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January 27, 2005
Green Neocons
Robert Bryce has an interesting piece in Slate pointing out that Iraq hawks James Woolsey and Frank Gaffney seem to have jumped on the conservation bandwagon -- Woolsey is driving a hybrid Toyota Prius (although that may be just so he can drive in the carpool lane) and Gaffney is talking about "fuel efficiency and plant-based bio-fuels."
Bryce points out that Woolsey and Gaffney, both members of the Project for a New American Century, "are going green for geopolitical reasons, not environmental ones. They seek to reduce the flow of American dollars to oil-rich Islamic theocracies, Saudi Arabia in particular." (Digressive Note: What other "oil-rich Islamic theocracies" do American dollars flow to? Iran is not really so terribly "oil-rich," given its population, and none of the other countries I can think of qualify as theocracies even to the degree that Saudi Arabia, where feudal lords not clerics run the government, does.)
At least some environmentalists have no problem with such detestable bedfellows:
Neocons and greens first hitched up in the fall, when they jointly backed a proposal put forward by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Washington-based think tank that tracks energy and security issues. (Woolsey is on the IAGS advisory board.) The IAGS plan proposes that the federal government invest $12 billion to: encourage auto makers to build more efficient cars and consumers to buy them; develop industrial facilities to produce plant-based fuels like ethanol; and promote fuel cells for commercial use. The IAGS plan is keen on "plug-in hybrid vehicles," which use internal combustion engines in conjunction with electric motors that are powered by batteries charged by current from standard electric outlets.(Another Parenthetical Note: the NRDC endorsed NAFTA after the unenforceable "side agreements" on labor and the environment were added).The Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Council on Renewable Energy (Woolsey is on the latter's advisory board, too) both endorsed the IAGS plan. The environmental groups, who have been in the weeds ever since George W. Bush moved in at 1600 Pennsylvania, are happy for any help they can get. "It's a wonderful confluence. We agree on the same goals, even if it's for different reasons," says Deron Lovaas, the NRDC's point-man on auto issues.
As I have pointed out before, this is the kind of thing on which Michael Moore and Richard Perle agree completely -- in fact, it's not clear who would win a Saudi-bashing contest. One can imagine a grand alliance uniting Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Bill Maher, Arianna Huffington, and Michael Moore in the same righteous cause.
Of course, the neocons who are into this are the liberal type -- Woolsey was actually Director of Central Intelligence under Clinton (and Perle, not mentioned in Bryce's article, has characterized himself as a Democrat). The Cheney/Rumsfeld authoritarian statist right-wing extractive-industry corporate-moneygrubber faction's alliance with the neoconservatives may just be causing a split within the neocon ranks.
Alliances like this point up the dangers of fighting for a "good" cause in purely pragmatic terms without taking on a harmful dominant ideology. This is a question the antiwar movement is faced with now, as the temptation grows among some sectors to concentrate on the number of Americans killed and the economic cost of the war to Americans without taking on the ideology of American exceptionalism that surrounds everything else and has managed to mute the effect of everything from murderous assaults on civilians to torture to the creation of a new police state in Iraq.
Posted by rahul at January 27, 2005 08:18 PM
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