Douglas Feith refused to appear before a congressional committee yesterday, apparently because Col. Lawrence Wilkerson was also set to testify. And Wilkerson has been sharply critical of the neocons.
I'm amazed that Feith even has the status that he does. His rise and inclusion in foreign-policy councils is testimony to the tremendous people-moving abilities of the neoconservative movement, which transformed the Washington establishment and allowed loons to become respectable. This is the thesis of Stephen Sniegoski's fine new book, The Transparent Cabal. I'm on page 40 and it's superb, calm, analytical, slightly hackademic, to use Avi Shlaim's expression. Sniegoski's achievement thus far is showing how the neocons left the Democratic Party, which of course was mother's milk to all Jews, and joined the Republicans over the issue of an aggressive foreign policy; and then performed a great service to Reagan: made Reagan's craziness (I remember those days) seem respectable in establishment east coast circles, by giving him the imprimatur of intellectuals with fancy degrees and media connections. Wonderful, true. And thus the neox' virulent non-conservative foreign-policy agenda, of militant transformation, got its nose under the camel's tent. You know what I'm saying. Then when they were in, the tough old battlescarred neocons gave position and status and jobs to effete young escargot-quaffing armchair neocons.
I also like how straightforward Sniegoski is about the neocons' Jewishness and Israel-centric agenda. Of course they're Jewish, though there have been plenty of fellow travelers from across the religious aisle, he says. And Israel is not the be-all and end-all of their vision of foreign affairs, he says in fairness. But when it comes to the Middle East, they're completely Israelcentric, and Likudnik. And so they placed American behind the colonization of the West Bank, for unexamined religious-nationalist reasons. Radical Menachem Begin's putsch, after 30 years in the desert, transformed our politics too.
I'm enjoying Sniegoski's calm dissection. His work is far braver than Jacob Heilbrunn's They Knew They Were Right, which while wonderful on the Jewishness of the neocons' daddies, quails when it comes to the Iraq war plans. And Sniegosi is more intellectually-honest about these issues than Glenn Greenwald's book, A Tragic Legacy, which went after the good-vs-evil mentality of the Bush administration. Real smart guy, Greenwald, but he took the conventional line, holding fire on the Israel-centric character of the neocons (a theme that he had hit in his blog) out of the sort of mainstream-soapbox prohibition that Sniegoski is flouting. Greenwald and Heilbrunn are merely emblematic of a great river of journalism that has skirted the tilting oak of the Israel question. I'm stunned that we have had no open discussion–i.e., media lynchmob–of these Jacobins who hijacked our foreign policy. I wonder whether Sniegoski will get on "Fresh Air," with Terry Gross, or on any NPR show. I feel that his last name will hurt him. There is prejudice against people who Jews believe are Polish. Just ask Zbig Brzezinski. Uri Avnery has written that Walt and Mearsheimer were "boycotted… by the Jewish establishment" in the U.S. Amazing, true. And it took an Israeli to understand this. I feel that Sniegoski will face the same boycott….
