Jonathan Clarke Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Over these years, there was a generational change among the neo-conservatives, and this new generation, represented by Irving Kristol's son, William Kristol, and others; these individuals had come to have a much more ambitious view of how American power could transform the world, when we compare them to, for example, Irving Kristol himself, who had a more limited notion that the U.S. could go in somewhere and, for example, change a Muslim society to a Western democracy.
The first generation was strongly anti-Communist and strongly opposed to things like détente, but were not expeditionary in a sense that this later generation [was]. One of the reasons for that, of course, was that the military technology was not yet available in the seventies and eighties. But what happened in the 1990s, which was really where modern neo-conservatism started to take root, was under the Clinton administration. The Clinton administration was everything that neo-conservatives didn't like. It was unfocused, it was unconceptualized, it was random, it wasn't particularly interested in international affairs, it occasionally talked the big talk over the Balkans but never actually did anything. It talked the big talk about responding to terrorist attacks but never in fact followed through.
During the 1990s, Irving Kristol's son, Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz, John Bolten, Jim Woolsey, then in the CIA, started to put together a very strong blueprint for American intervention in the Middle East. Their strategy behind that was a very far-reaching one, which was that the United States risked getting embroiled in an extremely uncomfortable and awkward challenge in the Middle East brought about by the basic instability of the area, and they saw that if America was drawn into that there was just simply no good outcomes for the United States. So, they developed a concept which would somehow see American power intervening there and trying to unleash a sort of democratic cascade.
Iraq was a particularly suitable choice to start that enterprise, inasmuch as it was headed by an international villain like Saddam Hussein, it was relatively doable, in a sense. Iraq was a weak country, unlike Iran, a much tougher proposition in the area, although arguably much more the source of instability in the Middle East. So, Iraq was a good place for neo-conservatives to develop this idea of linking the advancement of American ideals, sort of Wilsonianism, with American power.
In summary one could say that this set of ideas came into play after 9/11 in a very powerful way and ultimately focusing on Iraq, whether or not Iraq had anything to do with either 9/11 or al Qaeda. So, the power of these ideas put aside what we were talking about earlier, namely understanding the culture, the history, the tradition in place, and one would have to say these ideas were married to America's new-found military power summarized in the term "shock and awe" to hope that a major transformation could occur in Iraq.
When you put this all together, what you're saying is that an interest group, in the way that George Washington warned about in his farewell address, had come into play in the American system with the detrimental consequences that you've talked about.
That's right. I think what one is saying here is that the idea of attacking Iraq was around well before 9/11. Paul Wolfowitz, for example, is on record saying that he'd been interested in intervening in Iraq since 1979. So, it goes a long way back. The reasons for neo-conservative interest in Iraq have much more to do with transformation of the region, for democratization of the region, than they have ever had anything to do with 9/11 or terrorism, or anything like that. It was much more this trying to bring about a greater stability in the region for what they saw as good American reasons, and concentrating on that part of the world to the detriment of elsewhere. That's where you describe them as a special interest group. In other words, they did bring a really very limited range of ideas and interests to the table, and which they represented as the whole of American foreign policy, and that the mistake is in enabling them to go ahead with those projects to perhaps the detriment of wider American interests.
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