lectrotext
14-01-2004, 08:57 AM
The new Jacobins are intent on global reconstruction and rooting out “evil.” After 9/11 President Bush became their chief spokesman. Paradoxically, in his election campaign, Bush had repeatedly promised a more “humble” foreign policy and a move away from interventionism and nation building. If he had meant what he said then, 9/11 brought a metamorphosis. Neo-Jacobins who had worried that Bush might be an obstacle to their plans were delighted by the ease with which he could be converted to their cause. He adopted the neo-Jacobin rhetoric of his speechwriters with evident relish, explicitly committing America to armed world hegemony, portraying it as the savior nation: “There is a value system that cannot be compromised, and that is the values we praise. And if the values are good enough for our people, they ought to be good enough for others.”
Bush’s conversion, if indeed there was one, was no accident. Especially since the end of the Cold War, neo-Jacobin ideology had spread quickly through think tanks, magazines, newspapers, the electronic media, and the two main parties, especially the Republicans. The ideology had long been propounded by a profusion of writers and activists such as Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, and William Kristol. In the president’s inner circle, it had a leading spokesman in Paul Wolfowitz. One of Wolfowitz’s old professors was Allan Bloom, with whom he had stayed in touch. Politicians and businessmen like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had been drawn into the neo-Jacobin ambit through protracted cultivation.
The new Jacobins are not content to promote and protect American and Western interests and to nurture a common ground with other countries. They have a panacea and insist that the world adopt it. Virtually all Americans recognized the necessity of an emphatic response to 9/11. The reason this atrocity did not elicit focused action against the perpetrators but became instead the justification for war against Iraq and a worldwide battle against terrorism is that neo-Jacobin intellectuals and activists had long prepared to launch such a policy. After 9/11 they could push through policies whose full implications were not obvious to their less ideological bosses. President Bush had the excuses that he confronted wholly unanticipated and unsettling circumstances and was not an intellectual and historian able fully to understand the cause that he adopted.
<the whole article>
http://www.amconmag.com/1_19_04/article.html
Bush’s conversion, if indeed there was one, was no accident. Especially since the end of the Cold War, neo-Jacobin ideology had spread quickly through think tanks, magazines, newspapers, the electronic media, and the two main parties, especially the Republicans. The ideology had long been propounded by a profusion of writers and activists such as Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, and William Kristol. In the president’s inner circle, it had a leading spokesman in Paul Wolfowitz. One of Wolfowitz’s old professors was Allan Bloom, with whom he had stayed in touch. Politicians and businessmen like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had been drawn into the neo-Jacobin ambit through protracted cultivation.
The new Jacobins are not content to promote and protect American and Western interests and to nurture a common ground with other countries. They have a panacea and insist that the world adopt it. Virtually all Americans recognized the necessity of an emphatic response to 9/11. The reason this atrocity did not elicit focused action against the perpetrators but became instead the justification for war against Iraq and a worldwide battle against terrorism is that neo-Jacobin intellectuals and activists had long prepared to launch such a policy. After 9/11 they could push through policies whose full implications were not obvious to their less ideological bosses. President Bush had the excuses that he confronted wholly unanticipated and unsettling circumstances and was not an intellectual and historian able fully to understand the cause that he adopted.
<the whole article>
http://www.amconmag.com/1_19_04/article.html