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.)
No, I said he hates an entire group of people. He probably knows and is friends with a few Jews--lots of bigots hate a group in general, but like specific members of that group in particular. It's weird, but it's human nature.
Aren't you in fact generalizing when you infer that because somebody butts heads with the Likudniks in Israel and America they must be bigots?
Pat Buchanan not only goes hammer-and-tongs at Israel, he complains about Wall Street--and he somehow manages to mention only those trading firms with Jewish-sounding names.
Pat Buchanan, if he isn't an actual anti-Semite, is making one hell of an effort to sound like one.
PB has spoken highly of Barak's peace efforts.
As have others, including those who just wish the Jews would shut up and get in the showers.
Why would he say anything complimentary of Isreal Labor if he's such a monster?
Apparently, he was quite happy with Israel as long as they were willing to commit national suicide.
Did you know Abe Foxman owes his job to PB? Pat recommended him for the job long ago.
SFW?
1-It helps Israel (IMO, problematical, since a multitude of other actions GWB didn't take would have helped Israel more) and
2-There are Jew's in the administration, thus guilt is established.
It's curious that in noting Hoffman's four groups of influence, he notes only the fourth. IMO, Pat would qualify for number 3, admitadly less important than 1 and 2. But 4 runs the show. No matter what Pat says, American Fundamentalists, I kind of like that! The world would be a better place with more of them.
A third and less important group sees in everything a contest between America's traditional political and religious values and all who attack them, be they secular and dissolute liberals or Islamic terrorists. This group I call the American fundamentalists.
Actually, if we'd thrown everything into keeping the Shah in power, the net result would have been that the Shah had fallenp--and that the USSR would have occupied Iran under the terms of the 1921 Treaty of Friendship between the USSR and Iran.
When they speak of neo-conservatives you can almost hear them spitting out the word "Juden!"
You refer to Pat Buchanan and the people who think like him. Paleo-libertarians. They also think of themselves as conservative.
also happen to be the ones who demand that America abrogate its right to engage in international intercourse with the nation of Israel, solely to appease the mythical "Arab street?"
Appeasing hundreds of millions of Muslims is their priority so we can get MidEast oil with minimum hassle. They want no problems with the Muslim world and will do anything to avoid stirring them up. Israel gets in the way and should be left to the Jihadist wolves. Many of them plain don't like Israel (and Jews) so this works out fine. Their ideas are consistent with a libertarianism that is non-interventionist, that just wants to engage in uncomplicated trade. With politics that stop at our borders.
Why do anything in the MidEast? Even Saddam has to sell his oil somewhere. So why waste our resources and military on this mass murderer?
The flaw in their logic is that if we abandon the MidEast tomorrow the Chinese and Russians will move into the vacuum. I could see China coming up with a plan to charge America an extra $20 per barrel of oil to break us.
The treaty was still in force. Sorry, it was very relevant. It caused us no small amount of anxiety during Operation Eagle Claw in 1980.
in 1979, the shah was ill, but there was no reason for him to step down except that the Mullahs had engaged in violent street protests.
The violent street protests would not have gotten traction without the support of LOTS of the population.
Carter told the military to do nothing, so they did nothing.
Whose military? The Iranian military?
eventually all top 150 generals were killed in the revolution that followed.
That's what tends to happen to close political cronies of the head of state when there's a revolution.
The Shah was a modernizing Shah who gave the women the vote, which pissed off the local Bin laden-types.
Yeah. He also pissed off a lot of other people, and he looked to be too much of a foreign lackey for many people's taste. You have to know a bit of Iranian history--the dynasty was incredibly recent (1920, IIRC), the last popularly elected government had been bumped off by the CIA and MI6, and the Shah was dragging the whole damn country into the 20th century faster than Iranian culture wanted to get there.
A good US President would have stood behind the Shah and it would have been enough to maintain the peace in that constitutional monarchy, but Carter stabbed him in the back and a virulently anti-US theocracy took over...
With much popular support.
What would you have done differently?
I see what you mean perfectly now.
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