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Richard Perle's Outrageous Lies
Edmund
Connelly
February
24, 2009
I’ve just
finished listening to an enlightening 2-hour
radio interview with
hosts Mark Glenn and James Morris and guest Kevin MacDonald, and including an
interesting call-in appearance from Stephen Sniegoski. The general topic was
Jewish power, but one point in particular stood out: Recently, a premier
architect and promoter of the neocon war against Iraq, “Prince of Darkness”
Richard Perle, has been escalating his campaign to deny the neocon role in
American politics. Let me explain.
Back in
1996, a group of Americans writing for an Israeli think tank published a paper
for Israeli Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm.” In addition to calling for Saddam Hussein’s
replacement, it also advised an overthrow or destabilization of the governments
of Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iran, thus leading to something akin to a
“Greater US-Israel Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
One year
later came the formation of The
Project for the New American Century
(PNAC),
a neocon think tank based in Washington. William
Kristol
and Robert
Kagan
co-founded it as a non-profit educational organization, but many have accused it
of playing a primary role in the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war
with Iraq in 2003. Later, the
Pentagon hosted a unit called the Office
of Special Plans (OSP),
where Paul Wolfowitz joined Douglas Feith in propagating what many have claimed
were false allegations about Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass
destruction.
In the
American media there were legions of neocon writers who repeated the party line
about the need for a preemptive war against Hussein. Anyone following the
efforts and words of the neocons likely recognized a sense of schizophrenia
about describing who, exactly, these neocons were. Last year I
wrote about this
phenomenon of naming neocons (see also here), noting
how such comfortable homes to neoconservatism as The Public Interest, The National
Interest, and Commentary
(published by The American Jewish Committee) began to ignore any connection
between Jews and neoconservatism. For example, the Winter 2004 issue of The Public Interest had an essay titled
"Conservatives and Neoconservatives." Yet author Adam Wolfson offered not even
an oblique reference to Jews. Never mind that journal co-founder Irving Kristol
is considered by many to be the father of neoconservatism, or that the other
three editors over the forty-year life of the magazine have also been
Jews.
Over at its more foreign-policy oriented sister publication, The National Interest, Francis Fukuyama, in "The Neoconservative Moment" (Summer 2004) also failed to mention this connection. And in the October 2005 issue of Commentary, Joshua Muravchik did likewise in his article "Iraq and the Conservatives." (Notice that Muravchik doesn't even call them neoconservatives.)
The
schizophrenic aspect of naming or not naming neocons as Jews was obvious at
the New York Times beginning at the
end of 2008. In mid-December, America’s “paper of record” featured a review of a
book about neocon hawk Richard Perle written by Alan Weisman, “a world-traveled
journalist and the son of Ukrainian Jews.” In the review were found familiar
neocon names such as Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, and David
Frum. The reader, however, heard not a word about their Jewish identity.
One month
later, however, the very same Times Book
Review addressed Jacob Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the
Neocons—yet another book on neocons written by a Jewish author. But this
time the reviewer, Timothy Noah, could not have been more blunt about the Jewish
nature of the movement: “There’s no point denying it: neocons tend to be
Jewish.” Heilbrunn confirmed this in an interview, when he bequeathed to us this
verbal gift: "It
is anything but an anti-Semitic canard to label neoconservatism a largely
Jewish
phenomenon.” In an
article in The
American Conservative, Philip
Weiss delivered the same verdict: “Heilbrunn achieves one important chore: a
forthright social narrative of the neocons as a Jewish movement.”
All
of this brings us full circle back to 2004, when Kevin MacDonald wrote
that "neoconservatism is indeed a Jewish intellectual and political movement."
"The current situation in the United States is really an awesome display of
Jewish power and influence.”
Of
course anyone following the antics of the neocons always knew about a certain
Jewish character to the movement. After all, didn’t Pat Buchanan famously write
in his seminal
cover story in
The American Conservative in early
2003 that a “neoconservative clique” was responsible for a pre-planned attack on
Iraq following 9/11? Continuing, he thundered, “We
charge 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. We charge them
with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars.”
And who
might benefit from the Iraq War? Buchanan spelled it out:
Cui
Bono? For
whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America
save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war
of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one
party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.
One might
argue that the Jewish nature of the neocon movement and its efforts on behalf of
the State of Israel are two of the most heavily documented and discussed topics
of the last decade. Here is just a short list of the most well-known
considerations of Jewish power in this respect:
John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
Jimmy
Carter’s Palestine:
Peace Not Apartheid
IHS
Press's Neo-Conned and its
massive sequel Neo-Conned
Again
Mark
Green’s edited Persecution,
Privilege & Power: Reconsidering the Zionist Narrative in American
Life
Kevin
MacDonald’s Neoconservatism
as a Jewish Movement
(also here)
Jacob
Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were
Right: The Rise of the Neocons
Finally, I
arrive at the point of this column: Despite the massive proof of neocon
involvement in America’s decision to go to war with Iraq and despite the
overwhelming evidence that neoconservatism qualifies as a Jewish movement,
central neocon figure Richard Perle has, with a straight face, stated that
neocons do not exist
In a
story last week
in the Washington Post, journalist
Dana Milbank expressed skepticism about Perle’s odd claims. “Listening
to neoconservative mastermind Richard Perle at the Nixon Center yesterday,” he
wrote, “there was a sense of falling down the rabbit hole. In real life, Perle
was the ideological architect of the Iraq war and of the Bush doctrine of
preemptive attack. But at yesterday's forum of foreign policy intellectuals, he
created a fantastic world in which:
1.
Perle is not a neoconservative.
2.
Neoconservatives do not exist.
3.
Even if neoconservatives did exist, they certainly couldn't be blamed for the
disasters of the past eight years.”
Against
any form of reality that most of us would recognize, Perle averred that "There
is no such thing as a neoconservative foreign policy." This nonsense was spoken
at a gathering hosted by The National
Interest.
As
evidence of the coordinated nature of this disinformation campaign, one can
point to the essay Perle recently penned for The National Interest. Titled Ambushed
on the Potomac,
the essay has Perle spouting such howlers as, “I
know of no statement, public or private, by any neoconservative in or near
government, advocating the invasion of Iraq primarily for the purpose of
promoting democracy or advancing some grand neoconservative vision.” And this:
“And as for Israeli interests, well, the Israelis, who believed that Iran posed
the greater threat, were strongly and often vociferously against the United
States going into Iraq.”
He
also alleges that his fellow Jew Jacob Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were Right exhibits “an
obsession with neoconservative influence” but fails “utterly to describe or
document that influence.” Further, he adds, “This neoconservative conspiracy is
nonsense, of course, and no serious observer of the Bush administration would
argue such a thing, not least because there is not, and cannot be, any evidence
to substantiate it.”
The
National Interest is
entirely complicit in this campaign. Witness, for example, the six large
pictures interspersed throughout the article: Bush, Cheney, Powell, Tenet, Rice,
Rumsfeld —
none
of them a Jew. Perle (with the help of The National Interest) wants to frame
them for “the hijacking of foreign policy.” And he concludes that “what is unusual is the extent to which
President Bush was undermined by his own administration.”
What might be missed here is a two-year-old piece in Vanity Fair which reveals even more chutzpah on who is to blame for Iraq. In conversations just prior to the 2006 elections, a host of neocon operatives were interviewed and sought to distance themselves from the Iraq fiasco by blaming others—but only non-Jews.
Kenneth
Adelman, for instance, though professing deep respect for personal friend Donald
Rumsfeld, still blamed him for many of the problems in carrying out the plans of
the neocons. “I’m crushed by his performance.” Adelman also blamed three other
top non-Jews: Paul Bremer, George Tenet and General Tommy Franks. “Those three
are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq.”
Michael
Ledeen, top scholar from the American Enterprise Institute, a leading neocon
think tank, felt that Condoleezza
Rice, in her capacity as national-security adviser, had sought compromise rather
than correct decisions. Eliot Cohen saw “a very different quality of leadership”
as responsible for missed chances in 2003 and 2004. Michael Rubin, also from the
A.E.I., faulted the Commander-in-Chief this way: “Where I most blame George Bush
is that, through his rhetoric, people trusted him, people believed him.
Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves."
Perle
offered that “this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating
dysfunction within the Bush administration. . . . At the end of the day, you
have to hold the president responsible.” Incredibly, Perle claimed, “Huge
mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: they were not made by
neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened . . .”
The most outlandish opinion, however, came from Ledeen, who argued that the best way to understand the dysfunction of the Bush administration was to ask, “Who are the most powerful people in the White House?” His answer: "They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes." Quite frankly, I'm speechless.
James
Petras, who has penned three recent books on the “Zionist Power Configuration
(ZPC),” also noted the blame-the-goyim
approach.
"Whatever inside dope [journalist Seymour] Hersh cited that had not been public
was based on anonymous sources which could never be double checked or verified,
whose analysis incidentally coincided with Hersh's peculiar penchant for blaming
the Gentiles (WASPs) and exonerating the brethren."
Petras is
a man worth reading. In two previous books,
The Power of Israel in the United States
(2006)
and Rulers
and Ruled in the US Empire: Bankers, Zionists and Militants
(2007),
he lucidly outlined the power structure that controls Washington. (See my review
of both books for The Occidental Quarterly here).
Last year he come out with a new book, Zionism,
Militarism, and the Decline of U.S. Power
that continued his exposition. (For a short summary of such ideas about the ZPC,
see here.)
Petras
minces no words in this new book:
The
lesson is clear: the rise of Judeo-fascism represents a clear and present danger
to our democratic freedoms in the United States. They do not come with black
shirts and stiff-arm salutes. The public face is a clean-shaven, neck-tied
attorney, real estate philanthropist or Ivy League professor. But there is
rising anger and hostility in American against the ZPC, against its arrogant
authoritarian communal attacks on our democratic values, to say nothing of our
national interests. Sooner or later there will be a major backlash—and it will
reflect badly on those who, through vocation or conviction, engage in the
firings, censoring and intimidation campaigns against the American majority. The
American people will not remember their cries of ‘anti-Semitism’; they will
recall their role in sending thousands of American soldiers to their death in
the Middle East in the interests of Israel, and how that war has diminished the
United States’ image in the world, to say nothing of its economic well-being and
democratic freedoms at home.
Time will
tell whether the American people will react as Petras suggests. But more to the
point, will the American people swallow the current lies of Perle and his fellow
neocons? There are two reasons they might. First, Jews have a long history of
deception of non-Jews. MacDonald was being polite when he titled a
chapter on the history of Jewish deception “Rationalization
and Apologia.” Less charitable people might call it something else. In any case,
we might suspect that Perle is simply engaging in a tried and true tactic of his
tribe.
The second
reason Perle et al. might succeed in deceiving the masses is that the bulk of
American media is in
the hands of Jews, most of
whom, as Petras and others have shown, are highly sympathetic to the Zionist
cause. Israel
Shamir provides
a reason why the transgressions of Perle and his fellow neocons may well go
unpunished: “The
rich Jews buy media so it will cover up their (and their brethren's)
misdeeds.”
How the
American people react to these brazen attempts by the Jewish neocons to
whitewash their role in steering America on such a disastrous course will show
their maturity and determination to get to the truth of the matter, or it will
show their lack thereof. The proper response, of course, is to forcefully reject
these outrageous lies.
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