Andrew Sullivan is somewhat recanting his accusation of several days ago against the neocons as being Israel-centric by explaining all the good things that neocons do beside turn Arab societies into charnel houses. I sense a lot of emails. Sullivan's usually crystalline prose seems a little tortured, as though John Podhoretz is driving bamboo splints under his nails:
Israeli right does tend to characterize it accurately, but then again,
much of the Israeli center has moved toward that position as well.
The simple response to this is that despite all their other intellectual claims and long history, neoconservatism has boiled down, in this phase of history, and in light of their greatest act, the greatest disaster in American foreign policy
in at least a generation, to rigid support for American intervention in the Middle East and support for the Israeli occupation, which they don't even call an occupation. On this basis, Jacob Heilbrunn in his neocons book said that even Marty Peretz was a neocon; and neoconservatism is a movement that came out of Jewish life. So does the neocons' other biographer, Murray Friedman. No doubt neocons cared about other things than Israel. No doubt they had non-Jewish fellow travelers. Still do. Van Gogh did a lot of academic drawing and painting. Who remembers that?
(Phil Weiss)
'Neocons were also on both sides of many of the questions in the Iraq war: troop levels, counter-insurgency strategy, etc.' — Andrew Sullivan
Uh huh. And conscientious Nazis were also on both sides of many of the questions in Germany's last war: Jewish expulsion versus internment, slave labor strategy, etc. Let's not just broad-brush all of them as ogres.
Sullivan's conclusion is even more bizarre:
It does seem to me a real question, however, as to why some neoconservatives seem so grittily determined to bring democracy by force of American arms to the deeply dysfunctional politics of Iraq but not to the deeply dysfunctional politics of Palestine.
HUH? Is Sullivan saying that Israel's pounding of Gaza wasn't enough — that they should have invaded the West Bank and imploded Abbas's headquarters as well?
Wow, glad that I dumped the Atlantic back in the Nineties. I seem to remember it as kind of a realist, classical-liberal journal. It didn't have sanguinary, troglodyte neocon Klansmen blogging for it back then. But then, it didn't have David Bradley — a self-confessed "neocon guy who was dead certain about the rightness" of invading Iraq — as an owner, either.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/05/AR2007080501576_2.html
Die, Atlantic, die. As the inimitable George Ure said on Friday,
Here's a flag from my logical-thinking referential integrity checker: How long will it take for the owners of media empires to figure out that since the cost of moving information around (thanks to the 'Net) is about zero, therefore the pricing power for information products has dropped to the point where cutting down trees and spraying poisonous dirty sh*t that comes off on your hands onto paper is not a viable business model?
http://www.urbansurvival.com/week.htm
ah ha ha ha
AH HA HA HA
Die, Old Media, die …
"He also argues that Jewish neo-cons helped the larger conservative movement exchange a racist, anti-Semitic aura for intellectual sophistication and social-science chops."
This is from the Publishers' Weekly blurb on the Amazon page linked to above to Friedman's book, which is an accurate depiction of the origins of neoconservatism. The boundaries among neocons and liberal social scientists (Moynihan, Glazer, Bell) were permeable; later, especially regarding Israel, they were permeable in relation to Walzer, Gitlin, Wieseltier, Peretz–the New Republic/Dissent gang. So it's always been problematic to see the neocons as not having had important allies on specific issues–also, for example, welfare and crime during the Clinton era.
I think it's important to see the connections in order to understand what we're really up against. No group has absconded with American foreign policy. The neocons came into there own when liberal anti-communism was in trouble, when Cental America needed to be made an example of, and when the fall of the Soviet Union created an "enemies gap" (Colin Powell) that was filled by the Middle East with its oil and disobedient Muslims.
It neoconservatism hadn't existed, liberals would have had to invent it in order to continue to support war, and to appear to be to the left of somebody.
Shocking.
This is sad. Andrew had been increasingly critical of Israel since the Gaza attack. It's not his main issue, but he's a much read bellwether, and his taking a side was important. But, it's not easy to monetize a blog. I'm sure, as Phil says, there were a lot of emails.
I don't know why anyone cares what Andrew Sullivan thinks. He is so utterly lacking in substance or intellectual honesty that it's completely pointless to read anything he writes unless you just happen to find him amusing.
Ten cent bet says he got hit with a couple of blackmail calls, phone calls that would destroy his career.
Because you also have proof of previous lies? Pay offs from Hamas?
Unpacking Neocon. All he had to say to make his struggled point
was ask the question: If the neocons believed their own rhetoric and declared principle of bringing democracy to the Middle East, why has the neocon brought down a boot, or at minimum heavy hand, on every nation over there except Israel, against which, in comparison, the USA policy has brought out not even a velvet pink pointer finger to bear? Why ignore the total I-P dysfunction, the dysfunction singularly rippling constantly through the whole Middle East?
He concludes in his article the objective is the best interests of Israel and the US.
He ignores the follow up inquiry: What are those respective interests? He likes to keep his job?
The "passionate defense of Israel" he alluded to at the beginning of his article is what he needed to unpack; instead he obfuscated that
factor even as he outlined its consistency by showing it was across the board of political philosophies allowed. Gaza stirred him, but not much so as to suggest maybe it was time for a passionate defense of the USA by questioning whether its own foreign policy in the Middle East is really in its own best interest.
Mr. Weiss, you must have read this by now. It is very good!