Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  And one article, because I mentioned the neoconservatives who describe themselves as neoconservatives, I was called anti-Semitic. I mean, you know, unbelievable that that's the kind of personal attacks that are run when you criticize a strategy and those who propose it. I certainly didn't criticize who they were. I certainly don't know what their ethnic religious backgrounds are. And I'm not interested.

  I know what strategy they promoted. And openly. And for a number of years. And what they have convinced the President and the secretary to do. And I don't believe there is any serious political leader, military leader, diplomat in Washington that doesn't know where it came from.4

  Zinni was mercilessly smeared by all the usual suspects, but the mud didn't stick. Instead, it boomeranged, and, instead of isolating him, suddenly everyone was citing him, and defending him, including author Tom Clancy, who has co-written with Zinni a new book that promises to let the cat out of the bag as far as the origins of this war are concerned.1While neocon sock-puppets on the order of Jonah Goldberg flailed angrily about, retailing the obligatory innuendoes, The Forward, the oldest Jewish newspaper in America, intervened to recognize the new reality, and “The Ground Shifts” was the very apt title of their editorial on the subject:

  As recently as a week ago, reasonable people still could dismiss as anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering the claim that Israel's security was the real motive behind the invasion of Iraq. No longer. The allegation has now moved from the fringes into the mainstream. Its advocates can no longer simply be shushed or dismissed as bigots. Those who disagree must now argue the case on the merits.2

  Arguing for or against anything strictly on the merits is going to be a whole new experience for the neocons. Smearing their enemies and lying is, for them, a matter of course – it isn't just a matter of tactics, it's part of who and what they are.3

  As Israeli “settlers” push out the Palestinians under the protection of U.S.-made helicopter gunships and tanks, American soldiers are taking heavy casualties on the Eastern front – and the U.S. homeland gets ready for a “summer of terror.” How can anyone make a rational argument that this is in America's national self-interest? It isn't possible, and so the neo-cons have no arguments: only a barrage of lies and smears. Argue their case strictly “on the merits”? It can't be done, unless they want to argue openly that America's interests must be subordinated to Israel's. Strip away the ideological pretenses, the sexed-up “intelligence,” and the “patriotic” window-dressing, and what you see is the naked reality of Israel's fifth column in America.

  In identifying who dragged us into this war, and why, General Zinni “changed the terms of the debate,” says The Forward, and “he is not one to be waved off.” Not that they agree, exactly. They blame the President, “unilateralism,” and the “ideological predilections” of this administration, although they admit that

  [t]he truth is, of course, that Zinni is partly right – but only partly. Securing Israel was one of the war hawks' motives, but not the only one, probably not even the main one.1

  But what were these “ideological predilections” that the Bushies brought with them to the table if not the neoconservative ideology embraced by his top foreign policy advisors and officials – an ideology that, aside from championing a foreign policy aiming at “benevolent global hegemony,”2elevates Israel to a special status among America's allies, and advocates unconditional support for the actions of its ultra-rightist government?

  Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) has made the trenchant point that Bush's policies have made Israel, and Jews worldwide, less safe,3 but the mantle of victimhood is not so easily surrendered by the radical Zionist faction: this is “blaming the victim,” says the Likudnik chorus, a stance that neatly sidesteps the issue of whether or not anyone, Jew or Gentile, feels the least bit safer these days.

  According to Jonah Goldberg, the term “neoconservative” – up until now a recognized term in the American political lexicon, meaning “a liberal who's been mugged,” a Scoop Jackson Democrat turned Reagan Republican – is just a “code word” for “Jew.”4 But it's too late for special pleading and the usual victimological histrionics just won't do, as Rich Lowry, Goldberg's boss over at National Review, makes clear in an interview with columnist Bill Steigerwald in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

  With the war on terror, you saw neoconservatives emerging as a distinct tendency within conservatism, mostly on foreign policy; its hallmarks being extreme interventionism, extremely idealistic foreign policy, and emphasis on democracy building and spreading human rights and freedom and an overes-timation, in my view, of how easy it is to spread democracy and liberty to spots in the world where it doesn't exist currently.5

  It seems the neocons aren't creatures of pure myth, the unicorns of the American political bestiary, but living breathing individuals, and, what's more, they're a movement separate and distinct from ordinary unprefixed run-of-the-mill conservatives, with their own doctrines and organizations. So, is it “anti-Semitic” to separate them out from the rest of the Republican Right, and name them “as being the planners and instigators of the war in Iraq?” asks Steigerwald. Lowry's reply is more than a little equivocal:

  No. No. It would be false. It wouldn't necessarily be anti-Semitic. It would be accurate to say that some of the most articulate and powerful expressions of the case for war have come from people who are neoconservatives. So that's not anti-Semitic. But if you take a couple of steps beyond that, you begin to get into territory that is a little shady, I would think.1

  So Jonah is wrong, at least according to his boss, that merely employing the term “neocon” is the equivalent of shouting “Sieg Heil!” at the top of one's lungs. It's amazing to see how far the boundaries of neoconserva-tive political correctness are being stretched, these days, but then Lowry – perhaps remembering how much his magazine depends on the largesse of big neoconservative foundations – snaps back and comes out with this murky business of taking “a couple of steps beyond that.” What “steps” is he talking about?

  One need only step up to a computer terminal, and read Seymour Hersh's detailed sketch of the “Office of Special Plans,”2 or perhaps Julian Borger's (in the Guardian),3 and Jim Lobe's piece on Antiwar.com,4 to go beyond merely naming the neocons as the chief culprits in this dirty business of invading and occupying a nation that had never posed a real threat to us. What occurred in the run-up to war was not merely an intellectual debate, as Lowry genteelly pretends, but a battle between two organized factions, one of which had seized the reins of power in Washington, according to Bob Woodward, who writes in Plan of Attack that Cheney and the neocons had, in effect, set up “a separate government.”5

  In examining this highly organized effort, and in effect writing the history of what amounted to a coup d'état,6 a number of reporters, including on-the-scene observers such as Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, point to an Israeli component as a key element in the intelligence apparatus that pushed us into war.1 Robert Dreyfuss, writing in The Nation, cites a former U.S. ambassador with strong ties to the CIA:

  According to the former official, also feeding information to the Office of Special Plans was a secret, rump unit established last year in the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. This unit, which paralleled [Abram N.] Shulsky's - and which has not previously been reported – prepared intelligence reports on Iraq in English (not Hebrew) and forwarded them to the Office of Special Plans. It was created in Sharon's office, not inside Israel's Mossad intelligence service, because the Mossad – which prides itself on extreme professionalism - had views closer to the CIA's, not the Pentagon's, on Iraq. This secretive unit, and not the Mossad, may well have been the source of the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium for weapons from Niger in West Africa, according to the former official.2

  A Jewish conspiracy? No. An Israeli covert action? Perhaps.

  Anti-Semites may see no difference, but, then again, neither do the neocons. To the
m, an attack on the Wolfowitz-Feith-Shulsky Axis of Deception is an attack on “the Jews.” But this terminological confusion, as Michael Lind trenchantly pointed out in an excellent essay in The Nation, is rooted in journalistic sloppiness and the error of conflating ethnicity and ideology:

  It is true, and unfortunate, that some journalists tend to use “neoconserva-tive” 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 paleoconser-vatism 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 54–41.3

  The idea that naming names – identifying specific government officials as tireless advocates of war with Iraq – is the equivalent of painting a swastika on a synagogue door is, as longtime conservative activist Paul Weyrich put it to Steigerwald, “really outrageous.” Weyrich's answer to the “anti-Semite” smear needs to be read and absorbed by all thinking conservatives, especially those who supported the war:

  I really resent the idea that if you question who it is that planned the war – just because you ask questions about them – it is automatically anti-Semitic. It is not. It is legitimate to ask these questions. It is legitimate to have a debate about the legitimacy and effect of this war. If that means questioning some of the people who are involved in it, so be it. The President is a very committed Christian. Should we say that, “Well, we can't question anything that Bush does, because if we did it would be anti-Christian”? That's silly.1

  Silly – in a sinister kind of way. Political correctness is not entirely a phenomenon of the left, as Rush Limbaugh and his fellow neoconized “conservatives” would have you believe: the right has its own version, which is, in many ways, even more rigid than any campus “speech code.” But the failure of the neocons' war is introducing a note of glasnost into the conservative camp, as E. J. Dionne and others are beginning to notice.

  As this war pierces the very heart of the nation like a poisoned arrow, the day of the neocons may be over. But I wouldn't count on it. They are nothing if not resilient, and determined. Certainly they are well-funded. But of one thing we can be sure: the tide of opposition to this war – and the policy of imperialism – on moral as well as consequentialist grounds, is rising on the right as well as the left.

  1. Chris Matthews, “The Road to Baghdad,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 24, 2002, online.

  2. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July/August, 1996.

  1. Dana Milbank, “'Bush's Blunder' May Be Kristol's Inside Influence,” Washington Post, March 19, 2002, online.

  2. Joseph Shattan, “Bush's Blunder,” National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com), October 15, 2002.

  3. Neil Seeman, “What 'Neoconservative Agenda?'” National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com), March 6, 2002.

  1. Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement: Social Movements Past and Present (Detroit MI: Twayne Publishers), December 1, 1992.

  2. Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Burlingame, Calif.: Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993).

  3. Neil Seeman, “What 'Neoconservative Agenda?,'” National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com), March 6, 2002.

  4. Samuel Francis, “The Real Cabal,” Chronicles, September, 2003, p. 33.

  1. William Kristol et al., “Toward a Comprehensive Strategy: A Letter to the President,” September 20, 2001 (online at Project for the New American Century, http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm).

  2. Sam Tanenhaus, “When Left Turns Right, It Leaves The Middle Muddled,” New York Times, September 16, 2000, p. 7.

  3. Joseph Sobran, “Staying in the Muddle,” Sobran's Real News of the Month, September 19, 2000.

  1. Patrick J. Buchanan, “Bush-Bashing by Bill Bennett,” WorldNetDaily.com, March 22, 2002.

  1. Garet Garrett, The People's Pottage (Boston: Western Islands, 1965), p. 93.

  2. E. J. Dionne, Jr., “Iraq and the Conservative Crackup,” Washington Post, June 1, 2004, p. A23.

  1. Pat Buchanan, “Whose War?” The American Conservative, March 24, 2003, online. [See pp. 135–147 of the companion to the present volume, Neo-CONNED!.—Ed.]

  1. “Excerpts From Pentagon's Plan: 'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival,'” New York Times, Mar 8, 1992, p. 1.

  2. Thomas E. Ricks, “For Vietnam Vet Anthony Zinni, Another War on Shaky Territory,” Washington Post, December 23, 2003, p. C01.

  3. The McLaughlin Report, August 26, 1990.

  4. “Gen. Zinni: 'They've Screwed Up,'” 60 Minutes, May 21, 2004, online.

  1. Tom Clancy, Tony Zinni, Tony Koltz, Battle Ready (London: Grosset & Dunlap, 2004).

  2. “The Ground Shifts,” The Forward, May 28, 2004, online.

  3. John G. Mason, “Leo Strauss and the Noble Lie: The Neo-Cons at War,” Logos, Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring, 2004 (http://www.logosjournal.com/mason.htm).

  1. “The Ground Shifts,” loc. cit.

  2. Kristol and Kagan, loc cit.

  3. “The Ground Shifts,” loc. cit.

  4. Jonah Goldberg, “State of Confusion,” National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com), May 16, 2003.

  5. Bill Steigerwald, “So, What Is a 'Neocon'?” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, May 29, 2004, online.

  1. Ibid.

  2. Seymour Hersh, “The Stovepipe,” The New Yorker, October 27, 2003, online.

  3. Julian Borger, “The Spies Who Pushed for War,” The Guardian, July 17, 2003, online.

  4. Jim Lobe, “Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network,” Antiwar.com, August 7, 2003.

  5. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 292.

  6. See the interesting discussion by Maurizio Blondet of the idea of coup d'état on pp. 36–41 of the present volume.—Ed.

  1. Karen Kwiatkowski, “Open Door Policy,” The American Conservative, January 19, 2004, online. [Also see her essay in the present volume, pp. 199–207.—Ed.]

  2. Robert Dreyfuss, “More Missing Intelligence,” The Nation, June 19, 2003, online.

  3. Michael Lind, “A Tragedy of Errors” The Nation, February 23, 2004, online.

  1. Steigerwald, loc. cit.

  THE EDITORS' GLOSS: Illustrating our earlier point – that in a discussion of support for war in Iraq, the ethnicity or religion of those involved in the discussion is secondary at best, if relevant at all – is the fact that there are so many self-professed Christians who frame their perspective on questions of foreign policy around what is or is not good for Israel. One may be permitted to wonder if it's “anti-Semitic” or “antiChristian” to oppose Christian Zionism?

  One thing is certain, as Dr. Lutz makes clear in his article: without support for the Iraq war among Christians, it could not have happened. Israel has the support of those Christians who embrace an “apocalyptic” vision of events in the Middle East, imagining that whatever furthers modern-day Israel's political or foreign-policy agenda is somehow sanctioned by the Almighty. Pat Robertson illustrated this approach nicely when he said, “I see the rise of Islam to destroy Israel and take the land from the Jews and give East Jerusalem to Yasser Arafat. I see that as Satan's plan to prevent the return of Jesus Christ the Lord.” (How can mere “men” – or even Satan – prevent the return of God Himself, Pat?)

  The refreshing aspect of Lutz's piece is that he demonstrates, conclusively and even authoritatively, that most Christians do not su
pport the line taken by men like Robertson. In fact, the old and venerable Christian tradition directly opposes the Robertson “Christian Zionist” cant and states that the claims of justice apply to Palestinians and Arabs no less than anyone else. It argues, too, that such considerations of justice stem from an essentially Christian view of the world, whose substance is sadly missing in Robertson's “Christianity.” That this tradition has much in common with the common sense found outside the Christian communion is no coincidence.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Unjust-War Theory:

  Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem

  ………

  Prof. David W. Lutz, Ph.D.

  THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION includes a highly refined theory of just war, by means of which we can judge whether a particular war is moral or immoral. Just-war theory has roots in pre-Christian Greek and Roman philosophers, primarily the Stoics and Cicero, and was developed more fully by Christian scholars such as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suárez and Hugo Grotius. St. Thomas identified three criteria of just war:

  First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged. For it is not the business of a private individual to declare war ….

  Second, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault ….

  Third, it is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil ….1

  Subsequent thinkers have developed additional criteria. Although there is disagreement regarding the number of just-war criteria, seven clearly belong to the tradition:

  1. Legitimate Authority: The war must be declared by a legitimate authority, responsible for the common good, not a private citizen.