Article about the "Shadow Elite" on Huffpo by Janine Wedel, from her book of same title, that talks about the neo-cons and how they are motivated primarily by memories of the Holocaust. Says my friend Koozie: "Yet the author beats around the bush about the common denominator. Gee, they must all be African-Americans." Myself I think it is important to talk about their Jewishness, as Stephen Sniegoski does in his book The Transparent Cabal. Or as Adam Garfinkle does in Jewcentricity. In his fine new book on the Middle East, Beware of Small States, David Hirst of the Guardian espouses the Walt and Mearsheimer line, that Iraq grew out of neoconservative Zionism. So it’s an important conversation. And having that discussion will permit Jews to both describe their political diversity to others–and develop it, separating themselves, those who choose to, from the ultra-Zionist thinking about a permanent war that characterizes neocon idea, that has sort of ruined the Jewish relationship with the Arab world, and done no good for the American relationship to the Arab world. Wedel’s piece:
"For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause. . . . There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust." -Richard Perle, co-author, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, 2004
Note the small "h" on the word "holocaust" from the book co-authored by Bush White House advisor Richard Perle, one of the most influential instigators of the war in Iraq. It suggests that to Perle and his ideological allies, the Holocaust was not a singular event, but rather the first of other potential holocausts that must be prevented.
As I detail in Shadow Elite, Perle is the linchpin of the Neocon core, an informal group of a dozen or so members of the far bigger and more diverse neoconservative movement, who’ve worked with each other in various incarnations for some thirty years to realize their goals for American foreign policy through the assertion of military power.
In their conviction that the U.S. must identify and eliminate future Hitlers or potentially murderous regimes, they were willing to bend and even break the rules of democracy and traditional procedure. And they sidelined checks and balances, helping to expand executive powers in the process.
