| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Arther Miller" |
| Date: |
17 Aug 2003 08:24:12 AM |
| Object: |
What is a neo-conservative anyway? |
What is a neo-conservative anyway?
uploaded 14 Aug2003
WASHINGTON - With all the attention paid to neo-conservatives in the
international media nowadays, one would think that there would be a
standard definition of the term. Yet, despite their now being credited
with a virtual takeover of US foreign policy under President George W
Bush, a common understanding of the term remains elusive.
In this context, it may be useful to offer some description of their
basic tenets and origin, if for no other reason than to distinguish
them from other parts of the ideological coalition behind the
administration's neo-imperialist trajectory; namely, the traditional
Republican machtpolitikers (might makes right), such as Vice President
***** Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and the Christian
Rightists, such as Attorney-General John Ashcroft, Gary Bauer and Pat
Robertson.
As neo-con godfather, Irving Kristol once remarked, a neo-conservative
is a "liberal who was mugged by reality". True to that description,
neo-conservatives generally originated on the left side of the
political spectrum and some times from the far left. Many neo-cons,
such as Kristol himself, have Trotskyite roots that are still
reflected in their polemical and organizational skills and ideological
zeal.
Although a number of prominent Catholics are neo-conservatives, the
movement remains predominantly Jewish, and the monthly journal that
really defined neo-conservatism over the past 35 years, Commentary, is
published by the American Jewish Committee. At the same time, however,
neo-conservative attitudes have reflected a minority position within
the US Jewish community as most Jews remain distinctly liberal in
their political and foreign policy views.
Neo-conservative foreign policy positions, which have their origin in
opposition to the "new left" of the1960 s, fears over a return to US
isolationism during the Vietnam War and the progressive international
isolation of Israel in the wake of wars with its Arab neighbors in
1967 and1973 , have been tactically very flexible over the past 35
years, but their key principles have remained the same.
They begin with the basic foreign policy realism found in the
pessimistic views of human nature and international diplomacy of the
English political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, that neo-cons share with
most US practitioners: that "the condition of man [in a state of
nature] ... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone." Or,
as Machiavelli, another favorite thinker of the neo-cons, wrote, "Men
are more ready for evil than for good."
But neo-cons take "man's" capacity for evil particularly seriously,
and for understandable reasons. For neo-conservatives, the Nazi
Holocaust that killed some 6 million Jews during World War II is the
seminal experience of the20 th century. Not only was it a genocide
unparalleled in its thoroughness, the Holocaust also wiped out family
members of hundreds of thousands of Jewish citizens in the United
States, including, for example, close relatives of the parents of
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
For neo-conservatives, as for most Jews, the Holocaust represents
absolute evil, and the factors which contributed to the rise of Adolf
Hitler in Germany and the subsequent extermination of Jews must be
fought at all costs.
"The defining moment in our history was certainly the Holocaust,"
Richard Perle, a key neo-con and leading advocate of war with Iraq,
recently told BBC's Panorama. "It was the destruction, the genocide of
a whole people, and it was the failure to respond in a timely fashion
to a threat that was clearly gathering. We don't want that to happen
again, and when we have the ability to stop totalitarian regimes we
should do so, because when we fail to do so, the results are
catastrophic," he said.
For neo-conservatives, the 1938 Munich agreement, under which Hitler
was permitted by Britain and France to take over Czechoslovakia, is
the epitome of appeasement that led directly to the Holocaust. As a
result, Munich and appeasement are constantly invoked in their
rhetoric as a way to summon up the will to resist and defeat the enemy
of the day. Hence, almost every conflict in which the United States
has been engaged since the late1960 s - from Vietnam to Central
America to Yugoslavia to the "war on terror" in Iraq and against
al-Qaeda - has been portrayed as a new Munich in which the enemy
represents a threat virtually on a par with Hitler.
The resulting worldview tends to Manichaeism - the notion that the
world consists of a permanent struggle between the forces of good and
evil, light and dark (an idea which incidentally accords very well
both with the thinking of the Christian Right, not to mention of Bush
himself). As Michael Ledeen, a close collaborator of Perle's at the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI) told the same BBC program, "I know
the struggle against evil is going to go on forever."
Three major factors are seen as having contributed to the Holocaust:
the failure of the liberal Weimar Republic in Germany to prevent the
Nazis' rise; "appeasement"; and US isolationism that kept Washington
from intervening in World War II earlier.
Although neo-cons profess devotion to liberal democracy, they have
never hesitated to assail "liberalism", or what they sometimes call
with their Christian Right allies "secular humanism", whose
relativism, in their view, can lead to "a culture of appeasement",
nihilism or worse. Thus, even while supposedly defending "liberal" and
democratic ideals, their attitude is at best ambivalent.
Appeasement is prevented, in their view, by a powerful military
capable of defeating any foe, the constant anticipation of new
threats, and the willingness to preempt them. Thus, neo-cons have
consistently favored big defense budgets, a stance shared by the
right-wing machtpolitikers with whom they formed an alliance in
the1970 s to end detente with Moscow. In their view, peace is to be
distrusted, and peace processes are inherently suspect. "Peace doesn't
come from a 'process'," wrote Wall Street Journal editorial writer
Robert Pollock last year in a column that denounced the1990 s as a
"decade of appeasement".
In this view, war is a natural state, and peace is a Utopian dream
which induces softness, decadence and pacifism embodied by Bill
Clinton whose "corruption of the national mission, combined with the
myth that peace is normal, produces a solvent strong enough to
dissolve the strength of our armed forces and the integrity of our
political and military leaders", Ledeen wrote in2000 .
Similarly, enemies cannot be negotiated with. "Before the US can worry
about rebuilding Iraq, it has to win militarily, and decisively so,"
the Journal wrote just before the war. "... Arab cultures despise
weakness in an adversary above all," a refrain familiar to past
neo-con descriptions of the Soviet Union, China, and other
geo-political foes.
Finally, US engagement in world affairs is absolutely indispensable in
preventing catastrophe, according to neo-con ideology which, in the
words of another Perle intimate, Ken Adelman, sees "isolationism [as]
the default option" in US foreign policy. Indeed, many neo-cons,
fearing that the Cold War's end would revive isolationism, spent most
of the1990 s hawking policies designed to maintain Washington's
international engagement, even if that meant supporting Clinton when
he deployed troops abroad.
Why? If evil is embodied by Hitler and similar threats, the United
States comes as close to moral goodness as can be found in the world
today, according to the neo-cons. "Since America's emergence as a
world power roughly a century ago," Elliott Abrams, another prominent
neo-con who currently serves as the top Middle East policymaker on
Bush's National Security Council, wrote in a Commentary colloquium
in2000 , "we have made many errors, but we have been the greatest
force for good among the nations of the Earth. A diminution of
American power or influence bodes ill for our country, our friends,
and our principles''.
Thus, US intervention abroad, as in Iraq, is seen in the best possible
light. Michael Kelly, a Washington Post columnist who died in an
accident during the Iraq campaign, assured his readers last October
that, "what President Bush aspires to now, is not exactly imperialism.
It is something more like armed evangelism".
The moral goodness of the US is beyond question and justifies - indeed
requires - a unilateralist policy lest, by subjecting its will to the
wishes or agreements of other countries or international institutions,
the US would actually prevent itself from fulfilling its moral
mission.
This notion - that Washington would taint itself morally by working
through multilateral institutions or tying itself to alliances with
lesser countries - is certainly not unique to neo-conservatives. It
has been around since George Washington warned the country in his
Farewell Address against "entangling alliances" with European powers.
But the neo-conservatives have tried hard to reinforce this idea.
Thus, in an attack on the UN Security Council this year, Perle argued,
"This is a dangerously wrong idea that leads inexorably to handing
great moral and even existential politico-military decisions, to the
likes of Syria, Cameroon, Angola, Russia, China, and France." It
echoes a refrain delivered by Post columnist Charles Krauthammer 15
years ago about the UN, "Let it sink," he wrote. "It is corrupting."
This sense of US moral superiority applies especially to what is now
called "Old Europe", much as it was in US foreign policy until
Washington's entry into World War II. Thus, Kelly, again writing about
US imperial altruism: "Unlike the European powers, the United States
has never sought to own the world. In its peculiarly American fashion,
it has sought to make the world behave better, indeed be better."
Similarly, during much of2002 , countless neo-con columns and
editorials in the Post, the Wall Street Journal and the neo-con The
Weekly Standard (edited by Irving Kristol's son, William) cited a wave
of attacks against Jewish targets across Europe, almost all of them
carried out by Muslim immigrants or their children, as evidence of a
resurgent anti-Semitism distinctly reminiscent of the1920 s and1930 s.
"The whole of Europe is sick," wrote Paul Johnson, an English neo-con,
in the Journal, while, in one of his milder remarks, Perle accused
Europe of losing its "moral compass" over Iraq. Robert Kagan's
much-celebrated depiction of Europeans being from Venus and Americans
from Mars is an even milder version of the same basic worldview:
compared to forthright, masculine Americans, Europeans are passive,
decadent and unwilling to stand up for what is right.
Washington's moral superiority, however, combined with the possibly
"catastrophic" results of failing to confront Munich-type threats,
also justifies a range of extraordinary responses which, under other
circumstances, might be morally questionable, according to the neo-con
view. In particular, temporary alliances with other countries or
movements whose own ideologies or practices may be morally
reprehensible can be defended if they are used to fight a greater
evil.
"In World War II, we were allied for three years and eight months with
history's greatest murderer - Joseph Stalin - because we had a more
immediate problem, Adolf Hitler," said former Central Intelligence
Agency head James Woolsey, at an AEI briefing, in defending tactical
flexibility. Similarly, neo-cons were unabashed about their support
for "authoritarian" governments during the Cold War in the face of the
greater "totalitarian" threat of Soviet communism, described by
long-time Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz in1976 as nothing less
than "the most determined, ferocious and barbarous [enemy] ever to
have appeared on the Earth".
The readiness to make tactical alliances has extended even to
anti-Semitic governments and movements, such as the neo-Nazi military
junta in Argentina. The regime was strongly defended by the elder
Kristol, while neo-cons in the Ronald Reagan administration, such as
Abrams and then-UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, worked to reverse the
regime's diplomatic isolation and restore US and multilateral aid that
had been cut off by previous president Jimmy Carter. The embrace was
motivated primarily by the desire for Argentine cooperation in Central
America, as was the neo-cons' strong support for then-Nicaraguan
Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo despite his public stated beliefs
that the Jews were punished for killing Jesus Christ.
If anti-Semitism can be tolerated under some circumstances, however,
the security of Israel remains a fundamental tenet of
neo-conservatives who traditionally supported whatever Israeli
government was in power but, since 1993and the Oslo peace accords,
became much more closely identified with the views of the right-wing
Likud Party, which opposed the agreement. The neo-conservative
identification with Israel can be explained in part by its
predominantly Jewish membership, but Christian neo-conservatives very
much share the sense that a strategic alliance with Israel constitutes
a moral imperative in the post-Holocaust era. As Catholic neo-con
William Bennett wrote in a recent book, "America's fate and Israel's
fate are one and the same."
This commitment to Israel also explains the willingness of Jewish
neo-cons to overlook the anti-Semitism of their Christian Right
allies, whose own identification with Israel is based on a "Christian
Zionist" reading of Biblical scripture that recognizes a God-given
right of the Jews to what both religions consider the "Holy Land", at
least until the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ. Kristol
and other leading neo-cons have long argued that other Jews should not
be offended by this alliance. "Why would it be a problem for us?" he
wrote some years ago. "It is their theology; but it is our Israel."
Source: Asia Times
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| User: "Mark K" |
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| Title: Re: What is a neo-conservative anyway? |
17 Aug 2003 08:39:45 AM |
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"Arther Miller" <freethemedia2002@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1451cd92.0308170524.7b2ca7b2@posting.google.com...
What is a neo-conservative anyway?
Although a number of prominent Catholics are neo-conservatives, the
movement remains predominantly Jewish, and the monthly journal that
really defined neo-conservatism over the past 35 years, Commentary, is
published by the American Jewish Committee.
"The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most
of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of
history.
In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town
(Washington): the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was
disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all
of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list:
Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot
Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and
cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a
major driving force of history."
---
Thomas Friedman, April 4, 2003, New York Times
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| User: "Mark K" |
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| Title: Re: What is a neo-conservative anyway? |
17 Aug 2003 09:25:28 AM |
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"Chip Anderson" <b_andersNOSPAM@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:Xns93DA5A779C753bandersbellsouthnet@65.82.44.187...
"The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most
of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of
history.
In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town
(Washington): the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was
disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all
of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list:
Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot
Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and
cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a
major driving force of history."
Ari Shavit, April 5, 2003, Haaretz News Service (Israel)
We don't want to "change the course of history" but desire to steer it in
in a direction more amenable to the interests of the United States of
America, and therefore, the best interests of mankind.
What is good for Israel is good for US and hence for all mankind.
"Tariq Aziz has a theory. Saddam Hussein's deputy told the New York Times
this week, "The reason for this warmongering policy toward Iraq is oil
and Israel." Although no one wishes to agree with Tariq Aziz, he has put
succinctly what many people in Washington apparently believe.
The lack of public discussion about the role of Israel in the thinking
of "President Bush" is easier to understand, but weird nevertheless. It
is the proverbial elephant in the room: Everybody sees it, no one
mentions it.
The reason is obvious and admirable: Neither supporters nor
opponents of a war against Iraq wish to evoke the classic anti-Semitic
image of the king's Jewish advisers whispering poison into his ear and
betraying the country to foreign interests.
--- Ari Shavit, April 5, 2003, Haaretz News Service (Israel)
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| User: "James Hall" |
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| Title: Re: What is a neo-conservative anyway? |
17 Aug 2003 01:46:48 PM |
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A Fascist.
JHall.
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| User: "Mark K" |
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| Title: Re: What is a neo-conservative anyway? |
17 Aug 2003 08:56:49 AM |
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"Mark K" <self@server.net> wrote in message
news:BAL%a.166721$o%2.68381@sccrnsc02...
"The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most
of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of
history.
In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town
(Washington): the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was
disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all
of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list:
Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot
Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and
cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a
major driving force of history."
--- Thomas Friedman, April 4, 2003, New York Times
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The above statement was was actually from:
Ari Shavit, April 5, 2003, Haaretz News Service (Israel)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
James Rosen, April 6, 2003, The Sacramento Bee:
"In 1996, as Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to take
office, eight Jewish neoconservative leaders sent him a six-page memo
outlining an aggressive vision of government. At the top of their list
was overthrowing Saddam and replacing him with a monarch under the
control of Jordan.
The neoconservatives sketched out a kind of domino theory in which the
governments of Syria and other Arab countries might later fall or be
replaced in the wake of Saddam's ouster. They urged Netanyahu to spurn
the Oslo peace accords and to stop making concessions to the
Palestinians.
Lead writer of the memo was Perle. Other signatories were Feith, now
undersecretary of defense, and Wurmser, a senior adviser to John Bolton,
undersecretary of state.
Fred Donner, a professor of Near Eastern history at the University of
Chicago, said he was struck by the similarities between the ideas in the
memo and ideas now at the forefront of Bush's foreign policy."
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| User: "James Hall" |
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| Title: Re: What is a neo-conservative anyway? |
18 Aug 2003 08:41:18 PM |
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A fascist.
JHall.
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| User: "James Hall" |
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| Title: Re: What is a neo-conservative anyway? |
17 Aug 2003 01:45:41 PM |
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A Fascist.
JHall.
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| User: "Iconoclast" |
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| Title: Re: What is a neo-conservative anyway? |
17 Aug 2003 05:16:16 PM |
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Someone who is very willing to volunteer and/or dupe and/or coerce others
into military service to carry out their ideals.
It would be interesting to know how many of these prominent neo-cons have
actually not only served in the military, but put their lives at risk. I
read that Rumsfeld was once a fighter pilot (in the Korean War, perhaps;
he's 70), but I don't know of any others. There's nothing like facing the
discomfort and hazards of war to make one aware of, and temper ambitions,
with reality.
In my life, among U.S. Presidents, only 3 that I know of: Eisenhower,
Kennedy and Bush Sr. have done as much.
----
Arther Miller <freethemedia2002@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1451cd92.0308170524.7b2ca7b2@posting.google.com...
: What is a neo-conservative anyway?
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