The Washington Post Identifies Iraq War as a Pro-Israel Cause

Today’s Washington Post has two articles, showing that hawkish pro-Israel views about the Middle East are held in high places across party lines.

The first piece is Robert Novak’s column on Chuck Hagel, in which Hagel attacks the neoconservatives and accuses Elliot Abrams of "making policy in the Middle East," to frustrate the peace process. As noted here often, Abrams is the guy who wrote in 1997 that Jews who don’t live in Israel will always stand apart from the country they live in. Policymaker!

The second is a profile of Hillary Clinton pollster Mark Penn saying that Penn has worked for Likudniks in Israel and that Penn was part of a centrist force in the Democratic Party that supported the Iraq disaster.

Penn has deep roots in the national security wing of the Democratic
Party, along with other centrist Democrats — some of them Jewish and
pro-Israel, like Penn — who saw the merits of invading Iraq before the
war began..

That’s brave. Between the lines, the Post is saying that Jewish support for Israel played an important role in support for the Iraq war, whether you were a Democratic centrist or a neoconservative. The continuum of Elliot Abrams, Republican, and Mark Penn, Democrat, once again shows that pro-Iraq sentiment growing out of pro-Israel conviction captured even Democrats; and it underlines the point I have made here again and again: for the intellectual left to make an effective critique of the Iraq War, it must identify the pro-Israel component of the failed policy and forcefully distance itself from it. Leftwing Jews must disgorge and condemn the neoconservatives’ adherence to Israel. Many of us have. To the extent that progressive Jews haven’t come to terms with these issues, they will not be very persuasive against the Liebermans of the world (and they will demonstrate what LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers said to me last year, that "the left is also claimed by the Israel lobby").

Recent evidence of the bad thinking in the Jewish left comes from Todd Gitlin, former SDS-er, now a journalism prof at Columbia. Speaking at a Barnard event last month, Gitlin said that the war-for-oil theory doesn’t explain Iraq, nor does the war-for-Bush’s-father theory. And for damn sure not the war-for-Israel theory:

This is an argument made by conservatives and libertarians
who found their way into the antiwar movement–the argument… that this was fundamentally
a war in defense of Israel. I think that’s also a poor argument….Those who thought they were doing
something in favor of Israel actually seriously undermined Israeli security. There was no reason logically
why an Iraq without Saddam
Hussein, contained as he had been, would be a safer neighborhood for Israel than
what resulted…

As if the neocon reformers of the Middle East were logical men. Gitlin then explained why we are in Iraq:

To my way of
thinking what it is is blind and brute power at work. It is a reflection of a
certain idea about power…the
understanding of power that Bush and his inner circle themselves have, and which
has in fact served their own careers into power, and that is power
in behalf of power. ‘We do this because we can.’ The theorizing, if that is the
right word, of the bulldozer… It believes in doing it before it has the reasons… The
Bush movement… believes that power
gets what it wants by simply by putting itself somewhere and defying all
opposition

This is no analysis at all, it is blather. This policy came out of real ideas, held by powerful aides (as Jerrold Nadler said that night, attacking the neocons). I know that it is scary for Jews to say, Some Jews had real power. But until the left examines these issues honestly, it will be incapable of framing a clear alternative to the current mess.