Joel Kovel is an old lefty–or anyway, he was wearing a green
corduroy jacket at the Brecht Forum last night– and he insists on a central argument of this blog: that the neocons pushed the Iraq war out of a Zionist agenda. The neocons, says Kovel, are
"a nest of vipers in the heart of the Bush Administration." Dozens of them came into the Bush
Administration–"not all of them Jewish, but every last one of them a
violent ultra-Zionist." And then they overreached, by recruiting the U.S. in "satrap" Israel’s "paranoid" and militarized response to the Arab world.
The Iraq war has now created a "serious division
within the U.S. elite… that could have fateful consequences for Israel."
Walt and Mearsheimer have now spoken from the "heights of official
academica," making a very similar argument about the neocons/Iraq that
Kovel makes. (Kovel’s point about W&M’s influence is underlined by speculation I’ve gotten, in
confidential emails with one scholarly observer, that Obama and Hillary
and Bill Clinton have all read portions of The Israel Lobby. Journalists should ask them.)
Kovel said that he is writing a review of Walt and Mearsheimer
(good that someone assigned him, huh!) and that he finds many things
"wrong" in their analysis, not their research and facts. The book
"lays out the facts very clearly… an immense amount of research…"
I find this a very helpful statement coming from a Jewish scholar, because
W&M have been smeared by the Jewish establishment, lately by Ambassador Kurtzer, who (a freshly-minted professor himself) declares that they made it all up. And Bill Kristol, who is for good reason feeling hunted, called Walt and Mearsheimer "schmucks."
The next intellectual shoe to drop here is Stephen J. Sniegoski’s book The Transparent Cabal, forthcoming in May, promising to do what I thought Jacob Heilbrunn was going to do when he threw around the "cabal" word: lay out the mechanics of how the neocons got inside and what they really think about Israel, the peace process, and American force. I’ve got a copy, and early on it offers a precise argument:
The overarching goal of both the neocons and the Likudniks was
to create an improved strategic environment for Israel. To reiterate, this does not
necessarily mean that the neocons were deliberately promoting
the interest of Israel at the expense of the United States. Instead,
they maintained that an identity of interests existed between the two
countries–Israel’s enemies being ipso facto America’s enemies. However, it is apparent that the neoconservatives viewed American foreign policy through the lens of Israeli interest, as Israeli interest was perceived by the Likudniks.The aim
of the neoconservative/Likudnik foreign policy strategy was to weaken
and fragment Israel’s Middle East adversaries and concomitantly
increase Israel’s relative strength, both externally and internally. A key objective was to eliminate the demographic threat posed by the Palestinians to the Jewish state, which the destabilization of Israel’s external enemies would achieve, since the Palestinian resistance depended upon external support…
Lovely, helpful, precise. Spring is busting out all over.
