Neoconservatism

Review of PBS Frontline’s The War Behind Closed Doors

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While I was in the midst of trying to publicize the Jewish instigation and the folly of invading Iraq in early 2003 as an occasional writer of scripts for American Dissident Voices,  PBS Frontline presented a rather helpful documentary called The War Behind Closed Doors, written by Michael Kirk, and coproduced by Michael Kirk and Jim Gilmore.

The introduction to The War Behind Closed Doors is quite promising, with Frontline’s narrator stating: “Over two decades, they had served three presidents, and argued for one big idea, that the United States must project its power and influence throughout the world. This is the story of how they set out to change American foreign policy in the days immediately after the tragedy of September 11th.” Then, to be more specific about what that means, the intro includes a clip of former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack saying: “And it does seem very clear that this group seized upon the events of September 11th to resurrect their policy of trying to go after Saddam Hussein and a regime-change in Iraq.” This was a documentary that would clarify who was responsible for the drive for war against Iraq: Neoconservatives — which meant that the war was not fundamentally about oil.

The documentary describes the path to invasion of Iraq (which seemed imminent but had not yet occurred when the program aired on 20 February 2003) as a struggle between Neoconservatives (also calling themselves “Neo-Reaganites” or “hawks”) led by Paul Wolfowitz, and “pragmatists” or “realists” ostensibly led by Colin Powell. The Neoconservative position was that Saddam Hussein’s government must be destroyed, while the pragmatists, without disputing the Neoconservatives’ provocative claims about Saddam Hussein, advocated containment as the appropriate response. Read more

Donald Trump’s Rise Sparks Widespread Angst Among Jewish Republicans

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An article in The Forward again shows the true colors of the Republican Jewish Coalition: Liberal politics, abhorrence of White identity, and a powerful loyalty to Israel (Josh Nathan-Kazis, Donald Trump’s Rise Sparks Widespread Angst Among Jewish Republicans).

At a recent board meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, the big donors and high-powered operatives in the room went around the table to make sure they had someone supporting each potential Republican nominee.

Jeb Bush backers were easy to find. Supporters of Marco Rubio, too, were plentiful. Ted Cruz had friends there, as did Scott Walker, and even George Pataki and Lindsey Graham. The Republican Jewish elite have spread themselves wide across the GOP firmament.

Obviously it’s a good strategy to cultivate all the possibilities, just as the Israel Lobby has traditionally cultivated both sides of the aisle.

Yet Donald Trump, who has topped 20% to lead all other Republicans in recent presidential primary polls, and who also leads the pack in both Iowa and New Hampshire, is a different story. An RJC member who was present at the board meeting said he could not recall if Trump had backers there. What is clear is that, despite his surge in the polls, the anti-immigration hard-liner has strikingly little support among prominent Republican Jewish donors, activists and consultants.

Many Republican Jewish leaders remain unwilling to speak about Trump. …

Jewish Republicans’ critiques of Trump, when they can be convinced to air them, fall into two categories. Most echo the concerns of the Republican establishment, deriding the real estate developer and former reality show star who is advocating selective tax increases on the wealthy as unserious. They worry that he will drive away nontraditional Republican voters. Others, however, have deeper concerns.

Right. A tax on hedge fund profits, as Trump proposes, would be a serious blow to the RJC.

“There are a lot of folks who are, to be charitable, into white identity politics, and to be uncharitable are outright racists, who are supporting Trump,” said Nathan Wurtzel, a Republican political consultant and principal at The Catalyst Group, who is Jewish. “It’s very off-putting and disturbing.”

 

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“Jew baiter” Obama: The same people who brought you Iraq are opposing the Iran deal

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Sometimes Jewish comments related to anti-Semitism seem so unhinged that they surprise even me.  A Tablet article describes the meeting between Obama and a raft of Jewish leaders on the Iran deal (“Obama to Jewish Leaders: Lay Off the Iran Deal, and I Will Lay Off You“).

Words have consequences, and when they come from official sources, they can be even more dangerous, the president was told. The community worked hard to keep it from getting personal and didn’t make it specific to him. The president complained about the lobbying, and said some of the same people who brought you Iraq are opposing the Iran deal. He was told those characterizations are not accurate. Jewish lobbyists didn’t support the Iraq war.

Another participant who also asked to remain anonymous told me that some people expressed discomfort with  “how the debate is being framed—framed as, ‘if you are a critic of the deal, you’re for war.’ The implication is that if it looks like the Jewish community is responsible for Congress voting down the deal, it will look like the Jewish community is leading us off to another war in the Middle East.”

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Churchill — When Britain Said No

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When it comes to stirring oratory, few speeches have the power to quicken the pulse like Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches…”  from  June, 1940. Generations of British schoolchildren have learned how that voice, crackling over the airwaves, helped galvanise the nation to new heights of endurance in the struggle against an all-powerful foe.

Churchill’s grand aristocratic tones summoned up the spirit of British defiance from across the centuries. So British schoolchildren are taught anyway — and you still come across grey-haired veterans of those days who vividly remember where they were when they heard it on the wireless.

Shame then, that it was all a bit of a fraud.  For the recorded version of the speech we are all familiar with, was not made until nine years later at his Chartwell country residence with the old boy rumbling into a microphone while sitting up in his bed. (The original speech in the House of Commons was not recorded — extracts were read out by newsreaders).

That is one of the milder revelations in a bunker-buster of a BBC television program called Churchill: When Britain Said No  which told the story of how the victorious war time premier was overwhelmingly rejected at the 1945 general election.

Predictably, the keepers of the flame are outraged. The Winston Churchill Industry in both the USA and Britain have expressed their disgust that such a program could have been broadcast. A “hatchet job” opined Lee Pollock, director of the Winston Churchill Center in Chicago. In an article in The Spectator  Mr Pollock wrote that “When Britain Said No  is so one-sided and hysterical that it actually does a disservice to the revisionist cause.” Churchill’s family, too, were enraged and condemned the program as “designed to belittle Churchill’s record.”

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RADIX II: The Great Purge

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Great+Purge+Cover (1)

The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement
Edited by Paul E. Gottfried and Richard B. Spencer
$24.00

There has been a long gap between the first copy of Radix Journal and the second one, which has recently appeared in print a good three years later. Compared to its predecessor, which clocked in at 300 pages, concentrated on the possibly overambitious theme of the “deconstruction of White European identity,” and even sent Andy Nowicki on an all-expenses-paid trip to report on the “Rainbow Nations” of South Africa, Radix II—The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement  has a narrower focus — namely the history of the American Conservative movement — as well as a lower page count (206 pages). This might seem like a case of the journal’s publisher and editor, Richard Spencer, drawing in his horns.

Following Radix’s launch in 2012, Spencer obviously took an extended time-out to reconsider just what shape his journal on “culture, history, politics, spirituality, and society” should take. The plan seems to be to make each journal strongly themed and bring in guest editors so that there is a feeling of reading a distinct book each time, rather than returning to a familiar journal. Accordingly, Radix II bears the mark of co-editor and contributor Paul Gottfried, undoubtedly one of the top experts on American Conservatism.

Although Radix II lacks the excitement — and drama — of its predecessor, it is more effective in its task, namely to offer an analysis and critique of its subject matter. With a narrower front, its firepower is more concentrated and effective, and it certainly helps that it includes some big guns in the likes of John Derbyshire, Keith Preston, James Kalb, and Peter Brimelow.

With the inclusion of several authors who have been directly and unfairly wronged by the American Conservative movement, there is even a delicious sense of grudge and “settling old scores” about the project. Read more

The Winner of the Iraq War: Israel

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If there was a poll right now asking Americans whether the war in Iraq was a good idea,  undoubtedly the vast majority would say no — the thousands of Americans dead, the tens of thousands wounded, many with life-long disabilities, the stratospheric, multi-trillion dollar costs.

And for what? Eleven years later there is sectarian/ethnically based violence with no end in sight. The neocons advertised a swift and easy victory, followed by joyous and grateful Iraqis eagerly embracing democracy and human rights . After all, underneath the surface veneer of sectarianism and tribalism, the Iraqis are just like us, or so said neocons like Prof. Bernard Lewis. Of course, he’s far from the only one (certainly the manufacturers of false intelligence working under Paul Wolfowitz at the DOD deserve a special place in Hell as  well), but I find Lewis’s behavior as an academic to be the height of evil.

So I guess we can all agree that it was all a huge mistake and everyone regrets what happened.

But that would be dead wrong. The people who sold the Iraq war to George W. Bush and the American people are nothing if not Israeli patriots. And there can be little doubt that Israel is quite happy with the consequences. Read more

Iraq Nightmare

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Given the situation of sectarian/ethnic warfare in Iraq, I am posting an article that originally appeared in 2011. It’s amazing that academics like me are routinely pilloried as doing shoddy research and skewing everything they write about for political/ethnic reasons. But that does not apply at all to academic activists like Bernard Lewis, the much praised Princeton University professor who promised George W. Bush that all that was needed for a flourishing of Iraqi democracy of multiculturalism and human rights was a little military nudge. Iraq will never be like the West. 

This logic continues with Tony Blair who absolves himself of any blame because “the sectarianism of the Maliki Government snuffed out what was a genuine opportunity to build a cohesive Iraq. Blair writes as if to say, “if only they had a better leader, all would be well.”

Who could have possibly known that Maliki would simply reverse Saddam’s modus vivendi and  start oppressing the Sunnis? Bernard Lewis, for one. But Lewis was far more intent on  carrying out Israel’s foreign policy interests than telling Bush the truth. A fragmented Iraq or an Iraq torn by war were equally attractive possibilities. Win-win. 

Of all the lies that the neocons came up with to get the U.S. to invade Iraq, the one that most angers me was Bernard Lewis’s lie that Iraq just needed a little nudge in order to unleash the popular surge for democracy and republican government.

Lewis … argues that Arabs have a long history of consensus government, if not democracy, and that a modicum of outside force should be sufficient to democratize the area—a view that runs counter to the huge cultural differences between the Middle East and the West that stem ultimately from very different evolutionary pressures. (see here, p. 50)

I agree that the WMD lie created and promoted mainly by Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Abraham Shulsky was critical. But Bernard Lewis deserves a special place in academic hell because he used his position as an elite academic to influence policy on behalf of his ethnic brethren in Israel and his close friends in the Likud government.
I assumed that Iraq would implode quite quickly after the U.S. left, but the pace is breathtaking. The LATimes report (“Iraq bombings kill 60, revive old fears“) shows that nothing has changed after 8-1/2 years of occupation, over 4400 U.S. armed forces dead and almost 32000 wounded, and over 100,000 Iraqis dead (see here). The Times article shows that the fundamental social structure hasn’t changed. The country remains divided along ethnic and religious lines.

The scenes of devastation were all too familiar after more than a dozen explosions ripped through the Iraqi capital Thursday, killing at least 60 people and injuring nearly 200, just days after the last U.S. troops left the country.

The attacks, some of the worst in Iraq this year, came in the midst of a political standoff between the country’s main Shiite Muslim and Sunni Arab factions. The dispute threatens to unravel a U.S.-backed power-sharing government, and is spreading anxiety over the prospect of a return to the sectarian bloodletting that devastated the country in recent years.

All the violence has not changed the basic fact that Iraq, like every other Arab culture, is a low-trust society:

“This crisis really is caused because there is pervasive distrust and an absence of institutions that can carry this kind of transition,” said Joost Hiltermann, an Iraq expert at the International Crisis Group. Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite, has never trusted the Sunni politicians with whom he has been forced to share power, Hiltermann said.

Western societies have uniquely been high-trust societies, a point made, e.g., by Francis Fukuyama and a basic corollary of the psychology of Western individualism (see here, p. 27ff). The problem is that we think that everyone is “just like us”—willing and able to set up individualist societies with democratic and republican institutions. As Ian Morris writes in his Why the West Rules—For Now, people are pretty much the same the world over (see Brenton Sanderson’s review).We want to believe this so badly that it was easy to pull off the big lie. It’s the foundational lie of multi-culturalism. Of course, the same goes for IQ. We are supposed to ignore the findings that the average IQ in Iraq is around 87.

The Sunnis want more autonomy under the Shiite government, and the Kurds will doubtless continue their drive for autonomy. Iraq will be fractionated, politically weakened where the only solution is a heavy-handed dictatorship a la Saddam Hussein, or partition into three states.

In the ideal neocon world, the U. S. would have remained in Iraq indefinitely. Since that didn’t happen, they are doubtless not unhappy to see Iraq’s current turmoil—except that it will be more difficult next time to sell attacks on Israel’s enemies as a crusade for democracy.

I suspect that the neocon strategy will now be to blame the Obama administration for premature evacuation and use this as a trump card in the current campaign for a war against Iran. Already, “Republican leaders have sharply criticized President Obama for not trying harder to keep a U.S. military presence in Iraq. Sen. John McCain of Arizona said on CBS television Thursday that Iraq was ‘unraveling tragically.’ ‘We are paying a very heavy price in Baghdad because of our failure to have a residual force there.'”

It is unclear what price we are paying, since it’s unclear what threat Iraq poses or ever posed to the U.S. But it is certainly the case that this will be an issue in presidential politics in the months ahead. One can imagine the Obama administration being more willing to do the bidding of the Israel Lobby on Iran in order to counter the inevitable charges that he “lost Iraq.”

In a sane society, the neocons would have been executed for high treason for their involvement in the death and maiming of thousands of U.S. citizens under false pretenses, not to mention the trillion dollar price tag. In the U.S., they are preparing for their next war.

And the Israel Lobby has their back. Any intimation of Jewish influence related to Israel policy remains off limits. Thomas Friedman recently had the temerity to write, “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” But it wasn’t long before he mollified his remarks and said he didn’t subscribe to any “grand conspiracy theories.”

I don’t subscribe to any grand conspiracy theories either. It’s all out in the open. In your face. Just don’t say so in public.