'Alone' indicts neocons, Bush

Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke are experienced, conservative foreign policy experts. Halper served as deputy assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, and Clarke had extensive service in the British diplomatic corps.

In "America Alone," they document the neo-conservative capture of American (and British) foreign policy, under the guise of a war on terror, to reorder Mideast politics and initiate a new doctrine of pre-emptive war.

Halper and Clarke are insiders who know the players and the sources. Their thoughtful, insightful work spans ideological and partisan differences, a rare phenomenon in these times.

The authors understand the history of American foreign policy. Detente, bipartisanship and respect for the views of allies are at the center of that history; they are not, as the neocons would have it, notions of weakness best replaced by a militant American world view and unilateralism.

Halper and Clarke blend realism and idealism. For them, victory in the Cold War resulted from a firm U.S. adherence to the doctrine of containment and a moral authority rooted in fostering the idea of a free, open society. Now, the authors contend, President George W. Bush and a band of ideological zealots have put that moral authority at risk."America Alone" levels a broad indictment against the Bush administration, which in the name of the war on terror has launched the Iraq war, mounted an assault on personal liberties at home, engaged in a purposeful deceit of the media and the public and, above all, has inflicted terrible damage on U.S. moral authority. The chief culprits for the authors are the neocons, who are depicted as conspirators who hijacked American foreign policy.

This is not exactly news, but the argument never has been put together so persuasively, so conclusively and so effectively.

Today neocons are the key Bush players, including Vice President Dick Cheney; his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; and Rumsfeld assistant Paul Wolfowitz. They are seconded by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and influential academic intellectuals and writers who preach warnings and celebrate their alleged triumphs.

The neocons have masked themselves as the true keepers of the Reagan flame, but Halper and Clarke will have none of that. The neocons, they bluntly charge, have "falsified history" and have inflicted a "historical mugging" on Reagan.

The neocons' mobilization for the Iraq war lies at the heart of this book. Saddam Hussein's tyranny apparently gave them no pause during his 10-year war with Iran. But George H.W. Bush's Persian Gulf War in 1991 left them embittered when Bush prudently decided that occupying Baghdad would only complicate the American role and endanger the grand alliance he had constructed.

The neocons were convinced that toppling Saddam would enable the United States to make Mideast politics more responsive to American wishes - and, not incidentally, also to help the Israelis. The idea had its origins in the late 1990s, when Richard Perle and Douglas Feith offered a bizarre plan to Israel's Likud Party calling for American-Israeli cooperation to overthrow Iraqi and Syrian regimes with American assistance. Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud's leader, wisely rejected this grandiose vision.

The neocons persuaded Bush that regime change was essential in Iraq, although in his few pre-presidential foreign policy utterances he had specifically rejected such a course. After Sept. 11, the neocons advanced "evidence" that Iraq played a crucial role in al-Qaida's worldwide terrorism plans. Halper and Clarke demonstrate that the neocons knew that the fundamentalist-dominated al-Qaida had no connection to the secular Saddam.

They knew that Saddam was no threat to American interests or values. The Persian Gulf War taught him not to threaten his neighbors - exactly as Richard Clarke argued, to no avail. The administration had very little evidence - precious little, as we have learned - that Iraq had nuclear, biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction.

Halper and Clarke denounce the Bush administration for effectively co-opting "important allies and entire government agencies in a pattern of deceit." The administration, they believe, created "a synthetic neurosis," which it buttressed by exploiting the Sept. 11 attacks. The price has been enormous, they say, with "substantial damage" to both core American political institutions and to American "institutional legitimacy."

With an election campaign looming, President Bush now concedes that "I believe in the international institutions and alliances that America helped to form and helps to lead."

Alas, the president and his advisers have rediscovered American history and policy only as our financial and military resources have dwindled, our moral authority has evaporated, our allies have become alienated and, worst of all, our adversaries are newly energized.

Regime change in Iraq, as this book tells us, has substituted one order of chaos for another, but this time at the cost of substantial American blood and treasure. The war in Iraq was imposed amid a climate of fear and patriotic fervor, with manufactured deceptions about our purposes and the enemy's.

Saddam Hussein was a brutal, ruthless tyrant, but he was no Adolf Hitler, and no realistic threat to the United States and the rest of the world, whatever George W. Bush and his neoconservative warriors tell us.

Stanley I. Kutler is the author of "The Wars of Watergate" and editor of "The Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century."

Stanley I. Kutler