I just got hold of a copy of Glenn Greenwald‘s new book, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good Vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. Greenwald is a leftlib blogger/lawyer and has a mind like a steel trap: fiercely logical. I just glanced at the book; but I’m pleased to read his discussion of the neocons’ agenda, for he frankly states what I also have: Israel is central to the neocons’ thinking and their push for war conflated American and Israeli interests:
There may (or may not) be a compelling argument to make that the U.S. should view terrorist attacks on Israel as attacks on the U.S. There may (or may not) be a compelling argument to make that because Israel is an ally of the United States, America should be willing to wage war against countries that sponsor terrorist attacks on Israel…If there are valid arguments for deeming Israel’s enemies to be enemies of the U.S., then they should be made explicitly and clearly..
From its inception, the campaign to depict and treat Iran as pure, unadulterated Evil has been driven by this manipulative and dishonest attempt to conflate Iran’s posture toward Israel with its posture toward the U.S. Whether the president himself was a victim of that manipulation or a knowing propagator of it is something one can debate, and the truth likely lies somewhere in between. But what is beyond dispute is the centrality of Israel and its right-wing American supporters in shaping the president’s moralistic and absolutist view of Iran..
[I]f Americans are being induced to support wars not in American interest but in Israel’s, and if American lives and treasure are being squandered in wars justified by false premises, by a hidden agenda, they will realize that at some point…When the realization begins to dawn that at least one substantial factor as to why America waged Middle Eastern war(s) is because influential individuals with an overarching devotion to Israel pushed for war against Israel’s enemies, then an anti-Israeli backlash is highly likely to occur. And the backlash is likely to be far more severe and hostile than anything that would ever happen naturally, meaning in the absence of such manipulation…
Greenwald’s argument is important. Greenwald is an influential lib blogger. He is not a conservative or a libertarian (the camps where Todd Gitlin claims the Israel-motivation-for-Iraq theory is perpetrated). Also, I am guessing Greenwald is Jewish, as I am; and so he is demonstrating just what I have called for: for the liberal Jewish community to identify the hidden agenda among conservative Jewish supporters of the Iraq war and repudiate it.
Like it or not, Jews have a special place in this conversation. We are all over the media, we are involved with the Israel lobby. When Greenwald talks about some people’s "overarching devotion" to Israel, he has special cultural insight into this, as I do. No, he doesn’t go as far as I do; no, he doesn’t speak openly of the neocons as mostly Jewish, something we all know to be true. And he ascribes greater power to rightwing evangelical Christians than I do…
But he is making it clear that in the aftermath of a disastrous mistake in Iraq, these issues are fair game. My friend Dan Fleshler doesn’t like this conversation, it touches on ancient antisemitic claims. What I would tell him as a Jew is that leftleaning American Jews must engage this conversation. And some of us are doing so now, with Greenwald’s fierce honesty. We will not be party to a hidden agenda!
I think I actually agree with Dan in that I do worry about a backlash on the issue of American support for Israel; I worry that this backlash will be spearheaded by populist right-wing jingoism that will carry lots of anti-Semitic undertones, and that might cause deep problems in American society that I genuinely fear.
However, I agree with Phil (and disagree with Dan) that the right way to approach this topic is not for progressives to avoid it, not discuss it, or frown on it when it crosses certain 'divine' topics like Zionism and Israel's racism. But for it to be owned by progressive elements in America with a clear understanding of what it means, how Israel mest up, how America enabled it to mess up, and how this can be fixed, to make sure that when the right-wing dormant anti-Semites start peddling their nonsensical "it's all the Jews' fault" venom, they won't find anyone to hear them out.
The best way to avoid any horrible backlash is to be open about this and have an open discussion. Sunlight is the best disenfectant.
But, in a sense, we're all parties to a hidden agenda, which is that of the war profiteer. Very few comment on the bias towards war caused by munitions manufacturers; ie, the "military-industrial complex." If we accept Smedley Butler's thesis that 'War is a Racket,' then it seems somewhat particularist (and, therefore, lending itself to allegations of invidious intent)to focus solely on Jewish neo-cons. Is Halliburton Jewish? Lockheed? Newport News Shipbuilding? Grumman? What about all these companies?
http://www.homelanddefensestocks.com/Companies/HomelandDefense/Stock_List.asp
I admire your efforts, Phil, and if you want to concentrate on this very narrow perspective, that's your call, but dare to make the connections: wars are immensely profitable for a certain sector, and that sector is not (at least to my knowledge) identifiably Jewish. Far larger forces are at play than mere sectarian passion (or, for that matter, oil thirst).
Many people wonder why the Palestinian dilemma festers, 50 years on. One reason, I'm reasonably certain, is that the Israeli security status quo (ie. not good), is profitable to certain defense sectors (and, by extension, to venal Israeli politicians), and they have no interest in changing that (lucrative) reality.
Many on the libertarian right and on the left readily acknowledge that "perpetual war for perpetual peace" in the West means perpetually windgall profits for a few (as well as burgeoning Big Brotherism.) If our own "GWOT" is viewed as a scam, if many if not most past U.S. wars can be viewed as wars of imperial rapacity (the reason General Butler came to see himself as a "gangster for American corporations"), then I doubt the Israeli situation is much different.
Follow the money to the War Pigs. You will find them to be a rather ecumenical group.
Media coverage of Israel's underground in the US –
and the 9/11 connection in chronological order:
http://www.antiwar.com/israeli-files.php
"When the realization begins to dawn that at least one substantial factor as to why America waged Middle Eastern war(s) is because influential individuals with an overarching devotion to Israel pushed for war against Israel's enemies, then an anti-Israeli backlash is highly likely to occur. And the backlash is likely to be far more severe and hostile than anything that would ever happen naturally, meaning in the absence of such manipulation…"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17260.htm
http://www.madcowprod.com/index58bb.html
http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/052204/geo_15672724.shtml
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3484.htm
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,52681,00.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/80403_fbi29.shtml
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7545.htm
http://cryptome.org/dea-il-spy.htm
The Iraqi chaos is a disaster to the ordinary Iraqis.
The chaos has one creator: Iranian mullah junta.
The US government wanted Saddam out and a close build up of military forces next to Iran.
Iran has thrown in significant resource to generate fluctuating anarchy in Iraq.
All happy celebrating viewers are as evil as the Iranian junta.
But, the chaos will have no winners, and the burden will be on the ordinary Iranians who will pay for the destruction of Iran when the conflict will spread to there.
Gaza and Lebanon have paid their price already. Iran may be next.
Here's a disturbing article from the Marine Corps Times about a huge 7.2 square mile mockup of an Arab town built in Israel for IDF training. It can have its configuration changed to look like specific towns in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon or Syria. But it will ALSO be used to train U.S. forces on their way to Iraq! What kind of message does this send to the Arabs–a permanent Zionist-Crusader war against any and all of them?
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2007/06/marine_israel_combattraining_070624/
steve- that was a pretty scary response, only partially because it has nothing to do with the topic.
saifedean- "I think I actually agree with Dan in that I do worry about a backlash on the issue of American support for Israel; I worry that this backlash will be spearheaded by populist right-wing jingoism that will carry lots of anti-Semitic undertones, and that might cause deep problems in American society that I genuinely fear.'
boo hoo.
anyway, yes the neo cons, like other religious extremists (they are still sort of forming their fire and brimstone judaism, the muslims and others have had a long head start) are virtual charicatures of the racist view of all jews. I've met a number of muslims who are stereotypes. they are a MAD tv sketch poking fun of muslims. The three abrahamic faiths are the three stooges of humanity and we need to keep the extremists way way way in the back. they need to be in the stock room, not the main office.
To Phil –
I actually vehemently object to "liberal" ownership of anti-war and anti-Zionist ideas. The fact that Republican Party veered off traditional Conservative value system does not transfer traditional anti-war, mind-your-own-business, curb-governmental-powers agenda into the hands of liberals.
I would recommend everyone to pick "The American Conservative" magazine once and take a look if you like it. Its a true paleocon publication that many liberals absolutely adore.
BTW, being a very Conservative Republican (I suspended my Republican membership after US-Nato invasion into Yugoslavia) I always believed that if we get rid of special interest lobbying power, liberals and conservatives will find their position much closer and compromises and alliences much easier to forge that we used to believe.
To Steve:
Of course. Iranians also were behind Nazi Holocaust. Hitler himself was an Iranian, actually.
Gaza is on its way to become a seat of Hamas, which, together with Hizbullah slowly becoming the most dynamic political movement in the region. Lebanon war created a panic among Israeli hawks and won morally so convincingly that Israeli government lost its own population support.
Iran next? If the victory over Iran will be of any similarity of the victories over Gaza or Lebanon, God help us.
If Iran is attacked, independant of short-term results, a long term process of Sunni-Shia and Arab-Pharsi unification into pre-schism monolithic Islamic region will be greatly accelerated.
Alex, I agree with you that the left/right paradigm is increasingly unhelpful for analyzing current events, and is in fact often used to intentionally distract. But Phil is way ahead of you: he has written for The American Conservative a couple of times.
Another chink in the armor, this from a Dutch current affairs program–
link to youtube.com
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link to youtube.com
(You would think that at least a FEW of these viewpoints would show up in the famously free U.S. media this anniversary year — if only to be ridiculed as "revisionist." It's not as if the 1967 War is not still affecting all our lives.)
David, thanks for the reference. I hadn't seen this program.
The facts related here are well known among those who have seriously looked at the history and pre-history of this war.
What is new, however, is that this can be publicly shown on Dutch television. It would have been totally impossible at the time itself. As Muehren relates, an article he wrote about it for the 'Army Courier'was not published. Stated reason: it did not accord with the sentiments of the population.
No, it certainly didn't. Holland was fanatically pro-Israel at the time. People were queuing up to donate blood for Israeli soldiers.
A Dutch writer, the late Renate Rubenstein, relates in her book about Israel how she attended a teach-in about the war at the time. Somebody raised the question about Israel's supposed use of napalm. The answer that came from an editor of one of the most prestigious Dutch newspapers, a foreign affairs specialist, was that he was happy with this question. It showed, he said, that the Israelis were merely human – and they were therefore all the more dear to us.
Though the Dutch are, by and large, still fairly pro-Israel and critical voices are in the minority, the adulation of the sixties has disappeared. In a recent poll with the question which country should be regarded as the greatest threat to world peace the percentage of those who believe that Israel is was in Europe highest in Holland.
Interestingly when you, after looking at this program, click on related English language videos on the YouTube screen you get all the old propaganda dished up again.
I don't think that there are all that many people left who regard the US media as 'famously free'. In the last survey by Journalists Without Borders I looked at they came out below those of Costa Rica.
Admittedly the coverage of the Israel-Palestine question was not a criterion here. If it had been the US media might have ended up below those of, say, Zimbabwe.
The question that always lingers behind the charge that Jews have manipulated the powers that be to take a major decision (and there aren't much more major decisions than attacking another country) is how did those goys fall for it? Are Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush so stupid? Perhaps. But then those wily Jews also managed to pull one over on Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, John Kerrey, John Edwards and the dozens of other elected officials who voted for the war resolution. And these Jews did it without even the support of the entire Jewish community because most of my Jewish friends and relatives were against the war from the beginning. Maybe the Neocons, with all their power and wiles, could figure out a way to secure a peaceful homeland for the Jews in a tiny sliver of the expansive Middle East? Bill Kristol, are you listening?
Larry, I don't think governments need to be tricked into going to war. War is their natural state. That's why democracies rely on a system of checks and balances to keep them under control most of the time. All a lobby has to do is dismantle those institutional barriers. Think of the media in the run-up to this war, and compare it to the media of the Vietnam era. The swamping of campaign financing by pro-Israel money is another example of how the system is bypassed. At the cultural level, there's the toleration (and promotion) of Islamophobic discourse. There's lots of other examples.
I don't think anyone has ever claimed the Israel lobby was the ONLY reason for the Iraq war; only that the war could not have happened WITHOUT the lobby.
"Maybe the Neocons, with all their power and wiles, could figure out a way to secure a peaceful homeland for the Jews in a tiny sliver of the expansive Middle East?"
They would be prevented by the organized financial and political power of the Merchants of Death, for whom the current security arrangements are so profitable. War is big business; as Randolph Bourne noted, "War is the health of the state." Modern war-states must have external enemies to frighten the populace with: if they don't exist, they will manufacture them.
When "the commie" was no longer a viable threat to ensure the continual flow of tax dollars to the military-industrial coffers, we switched to "the terrorist." That is starting to fade in popularity, so expect a return to Russia, a much more ideal external enemy, since you never really have to fight them, but still have to spend trillions to "deter" them. A beautiful arrangement! Proxy wars arise from time to time, yes, but can be limited to far-away lands and "acceptable" casualty rates.
The "War on (some) Drugs" had its uses: expansion of police-state powers, yes, but only limited weapons systems could be deployed, and too high a percentage of the populace was, so to speak, in bed with the enemy.
Forget China: they beat us in Korea, the beat us in Indochina, and they would easily defeat us now, if we were so stupid to make war on them. Plus, they own too much of our debt.
Until the profit aspect of conflict is removed, "peace" will be a word spoken only be officially-designated "traitors." And yet, and yet…"blessed are the peacemakers."
Larry,
You are a dear friend (full disclosure to reader; we go way back, have helped one another's careers…) but you mock the idea that Greenwald/I put forward as a canard, and in my case an antisemitic one.
I feel that you are invoking a traditional idea of Jews as outsiders and thereby failing to deal with real issues of Jewish power in today's society. AEI underwrote a number of ideas that Cheney imbibed there. Yes, willingly imbibed; and of course he deserves blame. As do the Christian right Greenwald fingers. But so do neoconservative Jews. They weren't potted plants.
What does it mean that a Jewish separatist, Abrams, is advising on Middle East policy? Can you imagine the articles if a Muslim ws inthat position? What does it mean that more than half the Dem. pres'l campaign money comes from Jews, and as a result Israel is not discussed in the campaign? What does it mean that Bernard Lewis, as opposed to say, Tony Kushner or Tony Judt or Noam Chomsky, was visiting the White House and Cheney's office before Iraq? What does it mean that a former IDF soldier, Jeff Goldberg, was writing Let's go to war in Iraq stuff for the NEw Yorker? I'm not talking about a conspiracy, I'm talking about rightwing pro-Israel devotion in high places. Largely unexamined. And when anti-stem-cell evangelists step into the process, everyone gets to talk about Religion and politics….
You also seem to deny the power of a White House adviser. When Kennedy invented the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver helped out, and is today deservingly given great credit. Hurray! As we give Richard Perle and Douglas Feith credit for the Iraq war. Their Likudnik/pro-Israel positoin is hardly a coincidence. It is incumbent on all liberal/left intellectuals who are trying to extricate America from this bad thinking– including many Jews– to examine that thinking and today's power structure and identify the pro-Israel strand there….
Phil
Phil,
I don't believe you are anti-Semitic and would never make such an accusation. Sorry if my comment was too clever by half in that regard.
My point was to illustrate that your way of connecting the dots veers away from reality. Jews were not behind the war in Iraq. Some well-connected Jews were behind it, some Jews supported it, lots of well-connected Jews tried to stop it and many Jews opposed it. The fact that Bernard Lewis counsels Bush as opposed to Tony Kushner is Bush's decision. Clinton, for example, may have invited Kushner to the White House. Sargent Shriver does indeed deserve credit for the Peace Corps but I don't know anyone who calls the Peace Corps a Catholic policy or the result of a Catholic cabal surrounding Kennedy. (Actually, I do know of someone who saw Vietnam at the time as a Catholic conspiracy between Kennedy and Diem but nobody seriously entertains that POV.) So Jeffrey Goldberg was in the IDF. Abraham Joshua Heschel was a Hassidic Rabbi but he marched with Martin Luther King. People can be more or less biased based on than their past associations. You need to look a little deeper than that. Lots of former IDF soldiers are leading the peace movement in Israel.
Look, I am not denying that the Neocons should be held accountable. They should and I would submit that they have been. (Though not enough for my taste.) Would Wolfowitz be out of job now but for his role in the Iraq fiasco? I am not denying that they have influence. Clearly they do. But they are by no means uniformly Jewish and they are selling ideas, not buying. The buyers are Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. Bush okayed the war. He just as easily might have bought ideas from right-thinking Jews like myself but he chose not to. You could also make an argument that Bush was already determined to topple Saddam from day one (See Paul O'Neill's book) and that the Neocons merely supplied with him some high-minded rhetoric.
Ethnic Ashkenazim as the ultimate insiders
Critics of German Jews and ethnic Ashkenazim in Germany and Eastern Europe accused the Jewish and ethnic Ashkenazi leadership of being the ultimate insiders.
Just think of Rotschild, Rathenau, or Bleichroeder. The Polish ENDEKS always criticized the PPS (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna) of suffering from the domination of Jewish/ethnic Ashkenazi ideologues.
Professor Jay Harris of Harvard wrote an article a few years in which he described the education process used by German anti-Semites to convince the German aristocratic elite to distance itself from German Jewish service providers.
While the Czarist elite tended to keep its distance from ethnic Ashkenazim (Russian Germans were preferred service providers), ethnic Ashkenazim became the quintessential Soviet class for the first 20 years of the Soviet Union and were still disproportionately represented right up to the end in the KGB.
I had an amusing experience about 6 years ago. A friend of mine married a Russian junior Harvard Fellow, who had studied at the University of Moscow. I joined him, my friend and some of his friends from UoM at dinner in Cambridge. I, who had marched on behalf of Shcharanski, Nudel and other Soviet refuseniks, asked him about discrimination against Jews in Soviet Academia. He started laughing at me and then everyone else started laughing at me. I finally asked, "What is so funny?" He told me that there had been about 200 students in his division. Of the 200, he was one of the two that had no Jewish ancestry even if only 4 of the other students were officially evreiski on their national IDs.
Ethnic Ashkenazim and German Jews have been conning non-Jews about outsider status for a long time.
"…is how did those goys fall for it? Are Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush so stupid? Perhaps."
To suggest that they were "stupid" is to make a move towards exonerating them, which would be very wrong (and I'm sure Larry was only using this as a rhetorical device). They weren't stupid or innocent: they, and the forces arrayed about them, which were instrumental in placing these venal creatures in power (including oil and defense interests), YEARNED for this war, from before they took office (as Larry noted). If it fitted in with PNAC's assessment of Israeli security needs, so much the better. It certainly made the push for war easier, amplified as it was by the Judy Millers and Jeff Goldbergs and all the other, er, enthusiasts for Israel, themselves blind to the larger picture, which is that war is ALWAYS ruinous to humankind and to future plans for peace. "Reap the wind, sow the whirlwind," as some ancient text has it. Arms manufacturers, and those who benefit from conflict, take the proverb quite literally. The whirlwind, they hope, will provide their kids and grandkids with handsome trust funds.
That it is a whirlwind of blood matters little to them.
"For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind."
Hosea 8:7
Nice to see someone as bright and articulate as Larry disturbing Phil's little echo chamber.
Thanks, Montag, for the correction. How himbarrasing.
(Damn bible-thumpers)
Larry wrote, "He just as easily might have bought ideas from right-thinking Jews like myself but he chose not to."
Are you saying that you took a public position in the summer of 2002 against the coming invasion of Iraq? Would you mention some more names from the Jewish community who were speaking out with you? (I'd particularly appreciate names from those in positions of power, say in the media.)
Good job David. Make that Jew pledge an oath against the Soviets, er, I mean, Israelis, otherwise we will have to treat them as enemy combatants and take away their JCCs.
Most people who study antisemitism stick with the Holocaust, but as I live in Spain I have also studied the Jewish story in Spain, their enormous integration into medieval Spanish life both in Arab and Christian areas, the protection they received right up to the end from Ferdinand and Isabel against popular wrath (their services were essential to the crown)during the 1480s and their final expulsion from Spain in 1492. After the expulsion the Spanish Inquisition, a totalitarian movement unequaled till the 20th century, turned "purity of blood" into a national obsession that set Spain back centuries in its future development. Here is Wikipedia on the subject
"It must also be pointed out that many Spaniards felt the large Jewish population in 15th Century Spain a threat. The Jewish Encyclopedia (ed 1906. Vol XI, p.485) states that, "It remains a fact that the Jews, either directly or through their co-religionists in Africa, encouraged the Mohammedans to conquer Spain." The majority of Spaniards believed this could in all probability happen again, especially with the many privileges granted to the Jewish population by Henry IV of Castile. Fear of the Jews, as collaborators with the Moors, was also significant factor in the institution of the Spanish Inquisition."
On studying this material over the years I have found many more troubling parallels with the Jewish story in the USA and possible tragic outcomes than in the German case, where I have never been able to discover the least objective reason that Hitler could have tapped to create his horror and also, in only a few decades Germany has recovered her power and influence; therefore I find the Holocaust irrelevant to the American situation, as far as I can see. However Spain is filled with lesson in my view.
The great lesson of the Spanish story is one of a paradise lost and a closing of Spanish culture that set the society back centuries.
In the United States, I cannot imagine either the expulsion or the organized persecution of the Jews, but I can imagine Greenwald's "Spanish" scenario, where a justified suspicion of Jewish motives could lead to a general dislike of Jews and Jewishness which in turn could have an immensely destructive effect on America's cultural, civic and economic life as it did on Spain 500 years ago.
There's no stain in not having opposed the war, McCarthy — many people were mislead and many people just weren't very interested. It's just that for those of us who WERE working in the anti-war movement at the time, we had no doubt who was opposing us. You only needed to look at the bylines on the editorial columns. But now we find that there was a huge group of Jewish Americans working behind the scenes to keep America out of war. Who would have thunk it?
All right Dave, you leave me no choice. I'm going to call the top secret classified phone number that we all get on our bar mitzvah and crank up the elders in Jerudalem about you. Our leniency has gone on long enough
David – That's funny. I heard my pro-war roommate (not jewish btw) regularly cursing Krugman, who is Jewish, btw.
Better start sorting out the good jews from the bad jews. You sound like the right man for the job.
Apart from Krugman and Lerner, you'd be hard pressed to come up with a Jewish voice publicly opposing the war, and Lerner is hardly prime-time. But you're right: I was discussing a community consensus, not racial determinism.
Remember, there's nothing illegal in having promoted the war. Those who did may have thought they were serving America's interests. But these attempts to re-write history should be resisted, so that it's less likely to happen again.
While we are at it, lets examine how many Muslims denounced Al Qaeda after 9/11 and continue to maintain that non-muslims are infidels who are inferior to Muslims.
While we are at it, lets examine how many Muslims denounced Al Qaeda after 9/11 and continue to maintain that non-muslims are infidels who are inferior to Muslims.
David Seaton: "On studying this material over the years I have found many more troubling parallels with the Jewish story in the USA and possible tragic outcomes than in the German case…"
Would you tell us about those parallels, please?