Civil war breaks out among Conservatives NeoCons
Jack Linthicum
to do battle, The Palm, Lodge 201 are the South Lebanon of the war. The
large Conservative tent gets smaller as the loyalty oaths turn into
pink slips.
"The brand of foreign policy that Hulsman [one of the firees]
espoused--a dispassionate realism and distaste for both liberal and
neoconservative interventionist impulses--resided close to the party's
mainstream. That, of course, changed with the Bush administration's
aggressive response to September 11, which quickly rallied a new
doctrinal consensus among conservatives."
"If the midterms go badly, the civil war in the GOP starts the day
after," Hulsman says. "The neocons and Kristol will say that Bush is
incompetent and the neocons are not to blame." Maybe then it'll be
Hulsman who leads the next purge.
THE GROWING RANKS OF THE CONSERVATIVE PURGED.
by Spencer Ackerman
Post date 08.07.06
The Heritage Foundation has never been known as an intellectually
adventurous place. For decades, its policy briefs and studies have
closely tracked Republican talking points. So did the opinions of the
think tank's senior foreign policy analyst, John Hulsman. In his
Washington Times op-eds and Fox News appearances, he cheerfully whacked
Howard Dean, John Kerry, the French, and other enemies of the cause.
But all these years of fidelity to the conservative cause couldn't
spare Hulsman from suffering the wrath of his comrades. On July 7, his
boss, Kim Holmes, sent a note to the Heritage staff wishing Hulsman
"the very best in his continuing career." No one at Heritage was fooled
by Holmes's euphemistic send-off--least of all Hulsman. "After getting
fired," he says, "I was a walking corpse."
Following Holmes's lead, the official line from Heritage is that
Hulsman left his $90,000-a-year job of his own volition. Indeed, two
Heritage spokespeople initially denied to me that Hulsman was shown the
door. When I pressed them, both then told me that the think tank
doesn't discuss its "human resources policies." The reasons for
Hulsman's departure, however, are perfectly evident. "At Heritage,"
says Chris Preble of the Cato Institute, "anything that smacks of
criticism of Bush will not be tolerated." And, as the Iraq war
faltered, Hulsman grew increasingly bold in criticizing the
administration's foreign policy in essays and conversations with
reporters. In September, he will co-publish a book with the New
American Foundation's Anatol Lieven titled Ethical Realism, a scathing
indictment of the neoconservative worldview. With his firing, Hulsman
joins Bruce Bartlett, the economist who was dismissed from a right-wing
think tank for his criticisms of Bush, in the ranks of the conservative
purged.
And in the coming months, their ranks will likely grow even larger.
Conservative recriminations over Iraq are igniting all across
Washington, with opponents of the war loudly assaulting its leading
champions (see Francis Fukuyama v. Charles Krauthammer and George Will
v. William Kristol.) But what the Hulsman incident reveals is that the
war's supporters aren't about to passively absorb criticism and issue
public apologies. They are going to fight back against their
critics--and an ugly debate will become much uglier.
The evening of his dismissal, a stunned Hulsman led a procession of
ex-colleagues to Lounge 201, a Capitol Hill martini bar. "We pretty
much closed the place," recalls Hulsman. Responding warmly to the
respects paid to him by his Heritage friends, Hulsman quoted the Max
Fischer character from the dark comedy Rushmore, who tells Bill
Murray's beaten-down Herman Blume, "I guess you've just gotta find
something you love to do and then do it for the rest of your life."
Then he decamped to his farm in the Shenandoah Valley.
When I spoke with Hulsman a few weeks later, he told me that a
non-disclosure agreement prohibited him from providing any details
about the terms of his departure. But he was eager to speak about the
ideological and policy differences that prompted it. Despite his
firing, he continues to harbor warm memories of the think tank. When he
arrived there in 1999 to revitalize its European studies program,
Heritage seemed an exciting and intellectually open place to work. "It
was always a big tent," he remembers. "There was a sense that you had
authoritarians, neocons, realists and libertarians, all bubbling
along." But what Hulsman took for intellectual freedom may simply have
been ideological incoherence. In the '90s, no foreign policy doctrine
dominated the party, and different factions vied for dominance. The
brand of foreign policy that Hulsman espoused--a dispassionate realism
and distaste for both liberal and neoconservative interventionist
impulses--resided close to the party's mainstream. That, of course,
changed with the Bush administration's aggressive response to September
11, which quickly rallied a new doctrinal consensus among
conservatives.
As that consensus emerged, Hulsman hesitated to buck the administration
and repeat his old complaints about moralistic foreign policy. In 2004,
several of Hulsman's friends established the Coalition for a Realistic
Foreign Policy--a loose anti-neocon confederation of liberal and
conservative realists--but he declined to add his name to any of the
coalition's manifestos. "People at Heritage said, 'You've gotta be
careful signing this,'" Hulsman recounts. "I think there was general
unease about me not hopping on the freedom train."
But years of insurgency, civil war, and general chaos emanating from
Iraq emboldened Hulsman to finally vocalize his dissent. Last summer,
he and Lieven penned a National Interest essay contending that the
neconservatives--and, implicitly, Bush--were "expending blood and
treasure for problematic gains such as Iraq" and "significantly
retarding America's ability to act against the true barbarians at the
gate." In March, Hulsman vociferously argued against the arch-neocon
Michael Ledeen during a House International Relations Committee hearing
on Iran policy. He was subsequently informed that he was not to write
anything on Iran for Heritage.
Soon after publishing their National Interest essay, Hulsman and Lieven
signed a deal with Pantheon to expand their argument into a book, which
will be released next month. "I worried about getting fired, but we
keep encouraging people to believe in moral courage, so we had to show
some," Hulsman says. As the book's publication date loomed, however,
Heritage began worrying about his doctrinal deviations and the
attention they would receive. "They had a desire to see what the book
said ahead of time," he says. "I had a desire to say it was none of
their business." And although Hulsman won't say what exactly happened
next, that was the end of his seven-year affiliation with the Heritage
Foundation.
The key figure in Hulsman's demise is Kim Holmes, who has directed
Heritage's foreign policy program almost continuously since 1992.
Holmes is an unlikely defender of neoconservatism. When William Kristol
and Robert Kagan published their seminal 1996 neocon manifesto, "Toward
A Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," Holmes laid waste to it in the pages
of Foreign Affairs, denouncing it as "low on strategic clarity" and
"pure escapism." Days before September 11, he sneered at the idea of
the United States acting as a "global policeman."
But that was before he went to work as the assistant secretary of state
for international organization affairs in 2002. Over the next three
years, Holmes quickly ditched all his old qualms about moralistic
foreign policy. And when he returned to Heritage last summer, he began
proselytizing for the administration's foreign policy with a convert's
zeal. Last April, in a speech, he contended that "[t]here can be no
real security in America without the advance of liberty in the world,"
an almost word-for-word quote from Bush's second inaugural address.
With Holmes's new outlook, it was only a matter of time before Hulsman
found himself in his boss' crosshairs. When I sought comment from
Holmes about the Hulsman affair, he first denied to me that Hulsman was
fired and then demanded I give him the name of the poor Heritage press
flack who transferred my call. (I politely declined.)
While some believe that Holmes's long knives are simply a matter of
enforcing Bush's prerogatives within the GOP, Hulsman gives his old
boss more credit. "Kim began to adhere to the views of the
administration," he says, "He sincerely changed his mind." But he
predicts that the recriminations at Heritage--and throughout the
conservative movement--will soon intensify. "If the midterms go badly,
the civil war in the GOP starts the day after," Hulsman says. "The
neocons and Kristol will say that Bush is incompetent and the neocons
are not to blame." Maybe then it'll be Hulsman who leads the next
purge.