Re: More Anti-Semites Join Sheehan - NBC

Ah, what the hell. The following article talks about many of the
sources where this myth is being circulated. The Lind article that is
referenced can be found at http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lind1.html.

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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