The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News April 22, 2005

Neo-conservative lectures
Mixed opinions on Iraq war
 
The New Republic: Editor Lawrence Kaplan spoke Tuesday on foreign policy.
 

“You guys win the oxymoron award for my speaking invites this year,” said New Republic editor Lawrence Kaplan, referring to the Oberlin College Republicans who sponsored his speech on Tuesday. “Not even Jews for Jesus or the Socialist Worker’s Party at Brigham Young could outdo a Republican group at Oberlin.”

All the same, Kaplan’s neo-conservative stance on foreign policy drew around 50 Oberlin students of various political persuasions to King 306.

The main topic of Kaplan’s talk was U.S. policy in the Middle East, particularly Iraq on which he authored a book titled The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission with National Review editor William Kristol in 2001. A proud member of the neo-conservative movement in American foreign policy, Kaplan argues for the use of American economic and military power to advance democracy throughout the world.

A graduate of Columbia University and Oxford, Kaplan was executive editor of the National Interest and has written for Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard and The Washington Post.

Kaplan, though still a registered Democrat, traces his conservatism back to his time at Columbia University where the political correctness of the area made him “appalled at the sheer intolerance of a place I thought would be a bastion of free inquiry.”

His criticism of educational institutions such as Columbia as well as Oberlin continued into his discussion of foreign policy.

“It’s there, not here, where liberalism is truly being advanced,” Kaplan said. “It’s out there and the engine for this is a reactionary named George Bush.”

Kaplan professed initial reticence towards Bush, stating, “a man who entered office pledging to conduct himself humbly towards the world has since become more Wilsonian than Woodrow Wilson himself. This is largely thanks to the devilish cabal of neo-conservatives whispering in his ear.”

He defined neo-conservatism as combining “the ideals of liberalism with the language of power inherent in realism and conservatism.”

Moreover, Kaplan argued that there is no contradiction between America’s ideological and strategic interests.

“The strategic case for promoting democracy is that democracies rarely, if ever, wage war on one another,” he said. “That’s about as close as you can get to a truism in today’s foreign policy world.”

In an interview with the Review, Kaplan expressed mix feelings about the usefulness of international institutions like the U.N.

“I think they are useful in that they lend legitimacy, but they are not important in and of themselves,” he said. “I don’t see much point in excessive fondness or antipathy towards international institutions.”

As for Iraq, Kaplan supported the war as a method of democratizing the Middle East but suspects that for Bush “the weapons of mass destruction were more important. This administration didn’t really start to talk much about democracy until after they didn’t find any weapons, which led many critics to be justifiably suspicious of their motives.”

All the same, Kaplan is encouraged by recent developments in the Middle East which he sees as direct consequences of the Iraq mission, particularly recent demonstrations against the regimes in Lebanon and Egypt.

“I think it’s the height of churlishness to say that Iraq had nothing to do with this,” he said

All the same, despite his enthusiastic support for the war in Iraq, Kaplan, who has visited Iraq several times since the war, is of decidedly mixed opinion about its consequences.

“If you spend enough time in the highways in Iraq and you see enough bloodshed and if you go up to Walter Reed hospital and see these kids with their legs blown off, grand theories tend to evaporate pretty quickly. I’m not at all sure how it’s going to come out in the end and I can’t say with any sense of certainty that it would definitely be worth it. I’m cautiously optimistic, but to be entirely honest, I just can’t say with any sense of certainty that the steep price that’s been exacted with American blood will be worth the gain.”
 
 

   


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