A Tragedy of Errors
by Michael Lind
About a decade ago, I invented a game with a colleague of mine who,
like me, had once worked for Irving Kristol. We called it
neoconservative bingo. The idea was that the clichés of
neoconservative discourse would be arranged in various combinations
on bingo cards: "The World's Only Superpower"; "The New Class"; "The
China Threat"; "Decadent Europe"; "Against the UN"; "The Adversary
Culture"; "The Global Democratic Revolution"; "Down With the
Appeasers!"; "Be Firm Like Churchill." The free space in the center
of the bingo card would be "The Palestinian People Do Not Exist"
(nowadays it would be "No Palestinian State" or "All Palestinians
Are Terrorists"). As you read an essay or a book by a
neoconservative, you would check off each slogan on the card in the
order in which it appeared.
We never printed our neocon bingo cards. But the neoconservative
manifesto by David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil, which is
more a collection of talking points than a coherent argument, can
serve just as well. The United Nations "has traduced and betrayed"
the dream of world peace. The China Threat: "Eventual Korean
unification will reinforce the power of the world's democracies
against an aggressive and undemocratic China, should China so
evolve." There are the Neville Chamberlain appeasers and the Decadent
Europe theme: "To Americans, [Europe's doubts about the invasion of
Iraq] looked like appeasement. But it would be a great mistake to
attribute European appeasement to cowardice--or to cowardice alone."
There are the obligatory Churchill references--a chapter is titled
"End of the Beginning"--and there is this: "We will never cease to
hope for the civilized world's support. But if it is lacking, as it
may be, then we have to say, like the gallant lonely British soldier
in David Low's famous cartoon of 1940: 'Very well, alone.'"
Bingo.
Paradoxically, Perle and Frum happened to publish their manifesto of
neoconservative grand strategy at the very moment many of their
colleagues were insisting in print that neoconservatism does not
exist, and that the neocons have no influence on US foreign policy.
Up until the summer of 2003, neo-conservatives proudly championed
their movement against adversaries on the left and against factions
on the right (realist, paleoconservative and libertarian) that
questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq. That summer, however, the
invasion of Iraq--planned for a decade and carried out chiefly by
leading neoconservative foreign policy experts like the Bush
Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith--went terribly wrong. As
of this writing, more US soldiers have died in the unnecessary second
war in Iraq than have been killed in any other US military venture
since Vietnam, and several thousand Iraqis have died, with many more
maimed (the Bush Pentagon does not bother to count Iraqi casualties).
As the enormity of the debacle became apparent, neoconservatives
abruptly began avowing their own nonexistence. Not since Stalin
ordered the US Communist Party to go underground has an American
political faction pretended to dissolve itself in public like this.
David Brooks recently claimed in the New York Times that only
"full-mooners" believe that neoconservative institutions like the
Project for the New American Century (PNAC) have any influence on
Bush Administration policy because PNAC "has a staff of five and
issues memos on foreign policy." But PNAC disseminates the views not
of its paid staffers, receptionists and interns, but of powerful
Administration insiders like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld, in the same way that the Committee on the Present Danger
used to broadcast the views of Paul Nitze and Gene Rostow, who as
government officials were guarded in their own public comments.
Brooks continued: "In truth, the people labeled neocons... travel in
widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with
one another." In truth--to use Brooks's phrase--among those who have
signed PNAC letters are Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Robert
Kagan. PNAC is run by William Kristol, who edits The Weekly Standard,
for which Brooks writes, and is the son of Irving Kristol, founder of
The Public Interest and former publisher of The National Interest,
who wrote a book called Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an
Idea, and is married to the neoconservative historian Gertrude
Himmelfarb, William's mother. Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of
Commentary, is the father of John Podhoretz, a neoconservative editor
and columnist who has worked for the Reverend Moon's Washington Times
and the New York Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also
owns The Weekly Standard and Fox Television. Norman is the
father-in-law of Elliott Abrams, the former Iran/contra figure and
former head of the neocon Ethics and Public Policy Center and the
director of Near Eastern affairs at the National Security Council.
Elliott's mother-in-law and Norman's wife, Midge Decter, like many
older neocons a veteran of the old Committee on the Present Danger,
was recently given a National Humanities Medal after publishing a
fawning biography of Rumsfeld, whose number-two and number-three
deputies at the Pentagon, respectively, are Wolfowitz and Feith,
veterans of the Committee on the Present Danger and Team B, the
intelligence advisory group that grossly exaggerated Soviet military
power in the 1970s and '80s. Perle, a member of the Pentagon's
Defense Policy Board (and its former head), is a fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute and sits on the board of Hollinger
International, a right-wing media conglomerate (including the
Jerusalem Post and the Daily Telegraph) controlled by Conrad Black,
the chairman of the editorial board of The National Interest, which
Black partly subsidizes through the Nixon Center. Perle and
Feith--both PNAC allies--helped write a 1996 paper called "A Clean
Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," on behalf of Israel's
right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Perle, Feith and the
other US and Israeli authors called on Israel to abandon the Oslo
process and to restore martial law in the Palestinian territories
long before the second intifada began. Co-authorship is common among
the neocons: Brooks and Kristol, Kristol and Kagan, Frum and Perle.
These are people who, according to David Brooks, "don't actually have
much contact with one another."
According to Brooks, "To hear these people [the alleged conspiracy
theorists] describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral
Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles." He writes
that "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish.'"
With this vicious slur, Brooks has now joined Jonah Goldberg, Joshua
Muravchik, Joel Mowbray, Robert J. Lieber and other neoconservative
writers in accusing all critics of Israel's Likud government and its
neoconservative supporters of treating "neoconservative" as a synonym
for "Jew." Among those smeared by neocons in this way in the past
year are Chris Matthews, William Pfaff, Eric Alterman, Joshua Micah
Marshall, Gen. Anthony Zinni and yours truly. When I, the descendant,
in part, of Jewish immigrants, exposed Pat Robertson's anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories in 1995, Norman Podhoretz denounced me, not
Robertson, reasoning that while Robertson was objectively
anti-Semitic he could be forgiven because of his Christian Zionist
support for Israel, on the analogy of the rabbinical rule of batel
beshishim, which governs impurities in kosher bread. The most
loathsome libel in this loathsome campaign was written by Mowbray:
"Discussing the Iraq war with the Washington Post last week, former
General Anthony Zinni took the path chosen by so many anti-Semites:
he blamed it on the Jews.... Technically, the former head of the
Central Command in the Middle East didn't say 'Jews.' He instead used
a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites:
'neoconservatives.'" In An End to Evil, Perle and
Frum--spontaneously, one can only suppose, as neocons "don't actually
have much contact with one another"--repeat the new party line: "Most
important, the neoconservative myth offers Europeans and liberals a
useful euphemism for expressing their hostility to Israel."
It is true, and unfortunate, that some journalists tend to use
"neoconservative" to refer only to Jewish neoconservatives, a
practice that forces them to invent categories like "nationalist
conservative" or "Western conservative" for Rumsfeld and Cheney. But
neoconservatism is an ideology, like paleoconservatism and
libertarianism, and Rumsfeld and Dick and Lynne Cheney are
full-fledged neocons, as distinct from paleocons or libertarians,
even though they are not Jewish and were never liberals or leftists.
What is more, Jewish neocons do not speak for the majority of
American Jews. According to the 2003 Annual Survey of American Jewish
Opinion by the American Jewish Committee, 54 percent of American Jews
surveyed disapproved of the war on Iraq, compared with only 43
percent who approved, and American Jews disapproved of the way Bush
is handling the campaign against terrorism by a margin of 54-41.
Neoconservatism--the term was Michael Harrington's--originated in the
1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in
the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry
("Scoop") Jackson, many of whom preferred to call themselves
"paleoliberals." While there was a pro-Israel wing, the movement's
focus was on confrontation with the Soviet bloc abroad and on the
defense of New Deal liberalism and color-blind liberal integrationism
against rivals on the left at home. With the end of the cold war and
the ascendancy of the Democratic Leadership Council, many
"paleoliberals" drifted back to the Democratic center. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, once spoken of as a possible neoconservative presidential
candidate, broke with the movement in the 1980s over its growing
contempt for international law and its exaggeration of the Soviet
threat. Today's neocons are a shrunken remnant of the original broad
neocon coalition.
Nevertheless, the origins of their ideology on the left are still
apparent. The fact that most of the younger neocons were never on the
left is irrelevant; they are the intellectual (and, in the case of
William Kristol and John Podhoretz, the literal) heirs of older
ex-leftists. The idea that the United States and similar societies
are dominated by a decadent, postbourgeois "new class" was developed
by thinkers in the Trotskyist tradition like James Burnham and Max
Schachtman, who influenced an older generation of neocons. The
concept of the "global democratic revolution" has its origins in the
Trotskyist Fourth International's vision of permanent revolution. The
economic determinist idea that liberal democracy is an epiphenomenon
of capitalism, promoted by neocons like Michael Novak, is simply
Marxism with entrepreneurs substituted for proletarians as the heroic
subjects of history.
The organization as well as the ideology of the neoconservative
movement has left-liberal origins. PNAC is modeled on the Committee
on the Present Danger, which in turn was modeled on the Congress for
Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded network of the anti-Communist
center-left that sought to counter Stalin's international cultural
front groups between the 1940s and the 1960s. Many of the older
neocons are veterans of the CCF, including Irving Kristol, who with
Stephen Spender co-edited Encounter, the CIA-bankrolled magazine of
the movement. European social democratic models inspired the
quintessential neocon institution, the National Endowment for
Democracy.
Along with other traditions that have emerged from the anti-Stalinist
left, neoconservatism has appealed to many Jewish intellectuals and
activists, but it is not, for that reason, a Jewish movement. Like
other schools on the left, neoconservatism recruited from diverse
"farm teams," including liberal Catholics (William Bennett and
Michael Novak began on the Catholic left) and populists, socialists
and New Deal liberals in the South and Southwest (the pool from which
Jeane Kirkpatrick, James Woolsey and I were drawn). There were, and
are, very few Northeastern WASP mandarins in the neoconservative
movement, for the same reason that there were few on the older
American left, which tended to mirror the New Deal coalition of
ethnic and regional outsiders.
With the exception of its Middle East strategy--a subject to which I
will return--there is nothing particularly "Jewish" about
neoconservative views on foreign policy. While the example of Israel
has inspired American neocons to embrace tactics like preventive war
and "targeted assassination," the global strategy of today's neocons
is shaped chiefly by the heritage of cold war anti-Communism. Neocon
hostility to the UN, too often explained solely in terms of UN
condemnations of Israel, is a relic of the 1970s and '80s, when the
General Assembly was dominated by an anti-American alliance of the
Soviet bloc and Third World autocracies. The claim that we are waging
"World War IV"--made by Elliot Cohen, James Woolsey and Norman
Podhoretz--is a reflex of superannuated cold warriors, as are
parallels between militant Islam and secular totalitarianism and the
attempt to inflate China or post-Communist Russia into threats
comparable to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Not only America's cold war history but the British experience in the
twentieth century has shaped neocon perceptions. This is not as
strange as it seems. Britain was the leading world power until a few
generations ago; many neoconservatives are adult immigrants from the
British Commonwealth, like the former Canadian subjects of Her
Majesty Charles Krauthammer and David Frum; and many neocon thinkers
follow Lionel Trilling (whom Irving Kristol has cited, along with Leo
Strauss, as one of the greatest influences on his thought) in looking
to British culture to explicate American society. The first modern
industrial society, Britain reached its peak, neocons believe, as a
result of the combination of imperial ruthlessness, bourgeois (not
managerial) capitalism and Victorian virtue. Tragically, however,
British strength was sapped from within by the postbourgeois elitists
of Bloomsbury, who mocked Victorian values even as the work ethic was
eroded by the welfare state. As a result, Britain was morally and
materially unprepared to fight fascist totalitarianism. The greatest
man of the twentieth century, to judge from the number of times he is
cited by neocons, was not Franklin Roosevelt but Winston Churchill,
the upholder of Victorian values.
In neocon ideology, the United States is reliving the experience of
Britain three-quarters of a century ago. Osama bin Laden (or Saddam
or the Chinese leadership or Yasir Arafat) is the new Hitler. Bush is
the new Churchill, as Reagan was earlier. Moderate Republicans and
conservative realists, as well as liberal Democrats, are the new
Neville Chamberlains. The working-class Protestant fundamentalists of
the rural and suburban American South are equated with the bourgeois
dissenting Protestants of Victorian England. The American university
is the new Bloomsbury, full of decadent liberals and leftists sapping
the morale of young Americans, who many neoconservatives think should
be drafted and sent to fight a series of wars abroad to promote
democracy. Four years ago, Donald Kagan and Frederick Kagan (Robert
Kagan's father and brother, respectively) published a book called
While America Sleeps, comparing the United States to Britain in the
late 1930s. For the neocons, America is the Britain of Churchill and
Chamberlain, and it is always 1939.
Something like what Vivian De Sola Pinto wrote of Kipling in
Crisis in English Poetry (1968) could be said today of Kipling's
admirer Max Boot and most of today's neoconservative imperialists:
"There was no Irish or South African problem, only rebels and
traitors; there was no aesthetic problem, only wasters and rotters
like Sir Anthony Gloster's son who was educated at 'Harrer an'
Trinity College' and 'muddled with books and pictures,' and
Tomlinson whose sins were entirely literary; there was no problem
of war and peace, only foolish liberals and sentimental or knavish
pacifists. All the world needed was more discipline, obedience and
loyalty, and above all a paternal British Empire with its
unselfish and efficient administrators and admirable army licked
into shape by perfect N.C.O.s."
Despite its eccentricities, like its un-American nostalgia for
British imperialism, neoconservatism, as paleocons and libertarians
never tire of insisting, is a movement that shares some of the same
values as the center-left. When Richard Perle calls for women's
rights in Muslim countries, when David Brooks writes in support of
gay marriage, and when The Weekly Standard denounces neo-Confederate
racism, there is no reason to question their sincerity. Nor is Irving
Kristol being disingenuous when he says that the welfare state is
here to stay. Straussian elitism does not disqualify the leftist
credentials of the neocons. Many liberal and democratic movements
have had doubts about the ability of the majority to govern
themselves, and have put their hopes in some sort of enlightened
elite--Jefferson's natural aristocracy, the technocrats favored by
American Progressives, the vanguard intelligentsia of the
Marxist-Leninists. Imperialism, too, has been compatible with a
certain liberal messianism. Until the rise of Third World national
liberation movements, some of empire's staunchest advocates were
liberals, among them British Fabians and American Progressives. Even
Marx was willing to acknowledge that underdeveloped countries like
India could benefit from imperial tutelage.
The influence of Marxism is particularly evident in neoconservative
conceptions of patriotism. In The Weekly Standard of last August 25,
Kristol published an essay titled "The Neoconservative Persuasion"
(evidently someone had neglected to inform Kristol, "the godfather of
neoconservatism," about the new party line that neoconservatism does
not exist). Among what Kristol calls "the following 'theses' (as a
Marxist would say)" is his claim that "large nations, whose identity
is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United
States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to
more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United
States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic
nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal."
Therefore the United States should "defend Israel today...no
complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are
necessary" (an odd sentiment from the former publisher of a magazine
called The National Interest, of which I was executive editor from
1991 to 1994). Let us set the question of Israel aside for now, and
note that very few Americans think of their country as a version of
the USSR with liberal democracy instead of Marxism-Leninism as the
official ideology--probably as few as think of American foreign
policy in terms of "'theses' (as a Marxist would say)."
A few years earlier in the Wall Street Journal, Irving's son William
and David Brooks co-authored a similar call for a "national greatness
conservatism" in which American patriotism is emptied of all content
except for military crusades on behalf of democracy abroad. As far as
empire is concerned, William Kristol and Max Boot embrace the
"e-word" while Frum and Perle disavow it. But if the nation has value
only as the host or carrier of a potentially universal ideology,
which must be spread abroad by force of arms and subversion, then the
distinction between "national greatness" and "imperialism"
disappears--in the case of American neoconservatism no less than in
the comparable cases of Soviet Communism and Napoleonic liberalism.
This kind of crusading secular messianism has nothing at all to do
with conventional patriotism and nationalism, even in their liberal
forms. Many Americans have thought of our country as a model for
other liberal democracies, but hardly any view our nation as a mere
staging platform for a "global democratic revolution," to be promoted
by invading foreign countries and arming foreign insurrections where
no "calculations of national interest are necessary."
The distant influence of the Trotskyist Fourth International is
apparent, even though the neocons ransack American history in order
to provide their movement with a usable past. Max Boot calls himself
a "hard Wilsonian," but in his celebration of Kipling-style
imperialism it's hard to see much of Wilson, who viewed international
law and international organization as the alternative to the
militarization of American society that he dreaded, and who is
forever identified with national self-determination of the kind
claimed by the Palestinians. William Kristol and David Brooks invoke
the name of Theodore Roosevelt. But unlike TR's imperial
Progressivism, which supported conservation and prolabor reforms, the
domestic side of "national greatness conservatism" is vacuous,
consisting chiefly of the suggestion by Brooks and Kristol that the
United States build more war memorials, perhaps in response to the
body count they anticipate from their wars of democracy promotion.
Like Paul Berman, the maître penseur of the liberal hawks, many
neocons try to enlist Lincoln for their cause. But Lincoln opposed
the Mexican War and rejected the idea that the United States had a
duty to spread democracy by force. In 1859 Lincoln ridiculed "Young
America," who "is a great friend of humanity; and his desire for land
is not selfish, but merely an impulse to extend the area of freedom.
He is very anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations
and colonies, provided, always, they have land, and have not any
liking for his interference."
The redefinition of American patriotism as zealotry on behalf of a
crusading, messianic ideology is compatible with a disrespect for
actual American institutions, which, if it were expressed by leftists
or liberals, would be denounced as un-American by neocon arbiters of
American patriotism like Frum, a Canadian who bothered to become a US
citizen only after he'd served in the Bush White House. Most of the
career professionals in the national security agencies--the military,
the intelligence community and the Foreign Service--oppose the grand
strategy of Bush and his neocon political appointees. Logically,
therefore, Perle and Frum want to replace lifelong public servants
with presidential spoilsmen. Of the intelligence community they
write, "It may be time to bring all of these secret warriors into a
single paramilitary structure ultimately answerable to the secretary
of defense"--not to mention Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and
Under Secretary of Defense Feith. If the intelligence agencies had
already been subordinated to civilians in the Pentagon, then
Wolfowitz and Feith would not have needed to do an end run around the
CIA and the State Department by creating a new intelligence agency,
the Office of Special Plans, which tortured data until it supported
the policies advocated by the neocons. While neocon appointees in the
Pentagon bring the intelligence community to heel, others will
colonize the diplomatic service. Perle and Frum, two former political
appointees, write, "Next, we should increase sharply the number of
political appointees in the State Department and expand their role."
The ideological Gleichschaltung will extend to the US military. The
neocons, few of whom ever served in the military, can scarcely
conceal their contempt for America's soldiers; Frum and Perle write
of "the dead hand of military tradition." (Lieut. Gen. William
Boykin, a Christian fundamentalist like so many of Ariel Sharon's
American supporters, is acceptable, and has been brought into the
Office of the Secretary of Defense to work with civilian appointees
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith.) The career military, so often an
obstacle to grandiose neocon schemes, must be transformed into an
instrument of preventive wars, argue Perle and Frum: "Will we need to
go after a terrorist camp in some remote village in Indonesia? Or
raid Syria to retrieve or destroy weapons of mass destruction that
may have been sent there by Saddam Hussein for safekeeping? Or strike
a decisive blow against a North Korean facility about to produce
nuclear weapons for a terrorist customer?"--actions justified, we
have reason to fear, on the basis of data doctored by neocon
political appointees in the US intelligence community.
The new American armed forces will be busy, if Perle and Frum get
their way. In the course of An End to Evil they call for deposing the
governments of Iran and Syria, treating Saudi Arabia as an enemy,
blockading North Korea--oh, and let's not forget, France is an
adversary, along with "France's pilot fish, Belgium."Down with
Belgium, France's Pilot Fish!--this is a new addition to the litany
of neoconservatism.
If Frum and Perle are to be believed, a great number of US invasions
and US-supported revolutions will be necessary to bring democracy to
countries that now lack it: "Kofi Annan complained in July 2003 that
democracy cannot be imposed by force. Really?" Annan is a better
historian than Perle and Frum. The record is clear--most of the
democratic transitions that have taken place in the world in the past
two centuries have had nothing to do with foreign military
intervention or military pressure, while most US military
interventions abroad have left dictatorship, not democracy, in their
wake. The two cases that neocons constantly return to, Germany and
Japan, are among the few cases where democracy has been restored (not
created ex nihilo) as the result of a US invasion. The Soviet bloc
democratized itself from within in the 1990s, even though the United
States did not bomb Moscow, impose a martial-law governor on the
Poles or imprison former Hungarian Communist officials without
charges in barbed-wire camps. In Latin America, Mexico became a
multiparty democracy instead of a one-party dictatorship without US
Marines posing for photos in the presidential mansion in Mexico City,
and it was not necessary for American soldiers to kill tens of
thousands of Argentines, Chileans and Brazilians for democracy to
take root in those countries.
One must hope that American soldiers leave behind a functioning
democracy in Iraq--rather than the dysfunctional autocracies and
kleptocracies that were the legacy of US military occupations in the
Philippines, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Mexico. But it is likely
that, if and when liberal democracy comes to the Muslim world in
general and to the Arab world in particular, the gradual, largely
bloodless transition will resemble those in Soviet Europe and Latin
America and will not be the result of US military action or
intimidation. The neocons--and the humanitarian hawks on the
left--are simply wrong about how best to spread democracy.
The global strategy of the neocons, then, is not ethnic but
ideological, a crusade in the name of democracy. But the
neoconservatives who support Israel's illiberal Likud Party, and
Likud's American allies, the Protestant Christian Zionists of the
Southern religious right, contradict their own professed principles.
In theory, neoconservative ideology is more compatible with Israeli
post-Zionism than with either the Labour Zionist or Revisionist
Zionist forms of Israeli ethnic nationalism. The neocons are always
denouncing American "paleoconservatives" for claiming that US
nationality must be founded on race (Caucasian) or religion
(Christianity)--and yet they defend Israeli politicians and thinkers
whose blood-and-soil nationalism is even less liberal than the
"Buchananism" the neocons denounce in the US context.
In the pages of The Weekly Standard, David Brooks made the
astonishing argument that the United States, a Lockean liberal
democracy, must defend Israel, another Lockean liberal democracy,
against illiberal Palestinian nationalism. The idea that Israeli
identity has nothing to do with blood-and-soil nationalism might
hearten post-Zionist proponents of Israel as "a state of all its
citizens" (not to mention Israel's 1 million Palestinian citizens)
but will come as news to Labour Zionists as well as to the Likud,
National Religious and Shas parties in Sharon's governing coalition.
Unlike Brooks, Douglas Feith does not lie about the nature of Israeli
nationalism. In an address he delivered in Jerusalem in 1997 titled
"Reflections on Liberalism, Democracy and Zionism," written before he
became the third-most-powerful official in the Pentagon, Feith
denounced "those Israelis" who "contend that Israel like America
should not be an ethnic state--a Jewish state--but rather a 'state of
its citizens.'" Feith argued that "there is a place in the world for
non-ethnic nations and there is a place for ethnic nations." Feith's
theory, unlike that of Brooks, permits pro-Likud neocons to preach
postethnic universalism for the United States and blood-and-soil
nationalism for Israel. While solving one problem for the
neoconservative movement, Feith creates others. He legitimizes
identity politics, which the neocons despise--how can one justify
Israel-centered Jewish ethnoracial nationalism while denouncing
Afrocentrism or the sinister neo-Nazi idea of an "Aryan-German" or
"Nordic" diaspora in the United States? Even worse, Feith's theory
seems to endorse the false claim of anti-Semites that Jews are
essentially foreigners in the nations in which they are born or
reside. Indeed, according to the Jabotinskyite ideology shared by
Sharon, Netanyahu and many (not all) of their neocon allies, there
are only two kinds of Jews in the world: Israelis and potential
Israelis. For generations, many if not most Jewish Americans have
rejected this illiberal conception.
A related contradiction is the ever-deepening alliance of the neocons
with the Likud's major supporters in the American electorate, the
Protestant ayatollahs of the Bible Belt, which inspired Irving
Kristol, William Kristol and Norman Podhoretz to open their magazines
to religious-right tirades against abortion rights, gay rights, gun
control and--my personal favorite--"Darwinism." This apertura to
Southern Christian fundamentalism--the opposite of everything that
neoconservatism defined as "paleoliberalism" once stood for--led to
my departure and that of several other former neoconservatives. We
thought we had joined an antitotalitarian liberal movement, not an
alliance of American Likudniks and born-again Baptist creationists
brought together to support the colonization of "Samaria" and "Judea"
by right-wing Jewish settlers.
Neoconservatism--that is, hawkish paleoliberalism--was hijacked by
elite American supporters of the Likud, both Jewish and non-Jewish,
and their Christian allies, long before the neocons, temporarily,
perhaps, hijacked US foreign policy under the second Bush. I can
attest that there are neoconservatives, including Jewish
neoconservatives, who don't share a love affair with the Likud, but
if they said so in public their careers in the movement would end.
The warping of an ideological movement by the ethnic, religious or
regional biases of its leaders is not uncommon. For example, there
was nothing innately Catholic or even Christian about William F.
Buckley Jr.'s "movement conservatism," which attracted many
Protestants, Jews and secularists. Nevertheless, the Buckley circle
was heavily Catholic and included his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, an
American follower of Spanish Carlism (the Carlists were the Catholic
answer to the American Likudniks). In the same way that criticizing
the Likud Party is a bad career move if you are a contemporary Jewish
or non-Jewish neoconservative who doesn't see why Israel shouldn't be
a "state of all its citizens" like the United States, so it was not a
good idea in the 1950s and '60s to criticize General Franco's Spain
if you were a National Review conservative.
The cynical way in which the Bush Administration lied to Congress and
the American people to justify an invasion of Iraq planned years
before September 11, 2001, by Wolfowitz and many of his PNAC allies
came as no surprise to me, a former neocon. In an anthology titled
The Fettered Presidency published by the American Enterprise
Institute in 1989, Irving Kristol wrote that "if the president goes
to the American people and wraps himself in the American flag and
lets Congress wrap itself in the white flag of surrender, the
president will win.... The American people had never heard of
Grenada. There was no reason why they should have. The reason we gave
for the intervention--the risk to American medical students
there--was phony but the reaction of the American people was
absolutely and overwhelmingly favorable. They had no idea what was
going on, but they backed the president. They always will."
But too much can be made of the mendacity of the neocons. The
influence of Leo Strauss's teachings about the need for the
"philosophers" to conceal the truth from the masses can be
exaggerated. The conviction on the part of neocons of their own
rectitude may be sufficient, in their minds, to justify deception of
the public in matters like Iraq's nonexistent threat to the United
States. After all, they are waging World War IV against--well,
against whomever--a revived Russia this year, China the next, and the
next year a vague "Islamist" threat that somehow contains
anti-Islamist Baathists and secular Palestinians along with Osama bin
Laden. In their own minds, the neocons are Churchillian figures, a
heroic minority who, as they battle a generic "totalitarianism" of
which radical Islam is the latest manifestation, are handicapped by
cowardly establishment "appeasers" and purveyors of a decadent
"adversary culture" among the "new class" in the academy and the
media. I don't doubt that many leading neocons sincerely wanted to
believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the
Iraqi masses would embrace Ahmad Chalabi as their de Gaulle, that
there would be a democratic domino effect in the Middle East,
bringing pro-Israel and pro-American secularists to power. Now that
they have been proven wrong, at enormous cost in American and Iraqi
life, they are disoriented. Instead of acknowledging and taking
responsibility for their catastrophic failure, they are desperately
trying to avoid blame.
Unfortunately for them, a political ideology can fail in the real
world only so many times before being completely discredited. For at
least two decades, in foreign policy the neocons have been wrong
about everything. When the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse,
the hawks of Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger declared
that it was on the verge of world domination. In the 1990s they
exaggerated the power and threat of China, once again putting
ideology ahead of the sober analysis of career military and
intelligence experts. The neocons were so obsessed with Saddam
Hussein and Yasir Arafat that they missed the growing threat of Al
Qaeda. After 9/11 they pushed the irrelevant panaceas of preventive
war and missile defense as solutions to the problems of hijackers and
suicide bombers.
They said Saddam had WMDs. He didn't. They said he was in league with
Osama bin Laden. He wasn't. They predicted that no major postwar
insurgency in Iraq would occur. It did. They said there would be a
wave of pro-Americanism in the Middle East and the world if the
United States acted boldly and unilaterally. Instead, there was a
regional and global wave of anti-Americanism.
David Brooks and his colleagues in the neocon press are half right.
There is no neocon network of scheming masterminds--only a network of
scheming blunderers. As a result of their own amateurism and
incompetence, the neoconservatives have humiliated themselves. If
they now claim that they never existed--well, you can hardly blame
them, can you?
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