The reason this blog exists (I often say) is because of something one of my siblings said to me in 2003: "I demonstrated against the Vietnam war, but my Jewish newspaper says this war could be good for Israel." This was shocking to me because my politics began with my academic family's opposition to the Vietnam war. In fact, one of the most formative events of my political life was the day in my 11th year that my mother went to the Quaker meeting in Baltimore that had been attended by Norman Morrison–the Sunday after Morrison burned himself to death on the lawn of the Pentagon to protest the horrors of Vietnam. My mother never went into churches. But expressing solidarity with Norman Morrison and his family was the most important thing in the universe.
My sibling's comment suggested that there was a Jewish interest that overrode even the antiwar spirit in my family culture, and it led me to look into my religious background and the role of Zionism in American Jewish life. I'd avoided looking at Israel/Palestine till then. Now I had to study the way that neoconservatism and its Zionist underpinnings had affected the Jewish liberal presence in American life. Some of the intellectual way-stations for me were: Kenneth Pollack's book, The Threatening Storm, which laid the basis for liberal support for the Iraq war and never once mentioned the Israeli occupation, even vaguely dismissing "violence" in Israel/Palestine as a distraction to Pollack's bold plans to remake an Arab society. And Pollack had backing from a leading Zionist: Haim Saban. Then of course there was Walt and Mearsheimer's paper, mentioning Saban and Pollack, and showing that the neocons had pushed the war out of concern for Israel's security, and that Sharon and Peres had jumped on board. Then I saw war-promoter Bill Kristol dismiss Walt and Mearsheimer as "schmucks" at Yivo and go on crazily about "conspiracy" theories about the neocons without speaking openly of his own Zionism. And lately reading Joe Klein's confession that "Jewish neocons" had sold the war to him as a "benign domino theory" that would serve Israel's interests.
All these people were reading my sibling's Jewish newspaper; and this agenda wasn't known to Americans.
The heart of this blog is the belief that the Iraq war was a disastrous turn for my country in the world, in which it imitated Israel's policy toward the Arab world, of militancy, occupation, arrogance. And from that comes my challenge to American Jewish identity: to come to terms with the Zionist push for this war, and the inherent dual loyalty issue in the Diaspora role in Jewish nationalism, and understand how it has corrupted Jewish tradition, let alone American policymaking.
A few days back, I was not all that surprised to read the piss-poor stand of the "leftwing" Zionist group Meretz on the Iraq war: they refused to take a position, even though they're "the Left." And I asked Ralph Seliger of Meretz–which is an American wing of an Israeli party–whether he had supported the Iraq war. He said,
I had to be one of the few board members at the time who hoped for the
overthrow of Saddam (albeit entirely for humanitarian reasons). But as
I told you in an email some months ago, once the UN Security Council
had voted against military action, I felt that unilateral US-led action
against Iraq was a bad idea. A ruthless, illegitimate regime like
Saddam's Iraq had to be confronted by a UN-endorsed international
coalition or not at all.
Seliger is misrepresenting his position. He didn't just hope. He pushed. He was a vociferous "liberal hawk" supporter of the war, who praised George Bush for his belligerence and compared Saddam to Hitler and Stalin. He was indistinguishable from war-supporters Paul Berman and George Packer in being repulsed by those who demonstrated against the war. And close to Pollack and Bill Kristol in his sense of the moral imperative in invading Iraq that went beyond "humanitarian" reasons.
One of my boustrophedonic fossickers has turned up Seliger's writings for me.
Here's Seliger writing in the New York Sun three months before the invasion (sorry, no link, it's off Factiva), comparing Saddam to Hitler and Stalin, and while mentioning that Bush was seeking a coalition, not saying anything about the UN Security Council:
The liberal case for war rests on two critical pillars: the danger to world peace posed by Saddam's regime and the nature of that regime…
Secretary of State Baker's 1990 reference to Saddam as a "Hitler" during the build-up to Operation Desert Storm was widely ridiculed at the time; he then undermined his own point, as the first President Bush and Mr. Baker voluntarily left this "Hitler" in power at war's end. Although Saddam was only arguably comparable to Hitler, this was not out of a lack of affinity but rather out of his blessedly limited military strength… Domestically, Saddam has ruled Iraq as a latter day Stalin…
Despite himself, extraordinary events have shaped President Bush into a foreign-affairs president and even an internationalist. In fact, the Bush administration and the liberal hawks are almost – though not quite – in sync. It is thanks to Mr. Bush's determined leadership that the United Nations Security Council authorized a renewed and robust inspections mission in Iraq, and he appears to be patiently building a coalition to effectively put an end to Saddam's regime, if and when the time comes.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Bush will have the staying power and the wisdom to entirely reverse his campaign rhetoric and invest substantially in the nation-building that will be required in Iraq, as it is needed now in Afghanistan….
There are clear risks to going to war and the costs to Americans, Israelis, and other friends of America – not to mention innocent Iraqis – may well be high. But critics rarely acknowledge the risks and costs of not eliminating Saddam's monstrous rule. The risks lie with his ongoing development of unconventional weaponry and his penchant to use it.
Not a lot of humanitarianism, just strict national security, and belligerence. A year later, here is Seliger on MidEast Web expressing revulsion at the demonstrators like me who opposed the war:
began this piece as many thousands participated in international
protests for the first year anniversary of the Iraq war. I remember
feeling some disdain, if not revulsion, at the massive anti-war
demonstrations of last year, before hostilities commenced. Didn't they
understand, I reasoned, that these enormous expressions of opposition
to United States and other efforts to rein in Saddam Hussein were acts
of support for his totalitarian tyranny? One of the things that upset
me most, is that in marching against the war before the United Nations Security Council vote, the anti-war protestors opposed any international effort to forcibly end a heinous regime in the name of "peace."
That is, by the way, a complete misrepresentation of what we protesters were saying. We were not supporting Saddam or opposing U.S. efforts to contain him, which were successful. I love the United States nearly as much as Seliger loves Israel and was trying to save it from disaster. In that angry statement, Seliger approaches his employer, the New York Sun, which called for "treason" investigations of us demonstrators.
In 2006, on the Meretz site (Cant get the link right now) Seliger celebrates war-drummer Chris Hitchens:
Personally, I'm pleased that Hitchens has broken with the most egregious elements of the isolationist and anti-American left.. [my emphasis; this guy is as bad as any neocon]. I respect his stand regarding Iraq… [T]o me Iraq was, at its worst, a blunder; more precisely, the invasion was a mistake because it failed to persuade a wide international consensus for intervention. [No UN Security Council here, just a wide consensus, which was utterly absent well before I demonstrated in February 2003] It was certainly not a moral shortcoming to overthrow the particularly odious regime of Saddam, but it has been badly handled politically, and badly executed on the ground – allowing an initial period of chaos to descend into a full-blown insurgency spearheaded by Saddamist hardliners and Al-Qaeda-inspired Jihadis.
The usual liberal hawk excuse: that it is possible to do an uninvited occupation well. Ask the Israelis how they're doing.
Then last year here Seliger is agreeing with a writer who says that Bush was right to invade Iraq, though he offers the usual qualification:
Although I don't agree 100%, this resonates with me. I was certainly sympathetic to the overthrow of Saddam in principle, and I was happy to see it happen. I wrote an op-ed in The Sun on the liberal case for war with Saddam. But when the US failed to win its case in the UN Security Council, I felt that an invasion without wide international support was a bad idea. The bull-headed US decision to attack in the face of international opposition was a foreshadowing for what would follow. It's the arrogant, ideologically rigid, hypocritical and incompetent nature of the US intervention that was the problem, not the fact that Saddam was removed (that was the good part).
I'd remind you that Seliger wrote for the Sun. The other day, he sniggered at me for writing for a paleo publication, The American Conservative, an association I'm proud of (they're against the war as I am). Seliger said to me, "I'd never expect to be allowed to write for Commentary or the Weekly Standard. " Well actually, you wrote for the Sun. What's the difference?
And that is the issue here. What's the difference between a progressive Zionist and a neocon Zionist? How important are the usual political distinctions when it comes to Zionist ideology? Often they are fairly meaningless. Because Seliger reminds me a lot of Doug Feith. Feith has Herzl's portrait on the wall. So I imagine does Seliger. For good emotional reasons in both cases: Feith's father lost his entire family in the Holocaust. Seliger's parents barely escaped the Holocaust thru a circuitous escape. And so they both believe in western anti-semitism. They both believe in the necessity of the Jewish state as a refuge for the Jews. They were both for the Iraq war, and both are trying now to cover up their own ideological commitment to this mess. Seliger has regularly defended the neocons against Walt and Mearsheimer, saying that W&M smeared them by blaming Iraq on them. It was all George Bush. Just what Doug Feith says in his non-mea-culpa book: George Bush did it. And again the point is Seliger is covering for the neocons because he was guilty of the same thing: thinking about Israel's security, out of Holocaust fears. Conflating Saddam and Hitler.
How much was he thinking about Israel's security? I don't know. As Seliger's misrepresentation to me demonstrates, he's not transparent. And this is the great damage that the neocons and the Seliger liberal-hawks have done to Jewish identity. By not being honest about an agenda, and by trying to cover it up to this day, when we all know Sumpin was going on, they allow Americans to look at all Jews and ask, Are you now or have you ever been a Zionist? As I have asked on this site. A legitimate question.
Some day Yivo will have a panel on what Zionism has done to American Jewish identity, in which American Jewish dual loyalty and the imitation by American policymakers of Israel's militant dead-end policies with the Arab world will be front and center. They are essential issues. And they speak to the terrible corruption among ardent Zionists in this country: their inability to take the lives of 100s of 1000s of Arabs even a fraction as seriously as they take Jewish lives. Their excuse is, The Holocaust. They are psychologically immured in those events of more than 60 years ago, and fail to see the world in front of their nose.
