Some day the left will have to answer for the fact that it harbored the neocons for years after the Iraq war proved to be a disaster. I believe this is in some measure a Jewish problem. Even leftleaning Jews like Carla Cohen of Politics and Prose bookstore have a core belief in protecting the Jewish state, and this has made if very difficult for them to drop the dime on neocons– who were motivated by concerns for the Jewish state of a more extremist order. Jewish defensiveness (the Forward's famous complaint of Walt and Mearsheimer, In Dark Times, Blame the Jews) caused Jews to want to keep this one inside the family; and prevented leftlib journalists from doing the simple work of exploring, Whose stupid ideas contributed to this mess, and how did they form those ideas? Even Jacob Heilbrunn, who assigned himself that very task, and who understood neoconservatism as a Jewish outsider movement, shied away cravenly in his book, They Knew They Were Right. While Daniel Lazare trashed Walt and Mearsheimer in the Nation, adopting the usual left line that the war was all about oil.
This left the hard job of fingering the Zionist agenda of the neocons to the right wing, to the realists and paleos, or to mavericks like myself and Michael Lerner. Thus, Mary-Kay Wilmers, the editor of the LRB, which published Walt and Mearsheimer, told me, I believe the American left is also claimed by the Israel lobby…
I recite this refrain here only because Scott McClellan's book is shaking loose some testimony. Here is Arnaud de Borchgrave's commentary in The Washington Times on the neocon planning for the Iraq War.
This reporter first heard about the inevitability of war a year before
the invasion at a party given by Dick Cheney – "the magic man," writes
Mr. McClellan – and his wife Lynne to celebrate the paperback edition
of chief of staff Scooter Libby's book "The Apprentice."
The capital's top neocons were on hand and convinced dubious
listeners that war with Iraq was now inevitable. They were persuasive
when they corrected me for saying, "If there is a war."
….Mr. McClellan is correct when he writes senior administration
officials began a campaign in 2002 to "aggressively sell the war," even
as he and other officials insisted all options were on the table. Of
course it was a war of choice, not of necessity, as he writes. The Bush
administration's main motive for invading Iraq was to introduce
"coercive democracy."
This, in turn, originated in a controversial 1996 White Paper titled
"A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," which referred
to Israel. It advised then incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
to repeal the Oslo agreements for a Palestinian solution, keep Gaza and
the West Bank under Israeli control, and establish democracy in Iraq by
overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Democracy in Iraq, said "Clean Break,"
would then be followed by similar regime changes in Syria and Iran.
Thus, Israel could begin to relax and look forward to real security for
the indefinite future.
Among its principal authors were neocon theoreticians–
Good to see the Clean Break paper mentioned outside of IRMEP. As I've said before, some day Yivo will be having highbrow colloquia about the neocons, and Jews will soul-search about their role in the Iraq war. And let me add the caveat, I'm not saying Jewish neocons were the only ones who plotted this disaster. But they had an important part. I'm glad someone's pushing the conversation. And again I'd cite the scouring attitude that young Jews like myself and Geoff Garin (Hillary's aide) had back in the 70s when it came to accountability for the Vietnam disaster. Don't we owe this great country the same postmortem this time round?
