

Recent events, he said, "call into question how conservatives see the White House. It doesn't look like the White House is as astute as we thought they were."

Although Mr. Bush appears to be sticking to the neoconservative view, the growing skepticism among some conservatives about the Iraqi occupation is upending some of the familiar dynamics of left and right. To be sure, both sides have urged swift and decisive retaliation against the Iraqi insurgents in the short term, but some on the right are beginning to support a withdrawal as soon as is practical, while some Democrats, including Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the likely presidential nominee, have called for sending more troops to Iraq.

In an editorial in this week's issue of The Weekly Standard, Mr. Kristol applauded Mr. Kerry's stance.

Referring to the conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, an outspoken opponent of the war and occupation, Mr. Kristol said in an interview on Friday: "I will take Bush over Kerry, but Kerry over Buchanan or any of the lesser Buchananites on the right. If you read the last few issues of The Weekly Standard, it has as much or more in common with the liberal hawks than with traditional conservatives."

In contrast, this week's issue of National Review, the magazine founded by William F. Buckley and a standard-bearer for mainstream conservatives, adopted a newly skeptical tone toward the neoconservatives and toward the occupation. In an editorial titled "An End to Illusion," the Bush administration was described as having "a dismaying capacity to believe its own public relations."

The editorial criticized the administration as having "an underestimation of the difficulty of implanting democracy in alien soil, and an overestimation in particular of the sophistication of what is still fundamentally a tribal society and one devastated by decades of tyranny."

[Perhaps Skull and Bones member Buckley will now be tilting more towards Skull and Bones Kerry instead of Skull and Bones Bush? - Ed.]

The editorial described that error as "Wilsonian," another term for the neoconservatives' faith that United States military power can improve the world and a label associated with the liberal internationalism of President Woodrow Wilson.

"The Wilsonian tendency has grown stronger in conservative foreign policy thought in recent years," the editorial continued, adding, "As we have seen in Iraq, the world isn't as malleable as some Wilsonians would have it."

The editorial was careful to emphasize that the war served legitimate United States interests and that violence against Americans in Iraq deserved harsh retribution. But it concluded: "It is the Iraqis who have to save Iraq. It is their country, not ours."

Some conservatives who focus on limited government and lower taxes said they were also worried about the political costs of an extended occupation of Iraq.

"We don't want to put troops into a situation that is increasingly a public-relations problem for the president," said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a group of conservative political donors. "No one wants body bags coming home in September and October."

So far President Bush appears to be sticking to Wilsonian goals. "We're changing the world," he said last week in a White House news conference, defending the occupation and pledging to maintain a military involvement after the planned June 30 handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi governing body. "My job as the president is to lead this nation into making the world a better place."

Some of the main conservative opponents of the invasion, including Mr. Buchanan and the libertarian Cato Institute ó were quiet after the war began but have now renewed their criticism.

[why were they quiet after the war began -- because they were afraid of speaking out on principle, perhaps on the off chance that the Iraq occupation could have turned out more successfully than expected? Now they have only renewed their criticism after things have obviously turned disastrous... - Ed.]

In his syndicated column last week, Mr. Buchanan, who argued against the invasion on the grounds that the United States should use military force only to defend its vital interests, posed a series of questions: "Do we go in deeper, or do we cut our losses and look for the nearest exit? How much blood and treasure are we willing to invest in democracy in Baghdad, and for how long? Is a democratic Iraq vital to our security? What assurances are there that we can win this war?"

David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said conservatives were becoming more receptive to Mr. Buchanan's arguments against the neoconservatives. "Now that they see Iraq edging into a nation-building kind of thing, conservatives are more skeptical," Mr. Keene said. "It isn't that someone went out and rhetorically beat the neoconservatives in an argument. It's just that they went out and tested their scheme against reality on the ground."

In a recent interview, Representative John J. Duncan Jr. of Tennessee, one of the few Republicans who voted against the invasion, said he believed the administration should seek an exit soon. "I think we should announce to the world that no country has come close to doing as much for Iraq as we have, but there are a significant number of people who don't appreciate what we have done," Mr. Duncan said. "I think we should get on out, we should celebrate victory and we should leave."

Conservatives who question the occupation can point to a long history of opposition from the right to United States military action overseas. Conservatives opposed Wilson's entry into World War I, and many opposed United States involvement in World War II until after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

But the cold war rallied conservatives around the military interventions abroad, and the protests of the Vietnam War era solidified the reputations of conservatives as hawks and liberals as doves. Still, even if some conservatives appeared to be returning to the movement's more isolationist roots, Mr. Kristol said he was undeterred.

"If we have to make common cause with the more hawkish liberals and fight the conservatives, that is fine with me, too," he said.

Recalling a famous saying of his father, the neoconservative pioneer Irving Kristol, that a neoconservative was "a liberal who has been mugged by reality," the younger Mr. Kristol joked that now they might end up as neoliberals ó defined as "neoconservatives who had been mugged by reality in Iraq."