The neocons have been making mischief for more than 100 years
FRANK JOHNSON
What books, if any, important politicians read, as well as being of itself interesting, could also influence how they rule. In the late 1940s, it became known that both the prime minister, Attlee, and the opposition leader, Churchill, had chosen the same holiday reading: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
It might have confirmed both in the belief that in the Soviet Union the West was threatened by a form of barbarian invasion, and that we should be better organised at defending ourselves against it than were the Romans. President Bush, it is said, reads the Bible every day. Even more useful to him, for his day-to-day conduct of affairs, might be to read about the similarities between himself today and the rulers of previous great powers. He will find much that is familiar.
He will find, for example, the noisy counsellors who assure him that there is a threat, that if he is to deal with it, it is now or never, and that victory will be quick. To mention just one of many precedents, he will discover that he is the Lord Salisbury of our day.
Salisbury's Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz figure in the late 1890s, when Salisbury was a Conservative head of government, was Lord Milner, the governor of the British Cape Colony. Miler's Iraq was the Boer republic of the Transvaal. It was a threat to the British position in southern Africa, he said. How was it a threat? Milner could not point to weapons of mass destruction. So he pointed to its treatment of the British who had gone to live there: the uitlanders. They were, among other things, denied the vote, it seemed. But that was defensible from the Boer point of view. The Boers considered the Transvaal their country. They did not want the uitlanders to become the majority. In any case, the British living there did not seem particularly upset at their lack of a vote. They had not gone there for votes. Many had gone there for gold and diamonds.
Many of the Boers were disagreeable, as their treatment of the blacks in the mid20th century was to show. But Milner did not emphasise the plight of the blacks. He emphasised the altogether more endurable plight of the uitlanders. In due course, the latter, by a petition to Queen Victoria and other plays on British domestic opinion, convinced enough British voters that their position had become intolerable. Salisbury, like Mr Bush when elected in 2000, was a quietist. Like Mr Bush, he had not come to office with any great scheme of foreign policy in mind. Doubtless Mr Bush, on becoming President, thought it would be a happy turn of events if he could overthrow his father's enemy and attempted assassin, Saddam. But the idea had played no part in his election campaign. That campaign was almost entirely a matter of his reassuring what we call 'floating voters' — especially women — that he was not especially rightwing; that he was 'a compassionate conservative'. That was the explanation for there being so many blacks and Hispanics on the platform at the 2000 Republican convention, and hardly any in the hall. Mr Bush did not expect many blacks or Hispanics — apart from anti-Castro Cubans around Miami — to vote for him. Nor did they. He hoped that their presence on the convention platform would reassure voters who might otherwise be hostile to him. Salisbury, whose version of placating blacks and Hispanics was placating the urban working class, would have approved.
But, for Salisbury and Mr Bush, foreign affairs interfered with their domestic idyll, which should have surprised neither, since both presided over superpowers. Salisbury had another Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz on his hands in the form of his colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. He too was for teaching the Boers a lesson. Salisbury also had, as part of his governing and electoral coalition, his neoconservatives — that is, the imperialists: politicians and journalists who thought that the British empire should be more assertive, should spread its values to unenlightened peoples such as the Boers. Chamberlain himself was something of a neoconservative. American neoconservatives
include many former Democrats and liberals. Traditional Republicans — who now call themselves palaeoconservatives, a group of whom publish a wonderfully readable magazine, Chronicles — say that neoconservatism is just another form of internationalism.
Chamberlain was a former Liberal. He had broken with Gladstone's Liberal party when it had embraced Irish Home Rule. Like today's American neoconservatives, he threw in his lot with the right-of-centre party, and soon came to believe that it was not right-of-centre enough.
Milner too was originally a Liberal. He, Chamberlain and the other British neoconservatives of the late 1890s had their war against the Boers. Like Mr Rumsfeld, Mr Wolfowitz and today's American neoconservatives, they told their head of government that it would be short. But it would last two and three quarter years and cost 22,000 British lives. Had Salisbury known that, it is unlikely that he would have embarked on it. As it was, he began to blame Milner and Chamberlain for getting him into it. Mr Bush's Chamberlains and Milners did not tell him that a year on he would still be fighting a classic colonial guerrilla war which might prevent his re-election. Had Mr Bush known that, it must be doubted that he would have invaded Iraq a year ago. His present acts do not suggest a heart in the neoconservative cause. His words still do. He makes speeches saying that the United States can bring democracy to Iraq and in due course to the rest of the Middle East. That is neoconservative doctrine. He is not yet ready to betray it. So vast a task would need even more American troops in Iraq than there are now. Yet he has promised to start withdrawing them in the summer. The war is becoming unpopular at home. Troops are not re-enlisting.
After the Boer war, Salisbury won his reelection campaign: the 1900 'khaki' one. Mr Bush might win in November. If he does, it could even be argued that he would have lost because of the economy, and that Iraq enabled him to play the khaki card. But his troops will still go home, and it is reasonable to suppose that Iraq will in due course be ruled by some sort of authoritarian regime. The neoconservatives and the Republican Right will then accuse Mr Bush of not staying the course. But no president will take their advice again. Their war has given the United States, as Kipling said of the Boer war, 'no end of a lesson'.
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