Kirkpatrick considered herself a special friend of the Argentine junta. On April 2, 1982, she attended a dinner at the Argentine Embassy in Washington. While she was there, the regime launched an invasion of the British-governed Falkland Islands off the Argentine coast. The Argentines took Kirkpatrick's presence as evidence of tacit official approval. The Falklands war that followed between an authoritarian regime and a democracy, between countries led by a military strongman and a conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to whom Kirkpatrick was occasionally compared, had not been foreshadowed in Kirkpatrick's theories. Nor did she imagine the overthrow of the Argentine junta when it lost the war.
Another war between two authoritarian regimes required the United States to choose sides. In the Iran-Iraq war, Kirkpatrick played a key part in preventing international condemnation of Saddam Hussein's use of weapons of mass destruction. By 1983, Iraq was reeling from Iran's human wave attacks and in danger of losing, prompting a U.S. tilt. In December, President Reagan sent a special envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, to meet with Saddam, a dictator with whom it was decided we could do business. Loans and trade deals were soon arranged. And Iraq unleashed chemical-weapons attacks against Iranian troops, contrary to international law. After both the State Department and the United Nations reported that Iraq was using WMD, Iran submitted a resolution demanding U.N. condemnation of Iraq's violations. But U.S. ambassador Kirkpatrick lobbied against its approval, urging "restraint" in denouncing Iraqi chemical warfare. Her action succeeded in thwarting any specific censure of Iraq, leading on March 30, 1984, to a U.N. Security Council statement against the use of WMD only in general terms. Saddam Hussein was spared.
By this time, the campaign of the right to install Kirkpatrick as national security advisor had failed. Her support within came from CIA director William J. Casey and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, but Secretary of State George Shultz viewed her temperament as "not well suited to the job," and she reached her ceiling.
From the beginning of the Reagan administration she had championed the contras as a force to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. She construed this battle as the flashpoint of the Reagan Doctrine that justified financing anti-communist guerrilla movements from Afghanistan to Central America. (Her theories did not anticipate that the funding of the mujahedin in Afghanistan would help foster the Taliban and al-Qaida.) In March 1981, she participated in the White House meeting that authorized the $19 million in covert funding that created the contras. Congress, however, passed legislation forbidding such subsidies. The Iran-contra scandal began in the illegal effort by elements of the Reagan administration to evade the ban by tapping foreign sources of money. Eventually, missiles were sold to Iran in order to finance the contra war. In June 1984, Kirkpatrick attended the secret meeting where Casey argued for going around the law. "It is an impeachable offense," Shultz warned. But Kirkpatrick, undeterred, argued, "We should make the maximum effort to find the money." Her good luck was not to be appointed to any position in Reagan's second term; if she had been, she would undoubtedly have been found in the thick of the scandal.
At the 1984 Republican Convention she appeared as the keynote speaker, delivering a speech in which she railed against "the San Francisco Democrats" for "always blaming America first." Using her identification as a nominal Democrat, her emblem as a neoconservative, she lent credence to the atavistic Cold War fear of homosexual subversion. Thus her most memorable performance was less as foreign policy mandarin than as J. Edgar Hoover in drag.
Despite the rapturous reception for her speech, it was her swan song. Conservative columnists lamented her leaving. George Will wrote, "She unites thought and action, theory and practice, better than anyone in government in this generation" and called her "the one indispensable person in government." William Safire extolled her as "the only woman who could today be considered as a serious possibility for President of the United States." But she received no further appointments and returned to academic life. And after the Iran-contra scandal, Reagan purged his administration of ideologues and swiftly entered negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War, the happy ending that Kirkpatrick had argued was an impossibility, the ultimate refutation. In 1987, spurred by her pundit fans and anxious about the dangers of Vice President George H.W. Bush's moderate tendencies, she considering running for the Republican nomination for president, but upon receiving no support within the party, she abandoned the quixotic campaign.
Without communism, neoconservatism was an ideology lacking a political context. A peculiar variant of anti-communism, neoconservatism had its origins as a strain of Trotskyism; it was composed of cadres imbued with a Leninist mentality, it had few adherents who had participated in Democratic electoral politics (Kirkpatrick was a glaring exception), and it was dependent on the patronage of a Republican White House for its influence.
In light of the fall of communism, Kirkpatrick's seamless dialectics were proved wrong in nearly every important respect. Her principles appeared as instruments of expedience, her strategies as polemics, and supposed evidence as sheer assertions. More than her substance, her style remained. Neoconservatives after Kirkpatrick carried on her stridency, denunciatory bullying, inflation and conflation of putative threats, fear-mongering and abuse of history, especially of the Munich analogy in which Democrats are accused of being appeasers and neoconservatives posture as contemporary Churchillians. During their post-Reagan, post-communism wilderness years, the neoconservatives tried to reorganize themselves as a movement initially in opposition to the elder Bush's foreign policy realism and then against Clinton's pragmatic internationalism. They considered Clinton's emphasis on nation building, the social problems of globalization and the threat of terrorism hopelessly soft. All along they sought a new enemy on the scale of communism that would recommend their own indispensable relevance to a Republican president.
Under Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld brought them back into power, and after the jolt of Sept. 11, fixated on an invasion of Iraq, they seemed to surpass their former glory. But the post-communist version of neoconservatism was Kirkpatrickism turned on its head. Neoconservative theorists equated Saddam with totalitarians past and bundled him up with al-Qaida terrorism, cast as totalitarian as well, a rhetorical approach that evoked but twisted Kirkpatrick's earlier work. Neoconservatism had become more an attitude than a policy, much less a doctrine. Quietly, the original godmother of neoconservatism dissented.
In their crusade to remake the Middle East in the American image, the neoconservatives mangled beyond recognition Kirkpatrick's ideas, once the holy writ of Reaganism, and embraced the "moralism" she deplored. While her theories did not stand the test of time as applied to communism, they provide a stinging if unintended critique of latter-day neoconservatism.
In her 1979 essay, she cautioned against simplistic thinking about transforming long-settled authoritarian regimes into democracies. "Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances," she wrote. "This notion is belied by an enormous body of evidence based on the experience of dozens of countries which have attempted with more or less (usually less) success to move from autocratic to democratic government."
Even more pointedly, she predicted the chaos that could envelop a country long ruled by a dictator upon his overthrow. Her description prophesies almost precisely the blunders of the Bush occupation of Iraq and reveals the omniscience of the neoconservatives as mere naiveté. "The fabric of authority unravels quickly when the power and status of the man at the top are undermined or eliminated," she wrote. "The longer the autocrat has held power, and the more pervasive his personal influence, the more dependent a nation's institutions will be on him. Without him, the organized life of the society will collapse, like an arch from which the keystone has been removed ... The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American policymakers and journalists accustomed to public institutions based on universalistic norms rather than particularistic relations."
This passage reads like a recent report on the blind arrogance of the neoconservatives and errors of the Coalition Provisional Authority. But the neoconservatives did not bother to reread her yellowing article, and her qualms gave them no pause as they distorted her arguments and plunged headlong toward Baghdad. In the final irony, it turns out that the regime that cannot change is Bush's.
About the writer
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton, writes a column for Salon and the Guardian of London. His new book is titled "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime."
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