F. Leon and others ought to read this article; it is opportune to have appeared at this very moment.
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neocon-conspiracy - a myth
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The Neoconservative-Conspiracy Theory: Pure Myth
By ROBERT J. LIEBER The ruins of Saddam Hussein's shattered tyranny may provide
additional evidence of chemical weapons and other weapons of
mass destruction, but one poisonous by-product has already
begun to seep from under the rubble. It is a conspiracy theory
purporting to explain how the foreign policy of the world's
greatest power, the United States, has been captured by a
sinister and hitherto little-known cabal.
A small band of neoconservative (read, Jewish) defense
intellectuals, led by the "mastermind," Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz (according to Michael Lind, writing in
the New Statesman), has taken advantage of 9/11 to put their
ideas over on an ignorant, inexperienced, and "easily
manipulated" president (Eric Alterman in The Nation), his
"elderly figurehead" Defense Secretary (as Lind put it), and
the "dutiful servant of power" who is our secretary of state
(Edward Said, London Review of Books).
Thus empowered, this neoconservative conspiracy, "a product of
the influential Jewish-American faction of the Trotskyist
movement of the '30s and '40s" (Lind), with its own "fanatic"
and "totalitarian morality" (William Pfaff, International
Herald Tribune) has fomented war with Iraq -- not in the
interest of the United States, but in the service of Israel's
Likud government (Patrick J. Buchanan and Alterman).
This sinister mythology is worthy of the Iraqi information
minister, Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who became notorious for
telling Western journalists not to believe their own eyes as
American tanks rolled into view just across the Tigris River.
And indeed versions of it do circulate in the Arab world. (For
example, a prominent Saudi professor from King Faisal
University, Umaya Jalahma, speaking at a prestigious think
tank of the Arab League, has revealed that the U.S. attack on
Iraq was actually timed to coincide with the Jewish holiday of
Purim.) But the neocon-conspiracy notion is especially
conspicuous in writing by leftist authors in the pages of
journals like The Washington Monthly and those cited above, as
well as in the arguments of paleoconservatives like Buchanan
and his magazine, The American Conservative.
Many of those who disseminate the new theory had strenuously
opposed war with Iraq and predicted dire consequences in the
event American forces were to invade. The critics had warned
of such things as massive resistance by the Iraqi military and
people, a quagmire on the order of Vietnam, Saddam's use of
weapons of mass destruction (though some of the same voices
loudly questioned whether Iraq had such weapons at all), Scud
missile attacks that would draw Israel into the fray,
destruction of Iraq's oil fields (thus creating an ecological
catastrophe), and an inflamed and radicalized Middle East in
which moderate governments would be overthrown by an enraged
Arab street.
Authors disparaged the notion that the Iraqi people could ever
welcome coalition forces as liberators. In words dripping with
sarcasm, Eric Alterman asked readers of The Nation, "Is
Wolfowitz really so ignorant of history as to believe the
Iraqis would welcome us as 'their hoped-for liberators'?" And
the inimitable Edward Said, writing in the London Review of
Books, offered a scathing denunciation not only of Wolfowitz
but of such apostates as Fouad Ajami, the Iraqi exile author
Kanan Makiya, and the exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi
for their "rubbish" and "falsifying of reality" in selling the
administration a bill of goods about a quick war. Instead,
Said asserted, "The idea that Iraq's population would have
welcomed American forces entering the country after a
terrifying aerial bombardment was always utterly implausible."
One of the less fevered explanations, as offered by Joshua
Micah Marshall in the April Washington Monthly, asserts that
the invasion of Iraq was not primarily about eliminating
Saddam Hussein, "nor was it really about weapons of mass
destruction." Instead, Marshall presents the war as the
administration's "first move in a wider effort to reorder the
power structure of the entire Middle East."
But more extreme versions of the argument are readily
available. For example, Alterman writes that "the war has put
Jews in the showcase as never before. Its primary intellectual
architects -- Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle (former aide to
Senator Henry M. 'Scoop' Jackson; assistant secretary of
defense in the Reagan administration; now a member of the
Defense Policy Board, an unpaid body advising Secretary of
Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld), and Douglas J. Feith (the No. 3
official at Defense) -- are all Jewish neoconservatives. So,
too, are many of its prominent media cheerleaders, including
William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Marty Peretz. Joe
Lieberman, the nation's most conspicuous Jewish politician,
has been an avid booster."
Alterman adds, "Then there's the 'Jews control the media'
problem. ... Many of these same Jews joined Secretary Rumsfeld
and Vice President Richard B. Cheney in underselling the
difficulty of the war, in what may have been a deliberate ruse
designed to embroil America in a broad military conflagration
that would help smite Israel's enemies."
Michael Lind's language is more overtly conspiratorial. In an
essay appearing in London's New Statesman and in Salon, after
dismissing the columnist Robert Kagan as a "neoconservative
propagandist," Lind confides the "alarming" truth that "the
foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made
by a small clique." They are "neoconservative defense
intellectuals," among whom he cites Wolfowitz; Feith; Lewis
Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; John Bolton at the State
Department; and Elliott Abrams on the National Security
Council.
Most of these, we are told, have their roots on the left and
are "products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist
movement of the 1930s and '40s, which morphed into
anti-communist liberalism" and now "into a kind of
militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American
culture or political history." Lind complains that in their
"odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for 'democracy,'" they
"call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism,' ... but it
is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled
with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism." Along with the
Kristol-led Weekly Standard and allies such as Vice President
Cheney, "these neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and
inexperience."
Lind's speculation that the president may not even be aware of
what this cabal has foisted upon him embodies the hallmarks of
conspiratorial reasoning. In his words, "It is not clear that
George W. fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz
and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe
that there was an imminent threat to the U.S. from Saddam
Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction,' something the leading
neocons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe
themselves."
Those themes are echoed at the opposite end of the political
spectrum, in The American Conservative, where the embattled
remnants of an old isolationist and reactionary conservatism
can be found. Buchanan, the magazine's editor, targets the
neoconservatives, alleging that they have hijacked the
conservative movement and that they seek "to conscript
American blood to make the world safe for Israel."
Even in its less fevered forms, the neocon-conspiracy theory
does not provide a coherent analysis of American foreign
policy. More to the point, especially among the more extreme
versions, there are conspicuous manifestations of classic
anti-Semitism: claims that a small, all-powerful but
little-known group or "cabal" of Jewish masterminds is
secretly manipulating policy; that they have dual loyalty to a
foreign power; that this cabal combines ideological opposites
(right-wingers with a Trotskyist legacy, echoing classic
anti-Semitic tropes linking Jews to both international
capitalism and international communism); that our official
leaders are too ignorant, weak, or naive to grasp what is
happening; that the foreign policy upon which our country is
now embarked runs counter to, or is even subversive of,
American national interest; and that if readers only paid
close attention to what the author is saying, they would share
the same sense of alarm.
A dispassionate dissection of the neocon-conspiracy arguments
is not difficult to undertake. For one thing, the Bush
administration actually has very few Jews in senior policy
positions and none among the very top foreign-policy decision
makers: the president, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of
State Colin L. Powell, Secretary Rumsfeld, and National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- all of whom are
Protestants. (British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the most
influential non-American, is also Protestant.)
But even identifying policy makers in this way carries the
insidious implication that religious affiliation by itself is
all-controlling. In reality, Americans of all persuasions have
exhibited deep differences about foreign policy and war with
Iraq. Before the war, public-opinion polls consistently showed
Jews about as divided as the public at large, or even slightly
less in favor of the war, and Jewish intellectual and
political figures could be found in both pro- and antiwar
camps. For example, the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, the
professor and author Eliot Cohen of the Johns Hopkins
University, and Senator Lieberman of Connecticut supported the
president, while opposition came from a range of voices,
including the radically anti-American Noam Chomsky, of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the moderate-left
philosopher Michael Walzer, of the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, N.J.; Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan; and a
bevy of leftist Berkeley and New York intellectuals -- Rabbi
Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine; Norman Mailer;
Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University; and
many others.
More to the point, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice are
among the most experienced, tough-minded, and strong-willed
foreign-policy makers in at least a generation, and the
conspiracy theory fails utterly to take into account their own
assessments of American grand strategy in the aftermath of
9/11.
The theory also wrongly presumes that Bush himself is an empty
vessel, a latter-day equivalent of Czarina Alexandra, somehow
fallen under the influence of Wolfowitz/Rasputin.
Condescension toward Bush has been a hallmark of liberal and
leftist discourse ever since the disputed 2000 presidential
election, and there can be few readers of this publication who
have not heard conversations about the president that did not
begin with offhand dismissals of him as "stupid," a "cowboy,"
or worse. An extreme version of this thinking, and even the
demonization of Bush, can be found in the latest musings of
Edward Said, as quoted in Al-Ahram Weekly: "In fact, I and
others are convinced that Bush will try to negate the 2004
elections: We're dealing with a putschist, conspiratorial,
paranoid deviation that's very anti-democratic." That kind of
disparagement has left critics ill prepared to think
analytically about the administration or the foreign-policy
imperatives facing the United States after 9/11.
Whether one favors or opposes the Bush policies, the former
Texas governor has proved himself to be an effective wartime
leader. The Bush Doctrine, as expressed in the president's
January 2002 State of the Union address ("the United States of
America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to
threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons") and
the September 2002 document on national-security strategy set
out an ambitious grand strategy in response to the combined
perils of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
Reactions to the doctrine have been mixed. Some foreign-policy
analysts have been critical, especially of the idea of
pre-emption and the declared policy of preventing the rise of
any hostile great-power competitor, while others (for example,
John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University) have provided a more
positive assessment. But the doctrine has certainly not been
concealed from the public, and the president and his
foreign-policy team have spoken repeatedly of its elements and
implications. While Bush's February 2003 speech to the
American Enterprise Institute, in which he articulated a
vision for a free and democratic Middle East, has been
criticized as excessively Wilsonian, its key themes echo those
found in the widely circulated Arab Human Development Report
2002, written by a group of Arab economists for the United
Nations Development Program, which decried Arab-world deficits
in regard to freedom, knowledge, and the role of women.
Partisanship aside, the president has shown himself to be
independent and decisive, able to weigh competing advice from
his top officials before deciding how to act. In August of
last year, for example, he sided with Secretary of State
Powell over the initial advice of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and
Cheney in opting to seek a U.N. Security Council resolution on
Iraq. Powell's own February 5 speech to the Security Council
was a compelling presentation of the administration's case
against Iraq, and well before the outbreak of the war, Powell
made clear his view that the use of force had become
unavoidable.
Conspiracy theorists are also naive in expressing anxieties
that the Defense Department may sometimes be at odds with
State or the National Security Council over policy. Political
scientists and historians have long described policy making as
an "invitation to struggle," and Richard E. Neustadt's classic
work Presidential Power characterized the ultimate resource of
the presidency as the power to persuade. Franklin D. Roosevelt
deliberately played his advisers against one another, the
Nixon presidency saw Henry Kissinger successfully undercut
Secretary of State William P. Rogers, and the Carter and
Reagan presidencies were also conspicuous for the struggles
between their national security advisers and secretaries of
state. In short, competing views among presidential
foreign-policy advisers are typical of most administrations.
Nor is Bush's support for Israel somehow a sign of
manipulation. From the time of Harry Truman's decision to
recognize the Jewish state in May 1948, through Kennedy's arms
sales, the Nixon administration's support during the 1973 Yom
Kippur War, and the close U.S.-Israeli relationships during
the Reagan and Clinton presidencies, this is nothing new.
American public opinion has consistently favored Israel over
the Palestinians by wide margins, and a February Gallup poll
put this margin at more than 4 to 1 (58 percent versus 13
percent). The strongest source of support for Israel now comes
from within Bush's own Republican base, especially among
Christian conservatives; and in addition to his own
inclinations, as a politically adroit president, he has
repeatedly shown the determination not to alienate his
political base.
Ultimately, the neocon-conspiracy theory misinterprets as a
policy coup a reasoned shift in grand strategy that the Bush
administration has adopted in responding to an ominous form of
external threat. Whether that strategy and its component parts
prove to be as robust and effective as containment of hostile
Middle Eastern states linked to terrorism remains to be seen.
But to characterize it in conspiratorial terms is not only a
failure to weigh policy choices on their merits, but
represents a detour into the fever swamps of political
demagoguery.
Robert J. Lieber is a professor of government and foreign
service at Georgetown University and the editor of Eagle
Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the Twenty-First
Century (Prentice Hall, 2002).
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Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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