Neocons Shaken, But Not Deterred
WASHINGTON - Almost exactly five years after it reached its zenith with the invasion of Iraq, the influence of neo-conservatives has waned sharply in Washington, as their nemeses, the ‘realists’ in the national security bureaucracy, have increasingly asserted control over U.S. foreign policy.
While battered, however, neo-conservatives have not yet been forced from the field. And while their hopes that President George W. Bush would ‘take out’ Iran’s nuclear programme before leaving office appear to have diminished substantially, their hawkish voice is still heard loud and clear both in the White House — courtesy of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and Deputy National Security adviser Elliott Abrams — and in this year’s Republican presidential race, where neo-conservative favourites include former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, Sen. John McCain, and, until earlier this week, Fred Thompson.
Indeed, as pointed out in Jacob Heilbrunn’s new book ‘They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons’ (Doubleday), the neocons, despite the fiasco in Iraq, are already trying to detach themselves from both Bush and the Mesopotamian adventure they so avidly championed and entrench themselves ever more deeply into institutional Washington.
‘Whether it’s the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies or the National Endowment for Democracy, the Weekly Standard or the New York Sun, the neoconservatives are battle-hardened fighters who have created a permanent base for themselves. They will not disappear,’ according to Heilbrunn, a former neo-conservative himself and senior editor at the Nixon Centre’s The National Interest journal.
Heilbrunn’s much-anticipated book, which coincides with the publication of a not entirely unsympathetic biography entitled ‘Prince of Darkness’ of the movement’s most influential hard-liner, Richard Perle, affirms a number of central truths about neo-conservatism that are generally ignored or avoided in mainstream discussion of what he correctly calls a ‘mind-set’ rather than an ‘ideology.’
First, neo-conservatism ‘is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon,’ even if many adherents — albeit a minority — are not Jewish and even if, it should be added, most U.S. Jews are not neo-conservatives. Moreover, neo-conservatives, both Jew and gentile, are bound by a ’shared commitment to the largest, most important Jewish cause: the survival of Israel.’
Second, its substance is largely determined by the lessons its followers draw from what they see as causes of the Nazi Holocaust: the alleged failures of German ‘liberals’ in the Weimar Republic to stand up to the twin challenges of Nazism and Communism and of the western European liberal democracies to stand up to Adolf Hitler in the run-up to World War II; and the necessity of having overwhelming military power to crush any new Hitler pre-emptively.
As Heilbrunn, whose Jewish father fled Germany before the war, correctly notes, neoconservatives ’see new Munichs everywhere and anywhere’ — a reference to the 1938 Munich pact by which Britain and France tried to ‘appease’ Hitler by ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Germany.
Indeed, it is characteristic of neo-conservatives to depict virtually every foreign policy challenge — from the Sandinista government in Nicaragua 25 years ago to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — to U.S. (or Israeli) hegemony as a potentially cataclysmic replay of the 1930s. The neo-conservatives, according to Heilbrunn, ‘have shaped a romantic narrative for themselves in which they are the new Churchills staring down the forces of evil.’
Fear that Saddam Hussein intended a ’second holocaust’ against Israel served as one of the main motivations for the neo-conservative promotion of war with Iraq, according to Heilbrunn. ‘As Jews, they (and their Catholic conservative allies) were haunted by the memory that the allies had not stopped the Holocaust — and they strongly believed that it was America’s obligation to act preemptively to avert another one.’
Third, the movement’s Trotskyist roots — incarnated by its ‘founding father, Max Shachtman — among the Jews from Central and Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century not only imbued its members with a distrust, even a hatred, of liberalism (despite their latter-day purported embrace of democracy promotion). They also largely shaped their polemical and political tactics, even as they moved rightward — into the Democratic Party after World War II and thence, after the traumas of the 1960s and early 1970s, including two Arab-Israeli wars — into Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party.
‘Their fling with Trotskyism [endowed] them with a temperament as well as a set of intellectual tolls that many never completely abandoned — a combative temper and a penchant for sweeping assertions and grandiose ideas.’ The fact that they see themselves as ‘a kind of aristocratic intelligentsia,’ according to Heilbrunn, derives from their Trotskyite origins.
Fourth, ‘the social exclusion experienced by Jews at the hands of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elite’ that persisted in the U.S. into the early 1960s stirred a ‘deep resentment’ among many of the movement’s most influential leaders, notably Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz.
Indeed, Podhoretz, who edited Commentary magazine from the early 1960s until the mid-1990s and now advises Giuliani, sees the movement as the war against the ‘WASP patriciate’, according to Heilbrunn.
Neo-conservatives ‘know that they will never be accepted by the establishment,’ he writes in a passage about Perle. ‘Indeed, they outwardly revel in the knowledge that they are outsiders. But beneath the veneer of confidence is a seething rage at the government bureaucracy and social elites.’
These insights are the strongest part of the book, but, unfortunately, virtually all of them are made within the first 100 pages.
A lapsed neo-conservative himself, Heilbrunn offers useful, if unoriginal, accounts of the influences of German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss and military strategist Alfred Wohlstetter on the movement and its worldview. But he gets lost in his recounting of the evolution of the neo-conservatism and its various factions — particularly the supposed divides between the Straussean/realist wing led by Irving Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick, on the one hand, and the Podhoretz-Abrams wing — from the moment it first enjoyed power during Ronald Reagan’s first term to the disastrous aftermath of the Iraq war.
While the reason for the subsequent incoherence of his account was probably due to deadline pressures and poor editing, it may also be attributable both to the ideological contortions of the neo-conservatives themselves and to the disappointing fact that Heilbrunn accepts and endorses the narrative of their own history. Indeed, his descriptions of liberal or left-wing foes, from the New Left and the Black Power movement to Democratic politicians, such as George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and even Bill Clinton, echo those of the most radical neo-cons.
Thus, Clinton’s first national security adviser Anthony Lake and secretary of state Warren Christopher ‘apparently saw the United States, not its enemies, as the main problem in the world.’ And had the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, ‘which funneled money to …Ahmed Chalabi …been heeded [by Clinton], it might have helped avoid the chaos that the toppling of the Saddam Hussein created.’
Ultimately, Heilbrunn is critical of the neoconservatives, but he accepts much of their worldview.
© 2008 Inter Press Service
Always Munich, 1938, never Spain, 1936. The Western powers ignored or, tacitly aided, Nazi and fascist aggression in Spain. What did Hitler learn from that experience?
a ’shared commitment to the largest, most important Jewish cause: the survival of Israel.’
This is what will surely destroy not only Israel but also the United States.
The Neocons movement is a terrorist organization, who use terrorist tactics e.g. “shock & awe”. The difference is that they operate within and have control of the state apparatus.
Ideologically, there is really no difference between the Neocons and Al Quaeda. Their goal: to transform the world into thier own vision of what they think it should look like, through lies, deciet, violence,, creating neccessary illusions. Using any means neccessary.
They never go away.
There will alwyas be a new generation of A**holes to prime and put into power
Also what I dont get is how Jews can be conservative and evoke the Holocaust at the same time.
Dont they remember what caused Nazi Party to come to power?
Are they part of the elite now, and there will never be another Anti Jewish campaign?
Maybe we have to ethnically cleanse the rest of the world of the other minorities before it is their turn the next time. And that is why they are in on this.
I’d really like to see how the history books are written out these days… My Pet Goat aside how is the trash that is US policy being presented to American kids. Lions as hunters would tell a different story I suppose…
Ah America’s 5th column blaming the holocaust for the rational of their own holocaust of Iraqis and Palestinians and soon to be Iranians.
This is what happens when you have foreign national running your country. The list of folks in govt with dual citizenships (Israel) is over 200 members long. The US of A has officially been US of I for now.
These people are criminals and murderers and should be arrested, tried and convicted of crimes against humanity. Of course it won’t happen… the US is a place where you can advocate genocide and get away with it. What the hell is wrong with you people that you continue to allow the evil that is the neo-cons to live amongst you. Really, I’m getting so tired of saying this but you Americans REALLY need to get your shit together and do something about the devils that run your country.
An apt comparison for the Neo-Con’s is the Likud party and their Hisdrut (pre-WW2 Jewish fascists who spawned Menahim Begin) forerunners. Make no mistake, these scum are as malign a presence on the American political and intellectual scene as the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920’s. They are so convinced of the “rightness” of their cause that they will never give up or go away willingly. In fact, progressives would be well advised to heed Sun-Tzu’s best advice: “Know thy enemy,” They are not about to go away anytime soon.
Actually Stubine, I think a lot of Catholics voted for Bush…it was the anti-abortion vote that tipped it…one issue voters…and I’m willing to place some collective guilt on that group….Well…all those one issue voters got their president, they got their congress and they got their supreme court…did they get their issue?
Stubine, being a jew is not the problem. The problem is that these jews are holding dual-citizenship and has Israel’s interests first, not American.
And all three jackarses in the photograph above are dual-citizens!
Let’s refer to them as Zionists, then.
They, like Israel, have been seduced by the dark side… American weapons and money.
CD keeps puting “Axis of Evil” photos on the cover page. These three fit the description, in my opinion. But then I said the same thing about the photo of Pelosi, Bush and Reid, the other day. ” Sure are a lotta evil doers out there. Gotta find em’ and smoke em’ out. Hee hee.”
CALLING UPON ALL EUROPEANS TO ASK THEIR EU GOVERNMENTS TO INVESTIGATE AND PROSECUTE THE WAR CRIMINALS! the people in US have no voice in the matter. It will take other nations governments to start this, the US gov isn’t going to go after their own!!
“[Neoconservatism’s] substance is largely determined by the lessons its followers draw from what they see as causes of the Nazi Holocaust.”
How utterly ironic. They are creating in the 21st-century United States of America (and in Israel) the same kind of fascist regime they claim to fear and detest. A unification of corporate and government power that uses fear as a stick and nationalism as a carrot to whip up war frenzy and suppress domestic criticism.
These people need to be purged from government — as policymakers, lobbyists and pundits — and should be exiled. Or put on trial.
Flashback America’s neocon Zionist problem has been going on a long time. Its currently a problem in the 2008 elections with AIPAC and it was a problem back in 2004 see below:
Published on Wednesday, October 13, 2004 by the Toronto Star
Israeli Tail Wags American Dog
by Gwynne Dyer
In a U.S. election campaign that is more about foreign policy than any presidential race in decades, one issue is completely off-limits: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
George W. Bush and John Kerry both back Israel 100 per cent, and neither man will offer a single word of criticism about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” plan, even though it means abandoning the notion of a peace settlement.
Once again, the Israeli tail is wagging the American dog.
Last week, Sharon’s chief of staff and most trusted adviser, Dov Weisglass, indulged in a carefully calculated indiscretion in an interview with the newspaper Ha’aretz.
“The `disengagement’ is actually formaldehyde,” he said. “It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Perfectly true, of course, and yet it was a shocking thing to say out loud.
Sharon was never really going to accept a peace deal with the Palestinians that required giving up most of the illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied territories conquered by Israel in 1967. Indeed, he was the man responsible for starting the settlements in the first place.
Yet, when he came to power in 2001 he inherited the Oslo peace accords, which imagined an Israeli-Palestinian peace based on two states living side by side — and the Palestinian state was to be created on exactly those territories.
Sharon had to pretend that he agreed with that goal because the whole international community (including the U.S.) supported the two-state solution. Over the past few years the “Oslo process” mutated into the so-called “road map” to peace, but the goal remained the same: Israeli evacuation of the occupied territories and the creation of a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel. In the past six months, however, Sharon has achieved breakout.
“Disengagement” means that Israel will evacuate its settlements in the densely populated Gaza Strip, where 7,500 Jews live surrounded by 1.3 million Palestinians, and four other tiny settlements with only a few hundred people that lie beyond the “security fence” in the northern West Bank.
They never made any sense in terms of the cost of protecting them anyway.
But by abandoning them, Sharon can seem to be making a major concession for peace — while hanging on to all the other West Bank settlements where the vast majority of the settlers live forever.
Forever is a long time, and Sharon still maintains the pretense that at some future time, when there is a different Palestinian leadership, there might be further negotiations about a Palestinian state.
But Weisglass spilled the beans on Oct. 6, pointing out that he had negotiated an agreement with the Bush administration in late August in which the United States had changed its policy of 37 years and agreed that the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank would eventually become part of Israel.
The 190,000 Jewish settlers there, he boasted, “will not be moved from their place.”
“What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns,” said Weisglass, adding that this would stall the peace process indefinitely.
“When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.
“Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda … all with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”
Weisglass said what he did to win back the more fundamentalist supporters of Sharon’s Likud party, who are threatening to abandon the party on the grounds that God gave Israel the land and it must never yield an inch of it.
Bush, presumably, did what he did in order to retain the votes of the extreme evangelical Protestants, estimated to account for a third of the Republican core vote, who believe that God’s plan requires the expansion of Israel and a great war in the Middle East.
But why does Kerry go along with it?
Presumably because his advisers tell him that in a tight election it would be suicide to alienate American Jews, most of whom reflexively support any Israeli government, regardless of its policies, and most of whom are still traditionally Democratic voters.
It all make sense in terms of political tactics, but it commits America to a policy that is contrary to international law and is not supported by any other government in the world except Israel’s.
If Kerry should win, it means he, too, would be shackled to a policy that makes it impossible for America’s European and Arab allies to co-operate in any Middle Eastern initiative he might launch with the goal of extricating American troops from the mess in Iraq.
Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian journalist based in London whose articles are published in 45 countries.
© 2004 Toronto Star
###
Can’t the diversionists just provide a link to their old news? (8:45)
And why is CD posting book reviews? Couldn’t they have asked that Heilbrunn character to write his own essay?
If the author is unaware of the true dimension of geopolitical strategy, then he should not be trying to analyze a work that is meant as revisionist history. —”Whether it’s the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies or the National Endowment for Democracy, the Weekly Standard or the New York Sun, the neoconservatives are battle-hardened fighters who have created a permanent base for themselves.”— This statement alone tells the tale, where those lowlife scum are always trying to glorify themselves as champions who are indispensable to society, when in reality they are just the crass residue of an old affair. The corporate government nations are nothing more than the age old type of criminal gangs trying to hold as much territory as they can. If anyone regards the current geopolitical situation as unique, without regarding it’s linkages to modern history, then they will never have a true understanding of the “game”.
“Was it not mostly WASPs who voted for GWB in the first place?” — Stubine, 3:52 pm
“a lot of Catholics voted for Bush…it was the anti-abortion vote that tipped it” — thinkingmom, 4:01 pm
Um, do you really think that actual votes had anything to do with Bush becoming president?
Well Homeward-Angel, Rumsfeld has two cases on appeal in the EU. France for Torture, Germany for War Crimes.
sigh.
Jews are just like the mafia. They claim they’re misunderstood and everybody’s after them.
Only, it appears many times just the reverse is true.
They’ve been monopolizing the machinery of governments and industry foreign to them for centuries. Jew purges have happened in many more countries and decades than just Nazi Germany during WWII. History will tell you the truth. All you have to do is read it. But Noooooo, it seems we Americans are destined to repeat it.
Some of my best friends are Jews. They tell me they wish they weren’t because they feel like everyone hates them. They are wonderful doctors, merchants and one was a banker. I don’t talk to him anymore because of his predatory loan activities I am now aware of.
There has to be a reason these troublesome people keep causing wars and stirring up religious fanatics to use in their cause of wresting wealth and power out of everybody. Is it their religion, or their belief in being the “chosen people?”
They always have to push everybody right off the cliff.
I give up.
“Heilbrunn’s much-anticipated book . . .affirms a number of central truths about neo-conservatism that are generally ignored or avoided in mainstream discussion of what he correctly calls a ‘mind-set’ rather than an ‘ideology.’”–J. Lobe
Either term, mind-set or ideology, implies a certain degree of rationality. Neo-conservatism is wholly irrational. It would better be described as a phobia, a bigotry, or a social pathology. Remember: neo-cons label their domestic enemies as “realists.”
Those poor, poor, Palestinians.
Living a life of hell in a concentration camp with no hope.
Courtesy of the wacked-out Evangelicals and the monkey’s faith-based initiatives (read: gun funds.)
When are you Earthlings going to learn, that religion is just another form of control and deceit. If you can ban your crazy christian superstitions out of government like the founding fathers told you to do, we could have a paradise.
Go ahead….. grab you bible and your old man in a robe and jump in the closet and tell secrets and fondle. I don’t care. Just don’t do it with the rest of us. It only leads to white stains on children’s baptism gowns and bombs falling on the heads of the innocent.
Thank you.
“As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.”
—Voltaire
http://www.twincitiesvfp.org/quotes.htm
“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship…Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”
— Leading Nazi leader, Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg Trials before he was sentenced to death
http://www.twincitiesvfp.org/quotes.htm
Neo-conservatives are dangerous buffoons. Instead of being in power they should be in prison. I would consider them to be an actual joke, if they did not cost so much human life.
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” — Mark Twain
“Moreover, neo-conservatives, both Jew and gentile, are bound by a ’shared commitment to the largest, most important Jewish cause: the survival of Israel.’”
The is a lie.
You people need to so some research on the roots of the neocon movement. Here’s a start as it’ll contain references to groups and individuals that you can further investigate. The essence of the strength of the movement is summed up in these 2 paragraphs:
“ALTHOUGH ANY remnants of socialist principles among today’s leading neocons have diminished entirely, what they have retained from their “Trotskyist” backgrounds is the underlying Marxian philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism — viewing class as the predominant factor in politics and economics, and the class struggle as the predominant basis of history.
What the Straussian influence has resulted in, however, is a fundamental inverse in Marxian principle — i.e., no longer viewing class struggle from the perspective of the working class, but rather from the viewpoint of the bourgeoisie.”
Read the article here:
http://news.mi-socialists.org/tms007-neocons.html
Learn more about Max Shachtman:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Shachtman
The ONLY way to get a clear understanding of the enemy and the philosophical underpinnings of their movement is to understand the greatest tool created for political understanding and analysis: dialectical materialism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism
From the Marxist mailinglist:
http://tinyurl.com/2qfpvg
Cheers.