Is Sullivan the best? Yes. He is doing the hard labor of taking on the Israel lobby forcefully in the mainstream media, with unrivaled clarity and eloquence. Here he bats down a piece of thuggery from Jeffrey Goldberg, that Sullivan believes that “a group of warmongering Jews– alone” is pushing World War III. Disgusting. Though Sullivan makes clear as he has again and again lately that the Israel lobby is unstraightforward about its agenda and that agenda is at odds with the American people’s interests.
Not all neoconservatives are Jewish, and I have never claimed as such. Does Jeffrey think I don’t know that Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, for example, desperately want war with Iran? And, as you can readily see in the posts I have cited, I have long known and written about Sunni Arab autocrats’ desire for Israel and the US to launch World War III against Iran for them. Jeffrey and I were at the same meeting two years ago when I directly challenged the King of Jordan on this very question. I was as passionate in defense of what I believe is in the interests of the West when debating a Sunni autocrat as when tackling the noble lies of the neocons. But that fact, which Jeffrey knows all too well, would muddy the smear that my position is some version of anti-Semitism. That same old lie. Always the same old lie…
[L]ook at what Jeffrey’s war would actually mean. It would mean that the US would be allied with both Israel and the Sunni Arab dictators – against the mass of oppressed people in the Arab and Muslim world and against the Green Movement in Iran. Now try and square that with the neoconservative vision (circa 2001) that they key to defeating Jihadism is to win over the people of the Arab and Muslim world with democracy, and thereby help Iranians shuck off their disgusting dictatorship as well.
Their position now is almost 180 degrees from their position then, which is why I am so mad at myself for taking their arguments at face value then. They want the US to ally with the most repressive forces in the region against the Muslim and Arab and Persian masses. And they think that this will somehow serve the interests of the US. This is why my frustration with the neocons is so deep. None of it makes sense – unless it is about the short-term shoring up of Israel’s power and nuclear monopoly, without Israel even offering the minimal concession necessary to construct a Palestinian state.
