Mugged by reality

Once the warrior queen of neoconservatism, Jeane Kirkpatrick died a critic of Bush's unilateralism. Her death illuminates the conflicting legacies of the movement she helped found.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Read more: Ronald Reagan, Politics, Sidney Blumenthal, Jimmy Carter, Saddam Hussein, Soviet Union, Augusto Pinochet, Communism, Opinion, Latin America, Iraq War

AP Photo

Former United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick in a Nov. 4, 1990, file photo.

Dec. 14, 2006 | The death last week of Jeane Kirkpatrick -- ambassador to the United Nations during Ronald Reagan's first term and the highest-ranking neoconservative in his administration -- coincided with President Bush's rejection of the Baker-Hamilton Commission report on Iraq and his subsequent consultations with neoconservatives to entrench his belief in "victory." But rather than providing a sobering but inspirational backdrop for Bush's heroic stand against the foreign-policy establishment, Kirkpatrick's passing illuminates the conflicting legacies of the ideological movement of which she was once an icon and the confusion that surrounds a president who demands certitudes.

In its obituary, the New York Times buried a surprising scoop about her last act of diplomacy, when she was sent by President Bush on a secret mission to Geneva in March 2003 to justify the invasion of Iraq to Arab foreign ministers. "The marching orders we received were to argue that preemptive war is legitimate," Alan Gerson, her former general counsel, recalled. "She said: 'No one will buy it. If that's the position, count me out.'" Instead, she argued that Saddam Hussein was in violation of United Nations resolutions. Her hitherto unknown rejection of Bush's unilateralism and extolling of international order apparently was her final commentary on neoconservatism.

"A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality," neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol remarked in a famously cynical line. At the time of her death, Kirkpatrick was a neoconservative mugged by reality and a shadow of her former ferocious self. Once the warrior queen of neoconservatism, she ended as an unexplained skeptic, less the Valkyrie than the world-weary doubter, akin to the disillusioned Francis Fukuyama but without the tears of an apologetic manifesto. She checked out silently, leaving no equivalent of a political testament.

Norman Podhoretz, who had been her editor at Commentary, disclosed near the end of an obituary he published in the Weekly Standard that she had grown disenchanted. "She had serious reservations about the prudence of the Bush Doctrine, which she evidently saw neither as an analogue of the Truman Doctrine nor as a revival of the Reaganite spirit in foreign policy," he wrote. "Even so, she was clearly reluctant to join in the clamor against it, which for all practical purposes meant relegating herself to the sidelines." But Podhoretz declined to reveal more details of her disapproval. Abruptly, he assumed the pose of a commissar, praising her "brilliant service on the ideological front" and awarded her "laurels" for what she "earned in World War III," though "what I persist in calling World War IV" failed to "tempt her back into battle." Comrade Podhoretz's oblique admission of her absence "on the ideological front" and the posthumous anecdote in the Times obituary are the runes of her alienation.

Jeane Kirkpatrick first came to public attention when her article "Dictatorships and Double Standards" was published in Commentary in November 1979. The Georgetown University professor's slashing attack on the Carter administration, appearing just as the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis began, became one of the principal theoretical documents of neoconservatism and platforms for the Reagan campaign. In this seminal piece, which immediately vaulted her to prominence, Kirkpatrick argued that Carter's adherence to human rights undermined traditional authoritarian regimes allied with the United States in the Cold War. "Authoritarian" states, she posited, could slowly change into democratic ones, unlike "totalitarian" ones. "The history of this century provides no grounds for expecting that radical totalitarian regimes will transform themselves," she wrote.

History has not been kind to most of her ideas. The opening sentence of her essay betrays it as a howling anachronism. "The failure of the Carter administration's foreign policy is now clear to everyone," Kirkpatrick began. But where was she going? Her devastating punch line was that Carter's "crowning achievement has been to lay the groundwork for a transfer of the Panama Canal from the United States to a swaggering Latin dictator of Castroite bent." It may be hard to remember that Carter's Panama Canal Treaty was then a red-hot right-wing cause, especially seized upon by Reagan as a surrender of America's Manifest Destiny, and that the supposed "Latin dictator" is long gone.

Kirkpatrick's central idea that communism was implacably resistant to change was, of course, belied by the collapse of the Soviet Union. And Carter's advancement of human rights is generally acknowledged as a contributing factor in its downfall. Kirkpatrick's awestruck description of gathering Soviet strength, universally shared on the right, was a fundamental misreading of the symptoms of a rapidly decaying system entering its terminal crisis. But in its time her view about the perpetual survival of communism was accepted as an eternal verity.

It may also be little recalled that alongside her mocking of human rights and "moralism" as "continuous self-abasement," Kirkpatrick ridiculed Carter for not invading Iran, even before the hostage taking. "Where once upon a time an American President might have sent Marines to assure the protection of American strategic interests, there is no room for force in this world of progress and self-determination," she wrote.

Kirkpatrick's record in office was as callous as her rhetoric was caustic. The barbarity of Reagan's policies in Latin America is largely forgotten, while the sordid assault on constitutional government in the Iran-contra scandal that flowed from it is rarely discussed. Kirkpatrick was obsessively fixed on Central America as a decisive cockpit of the Cold War and helped direct the administration's focus there. In the name of ideological struggle, she rallied support for authoritarian juntas throughout the Western Hemisphere.

On Dec. 2, 1980, a month after Reagan's election, four Roman Catholic Maryknoll nuns, dedicated to assisting peasants in El Salvador, then ruled by a junta that had provoked a guerrilla insurgency, were murdered; independent investigations and a trial later proved that Salvadoran National Guardsmen killed them on orders from above. Two weeks after these targeted assassinations, Kirkpatrick, just named to the U.N. post, leapt to the defense of the junta. "I don't think the government of El Salvador was responsible," she declared. "The nuns were not just nuns; the nuns were political activists."

Kirkpatrick was an ardent protector of the El Salvador junta, among other juntas from Guatemala (where the regime waged a genocidal war against Indian peasants) to Honduras, and from Chile to Argentina. (After the National Guard massacred more than 900 men, women and children in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote on Dec. 11, 1981, the Reagan administration sent Kirkpatrick's closest neoconservative ally within the administration, Elliott Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for human rights, before a Senate committee to testify that the reports of slaughter at El Mozote, later proved conclusively, "were not credible." (After pleading guilty to lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal, Abrams was pardoned; he is currently deputy national security advisor in charge of Middle East affairs.)

In August 1981, Kirkpatrick flew to Chile to meet with Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who had overthrown the democracy there eight years earlier. "Most pleasant," said Kirkpatrick about their conversation. She announced that the Reagan administration's intention was to "normalize completely its relations with Chile," including reinstating arms sales. Two days after her visit, Pinochet used Kirkpatrick's bestowal of legitimacy to expel the chairman of the Chilean Human Rights Commission and other prominent opposition leaders. One month later, Amnesty International issued a report noting that "torture still appears to be a systematic part of official policy."

Next page: Kirkpatrick considered herself a special friend of the Argentine junta