http://www.amconmag.com/3_1_04/print/coverprint.html
March 1, 2004 issue
Copyright ) 2004 The American Conservative
No End to War
The Frum-Perle prescription would ensnare America in endless conflict.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
On the dust jacket of his book, Richard Perle appends a Washington
Post
depiction of himself as the "intellectual guru of the hard-line
neoconservative movement in foreign policy."
The guru's reputation, however, does not survive a reading. Indeed, on
putting
down Perle's new book the thought recurs: the neoconservative moment
may be
over. For they are not only losing their hold on power, they are
losing their
grip on reality.
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror opens on a note of
hysteria. In
the War on Terror, writes Perle, "There is no middle way for
Americans: It is
victory or holocaust." "What is new since 9/11 is the chilling
realization
that the terrorist threat we thought we had contained" now menaces
"our
survival as a nation."
But how is our survival as a nation menaced when not one American has
died in
a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11? Are we really in imminent
peril of
a holocaust like that visited upon the Jews of Poland?
"[A] radical strain within Islam," says Perle, " ... seeks to
overthrow our
civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic
societies, imposing on the whole world its religion and laws."
Well, yes. Militant Islam has preached that since the 7th century. But
what
are the odds the Boys of Tora Bora are going to "overthrow our
civilization"
and coerce us all to start praying to Mecca five times a day?
In his own review of An End to Evil, Joshua Micah Marshall picks up
this same
scent of near-hysteria over the Islamic threat:
The book conveys a general sense that America is at war with Islam
itself
anywhere and everywhere: the contemporary Muslim world .... is
depicted as one
great cauldron of hate, murder, obscurantism, and deceit. If our
Muslim
adversaries are not to destroy Western civilization, we must gird for
more
battles.
To suggest Frum and Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take
seriously the threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from
dirty
bombs, or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder
truck or
container ship. Yet even this will never "overthrow our civilization."
In the worst of terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at
Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day's battle in a nation that was
one-ninth
as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200
weeks of
that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up and die. We did not come
all this
way because we are made of sugar candy.
Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years
of World
War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs.
Both came
back in a decade. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of devastation when
they
are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and the shoe bomber?
In the war we are in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to
the
weapon of the weak-terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on
America's side.
Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.
In 25 years, militant Islam has seized three countries: Iran, Sudan,
and
Afghanistan. We toppled the Taliban almost without losing a man. Sudan
is a
failed state. In Iran, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of
Savak
or the Great Satan but enough about the mullahs to have rejected them
in
back-to-back landslides. The Iranian Revolution has reached Thermidor.
Wherever Islamism takes power, it fails. Like Marxism, it does not
work.
Yet, assume it makes a comeback. So what? Taken together, all 22 Arab
nations
do not have the GDP of Spain. Without oil, their exports are the size
of
Finland's. Not one Arab nation can stand up to Israel, let alone the
United
States. The Islamic threat is not strategic, but demographic. If death
comes
to the West it will be because we embraced a culture of death-birth
control,
abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Western man is dying as Islamic
man
migrates north to await his passing and inherit his estate.
Said young Lincoln in his Lyceum address, "If destruction be our lot,
we must
ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must
live
through all time, or die by suicide."
In his first inaugural address, FDR admonished, "[T]he only thing we
have to
fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which
paralyzes
needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
Fear is what Perle and his co-author David Frum are peddling to
stampede
America into serial wars. Just such fear-mongering got us into Iraq,
though,
we have since discovered, Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to
al-Qaeda, no
weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no plans to
attack us.
Iraq was never "the clear and present danger" the authors insist she
was.
Calling their book a "manual for victory," they declaim:
For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war
against
this evil, our generation's great cause. We do not believe that
Americans are
fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are
fighting to win -- to end this evil before it kills again and on a
genocidal
scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or
holocaust.
But no nation can "end evil." Evil has existed since Cain rose up
against his
brother Abel and slew him. A propensity to evil can be found in every
human
heart. And if God accepts the existence of evil, how do Frum and Perle
propose
to "end" it? Nor can any nation "win the war on terror." Terrorism is
simply a
term for the murder of non-combatants for political ends.
Revolutionary terror has been around for as long as this Republic. It
was used
by Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and by People's Will in
Romanov
Russia. Terror has been the chosen weapon of anarchists, the IRA,
Irgun, the
Stern Gang, Algeria's FLN, the Mau Mau, MPLA, the PLO, Black
September, the
Basque ETA, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Al Aksa Martyrs
Brigade,
SWAPO, ZANU, ZAPU, the Tupamaros, Shining Path, FARC, the ANC, the
V.C., the
Huks, Chechen rebels, Tamil Tigers, and the FALN that attempted to
assassinate
Harry Truman and shot up the House floor in 1954, to name only a few.
Accused terrorists have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Begin, Arafat,
Mandela.
Three lie in mausoleums in the capitals of nations they created:
Lenin, Mao,
Ho. Others are the fathers of their countries like Ben Bella and Jomo
Kenyatta. A terrorist of the Black Hand ignited World War I by
assassinating the Archduke Ferdinand. Yet Gavrilo Princep has a bridge
named for him in Sarajevo.
The murder of innocents for political ends is evil, but to think we
can "end"
it is absurd. Cruel and amoral men, avaricious for power and
"immortality,"
will always resort to it. For, all too often, it succeeds.
But what must America do to attain victory in her war on terror?
Say the authors: "We must hunt down the individual terrorists before
they kill
our people or others .... We must deter all regimes that use terror as
a
weapon of state against anyone, American or not" [emphasis added].
Astonishing. The authors say America is responsible for defending
everyone,
everywhere from terror and deterring any and all regimes that might
use terror
-- against anyone, anywhere on earth.
But there are 192 nations. Scores of regimes from Liberia to Congo to
Cuba,
from Zimbabwe to Syria to Uzbekistan, and from Iran to Sudan to the
Afghan
warlords of the Northern Alliance who fought on our side -- have used
torture and terror to punish enemies. Are we to fight them all?
Well, actually, no. Excepting North Korea, the authors' list of
nations that
need to be attacked reads as though it were drawn up in the Israeli
Defense
Ministry. By the second paragraph, Perle and Frum have given us a
short list
of priority targets: "The war on terror is not over, it has barely
begun. Al
Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder."
Now (presumably) al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. But when did Hamas
attack us? And if Israel can co-exist and negotiate with Hezbollah,
why is it America's duty to destroy Hezbollah? Iran and North Korea,
the authors warn, "present intolerable threats to American security.
We must move boldly against them both and against all other sponsors
of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia. And we don't have
much time."
"Why have we put up with [Syria] as long as we have?" the authors
demand. They
call for a cut-off of Syria's oil and an ultimatum to Assad: Get
Syrian troops
out of Lebanon, hand over all terrorist suspects, end support for
Hezbollah,
stop agitating against Israel, and adopt a "Western orientation" -- or
you, too,
get the Saddam treatment.
But what has Syria done to us? And if Assad balks do we bomb Damascus?
Invade?
Where do we get the troops? What if the Syrians, too, resort to
guerrilla
war?
Bush's father made Hafez al-Assad an ally in the Gulf War. Ehud Barak
offered
Assad 99.5 percent of the Golan Heights. Why, then, must Bashir
Assad's regime
be destroyed-by us?
"We don't have much time," say Frum and Perle. But what is Assad doing
that
warrants immediate attack? Is he, too, buying yellowcake from Niger?
Colonel Khaddafi is now paying billions in reparations for Pan Am 103,
giving
up his weapons of mass destruction, and inviting U.S. inspectors in to
verify
his disarmament. Why is it imperative we overthrow him?
While the Saudis have been diffident allies in the War on Terror, they
are not
America's enemies. They pumped oil to keep prices down in the first
Gulf War.
They looked the other way as U.S. fighter-bombers flew out of Prince
Sultan
Air Base in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet the Saudis are directed to
provide us
"with the utmost cooperation in the war on terror," or we will invade,
detach
their oil-rich eastern province, and occupy it.
But why? If the monarchy falls and bin Laden's acolytes replace it,
how would
that make us more secure in our own country?
What did Iran do to justify war against her? According to Perle and
Frum,
Iran defied the Monroe Doctrine and sponsored murder in our own
hemisphere,
killing eighty-six people and wounding some three hundred at the
Jewish
community center in Buenos Aires-and our government did worse than
nothing: It
opened negotiations with the murderers.
But that atrocity occurred a dozen years ago, long before the reform
government of President Mohammad Khatami was elected. And if Iran was
behind
an attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, why did
Argentina and
Israel not avenge these deaths? Why is retribution our responsibility?
It was
not Americans who were the victims, and the attack occurred 5,000
miles from
the United States.
The Frum-Perle invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is both cynical and
comical.
If they were genuinely concerned about violations of the Monroe
Doctrine, why
did they not include Cuba on their target list, a "state sponsor of
terror" 90
miles from our shores that has hosted Soviet missiles and, according
to
Undersecretary of State John Bolton, is developing chemical and
biological
weapons? Why did Saudi Arabia make the cut but not Cuba? Might it have
something to do with proximity and propinquity?
For Iran, there can be no reprieve. "The regime must go," say our
authors,
because Ayatollah Khamenei has "... no more right to control ... Iran
than any other criminal has to seize control of the persons and
property of others. It's not always in our power to do something about
such criminals, nor is it always in our interest, but when it is in
our power and interest, we should toss dictators aside with no more
compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a
hostage-taker."
But where in the Constitution is the president empowered to "toss
dictators
aside"? And if it took 150,000 U.S. soldiers to toss Saddam aside, how
many
troops do Frum and Perle think it will take to occupy the capital of a
nation
three times as large and populous and toss the ayatollah aside? How
many dead
and wounded would our war hawks consider an acceptable price for being
rid of
the mullahs?
As South Korea favors appeasement, they write, we must take the lead,
demand
that North Korea surrender all nuclear materials and shut down all
missile
sites. If Kim Jong Il balks, we should move U.S. troops back to safety
beyond
artillery and rocket range of the DMZ and launch preemptive strikes on
known
North Korean nuclear sites and impose a naval and air blockade. As for
the
South Koreans, they should probably brace themselves. "We have no
doubt how
such a war would end," say the authors. They also had no doubt how the
Iraqi
war would end.
Is the Perle-Frum vision for the suffering people of North Korea a
future of
freedom and democracy? Not exactly: "It may be that the only way out
of the decade-long crisis on the Korean peninsula is the toppling of
Kim Jong Il and his replacement by a North Korean communist who is
more subservient to China. If so, we should accept that outcome."
Swell. America is to fight a second Korean War that could entail a
nuclear
strike on our troops, but, when we have won, we should accept a
communist North Korea that is a vassal of Beijing. How many dead and
wounded are our AEI warlords willing to accept to make Pyongyang a
puppet of Beijing?
But the Frum-Perle enemies' list is not complete. France, if she does
not
shape up, is to be treated as an enemy.
From every page of this book there oozes a sense of urgency that
borders on
the desperate for action this day: "We can feel the will to win ebbing
in
Washington, we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of
complacency and
denial."
The neocons are not wrong here. With the cost of war at $200 billion
and
rising, with deaths mounting, and with the possibility growing that
Iraq could
collapse in chaos and civil war, President Bush appears to be
experiencing
buyer's remorse about the lemon he was sold by Perle and friends.
They promised him a "cakewalk," that we would be hailed as
"liberators," that
democracy would take root in Iraq and flourish in the Middle East,
that
Palestinians and Israelis would break bread and make peace. With Lord
Melbourne, Bush must be muttering, "What all the wise men promised has
not
happened, and what all the damn fools said would happen has come to
pass."
What do Perle and Frum see as our decisive failing in Iraq?
"But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our
unwillingness to
allow the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq's leading anti-Saddam
resistance
movement, to form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad.
In 1944,
we took care to let French troops enter Paris before U.S. or British
forces.
We should have shown equal tact in 2003."
Thus, we are in trouble because Ahmad Chalabi was not allowed to play
de
Gaulle leading his war-weary, battle-hardened Free Iraqis into
Baghdad.
Why was Perle's protigi passed over? Because the "INC terrified the
Saudis and
therefore terrified those in our government who wished to placate the
Saudis."
The damned Arabists at State did it again.
Hastily written, replete with errors, with no index, An End to Evil is
a brief
in defense of neoconservatives against their impending indictment on
charges
they lied us into a war that may prove our greatest disaster since
Vietnam.
And the charge of deliberate deceit is not without merit.
In mid-December 2001, in a column distributed by Copley News, Perle
asserted
that Saddam "is busily at work on a nuclear weapon .... it's simply a
matter
of time before he acquires nuclear weapons."
Naming Khidir Hamza, "one of the people who ran the nuclear weapons
program
for Saddam," as his source, Perle gave credence to Hamza's tale of 400
uranium
enrichment facilities spread all over Iraq. "Some of them look like
farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look like
warehouses. You'll never find them." Only "preemptive action" can save
us, said Perle.
By the end of 2001, according to Perle, the threat of a nuclear-armed
Saddam
was imminent: "With each passing day he comes closer to his dream of a
nuclear arsenal. We know he has a clandestine program, spread over
many hidden sites, to enrich natural uranium to weapons grade .... And
intelligence sources know he is in the market, with plenty of money,
for both weapons material and components as well as finished nuclear
weapons. How close is he? We do not know. Two years, three years,
tomorrow even?"
When he wrote this, Perle, as chairman of the Defense Policy Board,
had access
to secret intelligence. So the question cannot be evaded: did Hamza
deliberately deceive Perle, or did Perle deliberately deceive us?
For those unpersuaded that Saddam was a strategic threat, there were
his links
to the 9/11 massacre. Saddam's "collaboration with terrorism is well
documented," wrote Perle, "Evidence of a meeting in Prague between a
senior
Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the September 11
ringleader, is
convincing."
Thus did the neocons get the war they wanted. And after America fought
the war
for which they had beaten the drums, how do Perle & Co. explain why it
did not
turn out as they assured us it would?
Answer: any disaster in Iraq, the authors argue, will be due to the
venality
and cowardice of the State Department, CIA, FBI, retired generals, and
ex-ambassadors bought off by the Saudis. "We have offered concrete
recommendations equal to the seriousness of the threat, and the
softliners
have not, because we have wanted to fight and they have not."
Which brings us back to the point made at the outset: the neocon
moment may be
passing, for they appear to be losing their grip on reality as well as
their
influence on policy. Rather than looking for new wars to involve us
more
deeply in the Middle East, Bush and Rumsfeld seem to be looking for
the next
exit ramp out of our Mesopotamian morass. "No war in '04" is said to
be the
watchword of Karl Rove.
Moreover, Americans are coming to appreciate that, all that bombast
about
"unipolar" moments and "American empire" aside, there are limits to
American
power, and we are approaching them. U.S. ground forces of 480,000 are
stretched thin. There is grumbling in Army, Reserve, and National
Guard units
about too many tours too far from home. Backing off his "axis-of-evil"
rhetoric, Bush said in this year's State of the Union, "We have no
desire to
dominate, no ambitions of empire."
The long retreat of American empire has begun.
In Washington, there are rumors of the return of James Baker and the
imminent
departure of Paul Wolfowitz. As Frederick the Great, weary of the
antics and
peculations of his house guest Voltaire, said, "One squeezes the
orange and
throws away the rind."
Moreover, the radicalism of their schemes for two, three, many wars,
seems,
given our embroilment in Iraq, not only rash but also rooted in
unreality.
Before Bush could take us to war with any of these regimes, he would
have to
convince his country of the necessity of war and persuade Congress to
grant
him the power to go to war. Yet absent a new atrocity on the magnitude
of
9/11, directly traceable to one of the regimes on the Perle-Frum list,
the
president could not win this authority. Nor does it appear he intends
to try.
And were the United States to attack Libya, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, we
would
alienate every ally in the Islamic world and Europe-including Tony
Blair's
Britain. To fight these wars and occupy these nations would bleed our
armed
forces and mandate a return to the draft. But how would any of these
wars make
us more secure from terrorism here at home?
Indeed, it is because Americans cannot see the correlation between the
wars
the authors demand and security at home that Frum and Perle must
resort to
fear-mongering about holocausts, the end of civilization, and our
demise as a
nation.
If it is America we defend, An End to Evil makes no sense. The
Perle-Frum
prescription for permanent war makes sense only if it is the mission
of the
armed forces of the United States to make the Middle East safe for
Sharon-and
here we come to the heart of the quarrel between us.
On Sept. 11, al-Qaeda attacked us. Al-Qaeda is our enemy, not Syria,
Libya, or
Saudi Arabia. And the way to cut off al-Qaeda and kill it is to
isolate it
from all Arab and Islamic nations and centers of power including
Syria, Libya,
Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
None of these nations had a hand in 9/11. All have a vital interest in
not
being linked to an al-Qaeda for whom an enraged superpower is on the
mortal
hunt. Thus, no matter the character of these regimes, we have
interests in
common. And if Bush can use carrots to get Bashir Assad to help us
find and
finish al-Qaeda-as his father got Assad's father to help us expel Iraq
from
Kuwait-let us make Syria an ally rather than another enemy of the
United
States.
But here is the rub: The neocons do not want to narrow our list of
enemies.
They do not want to confine America's war to those who attacked us.
They want
to expand our list of enemies to include Israel's enemies. They want
to
escalate and widen what Chris Matthews calls "the Firemen's War" into
a war
for hegemony in the Middle East. They had hoped to exploit 9/11 to
erect an
empire, and as they see the vision vanish, their desperation knows no
bounds.
That great American military mind Col. John Boyd once described
strategy as
appending to yourself as many centers of power as possible and
isolating your
enemy from as many centers of power as possible.
This was the strategy used by Bush I in the Gulf War. He persuaded
Russia and
China to sign on in the Security Council, Germany and Japan to finance
his
war, Syria and Egypt to send soldiers, Britain and France to help us
fight it.
By giving everyone a stake in an American victory-call it imperial
bribery, if
you will-Bush I lined up the world against Iraq. As did George W.
Bush,
brilliantly, in Afghanistan.
But what Frum and Perle are pressing on him now is an altogether
opposite
strategy. They want Bush to expand the war, broaden the theater of
operations,
multiply our enemies, and ignore our allies. If Bush should adopt this
strategy, it would be America and Israel against the Arab and Islamic
world
with Europe neutral and almost all of Asia rooting for our
humiliation.
Let it be said: it is vital to victory over al-Qaeda, to the security
of our
country, the safety of our people, and our broader interests in an
Arab and
Islamic world of 57 nations that stretches from Morocco to Malaysia
that we
not let the neocons conflate our war on terror with their war for
hegemony.
Neocons believe the Palestinian Authority must be crushed, Arafat
eliminated,
and the Golan Heights, West Bank, and East Jerusalem held by Israel
forever.
They want Hezbollah eradicated, Syria denatured, the Saudi monarchy
brought
down. Let them so believe. But their agenda is not America's agenda,
and their
fight is not America's fight.
There is no vital U.S. interest in whose flag flies over the Golan or
East
Jerusalem, when Barak was willing to give up both. But if we allow the
neoconservatives to morph our war on al-Qaeda into Israel's war for
Palestine,
our war will never end. And that is the hidden agenda of the
neoconservatives:
permanent war for their permanent empowerment. As Frum and Perle
concede, this
is "our generation's great cause."
"Who are those guys?" Butch and Sundance asked. Indeed, who are these
men who
would plunge our country into serial wars of preemption and
retribution across
the arc of crisis from Libya to Korea?
Frum is not even an American. He is a Canadian who did not become a
citizen
until offered a job in the Bush speechwriting shop. He was cashiered
after one
year when his wife bragged on the Internet that David invented the
"axis-of-evil" phrase. Expelled from the White House, Frum ratted out
his old
colleagues in a "hot" book and got himself hired by National Review,
where he
produced a cover story about a dirty dozen "Unpatriotic Conservatives"
who
hate neocons, hate Bush, hate the GOP, hate America, and "wish to see
the
United States defeated in the War on Terror."
Frum ordered all 12 purged from the conservative movement. (And we
must, in
fairness, report that all three editors of this magazine and four
regular
writers were among the 12 who went to the stake.)
Who is Perle? Unlike Frum, a cipher on foreign policy, Perle has been
a
serious player since the Nixon era. But throughout those years he has
betrayed
a passionate attachment to a foreign power. In 1996, Perle co-authored
"A
Clean Break," a now-famous paper urging Benjamin Netanyahu to dump the
Oslo
Accords, seize the West Bank, and confront Syria. The road to Damascus
lies
through Baghdad, Perle told the receptive Israeli Prime Minister.
Then an adviser to Republican candidate Robert Dole, Perle was thus
secretly
urging a foreign government to abrogate a peace accord supported by
his own
government. In 1998, he and other neoconservatives signed a letter to
then
President Clinton urging the United States to initiate all-out war on
Iraq and
pledging neoconservative support if Clinton would launch it.
Query: why is Perle permitted to retain his post at the Department of
Defense
while agitating for wars on four or five countries, including Saudi
Arabia, a
friend of the United States? Why does President Bush put up with this?
His
father would never have tolerated it.
The neocons have also begun to injure their reputations and isolate
themselves
with the nastiness and irrationality of their attacks. French cannon
once bore
the inscription ultima ratio regum, the last argument of kings. The
toxic
charge of "Anti-Semite!" has become the last argument of the neocons.
But they
have wheeled out that cannon too many times. People are less
intimidated now.
They have seen men look into its muzzle and walk away.
Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Centcom, is a hero of Vietnam. He
opposed
war with Iraq, arguing that the U.S. military was overstretched and we
would
unleash forces we could not control. In an interview, Zinni related
his
astonishment at the vapidity of the Wolfowitz clique with which he had
to deal
at the Department of Defense:
The more I saw, the more I thought that this [war] was the product
of the
neocons who didn't understand the region and were going to create
havoc there.
These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had had
an idea
that worked on the ground .... I don't know where the neocons came
from-that
was not the platform [Bush and Cheney] ran on .... Somehow, the
neocons
captured the president. They captured the vice president.
National Review's response was to brand Zinni an anti-Semite. In a
separate
column, NR regular Joel Mowbray not only accused the general of having
"blamed
the Jews," he insisted that the term neocon, in common usage for 25
years, is
now an anti-Semitic code word for Jews: "Neither President Bush nor
Vice-President Cheney ... was to blame. It was the Jews. They captured
both Bush and Cheney .. " Technically, the former head of the Central
Command in the Middle East didn't say 'Jews.' He instead used a term
that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites: 'neoconservatives.'
Mowbray and National Review thus slandered a brave and brilliant
soldier who
has bled for his country. Such slanders do the neocons no good but
only add to
their isolation and the burgeoning detestation of their tactics.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has also begun to smear critics
of the
neocons as anti-Semites. In the word "neocon," he writes, the "con"
stands for
conservative and the "neo" stands for Jewish.
But the problem for neocons is not that so many are Jewish, but that
so few
are conservative. Lawrence Kaplan, a Perle colleague who co-authored a
book
with William Kristol, after reading An End to Evil, declared: "This is
not
conservatism. It is liberalism, with very sharp teeth."
If the neocons purport to see ethnic hatred in everyone else's
motives, is it
unfair to explore for an ethnic affinity in their own? Why does every
grand
strategy neocons advance, from "American empire" to "benevolent global
hegemony" to "a Pax Americana" to "world democratic revolution" have
as its
centerpiece solidarity with Sharon and a vigorous wielding of American
power
against all the enemies of Israel?
Why is every peace plan proposed or endorsed by a president to give
the
Palestinians a home of their own-the Rogers Plan, the Oslo accords,
Camp
David, the Taba Plan, the Saudi Plan, the Mitchell Plan, the Road
Map-a Munich
sellout? Why is any American patriot, who demands that Ariel Sharon
stop
building settlements on Palestinian land and walling off Jerusalem, a
State
Department Arabist, a pawn of the Texas oil lobby, a Coughlinite, an
anti-Semite, or a bought-and-paid-for lickspittle of the Saudis?
The United States remains committed morally and politically to the
security
and survival of Israel and to providing her with the weaponry to
guarantee it.
No president is going to back off that commitment. But because Israel
is a
friend does not mean that the Sharonites have preemptive absolution to
settle
or seize Arab lands or permanently to deny Arab peoples the rights we
preach
to the world. In our own national interests, we must say so-in the
clear.
This is a time for truth. With a mighty and hostile Soviet Empire no
longer
militarily present in the Maghreb and Middle East, U.S. and Israeli
strategic
interests have ceased to coincide. And with nightly pictures of
Palestinian
suffering on Al Jazeera, they have begun to collide.
Thus between traditional conservatives and neoconservatives a breach
has been
opened and an irreconcilable conflict has arisen. We of the Old Right
only
have one country. We believe U.S. foreign policy must be determined by
what is
best for America. And what is best for America is what our forefathers
taught:
If you would preserve this Republic, stay out of foreign wars, avoid
"permanent alliances," beware of "passionate attachments" to nations
not your
own.
In 1778, Washington rejoiced in the alliance with France. But when
victory was
won, that alliance became an entanglement that could drag the Republic
into
Europe's wars. American statesmen who had celebrated the French
alliance now
sought to sever it, and, under Adams, succeeded.
With the end of the Cold War, an alliance with Israel has ceased to be
central
to U.S. interests. Indeed, our reputation as armorers and allies of
Israel
only damages us as Sharon rampages through the West Bank and Gaza
walling off
Arab land and denying to Palestinians that very right of
self-determination we
Americans espouse. Sharon is making hypocrites of us, and we are
cowards for
permitting it.
To the neocons, however, Zionism is second nature. They cannot
conceive of a
foreign policy that is good for America that does not entail absolute
solidarity with Israel. They are dangerously close to imbibing the
poisonous
brew that drove Jonathan Pollard to treason: If it is good for Israel,
it
cannot be bad for America.
To evade admission of the transparent truth, neocons have begun to
rationalize
their passionate attachment, to sublimate it. "The Arab-Israeli
quarrel is not
a cause of Islamic extremism," Frum and Perle protest.
But when every returning journalist and diplomat and every opinion
survey says
it is America's uncritical support for Israeli repression of the
Palestinians
that makes us hated in the region, how can honest men write this? Have
they
blinded themselves to the truth because it is too painful?
We stand by Israel, writes Irving Kristol, because America is an
"ideological"
nation, "like the Soviet Union of yesteryear." We and Israel are
democracies,
the Arab countries are not, and that is all there is to it.
That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense
of France
and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to
defend Israel
today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical
calculations of national interest are necessary.
But this is nonsense, and Kristol knows it. When Britain and France
declared
war on Hitler on September 3, 1939, FDR did not "come to the defense
of France
and Britain." He delivered a fireside chat that night promising the
nation
America would stay out. There will be "no blackout of peace" here, FDR
promised us.When France fell in May-June of 1940, pleading for planes,
FDR
sent words of encouragement. Not until 18 months after the fall of
France did
we declare war on Hitler and not until after Hitler declared war on
us. Thus,
we did not go to war to defend democracy in Britain or France. We went
to war
to smash the Japanese Empire that attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Kristol
is
parroting liberal myths.
In the Cold War the United States welcomed as allies Chiang Kai-shek,
Salazar,
Franco, Somoza, the Shah, Suharto, Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee and
the Korean
generals, Greek colonels, military regimes in Brazil, Argentina, and
Turkey,
Marcos, and Pinochet because these autocrats proved far more reliable
than
democratists like Nehru, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, and Pierre Trudeau.
When it
comes to wars that threaten us, hot or cold, we Americans are at one
with
Nietzsche, "A state, it is the coldest of all cold monsters."
India is democratic and 200 times the size of Israel. Yet in India's
wars with
Pakistan, we tilted toward Pakistan. Why? Because the Pakistanis were
allies,
and India sided with Moscow. That India was democratic and Pakistan
autocratic
made no difference to us.
As for Israel, has America really given her $100 billion and taken her
side in
every Arab quarrel because she is a democracy?
Tell it to Tony Judt. When this British historian proposed-given the
impossibility of separating Arabs from Jews on the West Bank-that
Israel annex
the West Bank, become a bi-national state, and give Palestinians equal
rights,
neocons went berserk.
Frum called Judt's idea "genocidal liberalism" that would leave Jews
exposed
to slaughter. John Podhoretz declared it "unthinkable" and "the
definition of
intellectual corruption." "[H]aughty and ugly," said the New Republic,
which
hurled Judt from its masthead.
But if the just solution to the South African problem was to abolish
bantustans and create a one-man, one-vote democracy, why is that not
even a
debatable solution to the Palestinian problem?
In temperament, too, neoconservatives have revealed themselves as the
antithesis of conservative. In the depiction of scholar Claes Ryn,
they are
the "neo-Jacobins" of modernity whose dominant trait is conceit.
Only great conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony.
The
ideology of benevolent American empire and global democracy dresses up
a
voracious appetite for power. It signifies the ascent to power of a
new kind
of American, one profoundly at odds with that older type who aspired
to
modesty and self-restraint.
The Perle-Frum book is marinated in conceit, which may prove the
neocons'
fatal flaw. In the run-up to the invasion, when critics were exposing
their
plotting for war long before 9/11, the neocons did not bother to deny
it. They
reveled in it. They boasted about who they were, where they came from,
what
they believed, how they were different, and how they had become the
new elite.
With Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush marching to their war drums, one of
them
bellowed, "We are all neoconservatives now!"
But it is always unwise of courtiers to boast of their influence with
the
prince. And now the neocons have outed themselves. We all know who
they are.
We all have the coordinates. We all have them bracketed.
With the heady days of the fall of Baghdad behind us and our country
ensnared
in a Lebanon of our own, neocons seem fearful that it is they who will
be made
to take the fall if it all turns out badly in Iraq, as McNamara and
his Whiz
Kids had to take the fall for Vietnam.
And this one they've got right.
______________
fwd//Starman
"The word [terrorism] is extremely dangerous, because people tend to
believe that it does have meaning, and they use and abuse it by
applying it to whatever they hate as a way of avoiding rational
thought and discussion and, frequently, excusing their own illegal and
immoral behavior." -- John V. Whitbeck
"Stereotypes are the mind's shorthand for dealing with complexities.
They have two aspects: they are much blunter than reality; [and] they
are shaped to fit a man's preferences or prejudgments." -- ROBERT E.
LANE, Political Ideology, 1962.
"The language of the totalist [totalitiarian] environment is
characterized by the thought-terminating cliche. The most
far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief,
highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and
easily expressed." -- ROBERT J. LIFTON, Thought Reform And The
Psychology Of Totalism, 1961.
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