Getting it Right: Slate’s Phony Farewell to Jeane Kirkpatrick

Slate still offers this farewell to Jeane Kirkpatrick, former US Ambassador to the United Nations and renowned political scientist.

Unfortunately trying to fit this neo-conservative into thoughts on Iraq, Timothy Noah gives only hallow credit to Jeane and proves little of his own.

The article’s main point is to show Jeane as a different type of neo-conservative, one highly aware of the limitations of American power.

To support this claim Noah constructs a citation machination–he didn’t get me–and cites James Mann’s observation in Rise of the Vulcans (emphasis added):

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the neoconservative movement had come to espouse ideas directly contrary to those in “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” Whereas Kirkpatrick had ridiculed the notion that it is possible to establish democracy “anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances,” during the George W. Bush administration neoconservatives argued that the United States should seek democratic reforms wherever possible, from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Kirkpatrick had suggested that democratizing third world countries might take decades or centuries, but by 2002 neoconservatives were seeking democratic change among the Palestinians and in Iraq within no more than a couple of years.

Unfortunately Noah witty portrait fails in two dramatic respects. First, he fails to discuss her role as pro-Iraq pundit in the run-up to war. Second, and even more embarrassing, he fails to tease out a central lesson of Mann’s book. Neo-con lites, whether Kirkpatrick or Colin Powell, bought into the same world view as the neo-con heavies—doing nothing to stop the runaway train into Iraq.

For my evidence, I cite this 2002 interview from the Newshour with Jim Lehr discussing Powell’s now-infamous presentation to the United Nations:

GWEN IFILL: You don’t think Secretary Powell is out of step at all, do you agree with that?

JEANE KIRKPATRICK: I don’t think Secretary Powell is out of step. Secretary Powell has spent his life in uniform, and he’s a very disciplined military man and leader and I think he is a very… has a very important leadership role in the administration actually and with regard to foreign policy in the administration. I think he deserves a lot of the credit for the resolution. I also think by the way Prime Minister Tony Blair probably deserves some credit for that too.

JEANE KIRKPATRICK: It has important implications for non-proliferation too and our efforts at non-proliferation and nuclear weapons and nuclear technology because there has been such a effort with regard to Iraq. And if we fail in Iraq, there is little reason to think we’re ever going to succeed any place or in any country like North Korea for example.

Also, from the New York Times:

Fifteen years later, in March 2003, President Bush recalled Ambassador Kirkpatrick to active duty and sent her to Geneva, said Alan Gerson, who had served as her general counsel at the United Nations. The secret mission, previously undisclosed, was to head off a diplomatic uprising against the imminent war against Iraq. Arab ministers wanted to condemn it as an act of aggression.

“The marching orders we received were to argue that pre-emptive war is legitimate,” Mr. Gerson said. “She said: ‘No one will buy it. If that’s the position, count me out.’ ”

Instead, she argued that the attack was justified by Saddam Hussein’s violations of United Nations resolutions dating from the 1991 war against Iraq. The foreign ministers found her position convincing and their resolve against the war faded, Mr. Gerson said.

Here one finds Kirkpatrick favoring the country-specific and force-heavy approach to the world. As such, when it came to crunch time these voices (such as Powell and Kirkpatrick) came out in favor of the Iraq War.

Now I don’t say this to sully Kirkpatrick: one could argue the neo-con world view was not fundamentally flawed, but poorly articulated by the George W. Bush administration.Questions of this sort will fill history books and numerous best sellers for years to come.

But on the simple matter of where Kirkpatrick fell on the ideological spectrum is clear: she was a neo-con. Furthermore, she bought into the Bush campaign to go into Iraq when he did.

Noah’s attempt to sugar-coat her professed world-view is not only superficial, but insulting to Kirkpatrick’s legacy.