No regrets over hawks’ letter to Clinton for harsher stance on Iraq
No, there are I think just one or two that are angry, but I think most of them still remain friends. What went wrong with the neoconservatives? Was it that they tried to accelerate the process you had laid out in your «End of History» thesis? Was the problem with the means or the ends? I think it was really a problem with the means rather than the goals. The problem was that there is just a tremendous overemphasis on the role of American military power that really started in the 1990s and became the centerpiece of the agenda – that is, to have coercive regime changes as a path toward promoting democracy – and I think that was the basic mistake. I think democracy comes about because people want democracy and in every society the process is primarily driven by those internal forces. Outsiders can facilitate it in many ways but they are not really the ones that determine the timetable. Do you think the neoconservatives were victims of their success in Eastern Europe in the sense that there was an artificial division that faded, unlike despotisms in other parts of the world? I think that the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was a very unusual circumstance. I think we now understand in retrospect that communism was very artificial, in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and so forth. So it collapsed without any kind of violent resistance, which everyone at the time was expecting. Nobody thought that communism would simply end that peacefully. I think the problem was that many neoconservatives watching that [development] overgeneralized and believed that this was a general characteristic of totalitarian regimes, i.e. that they were hollow at the core and that if you gave them a little push from the outside they would collapse, like the Romanian or Bulgarian regimes. Is there no contradiction between your liberal interventionism and your rejection of social engineering? Well, I don’t reject all forms of social engineering. I think what you need is an awareness that if you get too ambitious and you try to go at fundamental root causes of different forms of social behavior, it is very difficult to know how to operate properly in that realm. But I think there are lots of things you can do. When you build a democracy you have to do social engineering: You need to create a rule of law, a judicial system, property rights, i.e. the basic institutions of a democracy, so everybody has to engage in it to some extent. The problem comes about when you try to do it in other societies where you don’t really understand the way the society works, where there is not a lot of domestic support for democratic institutions, where you don’t have strong political players that carry the burden of political change. Like Iraq for example? Well, in Iraq there should have been a warning signal that in a totalitarian society like that you really don’t have a lot of political parties and civil society organizations. These are critical to creating a really democratic society. Do you think the Iraq crisis was a sign of the decline of US hegemony? Well, I think the basic structural reasons for American hegemony will remain in place for some time but I think that this use of American power has generated a big backlash in many parts of the world, so that American power is going to be resisted a lot more strongly than it would have been in the absence of the war. Do you think the Republicans will survive the Iraq war? I don’t know. I think that if the situation continues to deteriorate and it looks like it was a big policy failure, I think they’re going to pay a price for that, but it depends on who they nominate and who the Democrats nominate. This November, we will have to see if the Democrats could regain control of one or possibly both houses of Congress. Do you regret having signed the letter urging former President Clinton to take a harder line on Iraq and Saddam? I changed my mind on that. I don’t regret, at one point, ever having supported the war, because I think it was morally a difficult choice to make. There were important moral goods on the other side, in terms of removing a very bad dictator. And so simply taking a while to make up your mind about this I don’t think is something that is necessarily blamable. I think in the end, once I’d thought it through in the year prior to the war, I decided that for a variety of reasons it was an unacceptable risk to launch the war. So it was not the war in itself but the way it was planned… Well, unless you did it in a way where the costs would be commensurate with the objectives, then it’s not a good idea to do things and wars are very difficult to control. It’s not just the execution, I think the war itself was a mistake.
