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No End to War
The
American Conservative
March 1, 2004 issue
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.
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 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 protégé 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.
Copyright © 2004 |
