Posted on 03/11/2003 1:14:12 PM PST by quidnunc
The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged. In a rare moment in U.S. journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle: “Can you assure American viewers … that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?”
Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group. People who claim to be writing the foreign policy of the world superpower, one would think, would be a little more manly in the schoolyard of politics. Not so.
Former Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot kicked off the campaign. When these “Buchananites toss around ‘neoconservative’—and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen—it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean is ‘Jewish conservative.’” Yet Boot readily concedes that a passionate attachment to Israel is a “key tenet of neoconservatism.” He also claims that the National Security Strategy of President Bush “sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible.” (For the uninitiated, Commentary, the bible in which Boot seeks divine guidance, is the monthly of the American Jewish Committee.)
David Brooks of the Weekly Standard wails that attacks based on the Israel tie have put him through personal hell: “Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my voicemail and in my mailbox. … Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It’s just that its epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite Right, but on the peace-movement left.”
Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan endures his own purgatory abroad: “In London … one finds Britain’s finest minds propounding, in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents, the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the ‘neoconservative’ (read: Jewish) hijacking of American foreign policy.”
Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic charges that our little magazine “has been transformed into a forum for those who contend that President Bush has become a client of … Ariel Sharon and the ‘neoconservative war party.’”
Referencing Charles Lindbergh, he accuses Paul Schroeder, Chris Matthews, Robert Novak, Georgie Anne Geyer, Jason Vest of the Nation, and Gary Hart of implying that “members of the Bush team have been doing Israel’s bidding and, by extension, exhibiting ‘dual loyalties.’” Kaplan thunders:
The real problem with such claims is not just that they are untrue. The problem is that they are toxic. Invoking the specter of dual loyalty to mute criticism and debate amounts to more than the everyday pollution of public discourse. It is the nullification of public discourse, for how can one refute accusations grounded in ethnicity? The charges are, ipso facto, impossible to disprove. And so they are meant to be.
What is going on here? Slate’s Mickey Kaus nails it in the headline of his retort: “Lawrence Kaplan Plays the Anti-Semitic Card.”
What Kaplan, Brooks, Boot, and Kagan are doing is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson does when caught with some mammoth contribution from a Fortune 500 company he has lately accused of discriminating. He plays the race card. So, too, the neoconservatives are trying to fend off critics by assassinating their character and impugning their motives.
Indeed, it is the charge of “anti-Semitism” itself that is toxic. For this venerable slander is designed to nullify public discourse by smearing and intimidating foes and censoring and blacklisting them and any who would publish them. Neocons say we attack them because they are Jewish. We do not. We attack them because their warmongering threatens our country, even as it finds a reliable echo in Ariel Sharon.
And this time the boys have cried “wolf” once too often. It is not working. As Kaus notes, Kaplan’s own New Republic carries Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman. In writing of the four power centers in this capital that are clamoring for war, Hoffman himself describes the fourth thus:
And, finally, there is a loose collection of friends of Israel, who believe in the identity of interests between the Jewish state and the United States. … These analysts look on foreign policy through the lens of one dominant concern: Is it good or bad for Israel? Since that nation’s founding in 1948, these thinkers have never been in very good odor at the State Department, but now they are well ensconced in the Pentagon, around such strategists as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
In a Feb. 9 front-page article in the Washington Post, Robert Kaiser quotes a senior U.S. official as saying, “The Likudniks are really in charge now.” Kaiser names Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith as members of a pro-Israel network inside the administration and adds David Wurmser of the Defense Department and Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council. (Abrams is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, editor emeritus of Commentary, whose magazine has for decades branded critics of Israel as anti-Semites.)
Noting that Sharon repeatedly claims a “special closeness” to the Bushites, Kaiser writes, “For the first time a U.S. administration and a Likud government are pursuing nearly identical policies.” And a valid question is: how did this come to be, and while it is surely in Sharon’s interest, is it in America’s interest?
This is a time for truth. For America is about to make a momentous decision: whether to launch a series of wars in the Middle East that could ignite the Clash of Civilizations against which Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has warned, a war we believe would be a tragedy and a disaster for this Republic. To avert this war, to answer the neocon smears, we ask that our readers review their agenda as stated in their words. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. As Al Smith used to say, “Nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.”
We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.
Not in our lifetimes has America been so isolated from old friends. Far worse, President Bush is being lured into a trap baited for him by these neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations in the Cold War.
They charge us with anti-Semitism—i.e., a hatred of Jews for their faith, heritage, or ancestry. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a “passionate attachment” to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America. …
<P(The entire article is available at bookstores.)
Buchanan's true motivation is... m-o-n-e-y. It's not America and for what she stands. It's not patriotism. It's simply m-o-n-e-y.
Now that he knows (as if he didn't already) he's not a true Presidential contender, he has found a nice little niche to play to that increases his bottom line.
That's it. Period. End of story. Open the church doors and pass the collection plate (no pun intended).
For those who say and/or think this is not true, ask yourselves these fundamental questions:
1. What purpose does it serve to divide the conservative movement (paleo-, neo-, traditional, and post-) against itself?
2. Why continue to submit treatises that place you directly at odds with others in your camp when you know that 99.8% of that camp disagrees with you?
3. Why do it so publicly? It's not about dissent, but about having a political tin-ear.
4. Why the absolute fascination with Jews?
5. Leftists are truly the enemies of America, yet Buchanan and his mental kin do not attack them. But if the subject is the Jews or the "neocon," this bunch attacks like my Prisa Canarios are going to attack when they are fully grown. Why is that?
I would use the word "irrational" to describe him, but that would be false. Buchanan knows what he's doing. Those like him know what they're doing as well.
For the love of money.
"All ya gotta do is say, 'Yes.'
--Floetry
I've been saying this selfsame thing for a long time.
Questions: If the conservative camp is divided, who benefits? And, if the division is brought about from inside the conservative camp, why is the divisive individual(s) tolerated?
"All ya gotta do is say, 'Yes.'"
Floetry
Sorry, that is a fact. Like it or not, it is a fact.
As others have noted, that guy was doing what Chavez is doing today. He had dissovled the popularly elected bodies, moved against the constitutional monarch, and was centralizing power, all the while relying more and more on Communist party (Tudeh sp?) ... Without US intervention in 1952, it was going into USSR orbit.
Quite true. But irrelevant.
The PERCEPTIONS of the Iranian people in 1979 were, by and large, not in sync with your views. And perception is reality in this case.
You've bought into the 'sour grapes' inevitability thesis on 1979.
It was inevitable because of Shah Reza Pahlavi's fecklessness in the decade before the revolution. You had a monarch who didn't know whether he wanted to restore the the absolute monarchy of the Sassanid Empire (and pi$$ off the rest of the world in the process), or an enlightened constitutional monarch on very nice terms with the West (and thus looking like an American sock puppet to his subjects). He alternately ran a police state and coddled his political opposition (and he was doing this long before anyone was even asking "Jimmy who?" in 1976). He tried to sit between two stools, and fell on his a$$ for his trouble.
I think he'd be right at home there. What a waste.
...the strain would probably kill him :o)
A washed-up populo-paleocon displays a warped notion of what this country's interests are:
Not in our lifetimes has America been so isolated from old friends.
Since when did Pat ever give a rat's backside about these other countries? Oh, yeah, nowadays, since it suits his position - in other words, OTHER countries are a better place to determine the interests of this country than the elected leadership of this country...--- head scratch ---
And then they'd say we deserved it because of our support of Israel.
No! It was William Safire.
Pat used to be pro Israel and anti - Arab. When criticism began flowing because of his support for ethnic Nazis (a policy he probably copied from then congressman Nixon), Pat cleverly turned anti-Israeli so he could say that the Jews were picking on him for his support of an even handed mid east policy.
It was calculation when he first started it, but now he has internalized it along with the anti-Semitism.
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