1

Neoconservative Dreams: the End of History, Utopias,

and the American Invasion of Iraq in 2003

This is an extended version of the talk given at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David,

Lampeter, 18 May 2016, for the launch of my book, The New Age in the Modern West:

Counter-Culture, Utopia and Prophecy from the late Eighteenth Century to the Present Day

(London: Bloomsbury 2015).

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-new-age-in-the-modern-west-9781472522795/

Nicholas Campion

Senior Lecturer, School of Archaeology, History and Anthropology,

University of Wales Trinity Saint David,

n.campion@uwtsd.ac.uk

This talk is about the reasons for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, based on material from my new

book, The New Age in the Modern West. My argument is that the neoconservatives who

controlled US foreign policy after 9/11 were enthusiastically implementing a metaphysical

and millenarian belief that history was bound to end in the triumph of American values. The

well-known lack of planning for the aftermath was therefore not a matter of simple

incompetence, but of deliberate calculation. To the neoconservative mindset, if success was

inevitable there was no point in planning for the aftermath: the metaphysics of history would

take care of it. The neoconservatives were born-again utopians, and like so many of their

predecessors, their plans came tragically unstuck when faced with reality.

The title is clear enough, I hope. My subtitle, Counterculture, Utopia and Prophecy,

elaborates the theme. These are three words which we can tangle with. Counterculture is a

word probably coined in 1969 to describe the 1960s’ youthful revolutions and hope that a

better world was dawning. In this 500th anniversary year of the publication of Thomas More’s

Utopia, utopianism is recognised as a general psychological condition in which people dream

of a better future, even though in popular journalism it is often used dismissively. Prophecy?

Well prophets tell us what that better future will be. All three words in my subtitle therefore

deal with varieties of expectation about the future.

First, a word from Herbert Marcuse, who wrote, ‘Utopia...refers to projects for change that

are considered impossible’.1 This is the problem with utopias. With the best will in the world

they founder upon the realities of human nature and the inevitability of change. The attempt

to create perfect societies is doomed by the laws of human behaviour and psychology,

witness the grand failure of all varieties of religious, communist and socialist model

communities created over the last century.

As I said, my focus today is on material from the last chapter of my book, which discusses

American neoconservatism and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. You might wonder what such

material is doing in a book on New Age prophecy. My argument, simply stated, is that

neoconservatism and New Age share certain fundamental characteristics, so much so that

they can be considered part of the same family if ideas. I am going to outline the thesis I

explore concerning the ideological reasons for the invasion. Everything I am saying is taken

from material in the public record, and the broad structure of my argument is set out in an

1 Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychafter oanalysis, Politics and Utopia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970),

p. 63.

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article in The Daily Telegraph by Sir Christopher Meyer, former British Ambassador to

Washington.2 I have filled in the gaps.

It is fair enough to say that the invasion of Iraq was one of the great foreign policy blunders

of modern times. To quote Christopher Meyer, ‘The failure to plan meticulously for

Saddam’s aftermath led to almost a decade of violent chaos and the ultimate humiliation of

British forces’.3 Five words in Meyer’s statement form the basis of my investigation: ‘The

failure to plan meticulously’. My question is why was there such a failure?

For the British government the Iraq invasion can be compared to the Suez adventure of 1956.

We are now approaching the 60th anniversary of that debacle, another disastrous military

adventure which was justified by a fair amount of deception. Of the two, the human costs of

the Iraq invasion have been immeasurably higher, and thirteen years later the country is still

gripped by popular dissent, government corruption, sectarian rivalry bordering on civil war,

and the horrors perpetrated by the so-called Islamic State.

It was long ago recognised that prior to the invasion there was no planning for the aftermath.

The year after the invasion an army post-mortem concluded that

the common perception throughout the theater is that a roadmap for the rebuilding of

Iraq does not exist. There is not a plan that outlines priorities with short, medium and

long-term objectives. If such a plan exists within the CPA [Coalition Provisional

Authority], it has not been communicated adequately to Coalition forces.4

There was indeed no plan for what was known as Phase IV – the period of reconstruction – because, as Jay Garner, first Director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian assistance in

Baghdad, asked, if the expectation was that there would be a democratic American-friendly

government installed by June 2003, ‘why have a phase IV plan?’ Unfortunately for the

Americans, a plan was precisely what the Iranians had.5 Neither, by the way, should we

imagine that the lack of a plan was a secret. Michael Ancram, the British shadow foreign

secretary, had raised the problem in the House of Commons before the invasion.

It is widely agreed that the chaos of the aftermath of the invasion can be blamed on the

military’s lack of readiness. To this we might add what appears to be an almost total failure

by the Foreign Office in London to pay any attention to local conditions in Iraqi society and

politics. I say ‘appears to be an almost total failure’ because Meyer claims that Blair ignored

‘repeated warnings from the Foreign Office and the Washington embassy’.6 For Meyer, the

Foreign Office is absolved of blame. However, we may not know the nature of that Foreign

Policy advice until the relevant papers are released, and under the thirty year rule this takes us

to 2033. That said, Blair’s decision to ignore the best advice on local conditions in Iraq is one

2 Christopher Meyer, ‘Iraq War: Sir Christopher Meyer: 'I'm with you whatever', Tony Blair told George Bush’,

The Daily Telegraph, 9 March 2013.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/9919816/Iraq-War-Sir-Christopher-Meyer-Im-

with-you-whatever-Tony-Blair-told-George-Bush.html 3 Meyer, ‘Iraq War’. 4 Cited in Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin 2006), p. 103.

See also p.212. 5 Cited in Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin 2006), p. 110;

see also p. 122.. 6 Meyer, ‘Iraq War’

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I wish to explore. Meyer hinted at the reason – Blair’s adoption of an extreme

neoconservative position. I will elaborate on this,

Even Blair now concedes that to ignore local conditions was a reason for the post-invasion

disaster. In 2015 he finally issued a qualified apology: ‘I also apologise for some of the

mistakes in planning and, certainly, our mistake in our understanding of what would happen

once you removed the regime’.7 On 25 May 2016 he added a little more detail and was

reported as having admitted that

the West must learn the “lesson” that toppling dictators can lead to the rise of

extremists…We underestimated profoundly the forces that were at work in the region

and that would take advantage of the change once you topple the regime. That’s the

lesson. The lesson is not actually complicated, the lesson is simple. It’s that when you

remove a dictator out come these forces of destabilisation.8

Again, this begs the question, why did Blair ignore the advice that Meyer says was offered

him? What world view did he subscribe to that allowed him to overrule Foreign Office

advice? The question of Blair’s philosophy is usually overlooked. For example, Tom Bower,

for all his detailed documentation of Blair’s alleged failings in his biography, Broken Vows,

never asks why Blair behaved as he did and pays no attention whatsoever to his ideology. He

only gives this hint of Blair’s historical determinism: Tony Blair, according to Tom Bower,

paid no attention to military briefings because ‘His instinct…convinced him that… Iraqis

would embrace liberal democracy once the ruling dictatorship had been destroyed’.9

Most books on the Iraq invasion are purely descriptive. They are chronicles, and as such are

clearly important and extremely useful as sources, but they are usually devoid of analysis. I

am thinking particularly of fine books by John Le Anderson, Patrick Cockburn, Russ

Feingold and Thomas Ricks.10 I have relied heavily on Ricks, in particular. Even Robert

Fisk’s magisterial study of the Middle East pays no attention to ideology.11 That the

American government was dominated by neoconservatives is usually ignored, which is

curious. Would one really expect to understand, say, Lenin’s policies with no reference to his

ideology. Or Mao’s? Or Roosevelt’s? Or any significant politician?

Patrick Cockburn, for example, has written a brilliant account of the war but locates the

radical nature of the US invasion solely in that fact that as the sole surviving superpower the

US could do what it liked. Therefore it could turn what had been the greatest Arab power –

until the first Gulf War – into a quasi-colonial state, seizing its oil reserves and altering the

global balance of power, just because it could.12 But surely life is a little more complex than

that? Cockburn allows only a passing reference to psychological motives for the invasion –

7 Nicholas Watt, ‘Tony Blair makes qualified apology for Iraq war ahead of Chilcot report’, The Observer, 25

October 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/25/tony-blair-sorry-iraq-war-mistakes-admits-

conflict-role-in-rise-of-isis 8 Steven Swinford, ‘I misread risks of Iraq war, admits Blair’, The Daily Telegraph, 25 May 2016, p. 2. 9 Tom Bower, Broken Vows: Tony Blair: the Tragedy of Power, London Faber and Faber, 2016. p. 234 10 John Lee Anderson, The Fall of Baghdad (London: Abacus, 2010); Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War

and Resistance in Iraq (London: Verso, 2007); Russ Feingold, While America Sleeps: a Wake-Up Call for the

Post-911 Era (New York: crown Publishers, 2011); Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military

Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin 2006). 11 Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East (London: Harper Perennial,

2006). 12 Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (London: Verso, 2007) pp. 1-2.

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‘imperial self-confidence’ born of what then seemed like success in Afghanistan, with

reinforcement of domestic support as an added bonus.13 He considers that ‘The debate on

why the US invaded Iraq has been over-sophisticated’.14 But was there seriously no other

motive? My argument that the Bush White House was driven by a historical ideology is

neither sophisticated nor controversial. The evidence is entirely within the public domain, but

widely ignored.

The Chilcot Inquiry into the invasion, it has now been announced, is to be finally published

on 6 July. Advance speculation on the contents of the report holds that the army was

unprepared because it had to stand by while Tony Blair and George W. Bush perpetuated the

fiction that they were waiting for the UN weapons inspectors to do their job. But this doesn’t

explain everything.

Especially, we need to ask why Blair and Bush were so determined to invade Iraq? One easy

answer is control of Iraqi oil. Well, oil undoubtedly made Iraq important, and there might

have been no first Gulf War back in 1990-1 if Iraq had not attempted to seize control of

Kuwait’s oil. The question has been extensively debated and it is beyond doubt that oil was a

factor in US military strategy. That this was so was clearly spelled out in the US ‘1992

Defence Planning Guidance’, which became the foundation of the so-called Rumsfeld

doctrine: ‘In the Middle East…our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside

power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil’.15 This is fairly

unambiguous.

But the need to control oil is only one reason for American interventionism. After all,

Afghanistan had no oil but was invaded in 2001. Even before the invasion of Afghanistan

minority voices questioned whether military action was the best way to deal with al-Qaeda.

The alternative strategy would have been to supply support to the Northern Alliance whose

heroic leader Ahmed Shah Massoud had been assassinated on 9 September 2011, a few days

before the attack on the Twin Towers. The assassination of Massoud is presumed to have

been organised by al-Qaeda in order to win favour with their Taliban hosts, reason enough for

the Northern Alliance to strike against Osama bin Laden. The reasons for the invasion were

partly strategic and partly psychological: to destroy al-Qaeda but also to avenge the worst

humiliation since Pearl Harbour.

Arguments that foreign policy is determined by crude considerations of resources and profit

ignore the fact that people are psychological creatures. From this point of view Saddam

Hussein needed punishing because he was insufficiently respectful of US power after his

defeat in 1991 and the 9/11 attack on the New York Twin Towers almost ten years later

provided a handy excuse. Here we turn to Meyer again:

Mr Bush’s critics have never cut him any slack for 9/11’s devastating emotional and

psychological impact. People forget that the greatest fear afterwards was that another

terrorist outrage would soon follow.’

13 Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (London: Verso, 2007) p. 2. See also p. 3. 14 Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (London: Verso, 2007), p. 2. 15 ‘Excerpt from the recent Department of Defense release of the February 18, 1992 draft Defense Planning

Guidance’, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb245/doc03_extract_nytedit.pdf

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An emphasis on resources and profit as a motive for international relations ignores

psychology – and it also ignores ideology.

Oil policy needs to be contextualised within an ideological framework. Here is Christopher

Meyer again, reminiscing on a meeting with the neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz

I remember a meeting with an old friend, Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neo-con thinker

on foreign affairs. Paul waxed fervently to me about the need to extend democracy to

the Middle East, create in Iraq an alternative to Saudi Arabia as an oil-producing ally

of the US, and occupy forthwith the southern Iraqi oil fields, from where to

undermine Saddam.

When Wolfowitz said before the invasion. ‘If we commit (our) forces, we’re not going to

commit them for anything less than a free and democratic Iraq’, he was showing genuine

commitment to neocon ideology.16 Similarly, we can understand George W. Bush’s pride

when in September 2003 he announced that,

Together, we are helping the long-suffering people of that country to build a decent

and democratic society at the center of the Middle East. Together we are transforming

a place of torture chambers and mass graves into a nation of laws and free

institutions.17

The neocons were idealists, dreamers of a better future, and many of their policies would

never be questioned by western liberals or socialists: in 2006 Bremer boasted that female

participation in the workforce had risen by 50% since the invasion.18 We may doubt how this

figure was arrived at but the sentiment is clear. Although regime change was the neocons’

specific historical mission, it was, though, often difficult to present this as a coherent policy,

hence the reliance on claims of weapons of mass destruction.19

For Wolfowitz, that Iraq was an oil producer could not be separated from the need to turn the

country into a democracy. Had the US been interested solely in oil it could have hoped to

replace Saddam with an alternative dictator. After all, Washington had worked happily with

dictators across the world for decades, and in Latin America it had usually preferred a

friendly tyrant to a potentially unreliable democracy. But for Wolfowitz democracy was now

preferred to tyranny as a matter of principle. And why was this significant? It was Wolfowitz,

as Peter Boyer observed, who became the ‘major architect of President Bush’s Iraq policy

and, within the Administration, its most passionate and compelling advocate’.20 Democratic

government in Iraq was not just a moral good: it was essential for American security.21 And

in neo con terms American security was itself a moral good, being of benefit to the centre

world. There was there a virtuous circle in which democracy, defence policy and control of

oil all contributed to forward leap in history.

16 Wolfowitz cited in Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin

2006), p. 95. 17 L.Paul Bremmer III, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, New York: Threshold Editions

2006, p. 157. 18 Bremmer, My Year in Iraq, p. 399. 19 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin 2006), p. 101. 20 Peter J. Boyer, ‘The Believer: Paul Wolfowitz Dfends his War’, The New Yorker, 1 November 2004,

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/11/01/the-believer 21 Bremmer, My Year in Iraq, p. 400.

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The End of History

Let me just backtrack to 1989, two years before Saddam’s fateful occupation of Kuwait. That

was the year that, encouraged by the Soviet reforms - glasnost and perestroika - Frances

Fukuyama wrote a paper for The National Interest, titled 'The End of History?'22 Fukuyama

argued that the end of ideological struggle signified by the imminent collapse of communism

equated to what he called the end of history. His analysis was expanded substantially in his

book, The End of History, which was published to huge publicity in 1991.23 When Fukuyama

visited London on a promotional visit in March 1992 his lecture was attended by a

distinguished panel including Ernest Gellner, Roger Scruton, Tessa Blackstone and Norman

Stone, a formidable selection from the intelligentsia of the time. They were all – and Norman

Stone especially so – deeply critical of what they regarded as Fukuyama’s millennial

prophecy. Predictions of the end of history in a variety of forms have, after all, been staples

of European apocalyptic belief for two thousand years. Fukuyama appeared not to take the

criticism seriously. And why would he? After all he was a devout believer in his own version

of the millennium.

Fukuyama’s major philosophical inspiration was the German Idealist George Friedrich Hegel

(1770-1831), and standing behind Hegel was Plato. Let me deal for a moment, then, with the

origins of western millennialism. There are two major literary origins. The first is in Plato,

whose theory of history receives its fullest exposition in the Timaeus and is based in his

model of the cosmos. Plato’s material cosmos emerged out of consciousness, the reverse of

the modern scientific consensus in which consciousness is a bi-product of matter. For

materialists, for example, thoughts are produced by brain chemistry. For Plato, on the other

hand, the entire material world is a product of thought. It follows that anything that takes

place in the material world must be a manifestation of the collective mind, which he termed

the world soul. His theory of history was metaphysical – above and beyond the physical. And

as Plato’s entire universe functioned as a single organism, it followed that on the large scale

there is a universal history which moves through an orderly series of stages and cycles.24

Other literary sources for western millennial thought are found in the Jewish and Christian

scriptures. They propose a theory of history, in which the current decadent world is always

about to be replaced by a better version, sometimes by a welcome end of the world. The key

passages are well known. In Isaiah God announced that 'For as the new heavens and the new

earth which I will make shall remain before me’.25 In Revelation God's inevitable victory is

to be followed by the arrival of a 'new heaven', a 'new earth' and a 'new Jerusalem'.26 The

theme of newness is repeated down to the present day and it is not a stretch to identify its

legacy in twentieth century modernism.

The New Age Movement

Moving forward from the ancient world, I want to briefly consider the modern New Age

movement. After all, it’s in the title of my book. The term New Age as a description for a

coming spiritual period of history can be traced back to the early nineteenth century. There

was also a thriving self-defined New Age movement in the 1920s and 30s. Like much of

popular culture it disappeared from public view during the Second World War, before

22 Fukuyama, Frances. 'The End of History?'.The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3-18. 23 Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin, 1991. 24 Plato, Timaeus, trans. R.G.Bury, Cambridge Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1931, 39D. 25 Isaiah 66.22-23 CHECK 26 Revelation 21.1-2.

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reappearing in the 1970s. William Bloom, an influential New Age writer, described it like

this:

The New Age is neither a movement nor a religion set apart from others. It is not

something one can choose or not to join...It is a mass movement in which humanity is

reasserting its right to explore spirituality in total freedom.27

The words I want to emphasise here are spirituality and freedom.

From an academic perspective Michael York wrote that ‘New Age predictions of historical

transformation are a 'mnemonic device far more than a prophecy’.28 York meant that it is a

mistake to take the prophecy of a coming spiritual age literally. Instead the prophecy acts as

an organising device, encouraging believers to engage with the world in order to bring about

whatever version of utopia or the promised golden future they believe in. Endowing the

future with reality in this way has been described as a kind of ‘thaumaturgic’ or magical,

prophecy; the act of making the prophecy is itself a means of bringing it into existence.29

Such prophecies provide what has been called a ‘temporal integrity’, creating a framework

for structuring an otherwise endless sequence of days, months and years into a meaningful

pattern.30 The various constructions used to identify the inauguration of the coming era,

whether New Age, Aquarian Age, New Jerusalem, Kingdom of God or Dictatorship of the

Proletariat, provide connectors between time and eternity. The names under which the future

age is known assume a magic power which encourages devotees to struggle for them to the

point of self-sacrifice, even death, witnessed in countless numbers of religious and

revolutionary martyrs over the centuries. They are what Lukacher called ‘time-fetishes’.31

New Age prophecy offers a time-fetish which sits within a Platonic view of the world in

which all things proceed from the divine, seen as a Platonic supreme consciousness, out of

which all things manifest.32 History then unfolds in a series of cycles, each one manifesting a

psychic change in the nature of humanity and ultimately in the entire cosmos. New Age

ideology then imagines history as an ordered manifestation of the world spirit, exactly as

Plato thought.

Millennial prophecy became an important subject for academic investigation after the horrors

perpetrated by Stalin and Hitler became clear, both of them were devout believers in the

imminence of the future paradise. Karl Popper. Made one of the most profound contributions

to the post-war study of millennialism. He categorised the belief that historical change

develops according to underlying laws which suggest a broadly predetermined pattern and

purposeful goal as historicist. He saw Plato as the originator of such ideas in the west, and

Karl Marx as their greatest modern exponent, and regarded them as intellectually bankrupt, a

claim embodied in the title of his monograph on the topic, The Poverty of Historicism.33

27 William Bloom, The New Age: An Anthology of Essential Writings (London, 1991), pp. xiii. 28 Michael York, The Emerging Network, (London, 1995), p. 49. 29 Fred Davis, ‘Why all of us may be hippies someday’, 15, 17. 30 Davis, ‘hippies’, 15. 31 Lukacher,Time Fetishes, x-xi. 32 Hanegraaff, Wouter J. (1996), New Age Religion and Western Culture, Leiden, New York: E.J. Brill, p. 121-

2. 33 Popper, Karl, The Poverty of Historicism, London and New York: Routledge, 1986.

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However, Popper noticed that there is a paradox which runs through all historicist beliefs:

while history is predetermined, human beings simultaneously possess the capacity to make

free choices, the only free choice being to help history on its way and serve its greater

purpose. This active participation he termed activism. As examples, Christian activism

demands that the faithful evangelise the gospels to prepare for the second coming, while

Marxism required the politically aware to form a revolutionary vanguard and prepare for the

revolution. In Popper’s opinion the belief in historical destiny therefore leads directly to

authoritarian states whose governments are liberated from ordinary codes of conduct, the

reason being that once people have obtained what they believe to be the absolute truth they

have, in their own terms, a moral obligation to impose their standards of behaviour and

principles on other people. In the twentieth century, the slaughter of Jews in Germany and the

kulaks in the Soviet Union were equally sanctioned by the demands of history, as was the

systematic murder of bourgeois intellectuals across the communist world, from Romania to

China.

For Popper historicist beliefs are also accompanied by a deep ignorance about the past:

Modern historicists...seem to be unaware of the antiquity of their doctrine. They

believe - and what else could their own deification of modernism permit? - that their

own brand of historicism is the latest and boldest achievement of the human mind, an

achievement so staggeringly novel that only a few people are sufficiently advanced to

grasp it.34

Every millennial or utopian determinist therefore imagines that its vision of the future is

novel, unique and cannot be questioned. This was precisely why Fukuyama was unable to

recognise the millennial nature of his own prophecy, even when this was put to him in

forthright terms.

And as Popper went on to say:

We find historicism very frequently allied with just those ideas which are typical of

holistic or Utopian social engineering, such as the idea of ‘blueprints for a new order,

or of ‘centralised planning’.35

The historicist, therefore, can attempt to micromanage society in order to encourage the

coming of a future paradise. Perhaps the most pervasive historicist belief in the modern west

is the theory of progress, about which Popper also had harsh words to say.36 I would define

progress theory as the belief that, as time passes, the condition of human life tends to undergo

a qualitative improvement. As a bi-product of western domination of the world during the

great age of imperialism, it is often thought that the west uniquely embodies the values of

progress: this flawed logic insists that, because western countries dominate the world, they

must represent the endpoint of history. No other future can be imagined. Also, for believers,

progress, being good for humanity is a matter not just of, say, technology, but also of

morality. Again, to quote Popper, according to progressivists:

34 Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, p 160 35 Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, p 73 36 Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, pp 152-9.

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The morally good is the morally progressive, i.e., the morally good is what is ahead of

its time in conforming to such standards of conduct as will be adopted in the period to

come.37

Again, we observe a flawed logic: because progressivists are by definition on the side of

history, and progress in history is beneficial to humanity, so progressive politics must also be

of benefit to everyone. The actions of progressivists are morally good by definition, no matter

what their individual character. Therefore murder of class-enemies in communist countries

became a moral good and was routinely excused by western sympathisers who would attack

the same behaviour in right wing regimes.

Platonic historic determinism is sanctioned by the laws of the universe. It follows that any

advance in theories of how the universe works is likely to influence historicist theory.

Platonic theory was given a massive boost by Isaac Newton who, more than any other

astronomer or natural philosopher, gave the eighteenth century its new, reformed cosmology

of unity, predictability and order. His discovery of gravity provided a single universal rule for

the entire universe: one formula according to which all existence might be understood.38 A

succession of key thinkers then developed the idea of progress as an inevitable qualitative

improvement in human affairs, written into the fabric of the universe. It takes place as time

passes but in some nations, such as Britain, France and, later the USA, faster than in others.

They therefore represent the cutting edge of history, to which all other nations aspire. One of

the first was Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727-1781) whose seminal A Philosophical

Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind, published in 1750, set the scene.39

For Idealists such as Johann Fichte (1762-1814), the predetermined movements of the

heavens still indicated the unfolding of the World Spirit through Universal Time.40

More influential than Fichte in the long-run was his contemporary, Hegel, partly of course,

because of his influence in Marx. Hegel’s own Idealism embedded his work firmly in the

same traditions as theosophy, and his theories of mind have been described as ‘theosophical

pietism’.41 Hegel firmly accepted the interrelationship of the spiritual and material worlds:

‘Secular life’, he wrote, ‘is the positive and definite embodiment of the Spiritual Kingdom’.42

In Hegel's historical scheme, the Platonic World Soul became manifest in a succession of

four great cultural epochs, corresponding to a cultural progression from east to west,

following the Sun's daily journey from dawn to dusk.43 He prophesied that the final age

would inaugurate 'the unity of the divine nature and the human, the reconciliation of objective

truth and freedom appearing within self-consciousness and subjectivity'. 44 History, he

believed, was the progressive embodiment of light in civilisation.

In the geographical survey, the course of the World's History has been marked out in

its general features. The Sun - the Light - rises in the East. Light is a simply self-

involved existence; but through possessing thus in itself universality, it exists at the

37 Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, p 54. 38 Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 9. 39 Turgot, ‘A Philosophical Review’, 56. 40 Johann Fichte, 'Idea of Universal History in Characteristics of the Present Age', 'The Origins and Limits of

History', in Works, vol. 2, trans. William Smith (London, 1844), 4. 41 Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 3. 42 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree(New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 442. 43Hegel, Philosophy of History, especially 79-81, 103-4, 412; G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans.

T.M. Knox (London, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), especially 220-3. 44 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 358.

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same time as an individuality in the Sun. Imagination has often pictured to itself the

emotions of a blind man suddenly becoming possessed of sight, beholding the bright

glimmering of the dawn, the growing light, and the flaming glory of the ascending

Sun'.45

Rolf Gruner summarised Hegel’s world view succinctly. Hegel, he wrote,

belonged to a tradition which began in late antiquity, and continued with ideas to the

effect that all reality is an emanation from a divine prime ground, that the one has

released the Many out of itself, that it has left itself, but will return to itself once

more.46

Hegel’s words are not just of antiquarian interest. Their importance for my thesis is based on

their influence on Fukuyama’s enthusiasm for the end of history in the 1990s. For Fukuyama,

the neocons’ foreign policy theorist, his own time, marked by the end of communism, was the

final return of the One to itself, from the many. And the One, to interpret Fukuyama, was the

USA.

The problem raised by Universal Histories, though, is whether the law of history applies

equally to all cultures in all periods. The problem was originally framed by the French

revolutionary Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-94) in his Sketch for a Historical Picture

of the Progress of the Human Mind. Being a Newtonian, Condorcet believed that history had

to take its own course, in its own time. However, he also distinguished countries where the

inevitable process of adopting the civilised values of America and France would occur

naturally, on the one hand, and those, more resistant to progress, where it would have to be

forced, on the other.47

The issue opens a fundamental philosophical divide between those who think that history will

take its own course and those who think it needs help. The distinction was a potent one which

separated different kinds of Marxists in the early twentieth century. Moderate social

democrats believed in reform to the current system in the expectation that the socialist

paradise would arrive when it was ready. The other extreme was occupied by Lenin, who

considered the problem in his tract What is to be Done in 1902.

Lenin was the very model of the perfect activist, taking a free choice to drive the

predetermined pattern of history. He attacked the social democrats of his day for being

diverted into reformism and instead argued for the creation of a revolutionary vanguard in

order to promote revolution, rather than wait for it.48 In 1917 he was distinguished from many

of his fellows by his belief that Russia, which was a largely feudal, peasant, state was in strict

Marxist terms hardly ready for a transition to the dictatorship of the proletariat, and could still

be pushed into revolution. The notion of forced historical change, as identified by Condorcet

in the French revolution, is then Leninist, and Leninism then spawned Stalin, Mao Tse-tung

and finally Pol Pot, who served the moral good of history by murdering a third of the

Cambodian people.

45 Hegel, Philosophy of History, 103, 412. 46 Gruner, Rolf, Philosophies of History: A Critical Essay, (Aldershot: Gower 1985), p. 57. 47 Condorcet, Antoine-Nicolas de, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans.

June Barraclough, New York: Noon Day Press, 1955,p. 175. 48 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich,’ What is to be Done?’, in Essential Works of Lenin 1902 (no place: bn publishing

2015), pp. 54-175 (p. 137).

11

Let’s leave revolutionary theory and return to the USA, considering another strange

phenomenon, American Exceptionalism. The roots of the belief that somehow the USA is

special date back to the earliest colonists, who identified their new world with their millennial

attempt to build the New Jerusalem.

Alexis de Tocqueville identified the core of what made the USA special in its combination of

faith and reason:

I have expressed enough to characterise Anglo-American civilisation in its true

colours… Americans have succeeded somehow to meld together in wondrous

harmony; namely the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty’.49

The idea that America is uniquely special has proved immensely attractive. For example, the

Platonically inclined conservative philosopher Leo Strauss, reputedly a major influence on

neoconservatism, claimed that Anglo-American democracy was the one true universal

regime.50 In John Gray’s critical summary,

The contemporary American faith that it is a universal nation implies that all humans

are born American, and become anything else by accident – or error. According to

this faith American values are, or will soon be, shared by all humankind…The United

States has built the illusions and superstitions of the Enlightenment into its view of

itself.51

Gray added, uncontroversially, that the USA was the ‘Utopia of global capitalism’.52 Gray

could have been thinking of Thomas Friedman in 1999, who argued that not only would the

whole world become American, but that it wanted to be American. Friedman was a huge fan

of Fukuyama, although he doubted the finality implied by the title, The End of History. Even

so, he popularised the view that Americanism represented history’s end game: ‘Culturally

speaking’, he wrote, ‘globalization has tended to involve the spread of Americanization –

from Big Macs to iMacs to Micky Mouse’.53

The vehicle for such Americanisation is neoliberalism, the doctrine which regards economic

freedom as the fundamental, benign driver of human progress. Neoliberalism stands on a

political and economic programme of small government and economic deregulation. Its

sacred text is Adam Smith’s 1776 tome, The Wealth of Nations. Smith generally avoided

philosophy in favour of practical examples and solutions, but there are traces of historicism in

his view that his prescription represents the ‘natural progress of things towards improvement’

as if the freedom to trade without government interference presented some kind of natural

law, written into the fabric of the universe.54

49 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London: Penguin, 2003[1835]), p. 55. 50 Grant N. Havers, Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy: A Conservative Critique(DeKalb, IL:

Northern Illinois University Press, 2013). 51 John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism(London: Granta,1998), p 132. 52John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (London: Granta,1998), 100. 53 Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999), 9; also see

xxi. 54 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (no place: Shine Classics, 2014) 187

12

Neoliberalism, as we know well enough, became the guiding ideology of the UK and USA

after 1979, with the ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

The high point of neoliberalism coincided with the rise of neoconservatism which means that

the two ideologies of newness are often conflated by virtue of the shared use of the prefix

‘neo’. It is true that neoliberals tended to be neoconservatives and vice versa, but the two

ideologies have distinct origins. Neoconservatism originated in left wing intellectual disgust

at the excesses of communism. It has a prehistory in revulsion at Stalinism in the 1930s, but

came together as a coherent set of ideas in the 1960s as a reaction against what was seen as

the violence and intolerance of student protesters, along with their love of communist

iconography, and the indulgence of many liberal academics. The philosopher Daniel Bell

denounced the New Left in 1962, almost at its inception: ‘For among the “new Left”, there is

an alarming readiness to create a tabula rasa, to accept the word “Revolution” as an

absolution for outrages, to justify the suppression of civil rights and opposition’.55 To some

liberals, though, the student protesters’ willingness to ransack university offices rather than

engage in debate brought uncomfortable reminders of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.

Their reaction gave a huge impetus to the development of neoconservatism.

The concern with moral decay was expressed forcefully by Gertrude Himmelfarb. As she

wrote in 1995, almost thirty years after the highpoint of student revolution, ‘civil society has

been infected by the same virus that has contaminated the entire culture: irresponsibility,

incivility, a lack of self-discipline and self-control’.56 Her apocalyptic diagnosis for this

‘grievous moral disorder’ was plain: ‘moral pathology requires strenuous moral purgatives

and restoratives’.57

The neoconservative notion that a final point in political development was approaching had

already been evident in the title of Daniel Bell’s 1962 book, The End of Ideology. However,

in millennial thought endings are always followed by new beginnings and Bell’s book was an

apocalyptic call to revive the American utopia:

The end of ideology is not – should not be the end of utopia well. If anything, one can

begin anew the discussion of utopia only by being aware of the trap of

ideology...There is now, more than ever, some need for utopia, in the sense that men

need – as they have always needed – some vision of the potential, some manner of

using passion with intelligence. Yet the ladder to the City of Heaven can no longer be

a “faith ladder”, but an empirical one.58

And Bell also admired Hegel. He wrote,

The goal of man for Hegel was freedom, a condition where man would be self-willed

and in which his “essence” would become his own possession – in which he would

regain his “self”’59

55 Bell, The End of Ideology, 405. See also Steinfels, The Neoconservatives, 47; and Spates, ‘Counterculture and

Dominant Culture Values’, 869. 56 Himmelfarb, ‘This Will Hurt’, x. 57 Gertrude Himmelfarb, Preface to This Will Hurt: The Restoration of Virtue and Civic Order, ed. Digby

Anderson (New York: The Social Affairs Unit, 1995), x. 58 Bell, Daniel,The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: The Free

Press, 1962, p. 405. 59 Bell, Daniel.The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: The Free

Press, 1962, p. 405.

13

Neoconservative Foreign Policy

And this all brings us back to Frances Fukuyama whose advocacy of a Universal History

based on Plato and Hegel gave the neoconservatives their foreign policy. Fukuyama

resembled his fellow neoconservatives in his balance of pessimism and optimism. ‘We in the

West have become thoroughly pessimistic with regard to the possibility of overall progress in

democratic institutions’, he wrote.60 However, ‘good news has come’, he announced, the

cause for optimism being the progressive collapse of the world’s dictatorships under the

weight of their own inadequacies.61

Fukuyama was a keen advocate of a Universal History, in which, history is directional and

progressive and culminates in the modern liberal state. He deliberately set out to restore

Hegel to a central position in his political thought. ‘Whether or not we acknowledge our debt

to him’, he wrote, ‘we owe to Hegel the most fundamental aspects of our present day

consciousness’.62 Paraphrasing Hegel he added, ‘The Universal History of mankind was

nothing other than man’s progressive rise to full rationality, and to a self-conscious awareness

of how that rationality expresses itself in liberal self-government’.63 He also shared Hegel’s

Platonic Idealism. The driver of history, he argued, is psychological and humanist, and based

in the supposed need of the thymos, the part of the Platonic soul which craves recognition as a

basis of self-esteem.64 The goal of each human being is therefore the recovery of one’s

personal essence in order to become a whole person. This is a close parallel with Bloom’s

description of the New Age movement as a search for spiritual freedom. Fukuyama looked

forward to the period when, after biotechnology has been used to maximum effect, ‘we shall

then finally have definitely finished human history, because we shall have abolished human

beings as such. And then a new, post-human history will begin’.65 INSERT

THEISOPOHICAL SEED MAN

Fukuyama also believed that the ‘good news’ was provided by a collapse of the world’s

dictatorships, particularly the communist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989, under the

weight of their own inadequacies.66 And what was the key inadequacy? His answer was their

failure to acknowledge their citizens’ true humanity. Fukuyama’s psychological theory of

Universal History held that the collapse of any dictatorship necessarily resulted in the

previously oppressed population’s ascent to full humanity. This in turn would result in a

modern liberal state with its trappings of free market economics and representative

democracy.

Peter Steinfels, who was critical of described Neoconservative foreign policy described its

relationship to domestic policy:

60 Fukuyama, The End of History,xiii. 61 The End of History,xiii. 62 Fukuyama, The End of History p. 59 63 Fukuyama, The End of History p. 60 64 Fukuyama, The End of History,163; also see 223-34, 300-12. 65 Fukuyama, ‘The end of history?’, 4. 66 The End of History,xiii.

14

A precarious international order requires a stable, unified society at home; renewed

emphasis on the Communist threat and on the Third World’s rejection of liberal

values is needed to generate the requisite national allegiance and discipline’.67

Foreign policy therefore had domestic as well as international uses. It could be used to

resolve moral collapse at home, as much as corruption and decay abroad In his later critique

of neoconservatism, Fukuyama wrote how, in the wake of 1989, neoconservative foreign

policy analysis was one in which the abolition of all the previous political and economic

structures of the state made perfect sense: into the vacuum would inevitably flow the benefits

of American exceptionalism.68 The vehicle for the neoconservative mission to remake the

world in the image of America was the ‘Project for the New American Century’, founded in

1997. Fukuyama was one of the Project’s initial twenty five founders, and it was he who

embedded Hegelian determinism in neoconservative internationalism, giving it its

theosophical pietism and its time fetish of imminent historical transformation.

The Project’s vision statement, written by its chairman, William Kristol, the husband of

Gertrude Himmelfarb, articulated the practical applications of Fukuyama’s historicism. The

Project, he wrote, was ‘dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American

leadership is good both for America and for the world; and that such leadership requires

military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle’, and intends to

‘strive to rally support for a vigorous and principled policy of American international

involvement...’.69

The Invasion of Iraq

So let us move to Iraq. From the Baathist coup in 1958 onwards, Iraq had a difficult

relationship with the West, although its invasion of Iran in 1980 made it an uneasy ally of the

USA. When it invaded Kuwait in 1990, though, it directly confronted American interests and

the untidy resolution of the first Gulf War, which left Saddam defeated but in power. This

pragmatic resolution was never accepted by some on the Republican Right. To leave Saddam

in power was a pragmatic decision taken by the American government under George Bush

senior on the grounds that it was better to leave the dictator in place than risk chaos.

However, for neoconservatives the dictatorship or chaos dichotomy was a false one because

once overthrown, as Fukuyama had argued, the law of history dictated that liberal democracy

was bound to follow, as a matter of historical necessity. The result would therefore inevitably

be order, not chaos.

George Bush senior was replaced by Bill Clinton in 1992 and here Christopher Meyer picks

up the story:

In Clinton’s presidency, there had been constant pressure from the hawks and the

ideological hard Right of the Republican Party – the notorious “neo-cons” – to bring

67 Steinfels, Peter. The Neoconservatives: The Origins of a Movement. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014, p.

71.

68 Francis Fukuyama, After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads. London: Profile Books, 2007, 3, 95-113.

69 The Project for the New American Century, archived copy from 9 June 2013,

https://web.archive.org/web/20130609154959/http://www.newamericancentury.org/,

accessed 24 July 2014.

15

down Saddam and conclude what was seen by them as the unfinished business of the

first Gulf war.70

From the outset many in the Project for the New American Century campaigned actively for

an invasion of Iraq, as a memorandum of 7 January 1999 made clear:

Now that the dust has settled from the 70-hour aerial attack on Iraq, it has become

clear that the only solution for the threat Iraq poses is to remove Saddam.71

And here is John Kampfner from Blair’s Wars, his critical assault on Tony Blair’s liberal

interventionism:

Prior to the invasion, the neoconservatives’ optimism had known no bounds: ‘“After

Baghdad, Beijing” ran one boast. They saw especially in the Middle East a web of

corrupt dictators, whose people would, if given the chance, embrace a Jeffersonian

view of democracy. Iraq was top of the list.72

Until the Twin Tower attacks of 9/11 the George W. Bush White House maintained the

pragmatic policy of the elder Bush and the Clinton administration. However, after 9/11 the

neoconservatives finally gained the upper hand in foreign policy, which was revised to

consist of three pillars. One, as before, was military dominance. The other two were pre-

emption and regime change. Now, the pace of history was to be forced. The belief that the

whole world was destined to become like America became the metaphysical guide, and

Popperian activism became the order of the day. Political transformation could now be

achieved by converting a gradual transition to democracy, as envisaged by Fukuyama, to its

‘imposition’.

The notion of forced regime change as formulated by the neoconservatives then becomes

Leninist.73 The guiding ideology behind neoconservative foreign policy may then be

described by what Ken Jowitt called ‘Marx-Fukuyama’.74 This description is surprising at

first sight, but shouldn’t be. After all Fukuyama shared with Marx a debt to Hegel’s

historicism. The Bush White House, following The End of History’s view that the rest of the

world would inevitably become more like the west, but without the nuances and subtleties in

Fukuyama’s discussion, subscribed to the idea (like Lenin) that the process could be speeded

up. In Jowitt’s summary, ‘History, the Bush administration has concluded, needs deliberate

organisation, leadership, and direction’.75 In November 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, the

new policy emerged when George W. Bush gave the first of series of speeches in which he

70 Christopher Meyer 71 Mark Lagon, ‘Memorandum to Opinion Leaders’, The Project for the New American Century, January 7,

1999, https://web.archive.org/web/20130609165624/http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqjan0799.htm,

accessed 24 July 2014. 72 John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2003), 25. 73 Kenneth, Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction. Berkeley: University of California Press,

1992, 88. 74Kenneth Jowitt, ‘Rage, Hubris and Regime Change: The Urge to Speed History Along’. Policy Review 118

(April-May 2003): 34-8. http://www.hoover.org/research/rage-hubris-and-regime-change [accessed 1 October

2014], 38. 75Jowitt, ‘Rage, Hubris and Regime Change’, on line version. http://www.hoover.org/research/rage-hubris-and-

regime-change [accessed 5 January 2015].

16

announced a new ‘forward strategy’ intended to promote democracy in the Middle East as the

only sure guarantor of peace.76

If there is a self-interest in American interventionism, for neoconservatives it is not an

interest based on military might and profit alone. This is not to say that there were no

geopolitical concerns. The outcome was indeed to be of benefit to hard American power – the

beginning of the creation of what John Kampfner called ‘a ring of American bases’, which

would enable ‘the US writ...to run everywhere’.77 There was no secret about this in 2003, any

more than there was about the rush of American corporations to profit from the American

occupation. Yet, from a neoconservative perspective this was a noble goal. For, what was

good for America, as the Project for the New American Century proclaimed, was necessarily

good for everyone: Fukuyama identified four threads in the neoconservative mindset, of

which the crucial one for foreign policy was a belief that ‘US power can be used for moral

purposes’.78 ‘American exceptionalism’ automatically meant that Washington’s global

domination was defined as what Fukuyama called ‘benevolent hegemony’.79

It was Fukuyama who confirmed the core problem: what was seen as good for the USA was

seen as automatically good for the world and faith in the outcome was, according to

Fukuyama, responsible for the USA’s lack of preparation:

By invading Iraq, the Bush administration saw itself not as acting out of narrow self-

interest but as providing a global public good. The administration’s belief in its own

good motives explains much of its failure to anticipate the highly negative

international reaction to the war.80

For the neoconservatives, the invasion of Iraq was a war of liberation and, as such, historical

necessity therefore removed the need for planning: the law of progress would take care of the

aftermath, just as it had in Eastern Europe. As Michael Codner, of the Royal United Services

Institute, put it, ‘As subsequent events showed, British planning did not take into account the

range of likely outcomes following invasion and regime change...This might be seen as the

behaviour of a liberating army rather than an occupying force’.81 When he was asked by

George W. Bush to take up his post in Baghdad, he replied ‘I believe America has done

something great in liberating the Iraqis, sir. And…I think I can help’.82 What he found when

he arrived was endemic corruption amongst the Iraqis and gross incompetence in the

American administration -= which he documents in great detail.

Fukuyama had developed his own doubts about the wisdom of invading Iraq prior to the war,

and finally repudiated his connections with the neoconservatives in 2004, when it became

clear that the invasion had been a spectacular failure.83 The neoconservatives, in his view,

had repudiated their own principles, entering into the social engineering they hated on a

76 ‘Bush demands Mid-East democracy’, BBC News 6 November 2003,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3248119.stm [accessed 25 April 2015] 77 Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, 25 78Fukuyama, After the Neocons, 4, 48-9. 79 Fukuyama, After the Neocons, 3. 80Fukuyama, After the Neocons, 95. 81Michael Codner, ‘The Two Towers, 2001-13’, in Wars in Peace: British Military Operations since 1991, ed.

Adrian L. Johnson (London: Royal United Services Institute, 2014), 61-2. 82 L.Paul Bremmer III, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, New York: Threshold Editions

2006, p. 7. 83Fukuyama, After the Neocons, viii-ix.

17

nationwide scale on the other side of the world.84 Those in favour of invasion had assumed

that local conditions were irrelevant in the face of universal prescriptions. They thought that,

because the overthrow of dictatorship in Eastern Europe had resulted in democracy, the same

consequence must follow in the Arab world. Fukuyama stuck to his Hegelian principles but

argued that the flow of time varied with cultural conditions. Not all people were ready to

enter the final phase of history at the same time, so what applied to Eastern Europe in 1989

did not apply to Iraq in 2003. Unlike Condorcet, Fukuyama now concluded that people who

had been left behind by history should not be forced to catch up, and to try to make them do

so was dangerous. In his view neoconservatism, in the Bush White House, had become an

ideology which pursued Ideal solutions irrespective of the evidence. It took the idea of the

Heavenly City at face value, ignoring the reality of human frailty.

Immediately after the invasion the pragmatists appeared to be in control of American policy

in Iraq. There was actually a brief interval between the US occupation of Baghdad on 9 April

2003 and 11 May, when the lead administrator, Jay Garner was working with elements of the

previous regime to restore independence as soon as possible. Garner was a pragmatist who

realised, in contrast to Rumsfeld, that de-Baathification had to be gradual and limited.85

Ultimately he was sacked because he was perceived in Washington as ‘not pulling things

together’.86 There was clearly a power-struggle in Washington, and the neoconservatives

succeeded in replacing Garner by Paul Bremer, who replaced pragmatism with ideology.

Bremer set about disbanding the organs of state, the Baath Party and the army and instituted a

policy of rapid neo-liberal privatisation. He wrote of ‘the switch from value-destroying public

enterprises to value-creating private ones’, which would then, he hoped, provide a foundation

for a free, democratic system.87 This was in spite of Saddam’s own programme of mass

privatisation in the 1990s. The results, as widely reported, were chaotic:

Faith in the capitalist firm as an agent of transition brought with it only unprecedented

levels of graft, plunder and incompetence. Nevertheless, in the spring of 2007 US

officials helped to fashion a new draft law that, if passed, would go a long way toward

privatizing Iraq’s oil sector. The specter of sectarian logic—encouraged by US

officials as they sought to manage the residual passions of a political world beyond

the market through intermediaries of their own choosing—now haunts Iraqi political

life with violent consequence.88

The crude consequences of the belief that the law of Universal History was being

implemented in Iraq were described by Rory Stewart, a British civil servant who observed

them at close quarters, having been appointed coordinator of the deputy governorate of

Maysan. Stewart described an encounter between an American expert on democracy sent to

southern Iraq, nine months after the US invasion of 2003, to discuss ‘capacity building’ with

the members of a provincial council: “Welcome to your new democracy’, the expert said, as

he drew oblong shapes on a white board to describe the administrative structure the

84Fukuyama, After the Neocons, 6. 85 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin 2006), p. 103. 86 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin 2006), p. 103. See also

p. 155. 87 L. Paul Bremer III, ‘Operation Iraqi Prosperity’, Wall Street Journal, 20 June 2003,

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB105606663932885100 [accessed 14 October 2014]; see also Fukuyama,

After the Neocons, 8. 88 Pete Moore and Christopher Parker, ‘The War Economy of Iraq’, Middle East Research and Information

Project, Middle East Review 243, Summer 2007, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer243/war-economy-iraq

[accessed 26 May 2016].

18

Americans had designed. “I have met you before. I have met you in Cambodia I have met

you in Russia. I have met you in Nigeria’.89 At the mention of Nigeria, Stewart relates, two

members of the council walked out: ‘we are an ancient civilisation”, said one cleric, “and

they treat us like Congo cannibals’.90

Without citing Fukuyama or neoconservative historical theory, to which the American

‘expert’ described by Stewart clearly subscribed, Timothy Mitchell observed their underlying

philosophy:

For an expert on democracy, democratic politics is the same everywhere. It consists of

a set of procedures and political forms that are to be reproduced in every successful

instance of democratisation. Democracy is based on a model, an original idea, that can

be copied from one place to the next. If it falls, as it seems to in many oil states, the

reason must be that some part of the model is missing or malfunctioning’.91

From this conception, Mitchell added, other consequences followed. For example the

apparatus of oil production was ignored. The same might be said of the rest of the Iraqi

economy. For Bremer, the neoliberal law of history dictated that once state industries had

been privatised the free market must, of necessity, resolve any problems. In the heart of

Washington the view was remarkably casual. As Pete Moore and Christopher Parker

remarked in 2007,

Queried about the chaos that reigned immediately after the fall of Baghdad, then

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejoined, “Freedom is untidy. People have to

make mistakes.” Four years on, there is little evidence that Bush administration

officials have learned from theirs.92

American incompetence was evident. Stewart wrote contemptuously of the post-invasion

American administrators as ‘chino-wearing US Republican appointees, fresh from the West

Wing and trapped sufficiently deep within the Green Zone’ to have no concept of lraqi

society or political structures.93 Indeed the entire notion of Reconstruction, with a capital R,

was a fundamental mistake which failed to grasp that Iraq already possessed deeply

embedded political and social structures. Daniel Kuehl, a professor at the National Defence

University, wrote ‘I think the course of the war itself will be measured in a few weeks, but

the Reconstruction… will last years. It won’t be a physical reconstruction so much as a

political one’.94 Kuehl made a deliberate comparison with reconstruction in the USA after the

Civil War. In his historical metaphysics, Iraqi society had potentially evolved to a point

reached by the USA a century and a half earlier.

89 Rory Stewart, Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq (London: Picador, 2006) pp. 280-1. 90 Rory Stewart, Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq (London: Picador, 2006) p. 280. 91 Mitchell, Timothy, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Lonon: Verso, 2011), p. 2. 92 Pete Moore and Christopher Parker, ‘The War Economy of Iraq’, Middle East Research and Information

Project, Middle East Review 243, Summer 2007, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer243/war-economy-iraq

[accessed 26 May 2016]. 93 Rory Stewart, Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq (London: Picador, 2006) p. 16. And see

Rajiv Chandrasekeran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, London: Bloomsbury

2006), p. 109. 94 Cited in Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin 2006), p. 103.

See also p.108.

19

Rajiv Chandrasekeran describes the typical selection process for American administrators.

Thomas Foley, the US official who was in charge of the privatisation programme, realised

that serious action was required to deal with endemic corruption in the Baghdad Stock

Exchange. Foley promised to send out ‘a securities expert’, and Thomas Wirges, who was on

the ground in Baghdad, expected ‘a high level person coming in from the New York Stock

Exchange or the Securities and Exchange Commission… someone who knows what to do’.95

The expert turned out to be Jay Hallen, a twenty-four year old real-estate agent with no other

business or financial experience. Just how such blunders took place is not clear, except that

we know that Wolfowitz and co. believed that the evolution of a successful free-market

economy was a matter of destiny. Ultimately, it seems it was Dick Cheney who issued diktats

on who should and should not be employed, firing experts on Arab affairs in favour of

inexperienced but ideologically acceptable alternatives: experienced State Department

officials were replaced by Defence Department employees who were loyal but had no

background.96 Tony Blair also, it is reported, excluded Iraqi specialists from his planning

meetings.97

Even predictions of the number of troops and levels of financial commitment required for

post-invasion Iraq were curtailed – not just by bad last-minute changes of plan on anything

from major strategy to the colour of post-invasion police uniforms – but by political

imperatives, which resulted in a fatal chasm between the government and the army.98

Rumsfeld was told of the need for higher troop numbers before the invasion but, at the time,

had ‘yet to be convinced’.99 The widespread belief was that the reconstruction would be self-

financing.100 Liberated from Saddam, it was thought, Iraqi business would naturally

recalibrate itself to an American model. There was incompetence on a grand scale but my

point is that while this may have been unintentional, it was encouraged by the deliberate

failure to plan.

We don’t know exactly what went through the neocons’ minds, but the logical extension of

their historical metaphysics is that it didn’t matter who was appointed or what the army did.

A monkey could have done the job. I am reminded of Caligula appointing his horse as a

Consul. Paul Bremer, Patrick Cockburn reports, believed that ‘given time, a host of well-

qualified and pro-American Iraqis would emerge from the maelstrom of post-Saddam Iraq’,

to replace the lazy and incompetent traditional authorities whom he regularly dismissed and

insulted.101 The process, in Bremer’s mind, was inevitable if not immediate. This in itself was

a slight rewriting of the original prediction that a new American-friendly, democratic

government would be in power by June 2003.102

The British were equally incompetent and disorganised. Stewart describes how a new police

chief who had impressed the local British colonel was appointed in Maysan, but was a

95 Rajiv Chandrasekeran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, London:

Bloomsbury 2006), p. 106. 96 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin 2006), p. 103. See also

p.105. 97 Tom Bower, Broken Vows: Tony Blair: the Tragedy of Power, London Faber and Faber, 2016, p. 376. 98 See, for example, Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin

2006), pp. 81 and 96-7, 155-6, 209-10. 99 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin 2006), p. 103. 100 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin 2006), p. 213. 101 Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (London: Verso, 2007),

p. 148. 102 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin 2006), p.110.

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‘nepotistic, biased, violent… semi-criminal’ whose clan ran the local smuggling operation.103

The British had almost no record keeping system in place and the local Provisional Council

had to deal with seven different army groups in two years.104 Clearly, the British operation on

the ground was chaotic, but the question is why was this so? My assumption is that the

disastrous disorganisation percolated down from Tony Blair’s neoconservative belief that no

planning was necessary.

Let’s return now to Christopher Meyer and his angry denunciation of Tony Blair.

With his Manichean black-and-white view of the world, Mr Blair was in his way

more neo-con than the neo-cons, more evangelical than the American Christian Right.

From this flowed Britain’s contribution to the mistakes made before and after the Iraq

invasion, despite repeated warnings from the Foreign Office and the Washington

embassy.105

As Bush said of Blair, The thing I most admire about (him)… is that he doesn’t need a poll or

focus group to convince him of the difference between right and wrong’.106 And here it is: all

the mistakes of British involvement in Iraq flowed from Blair’s neoconservatism, reinforced

by an evangelical strain of Christianity. I am arguing that the same holds for Bush,

Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and the others who dictated post 9/11 American foreign policy. The

chaos in Iraq therefore cannot be understood without an understanding of neoconservatism

and its descent from Plato. This is precisely the same lineage as New Age prophecy.

Platonism flourished in different intellectual environments, not all of them friends. The

Theosophist H.P. Blavatsky, one of the greatest influences on modern New Age thought,

drew extensively on Plato but denounced Hegel for his failure to construct a viable

metaphysical system.107 But read Blavatsky and Fukuyama together and we can see they are

telling the same story of history as the struggle for realisation of the soul.

New Agers and neoconservative share the same fundamental theory of history? First they

believe that history as an ordered manifestation of the world spirit. Second that history has

reached a critical point. And, third, for some, the pace of history can be forced. Like many

New Agers, the Neoconservatives’ big mistake: to believe that Plato’s time-fetish was literal

rather than metaphorical.

My hypothesis is that the reason for the lack of planning in Iraq was that for

Neoconservatives no planning was necessary for the metaphysics of history dictated that the

law of history dictated that once Saddam Hussein was overthrown Iraq must of necessity

become a free market, American style democracy. Or, as Ken Jowitt concluded, ‘the belief

that American-style democracy could be established in Iraq and the Middle East possessed

‘all the unreality of Don Quixote’. 108 Utopia, as Marcuse said, is impossible

I end my book with the following words:

103 Rory Stewart, Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq (London: Picador, 2006) p. 89, and see pp.

83-886. 104 Rory Stewart, Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq (London: Picador, 2006) p. 420. 105 Christopher Meyer 106 Tom Bower, Broken Vows: Tony Blair: the Tragedy of Power, London Faber and Faber, 2016, p. 244 107 Blavatsky, H.P. (1976), Isis Unveiled, Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 2 Vols., facsimile of 1877

edition, Vol 2, p. 369.. 108 Jowitt, ‘Rage, Hubris and Regime Change’, on line version http://www.hoover.org/research/rage-hubris-and-

regime-change [accessed 5 January 2015].

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There is more than a whiff of the Jacobin’s revolutionary calendar or the Khmer Rouge’s

Year Zero, in the idea that history could be reset.109

To return to Herbert Marcuse: ‘Utopia...refers to projects for change that are considered

impossible’.110 But when utopians are let loose, it’s the rest of us who pay the price.

109 Nicholas Campion, The New Age in the Modern West: Counter-Culture, Utopia and Prophecy from the late

Eighteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Bloomsbury 2015), p.160. 110 Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p.

63.