November 21, 2005 Issue
The American Conservative
http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_21/article.html
The Weekly Standard's War
Murdoch's mag stands athwart history yelling, "Attack!"
By Scott McConnell
As the Weekly Standard celebrates its 10th birthday, it may be time to
ask whether America has ever seen a more successful political
magazine. Many have been more widely read, profitable, amusing, or
brilliant. But in terms of actually changing the world and shaping the
course of history, what contemporary magazine rivals the Standard?
Even if you believe that the change has been much for the worse, the
Standard's record of success in its own terms is formidable.
At the time of the Standard's founding in 1995, there was considerable
speculation among neoconservatives over whether the movement had run
its course. In "Neoconservatism: A Eulogy," Norman Podhoretz argued
that neoconservatism had effectively put itself out of business by
winning on its two major battle fronts: over communism and the residue
of the 1960s counterculture. In the process, it had injected itself
into the main body of American conservatism to such a degree that it
was no longer particularly distinct from it. The eulogy was not a
lamentation, more an appreciation of a job well done.
But while there was something to the Podhoretz argument, the American
Right in 1995 did not have a neoconnish feel. Newt Gingrich and the
new Congress were the center of gravity; Rush Limbaugh was a far more
important figure than Bill Kristol; the issues that most agitated the
Right, gays in the military and Whitewater, were either the province
of religious and social conservatives or committed Republican
partisans.
On other national issues, neocons were either uncertain or not on the
cutting edge. Charles Murray's 1994 bestseller The Bell Curve, which
argued that IQ was hereditarily based and was increasingly and
ineluctably correlated with career success and life outcomes, was the
most discussed and controversial book on the Right, but neocons were
split over whether to distance themselves from it or quietly embrace
at least some of its analyses. Immigration, already an issue of
intense popular concern in California, was a key cause for National
Review, the oldest and most popular magazine on the Right. But most
neoconservatives deplored the immigration-reform impulse, with many
claiming to see in it an echo of the restrictionists of the 1920s,
whose legislation had the (obviously unintended) result of closing
America's door to Jewish refugees a decade later.
Foreign policy, which had been a prime unifier of the Right during the
Cold War, was on the back burner. Norman Podhoretz's Commentary had
been waging a lonely battle against the Oslo peace process (a track
leading to a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank), but its
position was very much in the minority among both foreign-affairs
experts and American Jews. In the quarterlies, foreign-policy
specialists debated America's role in the post-Cold War world, but it
was hard for most newspaper readers to keep up with obscure struggles
on the Balkans or complicated debate about NATO expansion. America, it
seemed, had no real enemies. Thus in 1995, it could be rightly claimed
that the original neoconservative movement had spawned a successor
generation, even two. But it was not clear what that generation's role
would be, if any.
Enter the Weekly Standard-edited principally by William Kristol, a
genial and sharp son of an eminent neoconservative family-which
arrived on the scene thanks to a $3 million annual subsidy from Rupert
Murdoch. It is not always understood beyond the world of journalism
that political opinion magazines almost invariably lose
money-sometimes a lot of it. The deficits are usually made up by their
owners and subscribers' contributions, some quite substantial.
Commentary was supported for most of its life by the American Jewish
Committee and now has a publication committee of formidably wealthy
people. William F. Buckley's National Review always had angels;
Buckley once answered a query about when his magazine would be
profitable by saying, "You don't expect the Church to make a profit,
do you?" The venerable Nation, at the time of the Standard's founding,
had an annual deficit of roughly $500,000, made up by owner Arthur
Carter. The prestigious Atlantic Monthly reportedly loses between $4
and $8 million a year.
That said, while the Standard's reported subsidy was gigantic for a
small ideological niche magazine, if Rupert Murdoch's purpose was to
make things happen in Washington and in the world, he could not have
leveraged it better. One could spend 10 times that much on political
action committees without achieving anything comparable.
It has never been obvious, however, what Murdoch's ideological and
political ambitions were. A brilliant businessman, he was generally
right-wing-though his newspapers and networks hardly humored socially
conservative sensibilities. His papers tended to endorse conservative
candidates who had a good chance of winning. More than anything else,
he seemed to relish his triumph over the British press unions. He was
not an immigration restrictionist but didn't share the neocon
antipathy to them. In 1993, it took considerable effort by New York
Post editorial-page editor Eric Breindel to persuade Murdoch that Rudy
Giuliani was vastly superior to the incumbent David Dinkins as a
candidate for mayor of New York. In one conversation I had with him
(during my own brief tenure as Post editorial-page editor) about the
paper's foreign-policy positions, he told me, when the discussion had
veered to Israel and the Middle East, "Well, it might not have been a
good idea to create it [Israel], but now that it's there, it has to be
supported." A splendidly ambiguous statement-perfectly consistent with
a strong pro-Israel position, but not the sort of thing an American
neoconservative would ever say.
The subsidy Murdoch accorded the Standard assured the new venture
would be highly visible by the standards of start-up political
magazines. It could afford a wide newsstand presence: it is costly for
any new magazine to print issues that will in most cases not be sold.
The Standard not only passed out thousands of complimentary issues
around Washington, it had them personally delivered to Beltway
influentials as soon as they were printed. Above all, the new journal
provided employment for a small coterie of neoconservative essayists
and a ready place to publish for dozens of apparatchiks who held posts
at the American Enterprise Institute and other neocon-friendly think
tanks.
With the fledgling Fox News network, the Standard soon emerged as the
key leg in a synergistic triangle of neoconservative argumentation:
you could write a piece for the magazine, talk about your ideas on
Fox, pick up a paycheck from Kristol or from AEI. It was not a way to
get rich, but it sustained a network of careers that might otherwise
have shriveled or been diverted elsewhere. Indeed, it did more than
sustain them, it gave neocons an aura of being "happening" inside the
Beltway that no other conservative (or liberal) faction could match.
Murdoch had refuted the otherwise plausible arguments in Norman
Podhoretz's eulogy.
But what was the Standard's type of neoconservatism? To some degree
the new magazine echoed the most popular GOP obsessions, exhibiting
for example a limitless enthusiasm for Kenneth Starr's inquisition
into Bill Clinton's sex life. It warned Republican lawmakers against
supporting a 1996 immigration reform that would have reduced the
numbers of legal and illegal immigrants. (Asians and Hispanics had
"increasingly Republican partisan inclinations" the magazine claimed,
without evidence.) It had a moment-one issue, precisely-of Great Fear
when it seemed possible that Pat Buchanan would capture the 1996
Republican presidential nomination and devoted a three-article cover
spread to bemoaning the possibility. (One piece was a smear, one a
reasoned look at Buchanan's protectionist economic views, and one
contained the interesting assertion that Buchanan's views on issues
were not particularly extreme-and in fact shared by tens of millions
of Americans-but his way of presenting them was, and therein lay the
problem.) It published Robert Kagan's attack on Samuel Huntington's
"Clash of Civilizations" under the charming neo-McCarthyesque title
"Harvard Hates America." But except for its foreign-policy stances,
the Standard seemed a bit themeless throughout its early life.
Nor does the recently released The Weekly Standard: A Reader 1995-2005
pinpoint the editorial heart of the publication. The volume (as does
the magazine itself) contains several excellent pieces, exuding an
urbane and sophisticated moderate conservatism. Worthy of note is what
may be the finest appreciation in print of the Columbia literary
critic and neoconservative precursor Lionel Trilling, written by
Gertrude Himmelfarb (Bill Kristol's mother). The collection also
contains essays by Christopher Caldwell, Joseph Epstein, and Andrew
Ferguson that any editor would be proud to publish. The magazine's
hawkishness is not exactly swept under the bed; Kristol and Robert
Kagan's "Saddam Must Go" editorial of November 1997 is reprinted: "We
know it seems unthinkable to propose another ground attack to take
Baghdad. But it's time to start thinking the unthinkable." Charles
Krauthammer's "At Last, Zion" (May 1998) is a powerful and moving
explanation of why Israel is at the center of his (and much
neoconservative) consciousness. In "The Holocaust Shrug" (April 2004),
David Gelernter wheels out the tried and tested appeasement analogy in
support of the Iraq War. Saddam is no Hitler, Gelernter acknowledges,
but "the world's indifference to Saddam resembles its indifference to
Hitler."
But these foreign-policy essays, making up perhaps a fifth of the
volume, don't do justice to the central role the Iraq War played in
establishing the Standard's identity. For despite the publication's
subsidy and visibility, before 9/11 it seemed to be floundering. It
was unable to push George W. Bush in a direction it wanted. Most of
the editors had supported John McCain in the Republican primaries; no
neoconservatives received cabinet-level posts in the administration.
The varied balloons Kristol and company hoisted to give a focus to
their politics ("national greatness conservatism" was one, with an
emphasis on an assertive foreign policy and constructing patriotic
monuments) never gained much altitude. In 2001, Kristol mentioned to
some that he was considering closing down the magazine. The Standard's
last cover story before 9/11 was a long meditation by David Brooks on
the TV show "Gilligan's Island" and what the evolution of pop culture
said about globalization.
One day a novel must be written that conveys the sense of purpose and
energy that surged through the Standard's offices-and that of the
whole Washington neoconservative network-in the days after September
11, 2001. No more esoteric musings about Gilligan and the Skipper. The
Project for a New American Century-a Bill Kristol-founded pressure
group that specialized in gathering the signatures of the obscure and
moderately famous in support of a more militarized foreign
policy-would be ignored no longer. At long last, there would be an
audience.
Inside the administration were ***** Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their
staffs, heavy with signatories of the original 1998 PNAC
Saddam-must-be-removed letter. They set out to neutralize the
skeptical CIA and Colin Powell's more cautious State Department and
rush the White House into a war in Iraq. Their story has been told in
several book-length accounts and administration memoirs. Outside, with
the vital task of shaping public opinion, the Standard emerged as the
nerve center, a focal point to concentrate and diffuse the message of
the Beltway neocons. For these bookish men, it was a Churchillian
moment, an occasion to use words to rally a nation and shape history.
Their job was to divert America's wrath away from those who
perpetrated the attack and turn it against those who did not. It was,
on the face of it, quite a stretch. The day before 9/11, the idea of a
ground invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein's Iraq was as
"unthinkable" as it had been when Kristol and Kagan had first broached
it four years earlier. But the country was confused-in shock and
primed for vengeance. Suddenly there was a large national audience for
foreign-policy discussion on the TV networks and talk-radio programs.
The whole conservative movement was looking for guidance. If
repetition could somehow insert into the national consciousness and
thereby render plausible an idea that would otherwise have occurred to
very few, the Standard would be up to the task. Again and again the
refrain would be pounded out, "Saddam Must Go!" and would be picked up
by commentators further down the ideological food chain.
In the first issue the magazine published after 9/11, Gary Schmitt and
Tom Donnelly, two employees of Kristol's PNAC, clarified what ought to
be the country's war aims. Their rhetoric-which laid down a line from
which the magazine would not waver over the next 18 months-was to link
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in virtually every paragraph, to
join them at the hip in the minds of readers, and then to lay out a
strategy that actually gave attacking Saddam priority over eliminating
al-Qaeda. The first piece was illustrated with a caricature of Saddam,
not bin Laden, and the proposed operational plan against bin Laden was
astonishingly soft. "While it is probably not necessary to go to war
with Afghanistan, a broad approach will be required, " they wrote.
Taliban failure to help root out bin Laden ought to be "rewarded by
aid to its Afghan opposition." Presumably Ramsey Clark was tendering
advice more dovish than this, but it could not have been by much.
Against Saddam, by contrast, no such caution was contemplated. "To be
sure," the PNAC duo intoned, "Usama bin Laden and his organization
should be a prime target in this campaign. ... But the larger campaign
must also go after Saddam Hussein. He might well be implicated in this
week's attacks - or he might not. But as with bin Laden, we have long
known that Saddam is our enemy, and that he would strike us as hard as
he could. ...The only reasonable course when faced with such foes is
to preempt and to strike first." "Eliminating Saddam," they concluded,
"is the key to restoring our regional dominance."
If by week two the Standard had laid out a grand strategy (focus on
the Saddam end of the fanciful "Saddam-bin Laden axis"), by week three
it had found an iconic cover photo to reinforce the message. Max
Boot's "The Case for an American Empire" was illustrated with two Navy
enlisted men in bright white uniforms, one black, one white, raising
(or perhaps lowering) the stars and stripes, the sea stretching before
them. This imperialism, the photo said, would be based on racial
harmony. It evoked the "France of 100 million" posters that recruited
soldiers from the empire to fight the Huns in World War I.
"Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of
enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident
Englishmen," Boot wrote.
Once Afghanistan has been dealt with, America should "turn its
attention to Iraq." "Who cares if Saddam was involved" in the 9/11
attacks? Boot did not. Saddam "has already earned himself a death
sentence a thousand times over. ... He is currently working to acquire
weapons of mass destruction that he or his confederates will unleash
against America. ... Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an
American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the
one in Kabul. With American seriousness and credibility thus restored,
we will enjoy fruitful cooperation from the region's many opportunists
'"
Standard writers would repeat these arguments for the next 17 months.
"If two or three years from now Saddam is still in power, the war on
terrorism will have failed," wrote Gary Schmitt some weeks later.
Several weeks after that, it was Reuel Marc Gerecht's turn: "Unless
Saddam Hussein is removed, the war on terror will fail." The line
derived from the letter of menace Kristol and PNAC had addressed to
George W. Bush on September 20, 2001. Failure to attack Iraq, they
told the president, would "constitute an early and perhaps decisive
surrender" in the War on Terror.
A magazine communicates through its covers as well. Most telling was
one of George W. Bush, gesticulating before an audience of troops, arm
extended in a Caesarian pose. "The Liberator," the Standard headline
proclaimed. Flatter the leader who will do your bidding. It was
February 2003, and the editors knew by then that war was almost
certain.
Bush and his team have since fallen out of favor in Standard land. The
magazine has begun blaming the bungled prosecution of the war on
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and has called for his resignation. As
Bush sinks in the polls, the journal will surely look to other
politicians to carry out its aspirations. If David Brooks, now a New
York Times columnist, is an indicator, that figure is likely to be a
centrist or a "progressive" in the Joe Lieberman mode-conservatism as
a vehicle for neoconservative foreign-policy goals having been pretty
much run into the ground.
During the second week of the Iraq invasion, the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz interviewed several intellectual supporters of the war. The
New York Times' Thomas Friedman (who backed the war despite being
haunted by its similarities to Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon,
which he saw firsthand) suggested that this was very much an
intellectuals' war. "It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those
people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it.
Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses
demanded. This is a war of an elite - I could give you the names of 25
people (all of whom are at this moment within a five block radius of
this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and
a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened." Then Friedman
paused, clarifying, "It's not some fantasy the neoconservatives
invented. It's not that 25 people hijacked America. You don't take
such a great nation into such a great adventure with Bill Kristol and
the Weekly Standard and another five or six influential columnists. In
the final analysis what fomented the war is America's over-reaction to
September 11. ... It is not only the neoconservatives that led us to
the outskirts of Baghdad. What led us to the outskirts of Baghdad is a
very American combination of anxiety and hubris."
That kind of ambiguous conclusion about the Standard's and the
neocons' role in starting the war is what the undisputed and public
evidence will sustain. The Standard was important. It amplified the
views of "the 25" the way luncheon seminars at the American Enterprise
Institute and other neocon think tanks never could have.
Its role can be likened to the Yellow Press, the Hearst papers and
Pulitzer's New York World, which did everything they could to
instigate a war against Spain over Cuba in the 1890s and boosted their
circulation mightily in the process. In the wake of 9/11, the Standard
didn't have to create the martial atmosphere artificially, just divert
it from Osama to Saddam.
Without the Weekly Standard, would the invasion of Iraq taken place?
It's impossible to know. Without the Standard, other voices-including
those of the realist foreign-policy establishment, which had been
dominant in the first Bush administration and which opposed a
precipitous campaign against Saddam-would have been on a more level
playing field with the neocons. That would have made a difference.
So in a sense the Iraq War is Bill Kristol's War as much as it is
George W. Bush's and ***** Cheney's, and the Standard is the vehicle
that made it possible. It should go down in history as Rupert
Murdoch's War as well, and thus becomes by far the most significant
historical event ever to be shaped by the Murdoch media.
How ironic it would be if it were not, in the end, a war Rupert
Murdoch particularly wanted.
November 21, 2005 Issue
http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_21/article.html
.
|
