HELL HATH NO FURY

The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War (Michael Lind, April 7, 2003, New Statesman)

The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called 'neoconservatives' because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, a Wolfowitz protégé who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these 'experts' never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.

Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for 'democracy'. They call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism' (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.

The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical 'pentagon' of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think-tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con 'in-and-outers' when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo-cons are ideologues, not opportunists.

The major link between the conservative think-tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defence experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co-signed a Jinsa letter that began: 'We . . . believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defence Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.'

The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a 'pro-Israel activist'. While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government.

Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidise Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.

The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots - odd as it seems - in the Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox Television network. His magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice-president, 1989-93), acts as a mouthpiece for defence intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-94) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada.

Strangest of all is the media network centered on the Washington Times - owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Reverend Sun Myung Moon - which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghost-writer for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the 'Gotcha!' style of right-wing British journalism, as well as its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement.

The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a PR technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neo-cons published a series of public letters, whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the US to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favourite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically being studied.

Are Trotskyites Running the Pentagon? (Alan Wald, 6-23-03, History News Network)

As a scholar researching for several decades the migration of United States intellectuals from Left to Right, I have been startled by the large number of journalistic articles making exaggerated claims about ex-Trotskyist influence on the Bush administration that have been circulating on the internet and appearing in a range of publications. I first noticed these in March 2003, around the time that the collapse of Partsian Review magazine was announced, although some may have appeared earlier.

One of the most dismaying examples can be found in the caricatures presented in Michael Lind's "The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War" that appeared in the April 7, 2003 issue of the New Statesman. Lind states that U.S. foreign policy is now being formulated by a circle of "neoconservative defence intellectuals," and that "most " are "products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s...." Moreover, Lind claims that their current ideology of "Wilsonianism" is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism."

However, I am not aware that anyone in the group of "neoconservative defence intellectuals" cited by Mr. Lind has ever had an organizational or ideological association with Trotskyism, or with any other wing of the Far Left. Nor do I understand the implications of emphasizing the "Jewish" side of the formula, although many of these individuals may have diverse relations to the Jewish tradition--as do many leading U.S. critics of the recent war in Iraq.

I Was Smeared: Last week HNN published Alan Wald's critique of an article written by Michael Lind for the New Statesman in which Mr. Lind argued that defense policy in the Bush administration is orchestrated by a group of people, many of whom are Jewish, who were allegedly shaped by Trotskyism. This week we publish an exchange between Mr. Lind and Mr. Wald. (Michael Lind, 6-30-03, History News Network)

The Straussian movement split long ago into "East Coast Straussians" and "West Coast Straussians." In addition, there are a few neoconservatives who know little or nothing about Leo Strauss. A defender of the neoconservatives as intellectually dishonest as Mr. Wald could use these facts in denouncing any scholar or journalist who mentions the influence of Straussianism on the distinctive political culture of the neoconservative faction of the Republican Party. If he were as disingenuous as Mr. Wald, he could argue that since there are East and West Coast Straussians, Straussianism therefore does not exist, and anyone who talks about a distinctive Straussian intellectual culture, or Straussian influence on neoconservatism is a) unscholarly and b) a paranoid conspiracy theorist who probably believes that the Shriners control the Council on Foreign Relations.

I happen to know a little about conspiracy theorists. At the cost of my career as a rising intellectual on the American Right, I exposed Pat Robertson's conspiracy theories about international Jewish bankers, Freemasons and Satanists in the New Republic, the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books between 1992 and 1995. My criticism of Robertson's anti-semitic conspiracy theories was the major factor in my expulsion from the neoconservative movement, in which I had taken part as the Executive Editor of the National Interest, published by Irving Kristol. Irving and Bill Kristol, of course, knew that everything that I said about Robertson was true--but my exposes were inconvenient for their personal political ambitions, which required an alliance of convenience rather than conviction with the religious right activists who dominated the Republican Party. For a similar tactical reason, Commentary, the flagship neocon magazine, began publishing articles in the 1990s claiming that Darwin, the bete noire of Southern Baptist creationists since before the Scopes "Monkey Trial," was wrong and that "biblical" creation science has been vindicated, something that Norman Podhoretz, Neal Kozodoy and other neocon intellectuals know very well is nonsense.

But wait--I used the word "neoconservative." Mr. Wald says not only that neoconservative originated as a pejorative used by Michael Harrington (true, if irrelevant) but that there never really were any self-identified "neoconservatives" (false). This line that there never really were any neoconservatives has long been used by Irving Kristol in interviews. I used to laugh about it with other of Kristol's employees. The non-existence of neoconservatism, except in the minds of conspiracy-mongers, certainly would have come as news to me and my fellow neoconservatives when I worked for Kristol and attended conferences and dinner parties with Gertrude Himmelfarb, Bill Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Peter Berger, and other self-conscious neocons. Unaware that we were not supposed to exist, according to Mr. Wald, we neocons were well aware of the shared views on the Cold War, race, and other topics that distinguished us from the Buckley Tories and the Buchananite Old Right. If Mr. Wald knew more about the neoconservative intellectual network of the 1980s and 1990s, as opposed to the long-defunct Workers' Party of the1930s, he would know that there was a bitter war in the conservative press between "neoconservatives" (many of them former Trotskyists, as he has confirmed) who reluctantly or enthusiastically accepted the term to describe themselves and the "Old Right" of Patrick Buchanan. Mr. Wald's quibbles about the term "neoconservative" are therefore either a deliberately dishonest debating trick (my guess) or evidence of a profound ignorance of what was (and remains) one of several self-conscious factions on the American Right.

Who Is Smearing Whom? (Alan Wald, 6-30-03, History News Network)

After four months, Michael Lind is still unable to produce even one piece of credible evidence to prove the exaggerated and unhelpful claims made in his widely-quoted New Statesman article of April 7th. So he issues a lengthy rant discussing a wide range of other matters. Some of his new arguments are too general to be controversial. Other statements, perplexingly, are attributed to me even though they are nowhere to be found in my critique of his original essay. [...]

My objection to Mr. Lind's argument is first of all that he gave no evidence that "most" of this "small clique" that is "in charge" of U.S. foreign policy has any significant connection, personal or ideological, to what he calls the "largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement." In his answer to my critique, Mr. Lind still refuses to provide documentation of such a sensational charge. Instead, he attributes to himself a different claim: "I stand by the observation that there is a distinct Trotskyist political culture, which shows residual influence on individuals who renounced Trotskyism or who were never Trotskyists but inherited this political culture from their parents or older mentors." But nowhere does he show us how a single member of the "small clique" either "renounced Trotskyism" or "inherited this political culture" from anyone.

I would be the last person to dispute that the political cultures of Trotskyism, Communism, anarchism, New Deal Liberalism, etc., can exist and be transmitted. For example, in regard to Trotskyism, it can be demonstrated that critiques of Stalinism from Marxist premises, a sympathy for the radical potential of literary modernism, and an internationalist view of Jewish identity together comprise a subcultural tradition that might be passed on. One might even write a whole book about the subject. (We might call it, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left) Moreover, such a study would point out that the original group coalescing as "neoconservatives" in the 1970s included a few prominent intellectuals who had passed through a wing of the Trotskyist movement, especially an anti-Shachtmanite tendency known as the "Shermanites" (led by Philip Selznik, aka Sherman). But even in the 1970s, among the strands of ideological DNA that formed to create "Neoconservatism," Trotskyism was very much a receding one. Now, thirty years later, in regard to a group of mostly younger people that some are also calling "Neoconservatives," it is close to non-existent.

We've already had our fun with the neocons and then Mr. Lind several months ago: THE SWINISH NIGHTINGALE (Brothers Judd, January 15, 2003). But two points seem worth making or reiterating here:

(1) As you can tell from his original essay and his response to Mr. Wald, Mr. Lind is not so much an anti-Semite as a hater of all forms of religious faith. He hates the Christian Right (Protestant and Catholic), Jews, followers of the Reverend Moon, anyone who doubts Darwin, and so forth all with about equal passion. In fact, like John Gray, his predecessor on this strange journey, it is not too much to say that he hates strong beliefs of any kind. Nor are he and Mr. Gray (before he crossed over into actual hatred of humankind, which is where Mr. Lind is likely headed) truly radical in what they've said, rather they have had the "courage" to take the modern doctrine of toleration to its logical conclusion. Inheritors of Hobbes, they base their philosophy on the avoidance of sectarian differences at all costs, even at the expense of devaluing every other idea except for acceptance of all ideas as equally valid and even at the expense of abondining the quest for a decent society. Theirs is the crystalline vision of the atomized world--each sufficient unto himself and unconnected to any other, with whom he might disagree about something. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Skinner box enclosing each human face--forever.

(2) Mr. Lind is correct to some degree though, in that you can't intelligently discuss the tension between the endlessly competing strains of isolationism and internationalism in American foreign policy without discussing the role that Jews play. And, it's terribly easy to get yourself in trouble once you do so. Logically, no one can question the assertion of Charles Lindbergh that the English and Jews had a greater interest in our fighting the Nazis than did those who were concerned only for our own domestic security. Hitler was no threat to us but a murderous threat to European Jewry and Great Britain. But because of the way Lindbergh phrased his case he made himself seem, and it was easy for his enemies to make him seem, anti-Semitic. Though he continued a long and productive life, his reputation never recovered and, even today, he is considered by the ignorant to have been "pro-Nazi".

Meanwhile, in the early phases of the fight against communism it was asserted that the movement was anti-Semitic because so many of the American Communists were Jewish. In one of the archetypal manifestations of this argument, Irving Kaufman, the judge who presided over the Rosenberg case, was held, by Howard Fast and others, to be anti-Semitic (as was a Jewish prosecutor), convicting and executing the Rosenbergs for being Jews rather than for being guilty, all in an attempt to clear the reputation of other Jews:

ARE the Jewish people in America so blind, so forgetful, so dulled to the meaning of history that they themselves will not ask certain questions? Can they avoid asking why a Jewish prosecutor and a Jewish judge were assigned to this case? Can they avoid asking why the first peace-time death sentence for espionage in all the history of the United States was reserved for these two people who are Jews?

Can they avoid asking why this death sentence was pronounced for an alleged espionage in favor of a country which was not only our ally in the Second World War, but to the valor of whose troops thousands and thousands of American soldiers owe their very lives?

If American Jews cannot and do not ask these questions, if they are willing to accept with all its hideous implications this terrible judicial murder of two innocent, brave, and good people, then indeed one can only hang one's head with shame and look into the future with fear and misgiving. For it would mean that the great mass of the Jewish people in America have chosen supinely to accept the fate which fascism historically reserves for Jewish people everywhere, and which has been shared by Jews wherever fascism triumphed.

However, I do not and cannot believe that the Jewish masses of America will accept the decision on the Rosenberg case in any such manner. Plainly and specifically I raise the following propositions for consideration.

It would seem to me that there was a most deliberate choice in this case of the Rosenbergs. Consider the whole pattern again. An ex-progressive, a lawyer who has become a servant and tool of American reaction, is chosen to make a deal for David Greenglass. Under his counseling, Greenglass confesses to espionage and implicates the Rosenbergs. We have good reason to believe that immediately after their arrest, the Rosenbergs had no knowledge of what crime they had been charged with or why they were arrested. Then the Jewish prosecutor is chosen. The case is tried amidst the worst hysteria and jingoism of the first part of the Korean war. The Jewish judge makes the incredible statement that he communed with God before passing the death sentence. The Jewish community is told, "See, it is one of your own members who sentences these two to death." In his sentencing, the judge charges Julius and Ethel Rosenberg with responsibility for the Korean war. The compounded insanity becomes diabolically sane, and all over America Jews sense the implication of the new order, thus:

"For the Jewish people, as for the Negro people, death will be the penalty for the struggle for peace."

This to me is the content and the purpose of the Rosenberg case. All too little has been made of it, both here and in other lands. It is a case with profound implications for all the people of all the earth, and with very special and immeasurably tragic implications for the Jewish people everywhere, and most of all of course, for the five million Jewish people of the United States.

IN A SPECIAL way, the Rosenberg case defines the epoch we live in. Through the Rosenberg case the Truman administration squarely and undisguisedly uses the death penalty for those who stand in opposition to it. More subtly, perhaps, than Adolph Hitler proceeded, more cleverly, perhaps, but with the same tactic, the Truman administration seeks to inflame anti-Semitism.

Thus were Kaufman and company apparently self-loathing Jews of some kind or another. To oppose the communists was de facto to hate Jews.

But then a significant reversal took place, as Jews, and the neo-cons in particular, recognized that the Soviet Union was now the greatest persecutor of Jews and that by its growing support of Arab regimes that it was a threat to the very existence of Israel. Increasingly, Jewish voices were heard on, and sometimes even led, the anti-communist Right, through vehicles like the Committee on the Present Danger. The Reagan Administration was sufficiently Californian heavy and old-line conservative that it was a bit less noticed at the time, but the middle generation of neocons--like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle--held important foreign policy positions. Indeed, it's not too much to say that Jay Winik's fine book, On the Brink, credits these folk in particular, many of them considered Scoop Jackson Democrats until the '80s, with winning the Cold War. If you're old enough you'll recall how ideologically suspect they were at the time, with Democrats feeling betrayed that they would serve Reagan and conservatives worried that they were "soft" on social issues, especially abortion. A Christian Right party questioning the "loyalty" of the Jewish neocons inevitably raised eyebrows. But then one of the seminal moments in the split between neocons and the Democratic Party came when Ms Kirkpatrick just ripped into her old party at the 1984 Republican Convention. Since then the neocons have been fair game for the Left and it's only those on the paleoconservative (Pat Buchanan) and hard-core Libertarian Right (Lew Rockwell, etc.) who still distrust them and who predictably get themselves in trouble doing so. Who can forget Mr. Buchanan's statement in the run-up to Gulf War I, a near paraphrase of Lindbergh, that: "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East - the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States"? This began the process that pretty nearly got Mr. Buchanan written out of the Right.

Now a third generation, the Bill Kristol's and John Podhoretz's--sons of the originators--are in charge and their cause is the defeat of Islamicism. How plausible is it that they are still Trotskyites? the proposition itself requires us to believe that the fathers fled from Left to Right but schooled the sons in the old-time religion of international socialism. That seems at least unlikely, if not entiirely absurd. Here is the voice of the greatest of ex-Communists, Whittaker Chambers, schooling his own children:

At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time--Communism and Freedom--came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men. Indeed, it would have been hard, in a world still only dimly aware of what the conflict is about, to find two other men who knew so clearly. Both had been schooled in the same view of history (the Marxist view). Both were trained by the same party in the same selfless, semisoldierly discipline. Neither would nor could yield without betraying, not himself, but his faith; and the different character of these faiths was shown by the different conduct of the two men toward each other throughout the struggle. For, with dark certitude, both knew, almost from the beginning, that the Great Case could end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending figures, just as the history of our times (both men had been taught) can end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending forces.

But this destruction is not the tragedy. The nature of tragedy is itself misunderstood. Part of the world supposes that the tragedy in the Hiss Case lies in the acts of disloyalty revealed. Part believes that the tragedy lies in the fact that an able, intelligent man, Alger Hiss, was cut short in the course of a brilliant public career. Some find it tragic that Whittaker Chambers, of his own will, gave up a $30,000-a-year job and a secure future to haunt for the rest of his days the ruins of his life. These are shocking facts, criminal facts, disturbing facts: they are not tragic. Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy--not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation. That is why this terrible book is also a book of hope For it is about the struggle of the human soul--of more than one human soul. It is in this sense that the Hiss Case is a tragedy. This is its meaning beyond the headlines, the revelations, the shame and suffering of the people involved. But this tragedy will have been for nothing unless men understand it rightly, and from it the world takes hope and heart to begin its own tragic struggle with the evil that besets it from within and from without, unless it faces the fact that the world, the whole world, is sick unto death and that, among other things, this Case has turned a finger of fierce light into the suddenly opened and reeking body of our time.

Are we to believe that the original neocons still revel in the reek and taught their children to do so?

[OOPS! Too long. We moved it here] Posted by Orrin Judd at July 6, 2003 10:54 AM