It's no fun to be marginalized. Let me tell you. The same week that American Enterprise Institute began purging the neoconservatives, and a few weeks after the plug was pulled on the New York Sun, the Forward allows the neocons in diaspora to go into what could become familiar prevarications about Iraq and who they are–familiar, that is, if the press gives them them a platform. But I don't think they will get a platform. They're gone. If the silence that greeted Douglas Feith's non-mea-culpa book of last spring, War and Decision (It Was All George Bush's Decision) is any indication, Richard Perle's opus due in January on How he opposed the Iraq war, or was sucked in by double agents of Saddam Hussein, will disappear with the sound of one amputee clapping.
In the Forward, Perle says, "I'm not a Republican."
Why did you get a big job in the Bush Administration? Feith also was not a Republican not long ago. Elliott Abrams seemed to slip from one side to the other. His father in law Norman Podhoretz was a Democrat until the late 70s or so when he saw the lower defense budgets and said they'd hurt Israel, and went Republican. Irving Kristol took the same path; both elders were open about their Israel-firstness, but then they were just writing for little magazines, not making American policy.
Why does party mean so little to these men? Because ideology is far more important. And in the end that ideology boils down to a militant policy toward the Arab world so as to rationalize Israel's brutal occupation as Just the way things are done in a very tough neighborhood. You cannot remove the Zionist strand from their thinking without it ceasing to be their thinking. Of course, the Forward does not press this question because the newspaper is implicated in dual loyalty issues itself. As to the neocons' remarkable staying power, credit the Israel lobby: the dependence of the Republican party on Sheldon Adelson, and his and Feith's One-Jerusalem program.
No matter. The world is moving on under Obama of Hawaii. We are about to see the reconstructed Israel lobby. Just watch: the Jewish world will slowly separate itself from the dual loyalty problem without fireworks, as my father always says–without any open discussion. Two-state will soon be the only official position, tho maybe too late. And no one will care about the neocons, besides the Forward and me.
