Blumenthal: Mugged by reality (Jeane Kirkpatrick)

[kskiska]

Once the warrior queen of neoconservatism, Jeane Kirkpatrick died a critic of Bush's unilateralism. Her death illuminates the conflicting legacies of the movement she helped found.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Dec. 14, 2006 | The death last week of Jeane Kirkpatrick -- ambassador to the United Nations during Ronald Reagan's first term and the highest-ranking neoconservative in his administration -- coincided with President Bush's rejection of the Baker-Hamilton Commission report on Iraq and his subsequent consultations with neoconservatives to entrench his belief in "victory." But rather than providing a sobering but inspirational backdrop for Bush's heroic stand against the foreign-policy establishment, Kirkpatrick's passing illuminates the conflicting legacies of the ideological movement of which she was once an icon and the confusion that surrounds a president who demands certitudes.

In its obituary, the New York Times buried a surprising scoop about her last act of diplomacy, when she was sent by President Bush on a secret mission to Geneva in March 2003 to justify the invasion of Iraq to Arab foreign ministers. "The marching orders we received were to argue that preemptive war is legitimate," Alan Gerson, her former general counsel, recalled. "She said: 'No one will buy it. If that's the position, count me out.'" Instead, she argued that Saddam Hussein was in violation of United Nations resolutions. Her hitherto unknown rejection of Bush's unilateralism and extolling of international order apparently was her final commentary on neoconservatism.

"A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality," neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol remarked in a famously cynical line. At the time of her death, Kirkpatrick was a neoconservative mugged by reality and a shadow of her former ferocious self. Once the warrior queen of neoconservatism, she ended as an unexplained skeptic, less the Valkyrie than the world-weary doubter, akin to the disillusioned Francis Fukuyama but without the tears of an apologetic manifesto. She checked out silently, leaving no equivalent of a political testament.

Norman Podhoretz, who had been her editor at Commentary, disclosed near the end of an obituary he published in the Weekly Standard that she had grown disenchanted. "She had serious reservations about the prudence of the Bush Doctrine, which she evidently saw neither as an analogue of the Truman Doctrine nor as a revival of the Reaganite spirit in foreign policy," he wrote. "Even so, she was clearly reluctant to join in the clamor against it, which for all practical purposes meant relegating herself to the sidelines." But Podhoretz declined to reveal more details of her disapproval. Abruptly, he assumed the pose of a commissar, praising her "brilliant service on the ideological front" and awarded her "laurels" for what she "earned in World War III," though "what I persist in calling World War IV" failed to "tempt her back into battle." Comrade Podhoretz's oblique admission of her absence "on the ideological front" and the posthumous anecdote in the Times obituary are the runes of her alienation.

more…
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/12/14/jeane_kirkpatrick/

[Captain Hilts]

1. She never mastered using her Safeway card to get the member discount.

Used to see her at the Arlington Rd. - Bradley Blvd. Safeway sometimes.