Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  Like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, a pair of rightist factions in the Bush administration are hoping to take the United States on the road to Baghdad. Unlike the beloved Hope-Crosby “road” pictures, however, the adventure in Iraq is not going to be funny.1

  Yes, but some were definitely all smiles, among them what Matthews calls the “neoconservative faction” of the administration: namely, Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard, who, with his sometime co-author Robert Kagan, proclaimed in a famous article that the goal of American foreign policy must be “benevolent world hegemony.”2 Matthews dolefully noted that the two of them “write a regular column for the Washington Post pushing war with Iraq,” as the rest of the neocon chorus dutifully shouted “Amen!” including Frank Gaffney, William Safire, and a host of Washington political operatives deeply embedded in the Bush administration. One widely-noted example of neocon dominance: as neocon presidential speechwriter David Frum, author of the “axis of evil” phraseology, exited the White House, neocon Joseph Shattan took his place.

  Dana Milbank pointed out in the Washington Post that a cadre of young neocons dominates the Bush White House corps of speechwriters: Shattan once worked for Kristol, when the latter was shilling for Dan Quayle, a job history young Shattan shares with Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully and Cheney scribe John McConnell.1 Other Kristolian alumni: Peter Wehner, another Bush speechwriter, and National Security Council wordsmith Matthew Rees. What was odd about Shattan's ascension, however, is that he had just gotten through savaging the Bushies in National Review for not being sufficiently pro-Israel. By endorsing a Palestinian state, Bush was exhibiting “America's cowardice and corruption,” averred the future White House speechwriter:

  “Thanks entirely to the President and his team … the campaign to defeat the Islamist challenge has gotten off to a singularly inauspicious start.”2

  After that, naturally, Shattan was vetoed for a job in the administration as a speechwriter for the Energy Department by the munchkins in the Office of Presidential Personnel – and, not so naturally, invited to work at the White House.

  Oh, but there's no such thing as a “neocon agenda,” National Review rushed to reassure us: this is an invention of “the Left.” NR writer Neil Seeman, a policy analyst at the Canadian Fraser Institute, complained: “After 9/11, terms like 'neoconservative agenda' and 'neoconservative' have acquired a new frisson in the anti-war lexicon.”3

  Seeman goes on to attack none other than Pat Buchanan for firing “the first fusillade.” Some “leftist”!

  Indeed, the first and loudest complaints against the neocons and their agenda came not from the left but from their critics on the right, not only Pat Buchanan but Tom Fleming of the Rockford Institute and conservative scholar Paul Gottfried: the latter's book, The Conservative Movement, chronicles what Gottfried regards as the degeneration of authentic conservatism since the neocons gained the upper hand over traditionalists and libertarians.1 My own book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement also tells the story of how the limited government and pro-peace conservatism of Senator Robert A. Taft was subverted by a coterie of ex-Stalinists and ex-Trotskyists and made consonant with a right-wing form of social democracy.2

  This is old news: the neocon-“paleocon” debate has been playing out in the pages of conservative journals for a decade. But Seeman was blissfully oblivious to all this, or pretended to be, and blithely derided the very idea of a neocon agenda as “one of those gems you might find littered in fascinating periodicals with names like the Journal of Canadian Studies.”3 Well, uh, not exactly: try Chronicles magazine, or The American Conservative, which are to National Review what real gold is to fool's gold, if you want the real dirt on the neocons.4

  A major target of the paleocon critique has been the globalist outlook of the neocon faction, whose foreign policy views can be summed up by simply inverting the title of Pat Buchanan's best-selling anti-interventionist tome, A Republic, Not an Empire. The paleocons, for their part, abhor war, albeit not on pacifist but on decentralist and libertarian grounds. Kristol and his fellow neo-imperialists have never seen a war they didn't support, even going so far as threatening to abandon the Republicans, during the Clinton era, if they didn't get squarely behind Clinton's rape of Serbia. Kristol called for “cracking Serb skulls” long before Clinton decided to drop bombs on Belgrade.

  Kristol and his followers almost did walk out of the GOP to support war-hawk John McCain, who, from Day One of the Kosovo war, called for putting in American ground troops, and whose blustering bullying style perfectly embodies the neocon foreign policy. For years, Kristol and his gang has been clamoring for war not only with Iraq, but with the entire Arab Middle East. In the wake of 9/11, they seized their chance, and took the offensive: the smoke had yet to clear from the site of the devastated World Trade Center when Kristol and a coterie of his fellow neocons signed an open letter to the President calling for the military occupation of not only Iraq, but also Syria, Iran, and much of the rest of the Middle East.1

  Oh, but not to worry, averred Seeman, it wasn't just the neocons because, you see, there was this poll of “opinion leaders,” and it showed that the idea of expanding the war to Iraq would be real popular if that country could be shown to “support terrorism.” (A big “if,” but never mind ….) So, you see, practically everybody – or, at least, anybody who's anybody – had forgotten all about Osama-bin-What's-his-name, and was at that point just as determined to see U.S. troops take Baghdad – no matter how many killed and wounded – as, say, Charles Krauthammer. “Sorry folks,” said Seeman,

  there's no vast right-wing conspiracy here. Curiously, though, the anti-war, anti-neocon cant continues. Neocons are “Washington's War Party”; the neo-cons are implacable and blood thirsty; and so on and so forth. Not so long ago, neoconservatives were a few estranged liberals, mugged by reality. Now they're everywhere, mugging America's entire political agenda? I don't think so.

  Who, us? Seeman's indignant denial may seem disingenuous to intellectual historians of the Right, who have traced the neoconservatives' promiscuous odyssey from schismatic Trotskyism to the far-right wing of Social Democracy and then into the arms of the conservative establishment. Yet it is perfectly in synch with the conceit that their predecessors on the right – the traditionalists and the libertarians – hardly mattered. In celebrating the complete takeover of conservative institutions by “a few estranged liberals mugged by reality,” Weekly Standard writer David Brooks once triumphantly declared “We're all neoconservatives now!”2 So, it seems, they are everywhere, mugging America's entire political agenda – and the number one item on their agenda is war.

  Joe Sobran once described the neocons as essentially “pragmatists” who are, at best, “muddled centrists” with “conservative leanings,” and as basically lacking any coherent ideology beyond support for the New Deal's stratification of American capitalism and a general feeling that they'd “had enough of liberalism.”3 Sobran is right about their statist inclinations, but wrong on the essential point. The neocons may be all over the map on domestic policy, exhibiting none of the gut-level distrust of government power that defines the traditional American Right, but on the vital question of foreign policy they have been the most consistently belligerent faction in American politics.

  Indeed, warmongering is the very essence of neoconservatism. The first neocons were James Burnham and Max Shachtman, two dissident Trotskyists who turned right starting in 1940, splitting with the left over the question of World War II: Burnham went on to set the tone at National Review, and Shachtman had an enormous influence on the slower-moving ex-leftists who became Reaganites in the 1970s and 80s. During the Vietnam era, the leading lights of the neocon movement left the Democratic party when the antiwar McGovernites took over. During the cold war, the neo-cons were the most militant faction, and they came into policy positions during the Reagan administration, burrowing their way into the National Endowment for Democracy, and, under t
he aegis of such ex-Democrats as Jeanne Kirkpatrick, into the national security bureaucracy. This marriage of right and ex-left was consummated, symbolically, when President Ronald Reagan awarded the Medal of Freedom to Sidney Hook, a lifelong socialist and fervent anti-Communist.

  To such forerunners of neoconservatism as Professor Hook, the heroes of the Old Right – Senator Robert A. Taft, Joe McCarthy, and even Barry Goldwater – were disreputable (to liberals, that is) and therefore beyond the pale. They didn't want to dismantle the Welfare-Warfare State that had grown up in the wake of the New Deal: indeed, they didn't care much about domestic policy, as most of the neocons' attention was directed abroad, at the battlefields of the cold war in Europe and Asia. With the end of the cold war, however, the neocons were temporarily in a funk. What to do?

  After all, their primary ideological focus had suddenly, without warning, dissolved before their very eyes, like a mirage in the desert. And what could take the place of the Kremlin in the pantheon of evil? In the neocons' never-ending war-game, a militant Good always requires an even more militant Evil. But no one was quite up to snuff: Slobodan Milosevic was supposed to be “another Hitler,” but instead turned out to be a smalltime hoodlum. Saddam Hussein was only a threat to Israel and Kuwait, in spite of the propaganda campaign that tried to paint his regime as the second coming of the Third Reich. Besides, in a post-cold war world that looked forward to a “peace dividend” – remember that? – their desperate search for a suitable enemy was more than a little unseemly: it occurred to many, on the right as well as the left, that the neocons were just trying to make trouble (trouble which, in their case, always means war).

  9/11 breathed new life into the neocons, and animated them as never before. They immediately sprang into action, taking full advantage of the war hysteria to broaden the scope of the public's anger toward all things Arab. From the beginning, they looked beyond Afghanistan and took a position that was, as they say, more royalist than the King. As the President and his Secretary of State looked to build a broad anti-terrorist coalition, including key Arab countries, the neocons accused him of selling out Israel. And here we come to yet another key element of the neocon agenda, and that is unconditional support for Israeli aggression and expansionism. As far as they are concerned, any talk of compromise or conciliation in the Middle East is “appeasement.” When Ariel Sharon compared George W. Bush to Neville Chamberlain, and his own nation to poor little Czechoslovakia, neocon Bill Bennett sided with Sharon.1 Never mind coalition-building: the neocons want nothing less than all-out war between America and the Islamic world, and don't mind at all if Israel is the prime beneficiary.

  Chris Matthews was right that the Bush administration is led by a bunch of “oil patch veterans” who have a “sense of entitlement” to the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf. He was also wise to the fact that a war on Iraq could only benefit Israel, and that the neocons were and are more than ready to sell American interests down the river if that is what Israel requires. It scared him that a cabal of ideologues who revel in the idea of waging what they call “World War IV” had worked their way into the White House, and was being given the run of the place. And he was also spot on in his analysis of the mechanics of the neocons' pact with Big Oil. This working alliance is a revamped version of the same right-wing Popular Front that took over the conservative movement in the late 1980s, the union of big business and neoconservative intellectuals that blossomed into lushly funded think tanks, magazines, and front organizations that proliferated like worms after a rain. The neocons crawled up through the ranks during the Reagan era, and began to assert their dominance aggressively on the Right. Having purged most of the libertarians and anyone else in the least bit original or interesting for any number of heresies, the right was short of intellectuals and was more than glad to welcome new recruits with open arms – especially those whose acceptability as former liberals made the New York Times and the Washington Post begin to take conservatives seriously.

  The conservatives of, say, 1952, would find the triumphalist rot trumpeted by our bellicose neocons nothing short of crazy. Invade and conquer the Middle East? I can hear old Bob Taft, who opposed NATO, questioned the Korean War, and – like virtually all conservatives of the day – derided the Marshall Plan as “globaloney,” rolling over in his grave. The conservative writer Garet Garrett warned, in 1952, that “we have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire.”1 But to today's “conservatives” of the neo variety, that's a good thing.

  In detailing “the conservative crack-up” over the Iraq war, E. J. Dionne writes:

  The isolationist conservatives around Pat Buchanan cannot understand why we went to war in the first place – and they opposed it from the beginning. These conservatives speak explicitly about the “costs of empire,” much as the left does. They argue that globalism is really “globaloney” and that being an empire is incompatible with being a republic.2

  Actually, that's not true. We “isolationists” – conservatives and libertarians alike – understand all too well why we went to war. As Pat Buchanan put it in the run-up to the invasion:

  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 ….

  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.

  Buchanan named names, tracing the development of the “what's good for Israel is good for America” doctrine to the influential sect known as neoconservatives: ex-leftists who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and 1970s over the Vietnam War, and wormed their way into top GOP policymaking circles, eventually winding up in charge of George W. Bush's foreign policy.1

  This theme – that an Israeli-centric foreign policy is the real reason for this war – was not looked on with favor when the shooting began. But a year later, by a simple process of elimination, it is the only rational explanation left standing.

  They said it was “weapons of mass destruction” in Saddam's possession, and, when those failed to turn up, they fell back on Iraq's alleged responsibility for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When that canard was debunked, however, the War Party was reduced to claiming that Saddam's tyranny alone was sufficient as a casus belli, and that their real goal – their primary goal - is to spread Democracy, Goodness, and Light throughout a region still mired in the Dark Ages. The lengthy foot-dragging before “elections” were called, however, along with Abu Ghraib and Paul Bremer's propensity for acting like a dictator, soon disabused all but the most gullible of such high-falutin' notions.

  That left only the truth, and it is this: Israel is the chief beneficiary of this war, with bin Laden coming in a close second. We have opened up an Eastern front on Tel Aviv's behalf, not only eliminating a secular Arab opponent of Israel, but also pressing the Syrians to kowtow to a nuclear-armed Israel, sending tremors through the rest of the Arab world. No sooner had we taken Baghdad, than Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made his move, ingesting whole hunks of the West Bank under the guise of a “withdrawal,” and blithely ignoring muted criticism by the U.S. State Department as his government subsidized yet more “settlements” on Palestinian land. A “Wall of Separation” was built – with U.S. taxpayers' money – to underscore the Likudniks' contempt for world public opinion, and especially American public opinion.

 
Looked at in purely geopolitical terms, the war in Iraq is diverting the energy, resources, and focused hatred of the Arab “street” away from the Israelis and toward America. In undertaking what promises to be a project of many years, the U.S. invasion has shifted the balance of power - already weighted in Israel's favor, thanks to massive American military aid – decisively and perhaps permanently in favor of the Israelis. Bristling with weaponry, including nuclear arms, and not shy about mobilizing its international amen corner to defend its interests aggressively, Israel is fast achieving the status of regional hegemon.

  Israel seems to be the one exception to the new U.S. theory of global preeminence – what might be called the Wolfowitz Doctrine, since he was one of the first to put it in writing – that no power should rival U.S. hegemony in any region of the world.1

  Now, it is fair to ask: why is that? But not everyone thinks it's fair, or even decent, to ask any such thing.

  When General Anthony Zinni, former commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, went on national television and told the truth about the key role played by the neocons in dragging us into this unwinnable and increasingly ugly war, the voices of political correctness were raised to a pitch of shrillness not heard since the early 1990s.2 Back then it was Buchanan – always ahead of his time – who first identified “Israel's amen corner” as the sparkplug and chief inspiration of the War Party, just as the first Gulf War broke out.3 Now, in the disastrous wake of the Second Gulf War, the rest of the country seems to be catching up with him.

  Zinni, a registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000, reflected the views of a broad swath of the thinking public when he told 60 Minutes:

  I think it's the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody – everybody I talk to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do.