The Transparent Cabal:
The Neoconservative Agenda,
War in the Middle East and the National Interest of Israel
By Stephen Sniegoski
“ . . . a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.”
—George Washington
Farewell Address
1796
Foreword
When my book They Dare to Speak Out was first published 25 years ago, I might have hoped, if I had thought about it at the time, that the pervasive and inordinate power of what is known as the “Israel lobby” might have been diminished somewhat in this country by now, for the good of the United States as well as that of Israel. After all, during those years Israel has become a prosperous, self-sustaining nation, and though surrounded by potentially hostile neighbors is far and away the most militarily powerful state in the region. And in reality, with a stockpile of atomic weapons reliably estimated to number in the hundreds, is among the four or five most powerful nations in the world.
Yet in spite of this, the lobby has not seen fit to curtail its influence. In fact, if anything, it has expanded it; and today exerts an even greater influence on both U. S. domestic and foreign policy than ever before. And it is the intertwining of the power of the various factions of the lobby with the predominantly pro-Israel neoconservative forces in our government that helped produce what Professor Richard Norton of Boston University called a “monumentally ill-informed and counterproductive” decision on the part of President Bush to invade and occupy the sovereign nation of Iraq.
But as the American public’s disenchantment with the war has grown, the remaining supporters (dwindling though they may be) continue to push for continued involvement in Iraq. For example, a pro-war group called Freedom’s Watch sponsored a $15-million ad campaign in the late summer of 2007 targeting Republican congressmen who were beginning to go soft on their support for the war. Now the fact that Ari Fleisher, former Bush White House spokesman, is a member of the board at Freedom’s Watch would be of little or no interest here except for this curious detail: As headlined by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), lead wire service for Jewish news, the “Pro-Surge Group [Freedom’s Watch] Is Almost All Jewish.” In fact, according to JTA, four out of five members of the board are Jews, as are half of its donors.
This in no way means to imply that there is anything intrinsically wrong with Freedom’s Watch wanting to continue support for the war in Iraq. That’s their choice. But in the overall context of this volume, it is the motivation for that support that merits comment. Author Philip Weiss, a self-described “progressive Jew,” maintains that “it is no coincidence that the biter-enders [war supporters] draw on heavy Jewish support” (The American Conservative, Oct. 8, 2007). These supporters of Israel, according to Weiss, have managed to convince themselves, and the current administration, that the United States is in the same war against terror as Israel is. And it is this same conviction that, in my view, also drives the efforts of the Israel lobby and the neoconservatives – to the potential detriment of the United States.
Details of the role played by the most hard-line component of the Israel lobby in leading us to war are found in this scrupulously researched and referenced book written by Dr. Stephen Sniegoski. The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East and the National Interest of Israel deals, in its own unique way, with themes also treated by two recent best-selling books. With rarely seen candor, Jimmy Carter’s Palestine Peace or Apartheid and Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy also deal in different ways with the results of lobby/neocon influence at home as well as on the ground in Israel. And, as we have sadly come to expect, they came under attack from the usual suspects as being anti-Semitic.
The same fate is likely to befall Dr. Sniegoski and his equally candid book. Which is too bad, because to the objective reader it can no way be seen as either anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli. In fact, Dr. Sniegoski goes out of his way to make it clear that the neocon movement did not single-handedly compel the United States to embark on war with Iraq. Support for that aspect of the neocon agenda from a number of other key groups was both necessary and instrumental for bringing it to fruition. In addition, neither the neoconservative movement nor the Israel lobby are entirely Jewish. Many pro-Israel groups, for example, are found among what the media generally term the “religious right,” and these tend to be mainly the Christian Zionists. (The term Christian Zionist, of course, is somewhat of a misnomer; they are more Zionist than Christian.) Moreover, in spite of charges to the contrary, the term “neocon” is not a codeword for “Jew.” But the fact is, as author Philip Weiss points out, the neoconservatives originated as a largely Jewish movement in the 1970s “in good part out of concern for Israel’s security.”
On the other hand, though the Bush Administration hawks that argued for war had a goodly number of Jews among them (many of whom had very close political and financial connections to Israel), one cannot ignore the non-Jewish actors, among whom we might mention Vice President Cheney, former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, William Bennett, and of course, the President himself, in the ill-fated decision to go to war.
At the same time, a fear of being smeared with the “anti-Semite” label should not, and does not, prohibit Dr. Sniegoski from pointing out the fact that people – all people – are affected to a greater or lesser degree in their foreign policy views by ethnic and emotional ties to a foreign country (often the country of their forebears). He maintains, and I agree, that the foreign policy views of various ethnic groups – be they German-American, Irish-American, Polish-American, or whatever – are based at least in part on their ethnic identities and loyalties. Can it not be reasonably posited, then, without charges of bigotry and worse, that within the heavy concentration of Jewish neocons in the White House circle of war planners that their identification with Israel helped shape their views on Middle East policy?
Sadly, for well over a half century, with rare exceptions, Jewish influence in the halls of political and governmental power has been off-limits for rational, reasoned discussion. In my 22 years as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, I became all too painfully aware that there are many in our government – too many, in my view – who are pre-primed to roar approval for all things Israeli, right or wrong; whether it be perpetual financial aid or going to war on their behalf. It was my opposition to this rubber-stamp approval for Israel that ultimately led to my to downfall. In 1980, my opponent charged me with anti-Semitism. Money poured into his campaign from across the country and two years later I was defeated by a narrow margin. In 1984, Senator Charles Percy, a sometimes critic of Israel, also lost his seat. Leaders of the Israel lobby claimed credit for defeating both Percy and me.
I relate these stories for one reason only. Let it be said that neither I nor any of those with whom I associate would ever engage in or endorse anti-Semitism, namely, hatred or persecution of Jews based on their race or religion. But it is a lamentable fact that all too often the calculated, knowingly false charge of anti-Semitism is used as a means of preventing rational discussion even in matters of life and death importance, or to crush political opposition that might otherwise prevail in a reasoned debate. Nowhere can a greater necessity for free and open debate be found than among the ranks of the neoconservatives in the top echelons of our government – many of whom just happen to be Jewish – who have, in my view, led our nation to the brink of disaster.
I hope that this book will motivate the American people to demand fundamental change in the way in which public policy is formed by our elected officials: That is, without fear of intimidation from any ethnic or ideological group, but with only the best interests of our nation in mind.
Introduction
Stephen Sniegoski’s study The Transparent Cabal: The Neo-Conservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel is a meticulously prepared and strenuously argued brief against the neoconservatives’ continued influence over American foreign policy. Although Dr. Sniegoski does not investigate all aspects of this pervasive influence on the Bush Two administration, he does focus methodically on the effects of the neoconservatives’ rise to power in terms of U.S. relations with the Middle East. What is most impressive about Sniegoski’s study is its rigorous demonstration of the persistence with which neoconservative “policy advisers” have pushed particular agendas, driven by their strident Zionism, over long periods of time. Indeed these activists have stayed with their agenda until both historic opportunities and their personal elevation have allowed them to put their ideas into practice.
Sniegoski does not have to reach far to prove his case. As his documentation makes crystal (rather than Kristol!) clear, much of the evidence for his thesis is readily available, or has been at least alluded to, in the national press and in the published works of neoconservative celebrities. As a European historian, I have been struck by the resemblance between this situation and the way certain European statesmen before the First World War, who were eager for a showdown with a particular national enemy, kept climbing back into power in ruling coalitions, until they could carry out their purpose. This was true for both of the sides that went to war in the summer of 1914.
It might be argued that the recent bestseller by John Mearsheimer and Stephen J.Walt, The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, has preempted Sniegoski’s work, by making a wide readership aware of the machinations of the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and its neoconservative shock troops. These well-known professors of international relations, whom Sniegoski cites, have recently delved into the ways that the American Zionist lobby has colored and distorted American foreign policy in relation to the Middle East. Mearsheimer and Walt have documented (and this may be the most effective part of their presentation) the war of vilification that has been conducted against any politician who has questioned the U.S.’s “special relation” with Israel. Equally important, Norman Finkelstein, who paid for his investigative zeal with his academic career, has shown the way that AIPAC and its allies have played the double game of being allied to the pro-Zionist Christian right while attacking Christianity as “a major cause of the Holocaust.” And my own articles have provided further evidence of how neoconservatives have been particularly adept at playing both of these angles at different times.
Nevertheless, Sniegoski has cut out for himself a less glamorous but historiographically valuable task, which is to detail exactly how the neoconservatives moved into a position to realize their purposes and, moreover, how closely their purposes dovetail with the foreign-policy aims put forth by the Israeli right since the 1980s and even earlier. Sniegoski performs these scholarly tasks while avoiding certain oversimplifications; and it might be useful to point out what he expressly does not do, because if the neoconservative press does decide to deal with his work, one can count on its efforts to misrepresent his arguments. Nowhere does Sniegoski suggest that the Israeli government controls its neoconservative fans in the U.S. – or even less that Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, and other neoconservative presidential advisors have been Israeli agents. In fact Sniegoski points to cases in which American neoconservatives have been vocally unhappy with peace initiatives begun by or with military restraint exercised by actual Israeli governments. While neoconservatives have generally opposed the Israeli Labor Party as too soft on Israel’s Arab enemies, it has also scolded Likud premiers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert when they have not met neoconservative standards of being tough enough with the Palestinians or with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Probably the ideal Israeli leader, from the neoconservative perspective, is Benjamin Netanyahu, for which one major reason is that this Likudnik hawk has spent considerable time in the U.S. and around the neoconservatives, and he slavishly imitates their rhetoric about Israel as a Middle Eastern advocate of “global democracy.”
Another argument that Sniegoski never makes, and which should not be ascribed to him, is to identify the neoconservatives and their beliefs with the pursuit of Israeli interests alone. The author’s position is far more sophisticated and goes something like this: The neoconservatives bring with them a distinctive worldview, and in terms of their positions on American internal politics, one can easily fit them into a certain tradition of New Deal-Great Society American progressivism. Nor have the neoconservatives ever tried to hide this identification, or their huge differences with either small-government, isolationist Taft Republicans or with the anti-Communist interventionists grouped around William F. Buckley and National Review in the 1950s and 1960s. What has made the neoconservatives seem “conservative” has been primarily their role in foreign policy, as critics of détente with the Soviet Union and as hardliners on Israel. Their anti-Soviet posture helped the neoconservatives relate to the conservative movement that had been there before; nonetheless, once they took over that movement (which is the subject of my latest book), they turned a hardline Likudnik view of Middle Eastern affairs into a litmus test of who is or is not an “American conservative.”
Finally, Sniegoski never suggests that the Israeli government pushed the U.S. into invading Iraq. What he does argue is that the neoconservatives, who played a decisive role in plunging us into that quagmire, were acting in harmony with what they perceived as the interests of the Israeli government and the position of the Sharon government. Nobody coerced President Bush into launching an unwise war; and if he were a more prudent and better-informed statesman, he would not have chosen to listen to Vice President Cheney and his neoconservative hangers-on about invading Iraq. Foreign states and domestic lobbies may agitate to get us to do questionable things internationally, but it is the duty of intelligent leaders to ignore such coaxing and threats. Nor does Sniegoski attach to the Israeli government any special quality of nastiness or deny that internally it is arguably a more civilized state than one might find among many of its Muslim adversaries. Israeli leaders are simply trying to advance the interests of their country, as they perceive them. What Sniegoski is challenging is the management of American foreign policy by extreme Zionists, who can never seem to make the proper distinctions between American and (their vision of) Israeli interests.
Although my views of the plight of the Israelis is probably far more sympathetic than that of Dr. Sniegoski, I am appalled by the evidence he adduces of the activities of neoconservative “policy-advisors” in pushing the U.S. into conflicts they thought were “good for Israel.” The dogged, obsessive character of these efforts, some going back to blueprints for change constructed in the late 1960s, gives the lie to any view that the neoconservatives are only trying to help the Israelis on an ad hoc basis. Sniegoski’s research also illustrates the tremendous gulf between what the neoconservatives want for Israel and intend to have the U.S. government provide and what the Israeli public, when polled, thinks is necessary to achieve peace with the Palestinians.
The neocons invariably seem more extreme, and the paper trail they have left behind about how the U.S. should advance “democratic” interests in the Middle East indicates something far less than even-handedness. The fact that the neoconservative press still denies what few Israelis would hesitate to acknowledge, that Palestinians were subject to ethnic cleansing in 1948, speaks volumes about Sniegoski’s subjects. Sniegoski also stresses the divergence between the bellicosity of neoconservative presidential advisors and the general lack of enthusiasm for the Iraq war expressed by American Jews. Whereas the general American population, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in February 2007, opposed the war by a margin of 56 to 42 percent, Jewish opposition to the war policy was as high as 77 percent. One must of course factor in that the vast majority of American Jews, despite their residual Zionism, are on the Democratic left; and since this war was started by a “right wing” Republican, they are predictably opposed to it. But the question – unanswered, naturally – remains whether or not they would oppose it, if they saw it as being in Israel’s interest, or if it were started by Jewish liberal Democrat war-hawk Senator Joe Lieberman. Sniegoski is nonetheless correct to note that in the present circumstances Jewish “public opinion” seems far less war-happy than the policy pursued by the Zionist neoconservatives.
In closing I would observe that this book compares favorably to the recent bestseller by Mearsheimer and Walt, although because of the author’s more modest professional position and because of the limited public relations funds available to Enigma, Sniegoski may never gain as much attention as these other critics for his scholarly efforts. His work covers many of the same themes as those found in The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, but he covers them with more voluminous documentation. By the time the reader gets to the end of this volume, he is pleasantly overwhelmed with facts and citations that amply support Sniegoski’s argument. Moreover, unlike Mearsheimer and Walt, Sniegoski does not ascribe to this group “decades” of evil doing, and he also points out that the Zionist lobby is acting in a perfectly “American” way to carry out what it regards as reasonable goals. He shows how the neoconservatives rose to national prominence, taking over the American conservative movement while maintaining extensive contacts within the liberal establishment. From this springboard, members of this group eventually became government advisors in Republican administrations – and more particularly in the Bush II administration; and this leverage allowed them to carry out particular plans for reconfiguring the Middle East, which some of them had been working on for many years. The argument is thoroughly convincing, and Dr. Sniegoski, who is a trained practitioner of the historian’s craft, merits high praise for what he has produced.
The history discussed in this book has not come to an end but belongs to an ongoing problem. Neoconservatives continue to have direct influence both in the Bush administration and with the leading contenders for the presidency. Rudolph Giuliani, the first leading Republican candidate, had his campaign war chest filled up with donations from neoconservative funding sources, and his roster of advisors looked like a gathering of the editors and contributors to Commentary magazine. And neoconservatives have now become the major advisors to the Republican presidential nominee John McCain, who explicitly expresses their democratic universalism and hawkish foreign policy. Nor is the neoconservative influence on presidential politics limited to Republicans. Such prominent neocon spokesmen as William Kristol and William Bennett initially eyed as a presidential candidate socially liberal Zionist hawk Joe Lieberman, and they have since adapted to circumstances by going from speaking of a Rudy-Lieberman dream team to having the Connecticut Senator on McCain’s ticket. Meanwhile, the New York Times’s token (neo)“conservative” David Brooks has heaped praise on Hillary, and a feature article in an issue of The American Conservative from late last year demonstrated that Hillary’s advisory staff is honeycombed with identifiable “neoliberals,” who bear a strong family resemblance to the neoconservatives.
If any one of these neocon-preferred presidential candidates gets into the White House, the story told in this book will be only a prelude to a much greater national disaster. Therefore intelligent and patriotic Americans are urged to purchase, study, and talk about this important work. If Stephen Sniegoski can help to create the public awareness necessary to deal with the problem that he painstakingly examines, we might be able to rejoice that his book pointed to, and warned of, an ultimately avoidable future.
Chapter 1 • Introduction
There is a growing realization that the U.S. war against Iraq and American Middle East policy in general has been disastrous to American interests In the words of A. Richard Norton, professor of international relations at Boston University, who served as an adviser to the James Baker-led Iraq Study Group, “Surveying U.S. history, one is hard-pressed to find presidential decisions as monumentally ill-informed and counterproductive as the decision to invade and occupy Iraq; however, a decision to go to war against Iran would arguably surpass the Iraq war as the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”[1] The unnecessary American war against Iraq has not only killed and wounded thousands of Americans and untold tens of thousands of Iraqis, but has also actually increased the terrorist threat to the United States. An American attack on Iran would compound this damage geometrically, bringing about a major conflagration in the heart of the oil producing region of the Middle East, which would reverberate throughout the entire world. This disaster is highly likely unless the United States completely eschews all elements of the Middle East war policy.
How did the United States come to formulate this colossal policy error? This is not simply a question of significance to those who study history; it is of vital importance to everyone alive today. For it is only by understanding the origins and motivation behind the current tragic policy that we may establish the proper policy to extricate the United States from the existing quagmire and bring about the best settlement now possible.
This work examines a controversial and in some respects taboo subject: the close relationship of the American neoconservatives[2] with the Israeli Likudnik right, and their role as the fundamental drivers of the Bush administration’s militant American policy in the Middle East – a policy which inspired both the 2003 war in Iraq and the equally militant solutions contemplated since for other Middle East policy problems. It marshals evidence to illustrate that the war in Iraq (a foreign-policy blunder of colossal proportions, considered from the perspective of the American national interest) and the policy that inspired it and continues to inspire our approach to other actors and issues in the Middle East, have their common origin in the orientation of the neoconservative policy towards service of the interests of Israel. This orientation is at the root of the explanation for why our policy does not seem to address or correspond with the genuine security needs of the United States. Such an understanding does not mean that the neoconservatives necessarily or consciously sought to aid Israel at the expense of the United States, but rather that they have seen American foreign policy through the lens of Israeli interest. Ideology and personal ties have blinded them to what most others clearly see as the foreign policy reality.
The term “neoconservative” is of popular usage, though like the description of political groups in general, it lacks clear-cut precision. What the term “neoconservative” refers to should become apparent in the following pages. While not focused on the neoconservative movement per se, the book reviews the background of the neoconservatives—their network and agenda—as it relates to the aforementioned foreign policy theme. And what characterizes neoconservatives is not only their ideology—which basically consists of support for a militarily oriented American global interventionism and a big government, welfare statist form of conservatism—but also their personal interconnectedness in terms of organizations, publications, schooling, and even blood. Of crucial importance, as the work will show, is how the neocons, over the years, identified closely with the interests of Israel, and how their Middle East agenda paralleled that of the Israeli Likudnik Right. In fact, much of the neocon approach to the Middle East can be seen to have originated in Likudnik thinking. And the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon worked in tandem with the neocons in supporting both the war on Iraq and later militant policies toward Iran and Syria.
The overarching goal of both the neocons and the Likudniks was to create an improved strategic environment for Israel. To reiterate, this does not necessarily mean that the neocons were deliberately promoting the interest of Israel at the expense of the United States. Instead, they maintained that an identity of interests existed between the two countries–Israel’s enemies being ipso facto America’s enemies. However, it is apparent that the neoconservatives viewed American foreign policy in the Middle East through the lens of Israeli interest, as Israeli interest was perceived by the Likudniks.
The aim of the neoconservative/Likudnik foreign policy strategy was to weaken and fragment Israel’s Middle East adversaries and concomitantly increase Israel’s relative strength, both externally and internally. A key objective was to eliminate the demographic threat posed by the Palestinians to the Jewish state, which the destabilization of Israel’s external enemies would achieve, since the Palestinian resistance depended upon external support, both moral and material. Without outside support, the Palestinians would be forced to accede to whatever type of peaceful solution Israel offered.
The neoconservative position on the Middle East was the polar opposite of what had been the traditional United States foreign policy, set by what might be called the foreign policy establishment. The goal of the traditional policy was to promote stability in the Middle East in order to maintain the flow of oil. In contrast to the traditional goal of stability, the neocons called for destabilizing existing regimes. Of course, the neocons couched their policy in terms of the eventual restabilization of the region on a democratic basis. This work questions the genuineness of the neocons’ motives with respect to democracy—at least in light of how democracy is normally understood. Likudnik strategy saw the benefit of regional destabilization for its own sake—creating as it would an environment of weak, disunified states or statelets involved in internal and external conflicts that could be easily dominated by Israel. The great danger from the Likudnik perspective was the possibility of Israel’s enemies forming a united front.
The book has been titled “The Transparent Cabal” because the neoconservatives have sometimes been referred to as a cabal, and, in fact, the term has been taken up by neoconservatives themselves. By implying secret plotting, the aim of such a term is often to make the whole idea of neoconservative influence appear ridiculous. For while the neoconservatives represent a tight group devoted to achieving political goals, they have worked very much in the open to advance their Middle East war agenda. Thus, unlike a true “cabal,” characterized by secrecy, the neoconservatives are a “transparent cabal”—oxymoronic as that term might be. The neoconservatives quite openly publicized their war agenda both before and after September 11, 2001. In developing this history, the author has relied heavily on published sources produced by the neoconservatives themselves. In fact, it is the very transparency of the neoconservatives that has allowed this work to exist.
Like a “cabal,” the neoconservatives have worked in unison to shape major policy. And though acting largely in the open, they nonetheless have been shrouded in a certain measure of secrecy, especially regarding their connection to Israel, because of the taboo nature of the issue. In short, the mainstream media has not probed this relationship to avoid the lethal charge of “anti-Semitism.”
Over the years, the neocons had developed a powerful, interlocking network of think tanks, organizations, and media outlets outside of government with the express purpose of influencing American foreign policy. By the end of the 1990s, the neoconservatives developed a complete blueprint for the remaking of the Middle East by military means, starting with Iraq. The problem they faced was how to transform their agenda into official United States policy. It was only by becoming an influential part of the administration of George W. Bush that they would be in a position to make their Israelocentric agenda actual American policy.
The neocons, however, did not gain the upper hand in formulating the foreign policy of the Bush administration until the terror attacks of September 11, 2001—which proved to be the pivotal event in the neocon ascendancy. When the administration looked for a plan to deal with terrorism, the neocons had an existing one to offer, and a network, inside and outside of the government, to promote it.
The second President Bush was essentially a convert to the neoconservative policy. Examples of national leaders’ falling under the influence of their advisers are commonplace in history. And it would be especially understandable in the case of George W. Bush, who prior to 9/11 never exhibited any strong understanding or interest in Middle East policy, and was therefore in need of guidance, which the neocons could easily provide and present in a simple paradigm that Bush could find attractive.
The neocons did not drag the majority of the American people into war in 2003 against their collective will. In large measure, the neocon militaristic agenda resonated with an American public and Congress that had been traumatized by terror and was desperately seeking a way to retaliate. Moreover, the neocon network, inside and outside the government, was in place to push the bogus propaganda—most critically the non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat—to successfully mobilize congressional and popular support for the war agenda.
The thesis outlined above is elaborated in the pages that follow. This work does not purport to be an overall history of the war on Iraq or the Bush Middle East policy; rather, evidence has been marshaled concerning the specific thesis of the neoconservative influence on U.S Middle East policy. In demonstrating the thesis, the work addresses various counter-arguments, dealing not only with allegations of the neocons’ powerlessness but also with arguments offered by critics of the war, that oil and the quest for global dominance motivated the American war on Iraq and overall Middle East policy. The evidence presented in the work demonstrates that the neoconservative pro-Israel thesis is far more compelling than other explanations for the Bush II Middle East policy.
Lest any reader misinterpret this work, it is necessary to further explain what the book is not. Since it is not an analysis of neoconservatism per sé, it does not claim that neoconservatism is simply a cover for the support of Israel. Undoubtedly, the overall neoconservative viewpoint does not revolve solely around the security needs of Israel, and the same is true even of the neocons’ positions on foreign policy and national-security policy. To state that neoconservatives viewed American foreign policy in the Middle East through the lens of Israeli interest—and that this was the basis of the neocon Middle East war agenda—is not to say that their support for Israel has been the be-all and end-all of their foreign policy ideas, which encompass the entire world.
There is nothing exceptional in this work’s interpretation as it has just been outlined. It is hardly controversial to propose that elites, rather than the people as a whole, determine government policies, even in democracies. We see that idea in, for example, Robert Michels’ “Iron Rule of Oligarchy” and Pareto’s concept of “circulating elites.” Even a cursory look at American historiography reveals that the premise of elite domination is widely shared.
Furthermore, there is nothing outré in the view that people would be affected in their foreign policy views by ethnic and emotional ties to a foreign country. The fear that such motives would shape American foreign policy loomed large in George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796. American historians, for their part, have often broached the idea that the foreign policy views of various ethnic groups—German-, Polish-, Irish-, and Cuban-Americans—have been based on their ethnic identities and loyalties. This clearly corresponds to the contention that the neocons’ predominantly Jewish background and their identification with Israel shaped their view of Middle East policy.
This motivation ascribed to the neocons, however, does not imply that a majority of American Jews held the same view as the neoconservatives on the war in the Middle East. The American Jewish Committee’s 2002 Annual Survey of Jewish Opinion—conducted between December 16, 2002 and January 5, 2003—showed that 59 percent approved of the United States taking military action against Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power while 36 percent opposed military action. This finding was comparable to polls of the general American population.[3] Other polls showed less support for the war among American Jews than among the public at large. A compilation of public opinion polls by Pew Research Center in the first quarter of 2003 showed war support among Jews at 52 percent compared to 62 percent among the general public.[4]
As the occupation of Iraq continued, opposition to the war become the majority position among American Jews. The 2003 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion, conducted between November 25 and December 11 of that year showed Jews opposing the war by 54 percent to 43 percent.[5] The 2005 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion revealed that 70 percent of Jews opposed the war on Iraq, while only 28 continued to support it.[6] A Gallup Poll conducted in February 2007 found that 77 percent of Jews believed that the war on Iraq had been a mistake, while only 21 percent held otherwise. This contrasted with the overall American population in which the war was viewed as a mistake by a 52 percent to 46 percent margin.[7] To be perfectly clear, there was nothing like monolithic Jewish support for the war on Iraq; in fact, Jews tended to be more anti-war than the American public in general. This work, however, does not focus on general American Jewish opinion, but rather on the neoconservatives and Israel.
In short, there is nothing about the overall thesis presented in this book that should cause one to reject it out of hand as somehow implausible. The question is: does the information provided back up the thesis? The following chapters, containing evidence both extensive and detailed, should answer that in the affirmative.
Of course, no work can be definitive, especially one dealing with contemporary issue that is still unfolding. Obviously, much information is yet to come, especially with the future release of archival collections. Evidence undoubtedly could appear that would alter this work’s interpretations. All historical interpretations are only tentative. However, it would seem impossible to find new evidence that would remove the neoconservatives and Israel from the picture concerning the American war on Iraq and the succeeding developments in the wider Middle East. As George Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, asserts in The Assassins Gate : “The Iraq War will always be linked with the term ‘neoconservative.’”[8]
[1] Quoted in Ken Silverstein, “War with Iran?,” Harpers.org, Posted February 13, 2007, online.
[2] This work will also use the common shortened version of their name, “neocon.”
[3] American Jewish Committee, “2002 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion: Strong Support for War Against Iraq,” January 24, 2003, http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ijITI2PHKoG&b=837277&ct=871913 , Accessed November 24, 2007.
[4] Samuel G. Freedman, “Don’t blame Jews for this war,” USA Today, Posted April 2, 2003, online.
[5] American Jewish Committee, 2003 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion, http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ijITI2PHKoG&b=838459&ct=1051549 , Accessed November 24, 2007.
[6] American Jewish Committee, 2005 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion, December 20, 2005, http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=ijITI2PHKoG&b=846741&ct=1740355 , Accessed November 24, 2007. This percentage was higher prior to the war, but it is apparent that the majority of American Jews have not adopted the neocon war position in the Middle East.
[7] Leonard Fein, “Leaders to the Right, Followers to the Left,” Forward, March 23, 2007, online.
[8] George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 15.
Chapter 2 • The Oft-Expressed Neocon-Israel Claim
The connection of neoconservatives and Israel to the American war on Iraq, and on the further developments in the Middle East that sprung from that war, is hardly a novel thesis peculiar to this author nor one confined to fringe elements on the Internet. On the contrary, it has been put forth by numerous commentators dating back to the time of the build-up for war. But while these commentators have been candid about the role neoconservatives played in making and effectively selling the case for war in Iraq, at times even locating the roots of the neoconservative argument in concern for the security of Israel, their assessment has, nevertheless, not by any means become mainstream. Indeed, the perspectives offered by many of these individuals have often been dismissed as mere assertion, if not outright “anti-Semitic” bigotry. Thus, a brief examination of some of these references will help to set the stage for the more extensive elaboration of the thesis that will be made in the succeeding chapters. It is hoped that this elaboration will ultimately show that their position, despite the dismissal and ridicule these individuals have at times encountered, is defensible, reasonable, and supported by an overwhelming amount of evidence.
Among those significant figures making the connection with the neoconservatives was Howard Dean, who in early August 2003, when he was the Democratic Party’s leading candidate for President, said that while President George W. Bush was “an engaging person,” he had been “captured by the neoconservatives around him.”[1] Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in several major speeches in 2003 that neoconservatives had been driving U.S. foreign policy into a dangerous direction. As Biden put it: “This is the most ideological administration in U.S. history, led by neoconservatives who believe that the only asset that counts is our military might.”[2] Regarding the war in Iraq, anti-war Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul proclaimed in September 2007 that “The American people didn’t go in. A few people advising this administration, a small number of people called the neoconservative [sic] hijacked our foreign policy. They’re responsible, not the American people.”[3]
Former acting ambassador to Iraq and ex-career service officer, Joseph Wilson, who had been sent on a CIA mission to determine the veracity of the administration’s claim of Saddam’s alleged attempt to procure yellow cake uranium from Niger, presents in his memoirs the neoconservatives as the major proponents of the war. “This enterprise in Iraq,” Wilson writes, “was always about a larger neoconservative agenda of projecting force as the means of imposing solutions. It was about shaking up the Middle East in the hope that democracy might emerge.”[4] Craig R. Eisendrath and Melvin A. Goodman in their Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk focus on the neoconservative dominance of Bush foreign policy.[5] Expressing a similar view of neoconservative control of Middle East policy during the George W. Bush’s first term were Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke in America Alone: The Neoconservatives and the Global Order. The authors consider themselves conservatives, and Halper served in the White House and the State Department during the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations.[6]
When serving as the director of the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Joseph Cirincione wrote on the organization’s web site: “We have assembled on our web site links to the key documents produced since 1992 by this group, usually known as neo-conservatives, and analysis of their efforts. They offer a textbook case of how a small, organized group can determine policy in a large nation, even when the majority of officials and experts originally scorned their views.”[7]
Joshua Micah Marshall authored an article in the liberal Washington Monthly entitled: “Bomb Saddam?: How the obsession of a few neocon hawks became the central goal of U.S. foreign policy.”[8] “The neoconservatives . . . are largely responsible for getting us into the war against Iraq,” observed veteran journalist Elizabeth Drew in her article “The Neocons in Power,” appearing in the prestigious New York Review of Books in June 2003. Drew maintained that “The neoconservatives are powerful because they are cohesive, determined, ideologically driven, and clever (even if their judgment can be questionable), and some high administration officials, including the vice-president, are sympathetic to them.”[9]
“The neocon vision has become the hard core of American foreign policy,” declared Michael Hirst in Newsweek magazine.[10] Liberal columnist Robert Kuttner titled one of his articles, “Neo-cons have hijacked U.S. foreign policy.”[11] News commentator Chris Matthews, of MSNBC’s television program “Hardball,” saw the move to war on Iraq as an alliance “demanded by neo-conservative policy wonks and backed by oil-patchers George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.”[12] Billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros stated that the “neocons form an influential group within the executive branch and their influence greatly increased after September 11.”[13]
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh went so far as to say that
the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.[14]
(This present work adds some of that “better documentation,” which shows that the neocons represented far more than a small cult of “eight or nine” individuals, but an interlocking network in the United States that often acted in tandem with the government of Israel. In fact, Hersh, through his investigative reporting, actually provided some of the evidence for this interpretation.)
The idea that the neoconservatives are motivated by their support for Israel is somewhat taboo, implying, as it does, external loyalties and Jewish power; nonetheless, it has received public attention. It is popular among rightist opponents of the neoconservative interventionist foreign policy and, in particular, of the Iraq war – that is to say, among paleoconservatives and paleo libertarians.[15] Patrick J. Buchanan, the well-known political commentator, former third-party Presidential candidate and editor of American Conservative, consistently pushed this theme; in his often-cited essay “Whose War?,” he charged “that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek, to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests . . . . What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel.”[16]
Lambasting the neoconservatives in his thrice-weekly column on the popular Antiwar.com web site, paleolibertarian Justin Raimondo summarized his views in his “The Neocons’ War,” in which he described the neoconservatives as “Israel’s fifth column in America.”[17] Among other leading paleoconservative journalists who expressed the neoconservative-war-for-Israel theme were Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the treasury under Ronald Reagan and Sam Francis, one of the major intellectuals of the movement.[18]
On the left, there was also mention of Israel’s relationship to the war on Iraq. Eric Alterman stated that “The war was planned by neoconservatives, many of whom worked directly with their counterparts in the Israeli government, who helped perpetuate the deception.”[19] Long before the buildup for the war on Iraq, Jim Lobe was a close follower of the neoconservatives for the Interpress Service News Agency; and his writings are referred to many times in this work.[20] In Lobe’s view, “neoconservatives put Israel at the absolute center of their worldview.”[21] Journalist and radio program producer Jeffrey Blankfort wrote one of the more extensive pieces on the subject, “War for Israel.”[22] And CounterPunch, one of the most frequently visited leftist websites on the Internet, is very sympathetic to the view that links neocons to Israel. For example, CounterPunch frequently publishes pieces by former CIA officials, Bill and Kathleen Christison, which focus on this subject. Bill Christison, for example, maintained that that “the neocons definitely wield real power and influence” and that they were able to direct the Bush administration’s policy agenda for the Middle East, which involved the “strengthening of Israeli/U.S. partnership and hegemony throughout the region and, in furtherance thereof, advocacy of war, first against Iraq and then if necessary against Syria, Iran, and possibly other Middle Eastern states.”[23] Others on the CounterPunch web site who expressed that view included: academicians James Petras and Gary Leupp, journalists Stephen Green and Kurt Nimmo, and editor Alexander Cockburn.[24] Petras would expand on this theme in his book, The Power of Israel in the United States, which was published in 2006.[25]
In the leftist Nation magazine, British author and consultant on Middle East affairs Patrick Seale stated that
The neocons – a powerful group at the heart of the Bush Administration – wanted war against Iraq and pressed for it with great determination, overriding and intimidating all those who expressed doubts, advised caution, urged the need for allies and for UN legitimacy, or recommended sticking with the well-tried cold war instruments of containment and deterrence.
Seale continued:
Right-wing Jewish neocons – and most prominent neocons are right-wing Jews – tend to be pro-Israel zealots who believe that American and Israeli interests are inseparable (much to the alarm of liberal, pro-peace Jews, whether in America, Europe or Israel itself). Friends of Ariel Sharon’s Likud, they tend to loathe Arabs and Muslims. For them, the cause of liberating Iraq had little to do with the well-being of Iraqis . . . . What they wished for was an improvement in Israel’s military and strategic environment.[26]
The Israeli connection to the war is not the preserve solely of the anti-establishment left and right; mainstream figures have also mentioned it. In February 2003, a month before the invasion of Iraq, an article entitled “Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical On Mideast Policy” appeared on the front page of the Washington Post. The author, reporter Robert Kaiser, quoted a senior U.S. official as saying, “The Likudniks are really in charge now [of U.S. policy].” Pointing out that Sharon often claimed a “deep friendship” and “a special closeness” to the Bush administration, Kaiser asserted that “For the first time a U.S. administration and a Likud government are pursuing nearly identical policies.”[27]
Author and political analyst, Michael Lind, who has been labeled “our first notable apostate from neoconservatism” by Scott Malcolmson in the Village Voice[28] because of his former neoconservative ties, stressed the leading war role of the neoconservatives. Lind held that
as a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies, the foreign policy of the world’s only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the U.S. population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment.
Lind continued: “The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defense intellectuals.” And “The neocon defense intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the center of a metaphorical ‘pentagon’ of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think tanks, foundations and media empires.”[29]
Columnist and television commentator Robert Novak referred to the American war on Iraq as “Sharon’s war.”[30] Maureen Dowd of the New York Times stated, in a column entitled “Neocon Coup at the Department d’Etat,” that the neo-conservatives seek to make sure that U.S. foreign policy “is good for Ariel Sharon.”[31] Arnaud de Borchgrave, who had been a senior editor of Newsweek and president and CEO of United Press International, wrote in February 2003: “Washington’s ‘Likudniks’ – Ariel Sharon’s powerful backers in the Bush administration – have been in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East since President Bush was sworn into office.”[32] He pursued that theme in a later, postwar article: “So the leitmotif for Operation Iraqi Freedom was not WMDs, but the freedom of Iraq in the larger context of long-range security for Israel.”[33] Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman included neocon concern for Israel as one of the motives for the war, writing that
there is a loose collection of friends of Israel, who believe in the identity of interests between the Jewish state and the United States – two democracies that, they say, are both surrounded by foes and both forced to rely on military power to survive. These analysts look at foreign policy through the lens of one dominant concern: Is it good or bad for Israel? Since that nation’s founding in 1948, these thinkers have never been in very good odor at the State Department, but now they are well ensconced in the Pentagon, around such strategists as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.[34]
In The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock, academician Virginia Tilley includes a discussion of the role of the neoconservatives in bringing about the war on Iraq. After mentioning the various official justifications for the war on Iraq, Tilley writes: “But sheltered under the U.S. vice president and secretary of defense was a cadre of advisors who had long planned the invasion on a very different agenda: to reconfigure the Middle East in ways favorable to Israeli security.”[35]
Jeffrey Record, a prominent national security analyst, who during 2003 was a visiting research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the ArmyWarCollege, writes: “The primary explanation for war against Iraq is the Bush White House’s post-9/11 embrace of the neoconservatives’ ideology regarding U.S. military primacy, use of force, and the Middle East.” Regarding Israel, Record maintains:
The neoconservatives who populated the upper ranks of the Bush administration had been gunning for Saddam Hussein for years before 9/11. They had an articulated, aggressive, values-based foreign policy doctrine and a specific agenda for the Middle East that reflected hostility toward Arab autocracies and support for Israeli security interests as defined by that country’s Likud political party.[36]
Some significant United States government figures, mostly retired or about to retire, also commented about the Israeli role in the war. On May 23, 2004, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, stated on the popular “60 Minutes” television program that the neoconservatives’ role in pushing the war for Israel’s benefit was
the worst-kept secret in Washington . . . And one article, because I mentioned the neoconservatives who describe themselves as neoconservatives, I was called anti-Semitic. I mean, you know, unbelievable that that’s the kind of personal attacks that are run when you criticize a strategy and those who propose it . . . . I know what strategy they promoted. And openly. And for a number of years. And what they have convinced the President and the secretary to do. And I don’t believe there is any serious political leader, military leader, diplomat in Washington that doesn’t know where it came from.[37]
Zinni had been in charge of all American troops in the Middle East as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Central Command, and had also served President George W. Bush as a special envoy to the Middle East.
Former President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski expressed a mild version of the war-for-Israel scenario, pointing out that “various right-wing, neoconservative, and religiously fundamentalist groups” hold the view “that America’s goal should be to reorder the Middle East, using America’s power in the name of democracy to subordinate the Arab states to its will, to eliminate Islamic radicalism, and to make the region safe for Israel.”[38]
In May 2004, U.S. Senator Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina, who was in his last term of office, addressed Israel’s connection to the war:
With Iraq no threat, why invade a sovereign country? The answer: President Bush’s policy to secure Israel.Led by Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer, for years there has been a domino school of thought that the way to guarantee Israel’s security is to spread democracy in the area.[39]
When called upon to retract his claims, which influential American Jews deemed “anti-Semitic,” Hollings instead reiterated them on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 20, 2004. “That is not a conspiracy. That is the policy,” he said. “Everybody knows it because we want to secure our friend, Israel.”[40]
It was even revealed that a Bush administration figure, Philip Zelikow, who then served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and supported the war, publicly acknowledged that the Iraqi threat was primarily against Israel, not the United States, in a speech at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002. “Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I’ll tell you what I think the real threat [is] and actually has been since 1990 – it’s the threat against Israel,” Zelikow asserted.
And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don’t care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.[41]
Zelikow later became the executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the 9/11 Commission.In late February 2005, he was appointed a senior adviser on foreign policy issues to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.[42]
Perhaps the most prominent proclamation of Israel’s connection to the war was made by two leading scholars in the field of international relations, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who produced an 82-page essay (42 pages of narrative and 40 pages of endnotes), “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” that became public in March 2006.[43] The paper was not published in the United States but did come out in an abbreviated form in the London Review of Books. In the United States, it remained only a “working paper” on a Harvard faculty website. Nonetheless, the work did gain a considerable degree of attention, especially in the intellectual press.[44] The authors transformed this work into a longer book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,which came out in September 2007.[45]
The Mearsheimer and Walt essay covered the broader “Israel Lobby,” of which they see the neoconservatives to be a part. They maintain that the pro-Israel lobby, made up of an extensive network of journalists, think-tankers, lobbyists, and officials of the Bush regime – largely but not solely of Jewish ethnicity – has played a fundamental role in shaping American Middle East policy. The lobby’s goal has been to enhance Israeli security, often at the expense of U.S. interests. Regarding the neoconservatives, they hold that “the main driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives, many with close ties to Israel’s Likud Party.”[46]
The essay drew a firestorm of criticism to the effect that it was anti-Semitic.[47] This has been the standard reaction to anyone who violates the existing taboo. In fact, the neocons have been quick to claim that criticism of the neoconservatives is really anti-Semitic. In doing so, they acknowledged the Jewish background of neoconservatism. For example, neocon Joshua Muravchik argued: “The neoconservatives, it turns out, are also in large proportion Jewish – and this, to their detractors, constitutes evidence of the ulterior motives that lurk behind the policies they espouse.”[48]
Norman Podhoretz, the doyen of neoconservatism, used the very popularity of the claim of the neocon/Israel connection to the war as reason to reject it as classical “anti-Semitism.”
“Before long, this theory was picked up and circulated by just about everyone in the whole world who was intent on discrediting the Bush Doctrine,” Podhoretz asserted in Commentary magazine in September 2004.
And understandably so: for what could suit their purposes better than to expose the invasion of Iraq – and by extension the whole of World War IV – as a war started by Jews and being waged solely in the interest of Israel?To protect themselves against the taint of anti-Semitism, purveyors of this theory sometimes disingenuously continued to pretend that when they said neoconservative they did not mean Jew. Yet the theory inescapably rested on all-too-familiar anti-Semitic canards – principally that Jews were never reliably loyal to the country in which they lived, and that they were always conspiring behind the scenes, often successfully, to manipulate the world for their own nefarious purposes.[49]
Even Jews outside the distinctly neocon orbit became very upset about the criticism of neocons and turned to the “anti-Semitism” defense. In May 2003, Abraham Foxman, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote an essay, “Anti-Semitism, Pure and Simple,” bemoaning the fact that
The accusation about Jews and Jewish interests is being aired almost daily, on the airwaves, in the nation’s editorial pages and from a range of pundits who want to pin the blame for this war on the Jews. The spread of this new lie is not surprising, because it is really not so new. In times of crisis, in times of uncertainty, at times nations face danger, Jews continue to be a convenient and tempting option for scapegoating.[50]
A year later, Foxman would demand that Senator Hollings retract his comments about neoconservatives and Israel, charging that “This is reminiscent of age-old, anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government.”[51]
Undercutting the charge of “anti-Semitism” was the fact that more than a few individuals of Jewish heritage shared the view that neocons played a major role in driving the United States to war, including Rabbi Michael Lerner, Michael Lind, Paul Gottfried, Robert Novak, Jim Lobe, Seymour Hersh, Stanley Heller, Philip Weiss, Joshua Micah Marshall, Jeffrey Blankfort, Eric Alterman, and George Soros[52]
In fact, Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal Jewish publication Tikkun, went much further than most gentile commentators in branding Jews pro-war:
The State of Israel seems unequivocally committed to the war, the most prominent advocates of this war inside the administration have been Jews, the major sentiment being expressed inside the Orthodox synagogues is that of support for the war, and the voices of liberals who might normally be counted on to be raising questions are in fact silent. Isn’t that enough reason for most people to feel that this is a war supported by the Jewish community, though in fact it is only the organized community and not most Jews who support it?[53]
Paul Gottfried explained what was really meant by those who ascribe a major role in the war to the neoconservatives: “No one who is sane is claiming that all Jews are collaborating with Richard Perle and Bill Kristol. What is being correctly observed is a convergence of interests in which neoconservatives have played a pivotal role.”[54]
Obviously, there are those who would label the war as the work of all Jews – an imaginary monolithic World Jewry – but all views can be distorted into fallacious, and even hostile ones. The war on Iraq, of course, spawned anti-Arab and anti-Muslim feelings, just as the World War II spawned anti-Japanese sentiment (and World War I Germanophobia). These developments, by themselves, would not undermine the causes to which they were attached, e.g., World War II.
Joshua Micah Marshall held that use of “blanket criticisms of anti-Semitism” were intended “to stigmatize and ward off any and all criticism” of the Bush administration foreign policy and Ariel Sharon.[55] “But I must tell you that I am growing more than a little weary of the Jewlier than thou comments emanating from some of my co-religionists on the other side of the aisle,” Marshall averred. He countercharged that
those who make these charges are exploiting and trivializing the issue of anti-Semitism by using it as a tool to blunt criticism of their foreign policy views and the foreign policy pursued by this administration. One does not have to agree with the policies of Ariel Sharon’s government to be a Jew in good standing or even an Israeli for that matter.[56]
Intertwined with the “anti-Semitic” charge was the implication that the very idea of neoconservatives exercising power or possessing inordinate influence was preposterous. For example, Robert J. Lieber, professor of government and foreign service at prestigious Georgetown University, titled an essay, “The Neoconservative-Conspiracy Theory: Pure Myth,” claiming that
this sinister mythology is worthy of the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed 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.[57]
It might be pointed out that Lieber himself was closely connected with the neoconservatives, and could legitimately be considered a neoconservative, being a member of the Committee for the President Danger, which was revived in July 2004 to promote war against Islamic terrorism and was made up of such neocon luminaries as Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Joshua Muravchik, Kenneth Adelman, Laurie Mylroie, Midge Decter, Frank Gaffney, and Max Kampelman,[58] Lieber’s argument here represents an ironical one pushed by many neocons – to wit, while the neoconservatives form many groups to influence public policy, they often deny that they are in any way successful in doing so.
Sometimes, however, neoconservatives do admit their influence on American war policy. For example, in the course of trying to deny the leading role of neoconservatives in the war on Iraq, neoconservative Max Boot in December 2002 had to admit that the national security strategy of the Bush administration “sounds as if it could have come straight from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible.”[59]
And in that very “neocon bible,” Commentary, Joshua Muravchik went a long way in the direction of acknowledging that America’s war on Iraq had reflected neoconservative policy. Ironically, the article, published in September 2003, was entitled “The Neoconservative Cabal,” seemingly intended to imply the ridiculousness of the critics’ charges, but the piece actually did much to provide confirmation. Muravchik acknowledged that the September 11 terrorist atrocities enabled long-standing neoconservative plans to come to the fore.
Not only did the neocons have an analysis of what had gone wrong in American policy, they also stood ready with proposals for what to do now: to wage war on the terror groups and to seek to end or transform governments that supported them, especially those possessing the means to furnish terrorists with the wherewithal to kill even more Americans than on September 11. Neocons also offered a long-term strategy for making the Middle East less of a hotbed of terrorism: implanting democracy in the region and thereby helping to foment a less violent approach to politics.
After 9/11, policies espoused by neoconservatives were “embraced by the Bush administration.”
Muravchik purported to be agnostic as to whether the neocons themselves caused the adoption of their policies: “Was this because Bush learned them from the likes of Wolfowitz and Perle? Or did he and his top advisers – none of them known as a neocon – reach similar conclusions on their own?” But Muravchik made the neoconservative authorship of American foreign policy more explicit in his final conclusion, where he wrote that if
the [current Bush administration] policies succeed, then the world will have been delivered from an awful scourge, and there will be credit enough to go around – some of it, one trusts, even for the lately much demonized neoconservatives.[60]
In December 2003, the neocon Hudson Institute and the neocon fellow-traveling, pro-Israel New Republic magazine sponsored a conference entitled “Is the Neoconservative Moment Over?” Obviously, the title itself implied that neoconservatism had been influential at least for the “moment” of the Iraq war. Moreover, Richard Perle, a leading neocon who was a speaker at the conference, would maintain that “Not only is the neoconservative movement not over, it’s just beginning.”[61]
Acknowledging neocon influence, of course, is not the same thing as saying that the neocons were motivated by Israeli interests. However, after General Zinni’s remarks in May 2004, the Jewish weekly, Forward, concluded that that the argument that Israeli security was the motivation for the American war on Iraq had to be confronted by ideas, and could not be simply tossed aside as sheer bigotry. Its editorial stated:
As recently as a week ago, reasonable people still could dismiss as antisemitic conspiracy mongering the claim that Israel’s security was the real motive behind the invasion of Iraq. No longer. The allegation has now moved from the fringes into the mainstream. Its advocates can no longer simply be shushed or dismissed as bigots. Those who disagree must now argue the case on the merits.
What was required, the Forward opined, was open debate.
The line between legitimate debate and scapegoating is a fine one. Friends of Israel will be tempted to guard that line by labeling as anti-semites those who threaten to cross it. They already have begun to do so. But it is a mistake. Israel and its allies stand accused of manipulating America’s public debate for their own purposes. If they were to succeed in suppressing debate to protect themselves, it only would prove the point. Better to follow the democratic path: If there is bad speech, the best reply is more speech.[62]
The Forward has here offered wise counsel, and it is not unreasonable to hope that it might be followed. Truth can only be obtained through freedom of inquiry, not by intimidation and suppression, and it is the arrival at a better understanding of the truth to which this work aims to contribute. As noted earlier, the thesis here presented is neither novel nor particularly original. What is newly presented, however, is the extensive evidence, from matters of public record, necessary to evaluate the claims made by, e.g., those identified in this chapter, whose assessments have up to now typically been dismissed as lunacy, bigotry, or both. Anyone wishing honestly to determine whether it is myth or reality that the neoconservatives were the driving force behind the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s later militant policy in the Middle East, and whether that neoconservative policy was and is designed to benefit Israel, must consider this evidence. The author believes the case made by it to be overwhelmingly persuasive.
[1] Howard Dean, interviewed by Roger Simon, “College, Vietnam, and The Clintons,” U.S. News & World Report, August 11, 2003, online.
[2] John Shaw, “Many Analysts Say Neoconservatives Driving U.S. Foreign Policy Agenda,” Washington Diplomat, February 2004, online; Remarks by Sen. Joseph Biden at the Release of “Progressive Internationalism,” October 30, 2003, Democratic Leadership Council Web Site, http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=106&subid=122&contentid=252157, accessed November 16, 2007.
[3] New York Times, “Transcript: Huckabee’s Fox Debate Attack on Ron Paul Over the Iraq War,” NewsandPolicy.com, September 5, 2007, online.
[4] Joseph Wilson, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004), p. 425. Wilson determined that the uranium claim was of no merit. It is believed that members of the Bush administration leaked the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA agent because of his criticism of the war on Iraq. See Jeffrey Steinberg, “Far, Far Worse Than Watergate: The “Outing of Valerie Plame,” in Neo-CONNED! Again eds. D. L. O’Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe (Vienna, Va.: Light in the Darkness Publications, 2005), 491–504.
[5] Craig R. Eisendrath and Melvin A. Goodman, Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives Are Putting the World at Risk (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2004).
[6] Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
[7] Joseph Cirincione, “Origins of Regime Change in Iraq,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Proliferation Brief 6.5 (March 19, 2003), http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=print&id=1214, accessed November 16, 2007.
[8] Joshua Micah Marshall, “Bomb Saddam?: How the obsession of a few neocon hawks became the central goal of U.S. foreign policy,” Washington Monthly, June 2002, online.
[9] Elizabeth Drew,” “The Neocons in Power,” New York Review of Books, June 12, 2003, online.
[10] Michael Hirsh, “The Mideast: Neocons on the Line,” Newsweek, June 23,2003, online.
[11] Robert Kuttner, “Neo-cons have hijacked U.S. foreign policy,” Boston Globe, September 10, 2003, online.
[12] Christopher Matthews, “The Road to Baghdad,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 24, 2002, online.
[13] George Soros, The Bubble of American Supremacy: The Costs of Bush’s War in Iraq (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), p. 4.
[14] Seymour Hersh, “We’ve Been Taken Over By a Cult,” CounterPunch.org, January 27, 2005, online.
[15] Many of these individuals identify with the pre-Cold War non-interventionist (“isolationist”) right, who opposed American entry into World War II. Their major publications include American Conservative and Chronicles.
[16] Patrick J. Buchanan, “Whose War?,” American Conservative, March 24, 2003, online.
[17] Justin Raimondo, “The Neocons’ War,” Antiwar.com, June 2, 2004, online.
[18] Sam Francis, “An Anti-War Column: Bush Likudniks seek to start ‘World War IV’”, VDare.com, March 20, 2003, online; Paul Craig Roberts, “Neo-Jacobins Push For World War IV,” LewRockwell.com, September 20, 2003, online; see also: Scott McConnell, “The Struggle Over War Aims: Bush Versus the Neo-Cons,” Antiwar.com, September 25, 2002, online.
[19] Eric Alterman, “Neocons for Anti-Semitism,” Altercation weblog, MSNBC.com, September 9, 2004, http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5887234/?#040909, accessed November 18, 2007.
[20] See for example: Jim Lobe, ” Neoconservatives Consolidate Control over U.S. Mideast Policy,” Foreign Policy in Focus, December 6, 2002, online.
[21] Quoted in Philip Weiss, “Ferment Over ‘The Israel Lobby’,” Nation, posted April 27, 2006 (May 15, 2006 issue), online.
[22] Jeffrey Blankfort, “A War for Israel,” Left Curve, No. 28, online.
[23] Bill Christison, “Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous: How They Might Influence the Election,” CounterPunch.org, March 5, 2004, online; for another example, see Bill and Kathleen Christison, “Israel as Sideshow,” CounterPunch.org, October 12, 2004, online.
[24] For example, see James Petras, “Israel and the Neocons: The Libby Affair and the Internal War,” CounterPunch.org, November 3, 2005, online; Gary Leupp, “Philosopher Kings: Leo Strauss and the Neocons,” CounterPunch.org, May 24, 2003, online; Gary Leupp, “The Two-Line Struggle at the Top. Phase Two: Syria and Iran,” CounterPunch.org, May 5, 2003, online; Stephen Green, “Serving Two Flags: The Bush Neo-Cons and Israel,” CounterPunch.org, September 3, 2004, online; Kurt Nimmo, “Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario,” CounterPunch.org, October 18/19, 2003, online; Alexander Cockburn, “Will Bush Quit Iraq?,” CounterPunch.org, January 19, 2005, online.
[25] James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2006).
[26] Patrick Seale, “A Costly Friendship,” Nation, July 21, 2003, online.
[27] Robert G. Kaiser, “Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical On Mideast Policy,” Washington Post, February 9, 2003, p. A-1.
[28] Quoted by Thaddeus Russell, “The Limitations of a Neo-Nationalist,” New Politics, vol. 6, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 23, Summer 1997, online.
[29] Michael Lind, “How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington – and Launched a War,” Antiwar.com, April 10, 2003, online; Michael Lind, “The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush’s War,” New Statesman, April 7, 2003, online. Lind has been an editor or staff writer for New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the New Republic.
[30] Robert D. Novak, “Sharon’s War?,” Townhall.com, December 26, 2002, online.
[31] Maureen Dowd, “Neocon Coup at the Department d’Etat,” New York Times, August 6, 2003, p. A-17.
[32] Arnaud de Borchgrave, “A Bush-Sharon Doctrine?,” Newsmax.com, February 17, 2003, online.
[33] Arnaud de Borchgrave, “Iraq and the Gulf of Tonkin,” Washington Times, February 10, 2004, online.
[34] Stanley Hoffmann, “The High and the Mighty,” American Prospect, January 13, 2003, online.
[35] Virginia Tilley, The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 105–6.
[36] Jeffrey Record, “Dark Victory,” Salon.com, April 29, 2004, online; Jeffrey Record, Dark Victory: America’s Second War Against Iraq (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2004), pp. 17–29.
[37] “Gen. Zinni: ‘They’ve Screwed Up,’” CBSNews.com, May 21, 2004, online.
[38] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership (New York: Basic Books, 2004), p. 35.
[39] Senator Ernest F. Hollings, “Bush’s failed Mideast policy is creating more terrorism,” Charleston Post and Courier, May 6, 2004, http://hollings.senate.gov/~hollings/opinion/2004506A17.html, accessed May 7, 2004.
[40] Matthew E. Berger, “Not so gentle rhetoric from the gentleman from South Carolina,” JTA, May 23, 2004, online.
[41] Emad Mekay, “Iraq was invaded ‘to protect Israel’ – U.S. official,” Asia Times, March 31, 2004, online.
[42] Kate Andrews. “Philip Zelikow Takes State Department Post”, Daily Progress(Charlottesville, Va.), February 26, 2005. p. A6.
[43] At the time, Mearsheimer was the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, and Walt was the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs and the academic dean of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
[44] John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby,” London Review of Books, March 23, 2006, online.; Mearsheimer and Walt, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Faculty Research Working Papers Series, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, March 2006, http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf, accessed November 16, 2007.
[45] John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
[46] Mearsheimer and Walt, Harvard University Faculty Research Paper, p. 31. My use of the term “driving force” to describe the neoconservatives’ role in bringing about the United States war on Iraq predates the release of the Mearsheimer and Walt essay.
[47] Lowell Ponte, “Harvard’s New Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” FrontPageMagazine.com, March 23, 2006, online; Ruth R. Wisse, “Harvard attack on ‘Israel lobby’ is actually a targeting of American public,” Jewish World Review, March 23, 2006, online; Eliot A. Cohen, “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic,” Washington Post, April 5, 2006, p. A-23; Alan Dershowitz, “Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy: A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt ‘Working Paper,” April 2006, Faculty Research Working Papers Series, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/research/working_papers/dershowitzreply.pdf,accessed November 16, 2007.
[48] Joshua Muravchik, “The Neoconservative Cabal,” Commentary, September 2003, online.
[49] Norman Podhoretz, “World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win,” Commentary, September 2004, online; Norman Podhoretz, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 63.
[50] Abraham H. Foxman, “Anti-Semitism, Pure and Simple,” Jerusalem Report, May 5, 2003, http://www.adl.org/ADL_Opinions/Anti_Semitism_Domestic/plain_anti_semitism_op_05052003.htm,accessed July 11, 2006.
[51] “ADL Urges Senator Hollings to Disavow Statements on Jews and the Iraq War,” Anti-Defamation League Press Release, May 14, 2004, http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASU.S._12/4496_12.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.
[52] The writings of these individuals have been mentioned already. For Stanley Heller, see “It’s Not Just the Oil,” Antiwar.com, February 20, 2003, online; for Philip Weiss, see Philip Weiss, “Ferment Over ‘The Israel Lobby,’” Nation, May 15, 2006, online; Philip Weiss, “Why I’m Right About Liberal Jews and the Antiwar Movement,” New York Observer, January 21, 2007, online.
[53] James D. Besser, “Jews Increasingly Blamed For War: Backlash evident before first shot fired in Iraq; fury over Rep. Moran’s comments,” Jewish Week, March 14, 2003, online.
[54] Paul Gottfried, “Goldberg Is Not the Worst,” LewRockwell.com, March 20, 2003, online..
[55] Joshua Micah Marshall, Talking Points Memo, January 6, 2004, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_01_04.php, accessed November 16, 2007.
[56] Joshua Micah Marshall, Talking Points Memo, October 22, 2003, http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2003_10_19.php,accessed November 16, 2007.
[57] Robert J. Lieber, “The Neoconservative-Conspiracy Theory: Pure Myth,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2, 2003, online
[58] Committee on the Present Danger, “Members,” http://www.committeeonthepresentdanger.org/OurMembers/tabid/364/Default.aspx,accessed December 1, 2007.
[59] Max Boot, “What the Heck Is a ‘Neocon’?” Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2002, online.
[60] Joshua Muravchik, “The Neoconservative Cabal,” Commentary, September 2003, online; four years later Muravchik would provide a more qualified version of this theme, maintaining that “However fantastical the conspiracy theories, and however polluted their origins, what is undeniable is that Bush’s declaration of war against terrorism did bear the earmarks of neoconservatism . . . . It is possible that Bush and Cheney turned to neoconservative sources for guidance on these matters; it is also possible, and more likely, that they reached similar conclusions on their own. In either case, the war against terrorism put neoconservative ideas to the test.” Joshua Muravchik, “The Past, Present, and Future of Neoconservatism,” Commentary, October 2007, online.
[61] Michelle Goldberg, “Is this the neocon century?,” Salon, December 17, 2003, online.
[62] “The Ground Shifts,” Forward, May 28, 2004, online.
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