Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  The device that was historically used to keep the Catholics in line was anti-Communism, and though Buckley discredited staunch anti-Communists Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran in the early '90s, the dawn of the 21st century posed a new threat in the person of the Pope. John Paul II was, in no uncertain terms, against the war in Iraq. That meant that Bill Buckley, if he wanted to continue to earn his keep, would somehow have to discredit him too. But how do you discredit the Pope? Events conspired to create what appeared to be a simple, and certainly convenient, answer. You do it by linking him to the homosexual and/or pedophilic priest crisis.

  Among the first articles Rod Dreher wrote after arriving at NR was a review of Michael Rose's study of American seminaries, Good-bye, Good Men. Rose had written a book that contained the testimony of many expelled from Catholic seminaries, submitted as evidence of a major homosexual network powerfully installed in the Church.

  In spite of NR's usual negative position on conspiracy theories, those that coincide with the party line are okay. In his review of Rose's book (“Andrew Sullivan's Gay Problem,” NR Online, March 13, 2002), Dreher had no problem claiming that a “'lavender Mafia' [was] running much of the institutional church” in America. Once Dreher had written his review, the “conservative” network picked up the drumbeat. Linda Chavez wrote a review for the Jewish World Review that was little more than a recap of Dreher's piece. “The Vatican,” Chavez concluded darkly, and without a shred of evidence offered in support, “has chosen to ignore this [gay subculture] aspect of the scandal.”

  Dreher's work was then cited by William Buckley himself. But more importantly, Regnery was soon to become publisher of what, up until the time of Dreher's piece, was Rose's self-published book. Regnery is as venerable a name in American conservatism as National Review. Henry Regnery, the firm's now deceased founder, published Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, as well as Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind.

  A recent article in the New York Press indicated that Regnery is now an integral part of the allegedly burgeoning conservative publishing network. “Regnery's recent success,” the article claimed, “is thanks in part to the market-driven rise of FOX News.” Regnery “sell[s] books through National Review's website or they try to get the author on to Sean Hannity's afternoon radio show. They can send a direct mail letter to NewsMax subscribers or bring it to Rush's attention. If Rush likes it, he'll tell his 20 million listeners about it.” In other words, the conservative network can mobilize to take advantage of an opportunity offered by a book like Good-Bye, Good Men if it suits their purposes.

  What are those purposes? In the opinion of Chris Manion,

  Mr. Dreher and his ideological cohorts have been called into battle to discredit all the countries, institutions, leaders, powers, and dominions that dare to question this war, while chasing after renowned moral authorities like Angola and Cameroon with billions in promised bribes, more popularly known as foreign aid and trade concessions.

  (The reference to Angola and Cameroon is a reminder of the U.S. attempt to buy off these countries and their crucial votes on the UN Security Council at a time when the Anglo-American aggressors were seeking a fig-leaf of legitimacy for the attack in the form of a second resolution.)

  As has been made clear, the editorial policy at NR, especially during the period immediately preceding the war in Iraq, was to colonize Catholics by discrediting their leaders; and for Catholics of lower rank who refused to go along with this stunt, other punishments were planned. “If they don't buy that [weapons of mass destruction],” Manion continues, “we'll threaten to brand them with dark and subterranean and totally unprov-able anti-Semitism.”

  Six days after Dreher “slimed” the Pope in the Wall Street Journal, David Frum launched his now infamous attack on the paleoconservatives in National Review. Both pieces were part of the same neoconservative propaganda barrage in support of the initially successful, but ultimately ill-fated Iraqi war. Why this apparent sense of urgency? Because too many people in general, and too many Catholics in particular, were leaving the conservative reservation.

  But the story doesn't stop here. Rod Dreher's writing appeared in Touchstone again in March 2003 with this warning: “If 2002 was a bad year for the Catholic Church, just wait for 2003.” Was he playing the prophet here, or just telling us about his plans? It seems clear that what Dreher and National Review intended to do was employ a divide-and-conquer strategy among a group that might be termed religious-right, social-issues conservatives. Heavily promoting a book like Good-Bye, Good Men was one obvious way – notwithstanding whatever merits the book itself possesses – to attempt subversion of those Catholics who might have been persuaded by the Vatican's opposition to the war, by highlighting its incompetence (or worse) in handling the pedophile scandal. Furthermore, by attacking magazines such as New Oxford Review, Touchstone, and Culture Wars, the neocon smart operatives hoped to open up internal friction among the people who support these publications.

  It's time to pull the plug on this brand of “conservatism,” whose purpose was and is the conversion of Catholic ethnics, isolationists, and white Southerners into supporters of the warfare state. Those who don't go along will be blacklisted by National Review, or will be recruited by divide-and-conquer tactics.

  As the frenzied activity at National Review and some other like-minded journals indicates, neoconservatism is fast becoming one more god that failed, just as its mirror image, Communism, failed. It has been a “black operation” from its inception. It's time to pull back the curtain and take a look at this “Wizard of Oz” for what it really is.

  THE EDITORS' GLOSS: Many on the “left” who are rightly upset by the support that generic “Christians” gave to the war in Iraq make the mistake – perhaps to some degree understandably – of failing to distinguish between different kinds of Christians, for such differences do exist. They would do well to read Dr. Lutz's piece as a primer on the subject. They would do even better to notice the care with which Kirkpatrick Sale handles the idea of who is a Christian and what Christianity really means.

  In the run-up to last year's presidential election, too many folks bought into the metro versus retro “divide,” the red-blue battle, and other such thought-killing paradigms. This framework simply precluded serious independent thought. Perhaps it was (and continues to be) fostered by Republicans and Democrats because both have far too big a stake in lucrative, hum-drum politics to let word get out that people don't have to be one or the other. An objection to this pigeon-holing of ideologies was raised in a small North Carolina paper, The Charlotte Observer, by journalist Mary Curtis on January 12, 2005. She asked: “Are you a 'Passion of the Christ' person or a 'Fahrenheit 9/11' person? Do you love Mel Gibson and hate Michael Moore, or the other way around?” Her answer contained all the wisdom anyone would need to find his or her way out of today's polarized political mess.

  “Silly me,” she wrote, “I was not aware that I had to choose.”

  Neither were we. Believe it or not, there are many “conservative” Christians out there who don't believe in unjust wars, exaggerated CEO salaries, “we're-always-right” foreign policy, or Lt. Gen William Boykin's notion that Bush is “in the White House because God put him there” to lead the “army of God” against “a guy named Satan.” (God help us.) Equally, there are those on the “left,” religious or not, who are all for social compassion but don't believe in the welfare state or the dissolution of the family. This is the world that transcends the artificial left-right divide and considers, in broader terms, what's right and wrong. This is the world that must be consolidated, strengthened, and united if the peoples of the world are ever going to get something approximating real peace and prosperity.

  CHAPTER

  10

  What the War Is All About

  ………

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  WHAT'S IMPORTANT TO know about this war in Iraq is that it is not about oil, or about weapons of mass destruction, or al-Qaeda,
or Saddam Hussein – this war is about American global hegemony.

  You see, Bush has a dream – or, rather, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and that crowd has sold Bush a dream: it is the creation of a world in which all states will be what we call capitalistic (though not allowed ever to be as rich as the U.S.) and what we call democratic (though the power elite doesn't have to change as long as it allows elections from time to time), and will participate in a global economy on our terms. This is what William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in a 1996 Foreign Affairs article, called America's “benevolent global hegemony” – and you know who is defining “benevolent.”

  This has been the goal of the neoconservative right wing ever since the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1989, and when they came to power with George the First they tried to push it as hard as they could, going so far as to make a war against Iraq for invading a country they told him he could invade; but they never got George to go the whole way. He was for a “new world order,” all right, but he didn't think his coalition wanted America to take over Iraq like some colonial power, and he saw no reason to fight a messy war in the streets of Baghdad that might or might not topple Saddam Hussein.

  Then comes George the Second, who early on in office was essentially an isolationist – he was opposed to troops in Kosovo, he was against “nationbuilding,” he knew practically nothing of the world beyond the Dallas Cowboys, and he had no notion of an American role in it. But he put into power the old crowd from the days of George the First and made it even more prominent. They started work on him right from the start, but he was a slow learner and nothing much stuck – he didn't even want to have anything to do with the so-called peace process in Israel, nor did he care much about recovering our spy plane when it was forced to land in China.

  Then came 9/11, and suddenly everything changed.

  Bush could see it all now. It wasn't just that there was a terrorist group based in Afghanistan that had brought the war to us. It wasn't just that the U. S. was hated by a whole bunch of Arabs. This was, as he said, “the presence of evil” – sheer “evil,” because it was attacking the United States, which was “good.” That struck a chord that his Manichean-Christian, born-again mind could understand, which saw things in terms of whether others were “for us” or “against us,” and so he declared a war against “evil” – a war not against the terrorists who destroyed two ugly skyscrapers in New York, but against terrorism itself, everywhere in the world, and for all time.

  That was all the opening that the global hegemony people needed, and they were right there telling Bush that the war against evil also had to be fought against the “evil” regimes – Iraq, say, and Iran too; and throw in North Korea since one non-Muslim state was needed: a trio that he famously called “the axis of evil.” And that was no off-handed phrase – it came from the bottom of his inflamed fundamentalist, American-“Christian” heart, that seeks to rid the world not so much of anti-Christianity but of anti-Americanism; to rid the world of those who, in his words, hate us because “we love freedom … and they hate freedom.” And as he said at another time, his task was to answer the attacks of 9/11, “and rid the world of evil.”

  Ridding the world of evil is, of course, a long-standing ideal for Christians, both the intelligent, honest, and reflective ones, and the us-against-them American Manicheans. The former think that the elimination of evil is to be done by teaching the Word of the Prince of Peace, that the seed of righteousness is sown in peace, and that if war is ever to be part of the equation it must meet narrow, rigid, in-practice-almost-impossible-to-meet criteria that ultimately boil down to permitting self defense in specific circumstances. There are some who think that war is itself an evil and the taking of lives is wrong, as God was trying to tell us in the Sixth Commandment. And there are others who think that a “just war” is a convenient cloak for launching a crusade against whoever the “evildoers” du jour happen to be, like, for instance, those who “hate freedom,” even if that's just a convenient way of saying they criticize America or don't accept its role as dominator of the globe.

  In fact it just so happens that George Bush, when he was governor of Texas, would go to a church in Dallas run by a minister who had founded a movement called the Promise Keepers, a fundamentalist sect that pushed a doctrine it called “dominionism.” Dominionism held that it was the duty of the forces of Good, guided in their mission knowing God was on their side, to rescue the world from evil and establish the Kingdom of God everywhere, “to restore the earth,” as they put it, “to God's control.” Bush clearly resonated with that idea; never mind that he had no clear sense – in fact you might say he had an “anti-sense” – of to what degree, in a “God-controlled” world, the United States would be obligated to comply with the requirements of justice, charity, peace, brotherhood, and all those other decent, commonsense things that more reasonable people find articulated in the Bible.

  And now here he was, actually able to put that dominionism into practice, with the largest and most powerful military in the world, and no one to prevent or challenge him. It was, as Bob Woodward reported in his book about the war planning,1 a chance to cast “his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God's Master Plan.” But more: he could do it not just in the name of God but in the name of America, because America was good, and believed in freedom, and was rich and successful, and it would be its dominion that would be established in the world: a benevolent … “Christian” … American … global … hegemony.

  Then Wolfowitz whispered “Iraq” to Rumsfeld, who whispered it to Cheney, who whispered it to Bush, and it was suddenly so obvious. Let us begin the campaign to make the world safe for goodness with a war against that convenient little mustachioed Arab Hitler.

  Besides, a war against the Taliban, say, or al-Qaedaistas in Pakistani caves, does nothing to promote the interests of Israel; but the destruction of Iraq would be just the ticket. It is obvious that this was an important secondary motive for the Jewish neocons around Bush, who could put up with his “Christian” rhetoric and pious fundamentalism as long as he invoked the same wrathful God. But it was also something that people like Bush and Cheney could roll with, because the support of Israel is a basic tenet of “Christian” fundamentalism, based on the somewhat wacky idea that there is a God-given obligation to restore the lands of Israel and defeat the enemies of Zion, so that the Second Coming of Christ can occur.2 So an attack on Saddam would be just the thing, taking out the most aggressive and militarily powerful of Israel's neighbors and providing bases, both military and propagandistic, to spread American influence in the rest of the Middle East on Israel's behalf.

  So there we have it. That is why the whole thing has seemed so irrational, because it doesn't have anything to do with rational, real-political calculations. And it doesn't need “weapons of mass destruction,” since they were only an excuse for the public and politicians. They had nothing to do with the real reason for the war.

  Bush doesn't care that there have been at least 175 wars since world War II, at the cost of perhaps 12 million lives, that have brought more misery than stability; or that the greatest user of weapons of mass destruction in history has been the United States; or that at least 10 other nations than Iraq actually have nuclear weapons. He doesn't care that he lost the popular election the first time around by half-a-million votes; or that the Joint Chiefs actually opposed the war at first; or that 70 percent of Americans oppose a war with significant casualties; or that the only other world superpower – popular opinion – is totally against him. Why should that distract him? He is on a holy, American mission. Against evil.

  And it won't stop with Iraq, as long as Bush is in power. You are forewarned.

  1. Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

  2. See the lengthy piece on Christian Zionism by Dr. David Lutz on pp. 127–169 of the present volume.—Ed.

  THE EDITORS' GLOSS: Naomi Klein's article, adapted from a piece that appeared in The Nation, and t
he postscript by Prof. O'Rourke, which originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, demonstrate the fallacy of the “at least Iraq's better off than it was” defense of the war. If their testimony is to be believed – and reports that have been released since indicate that they should be – corruption and graft are, indeed, far worse than they were. One report is “U.S. Mismanagement of Iraqi Funds,” prepared by the minority staff of the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform. It is a damning indication of how we approached just one aspect of the Iraqi commercial and financial situation. A New York Times report of June 25, 2005, noted an “office originally set up by the U.S. occupation to investigate corruption in Iraq” has, since July 2004, “looked into more than 814 cases of potential wrongdoing, producing 399 investigations that were still open at the end of May.” The cases are not even confined to “the Iraqi executive branch, but also sprawl across provincial and city governments.” One official said, according to the report, “that corruption had reached 'disastrous proportions' since 2003 and that some countries had been unwilling to send financial aid as a result.”

  Potentially shady dealings at the macro level are no less disturbing. Laith Kubba, a spokesman for the new Iraqi “Prime Minister,” indicated (Los Angeles Times, June 6, 2005) that “post-war” Iraq is obliged to reduce public spending under a debt-reduction scheme sponsored by the IMF. Those “in the know” will understand what this means: IMF schemes are often coupled with internal “structural adjustments” and new loans (read debts) that benefit those already atop the international economic pyramid, translating into political and financial oppression of the regular Iraqis by “international” institutions.