I’m nearly done with the book on neoconservatism that I previously described here and here. It’s going quickly now because I’m in the foreign policy section, and as a person who became politically engaged around 2003, much less of it is new to me. But there was a good little bit on why the neocons settled on Iraq rather than Iran as a test case for their theories: roughly, it was because everyone hated Saddam and the neocons figured people would get less bent out of shape if he were the target. All the other “national security” explanations, like the terror links and WMD, all applied as much or more to Iran. It was a purely pragmatic choice to push for conflict with Iraq instead, though one suspects it was merely a choice of ordering to these guys.

It occurred to me at this point that maybe part of why Iran wasn’t chosen to go first was because there are ideological complications. The neocons are obsessed with form over substance: they favor democracy in the sense of elections, not in the sense of liberal institutions like free speech, separation of powers, and so on. They favor religiosity but they don’t care what the religion is, just so long as it is peaceful (i.e. not anti-American) and complements the all-important civic religion. They favor finding “the center” of all public policy debates and sticking to it, which in effect means their politics are contentless. (Think about all the violent shifts in David Brooks’s politics since, say, 2005 as an example of this tendency.) It’s the neocon trademark, the closest thing they have to a universal principle, that there are no principles, just “principles” that are for the benefit of the filthy proles who need their religion to feel important, their democracy to feel in control, and their capitalism to feel like they can succeed. When you look at it that way, it’s clear what their gripes are with Saddam, a secular, quasisocialist autocrat. But Iran looks like a dark reflection of the society they want to build, one that satisfies their biggest premises while being fundamentally unacceptable in its final form. It sits there, quietly mocking their theories, day after day. It’s no wonder it drives them completely insane. Another way of saying all this is that it’s a refutation of their theories about political philosophy and human nature. Really, their only gripe with Iran can be its orientation toward America and Israel. They have no other basis for complaining about anything else. If we were living in a parallel universe where Iran was exactly the same in every way except that it accepted Israel’s right to exist and was nicer to America, not only would the neocons not consider Iran threat numero uno, but it would undoubtedly be held up as a model for the region, despite the oppression, thuggery and theocracy. After all, that stuff flies in Iraq and the neocons universally consider that a success story.

(P.S. The image is allegedly a political cartoon about Iran–supposedly what the Uncle Sam character is thinking in the speech bubble–caught my eye as strange and funny, but one which merely proves that political cartoons are inane in any language. We all know that George W. Bush would beat a drum and yell the name of a country he wanted to attack. The pertinent NSC meeting minutes will bear this out I’m sure, once they’re declassified around 2102 or so.)