Expanding the base of the neocons

Politics is all about polarities. Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, right vs. left, hard thinking vs. soft thinking. The labels are pervasive, but the ground frequently shifts, requiring a new prefix to freshen up the label.

The word neocon, for example (short for neoconservative), was born of such a shifting of the ground. Coined in the 1970s, the label stuck to Democrats who had watched the Scoop Jackson anti-Communist wing of the Democratic party evaporate before their very eyes. They saw the War on Poverty become a losing battle. On the domestic front, they observed the death of morality as it had been defined for thousands of years in the Judeo-Christian tradition. These Democrats finally concluded that liberalism, as they had known it, was dead.

Irving Kristol, father of the neocons, defined his band of brothers and sisters as "liberals mugged by reality." That reality was the "evil empire" as defined by Ronald Reagan, the leader they championed. The reality extended to a concern for crime and education and what came to be called "family values." A subdivision of the neocons, the "cultural conservatives," were wryly defined as liberals with daughters in junior high.

Jews were prominently identified with the neocons, largely because Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, made the magazine a sounding board for neocon criticism. But Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a Baptist, and William Bennett, a Roman Catholic, were prominent neocon voices from the beginning. So were other Christians. "What are we," they might ask, "chopped liver?"

The Jewish neocons understood what the majority of Jews who vote Democratic didn't - that Jews and Evangelical Christians held many things in common, among them an admiration and affection for Israel.

Such definitions and ideological attitudes are amply documented in the political history of the second half of the 20th century, but the neocon label resurfaces today as many journalists and pundits identify the neocons as a new generation driving the foreign policy of George W. Bush.

It's a label that doesn't quite fit, since those credited with influence are hardly "neo" anything. For the most part, the label is attributed to second-generation conservatives. Some are sons of the Scoop Jackson Democrats whose fathers have the last name of Podhoretz and Kristol, but the label as accurately understood has a much more inclusive intellectual base, including, for example, Vice President Dick Cheney; his wife, Lynne; Condoleezza Rice; Don Rumsfeld; and Paul Wolfowitz, the hugely influential deputy defense secretary.

The term, however, is disingenuously bandied about at dinner tables and policy meetings in London and Paris and elsewhere, where it is colorfully coded to suggest a Jewish conspiracy working on the White House.

A member of the French parliament, quoting Dominique de Villepin, the French defense minister, scoffed that "the hawks in the U.S. administration (are) in the hands of ([Ariel) Sharon." This is a not-so-sly reference to the conservative Jews who are credited with converting the president to a sympathetic regard for Israel. Of course, those who cite a conspiracy or cabal continue to see the president as a dunce, whose tabula rasa is filled in by manipulative Jewish advisers.

Closer to home, the New York Observer, in a front page story under the headline "Neo-York, Neo-York," says the "neoconservative network is riding high." This requires stretching the definition beyond recognition, citing Rupert Murdoch, the publisher of the New York Post, the Weekly Standard and the Fox News Network.

"I have been amazed by the label of conspiracy-mongering around neocons," David Brooks, an editor at the Weekly Standard tells the Observer. "I get it every day - the 'evil Jewish conspiracy.' The only distinction between 'neoconservative' and 'conservative' this way is circumcision. We actually started to call it the Axis of Circumcision."

Jay Nordlinger, an editor of the National Review, says the misuse of the term "neoconservative" as applied to him comes from reporters who are liberal, apolitical or stupidly political, "who know nothing about conservatism." He prefers the term "Reaganite."

Like Ronald Reagan, those who are called neocons today see the United States as a force for good against evil and they're not afraid to speak in such terms. George W. Bush began to express that kind of thinking after Sept. 11, when everything changed.

"Evil still stalks the planet," Ronald Reagan told the Oxford Union Society in 1992. "Its ideology may be nothing more than bloodlust; no program more complex than economic plunder or military aggrandizement. But it is evil all the same. And wherever there are forces that would destroy the human spirit and diminish human potential, they must be recognized and they must be countered."

Irving Kristol, sire of William Kristol, authored "Reflections of a Neoconservative" in 1983, and "Neoconservatism: Autobiography of an Idea" in 1999.

In the mid 1990s, neocon Mark Gerson wrote "The Neoconservative Vision", a history of the movement, and "The Essential Neoconservative Reader".

There is a website at http://neoconservatism.com/ , run by and about neoconservatives.

But now we are supposed to believe that "neoconservative" is a term invented by their detractors, and unfairly applied? Yeah, right. That must make Irving Kristol one of the original evil paleos, seeing as he appears to be the first to apply the name "neoconservative" to his own group.

Well, this little game will probably fool the useful idiots of neoconservative blather, but no one else.

Those EVIL neo-cons are at it again
Editorial: North Korea / Time for 'Let's make a deal'

Published April 30, 2003

The first news -- most of it leaks from U.S. officials -- out of U.S.-North Korea-China meetings last week in Beijing was all gloom and doom: North Korea was full of bluster; it has nuclear weapons and might use them, test them or sell them. Something about the reports seemed odd, and it was.

Dismayed by the U.S. spin, China started telling its view, and it seems the American leakers had failed to disclose that amid the typical North Korean bluster was an offer -- actually more of a desperate plea -- for a deal: North Korea would give up its nuclear program, stop testing ballistic missiles and stop selling missiles. In return, it wanted a lot of things, chief among them a security agreement and normalization of relations with the United States, plus quite a lot of aid.

So why the American spin? Because the neoconservatives at the Pentagon and American Enterprise Institute don't want the Bush administration making any kind of deal with North Korea. That's why they tried, and failed, to get the U.S. envoy to the talks, James Kelly, replaced with a belligerent, arch-hardliner, Undersecretary of State John Bolton.

The neocons would like to push North Korea until it lashes out, collapses or both. They want regime change, and a deal would squash that desire. But the idea of putting the screws to North Korea scares the Chinese, Japanese and South Koreans silly. China fears a collapse of North Korea would bring it millions of starving refugees even as Beijing tries to deal with the health and economic consequences of the SARS epidemic.

South Korea and Japan have the same fear, plus they know any military confrontation with North Korea would put millions of their own citizens at grave risk. Both countries are easily within striking range of the huge North Korean military. It's not an exaggeration to say that a war on the Korean Peninsula would cause many times more casualties in its first minutes than were suffered in the entire Iraq war.

All of that leads inexorably to the conclusion drawn by the Clinton administration: There are no good options with North Korea. It must be bought off.

But can Secretary of State Colin Powell sell a deal to President Bush? Alone he might not, but he will get a lot of help from Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo. Bush already has committed to Seoul that he will seek a peaceful, diplomatic solution to the crisis, and that means he will eventually be forced to negotiate a package settlement.

That's the only sane way to proceed, and if Bush plays his cards right, it can appear a huge diplomatic achievement for him, one with a big domestic political payoff. Missteps by the Bush administration precipitated this entire drama, but that would go mostly unnoticed as Americans breathe a sigh of relief that the White House has delivered the nation from a nuclear confrontation.

The only problem is that the neocon crowd would be furious at Powell's success. Then again, that would make the triumph of diplomacy sumptuous as well as sane.

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