The Assassins' Gate Read Online Free PDF Page A

Top Republican officials and neoconservative foreign-policy thinkers were sketching similarly large plans for the party and the country. But there are differences, perhaps not so obvious at the time, but ones that would prove critical a few years later, when these plans and ideas became the foreign policy of the second President Bush and laid the groundwork for a second war with Iraq. Though the DPG acknowledged that the Cold War was over, it was a document of Cold Warriors—the hard-liners of the 1970s who rejected accommodation with the Soviet Union. Paul Wolfowitz had been a member of the famous Team B, the group of outside experts that was appointed in 1976 by CIA director George Bush to review intelligence on the Soviet Union, and that came to far more dire conclusions about Soviet capabilities and intentions than the pro-détente officials of the Nixon and Ford administrations. The DPG, written in 1992 under Wolfowitz’s guidance (though he claims not to have read the draft before it was leaked), was very much a continuation of the neoconservative thinking that had spawned the Committee on the Present Danger. The skies were always ominous, threats always loomed on the horizon; even though the Soviet Union was no more, the sunlit vistas of the Reagan years had gone dark again. To officials like Wolfowitz, it was always 1979. And what were the new threats? They were everyone and everywhere: European allies, Arab dictatorships, Muslim terrorists, resurgent Russians, Chinese and North Korean communists, weapons proliferators. And what was the remedy? American power, everywhere—but not in the cause of democratic values. The DPG duly advocated “the spread of democratic forms of government and open economic systems,” but only as a gesture. When it came to the Middle East, “our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil. We also seek to deter further aggression in the region, foster regional stability, protect U.S. nationals and property, and safeguard our access to international air and seaways.” This is the language of realism, not Reaganism. It’s the balance of power without a balance. “With regard to Pakistan,” the document continued, “a constructive U.S.-Pakistani military relationship will be an important element in our strategy to promote stable security conditions in Southwest Asia and Central Asia.” The possibility that continued access to oil and good relations with Muslim dictators might ultimately be the cause of instability or worse didn’t occur to the DPG’s authors. The prospect of democracy in this dangerous region was never mentioned.
    Here, Kagan and the Pentagon hard-liners parted ways. Kagan saw no daylight between security, stability, and democracy. One of his Commentary articles took direct aim at the indulgence Jeane Kirkpatrick had extended to right-wing dictatorships in the same magazine a decade and a half earlier. What good was an international order if it didn’t bring freedom?
    There was another difference between Kagan and the Pentagon hardliners. They had no use for international alliances and institutions if these got in the way of America’s freedom to act. Kagan, though no lover of the UN, didn’t make a point of rejecting internationalism; at times, sounding like a Truman-era Democrat, he even invoked it as an important source of American influence.
    In 1996, Kagan and his friend William Kristol, by then editor of Rupert Murdoch’s new magazine The Weekly Standard, published an essay in Foreign Affairs called “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” It was a consolidation of the Commentary articles into a stirring manifesto, with Kristol, Dan Quayle’s former chief of staff and a shrewd Republican operative, adding the publicist’s touch to Kagan’s more analytical style. It’s hard to think