Bush's “Useful Idiots”: 9/11, the Liberal Hawks and the Cooption of the “War on Terror”

Abstract

This article examines the development of two distinct theories of American internationalism in the 1990s – the political humanitarianism of the liberal hawks and the unipolarism of the neoconservatives – and the fundamentally different and opposing grounds on which these two groups supported the 2003 Iraq War. The liberal hawks, however, failed almost completely to examine the motivations of the neoconservative architects of the “war on terror.” Instead, they imposed their own normative schema on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and campaigned for them as wars of liberation. Their almost total failure to engage with the intellectual origins of the war led them to accept uncritically the idealistic rhetoric of the President and to assume that the Bush administration and the neoconservatives were motivated by the same idealism and world view as they were themselves. This led them to dismiss critics of the war as opponents of liberal values. As the situation in Iraq worsened, they continued to view the war as a moral endeavour – just one that had gone wrong, as opposed to a war fought for strategic reasons in which nation building was never a priority.