My wrapup of the Maureen Dowd controversy yesterday missed a couple of important developments: wise men Jim Fallows and John Judis taking Dowd’s side. These interventions, by veteran respected journalists, have (I’m hoping) turned the tide. Note that Fallows is playing offense, questioning why the neoconservatives are even granted visas to Washington after pushing the Iraq war. I thought this accounting was going to happen years ago. It looks like now is the moment. And of course Dowd’s chief antagonist, Jeffrey (Saddam linked to Al Qaeda) Goldberg has a lot to lose in that conversation! No wonder he’s playing smashmouth politics.
First, here is Judis at the New Republic, yes the New Republic, explaining the role of the neocons in a historical framework:
American history does not have tightly organized parties that set policy. Policies sometimes emerge out of informal networks. And key foreign policy decisions have often come about in exactly that manner. In the 1890s, a group of intellectuals that included Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Brooks Adams met on Lafayette Square to discuss, among other things, the need to abandon America’s insular foreign policy and to join the global struggle for empire. They urged the McKinley administration to invade Cuba and the Philippines to replace Spanish with American rule. They had connections to the important magazines and newspapers of the day. And when Roosevelt became McKinley’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy, they had a crucial voice within the administration. McKinley, like George W. Bush, was a foreign policy neophyte who was pushed, prodded and even (in the case of Roosevelt) manipulated into becoming a champion of American imperialism.
The neo-conservatives of the mid-1990s played a very similar role in the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq. They were different from the first generation of neocons: they were more focused on foreign than domestic policy; they embraced a quasi-Trotskyist strategy of transforming the world in America’s image through hard as well as soft power; they saw Israel and to some extent Taiwan as irreproachable outposts of American power and idealism; and they were obsessed with overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
These neo-conservatives established a network of intellectuals, publications (led by William Kristol’s Weekly Standard) and policy groups (including the Project for the New American Century, which later spawned the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq). They promoted resolutions in Congress, and when Bush was elected, got people in key second-level positions in the Pentagon and Vice President’s office. Bush himself ran as an anti-interventionist, but taken aback after September 11, became a convert to the neo-conservative view of the world. He made the final decisions, but he made them within a strategic framework that the neo-conservatives had developed. If you want this story in detail —along with the analogy with the 1890s—I wrote about it in The Folly of Empire.
Now to the present. What about Romney? After the disaster in Iraq, many of the key neo-conservatives, including Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, left the administration, but neo-conservatives have remained at the center of Republican foreign policy.
Now Jim Fallows at the Atlantic. I like the way he rejects the claim that “puppetmaster” is an anti-Semitic trope. No, it’s colorful political language, which journalists are allowed to employ:
I agree with Maureen Dowd in nearly all of her criticism of the foreign policy team around Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. In specific I agree with her (a) that since there is so little there, there to Romney’s own expressed foreign policy views, it is fair to observe that he has surrounded himself with advisors whose well-established past opinions are now reflected in his policy statements, and (b) that those advisors were deeply involved in leading the United States into its costliest foreign-policy error of at least the past 40 years, the invasion of Iraq…
- For what it’s worth, I know that the term “puppet-master,” which Dowd uses about the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Dan Senor, fits some anti-Semitic tropes. But it also is a normal part of English that has nothing necessarily to do with anti-Semitism. I remember hearing a college lecture about Iago’s role as “puppet-master” of Othello; one biography of J. Edgar Hoover had the title Puppetmaster. As a kid I read a Robert Heinlein sci-fi novel of the same name.
And Fallows links a Paul Pillar piece at the National Interest asking, Why are the Neocons still around? Good question:
The Iraq War was one of the biggest and costliest blunders in the history of U.S. foreign relations. The human and material costs, including an ultimate fiscal and economic toll in the multiple trillions in addition to the political and diplomatic damage, have been immense. Moreover, promotion of that war demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of fault lines in the Middle East, political culture in the region, the nature of political change there, the roots of enmity and security threats toward the United States, and the limitations of U.S. power and especially military power. There is no reason anyone should pay one iota of attention to what the promoters of that war have to say today on anything related to those subjects. And yet those are the very sorts of subjects, often with particular reference to countries such as Iran, Syria and Libya, on which neocon promoters of the Iraq War expound today.
In some other political system, anyone who had been involved in an official capacity in promoting that war might, after resigning in disgrace, retire from public affairs to tend a garden, write fiction, or make money in private business. But somehow that has not happened with many of the people concerned in this instance.
The costliest blunder since the Civil War is more accurate, but we shall see probably to our dismay. Either Obama murders 90 million Persians with conventional weapons, several at a time(undermines the Crimes against Humanity argument) after the election or Herr Netan-Kooko will nuke them all and deny it. The “No Radiation in Hiroshima” subterfuge. It will probably fly once again if you control the Muppet press and they do. I suspect Barry will knuckle under just like Nixon. After all, this is his first experience with serious extortion. What will he tell his children?
Hej! Tumta
Great that these reputable journalist have Dowd’s back. Mentioned Pillar’s piece here at Mondoweiss last week. Nope had mentioned Paul Pillars “Netanyahu’s Arrogance”
thank you Kathleen! sorry to have failed to pick that up earlier….
John Judis knows first hand about the power of pro-war journalism. Judis was an antiwar activist from the 1960′s, who adroitly switched to support of the first Persian Gulf War (1991). By an amazing coincidence, this was around the same time that Judis got a job with Marty Peretz’s The New Republic. For Judis, it was his initiation into (relatively) big time journalism. Switching from antiwar to pro-war was his ticket of admission.
I gather that Judis has, in recent years, soured on the Persian Gulf war, which is now opposed by 90% of Democratic voters and 50% of Republicans. So although he may not have any discernable principles, he does has a good sense of timing.
Ned “…although he may not have any discernable principles”…
Now that comment definitely deserves a Mooser Humor Award.
With respect to Fallows, no, the neoconservative architects of the Iraq invasion shouldn’t merely live in disgrace. They should be tried and convicted of war crimes and suffer the civilized punishment of life imprisonment.
It cannot be said enough. The Iraq invasion was a crime of historical proportions. At the turn of the 21st century, war was in steep decline. Aggressive wars of conquest were becoming an anachronism. The neocons resurrected the worst atrocities of the past in waging an unprovoked war against Iraq.
Ostracism is not enough. The Zionists behind the Iraq war need to answer for their crimes before a legitimate court. Anything less justifies punitive sanctions that cause mass suffering of civilians as in Iran today. Anything less fosters the next preventive war. As we saw in Libya. As we may yet see in Syria and Iran, whether under this administration or a successor.
They have avoided accountability because they do not believe in it, and have expended their resources, including the tabu, to avoid it. But this is America, where accountability, where divided government – divided for the purpose of prompting accountability via competing limited powers – is in the DNA, is written in book of fate, is what makes America better than those governments that have preceded it – its tendency to self-correct over time. Time to self-correct.
I continue to believe that the only way to truly break the destructive influence of the neocons is to band together against them. Their atomic weapon, so to speak, is their Jewishness.
They use the anti-Semitic card in an offensive way, and what I mean by that is the word of aggression(attack) to silence critics and even to purge them out of the media.
As noted several times; neocons may have left Marxism, but they never left it’s most toxic remnant – Stalinist purges. That is how they operate.
Both within and outside the Jewish community.
Therefore thinking that you can somehow placate them, or discuss with them is a false notion. You can’t. If you let them roam, they will purge you if you allow them.
Fallows’ going on the offensive is the right thing to do, but unless there’s a merry band of journalists joining him and keeping the pressure up, they’ll just remember and get back at him at a later date. Now he is such a senior journalist so I don’t think he is threatened.
But it’s nonetheless interesting to note that Max Fischer, who was recently a senior editor at the Atlantic, quoted Goldberg approvingly of his smearing of Dowd.
So Fallows should contemplate that before he starts attacking the neocons, perhaps he would do well to clean up at his own door. Fischer’s leaving now, but the fact remains the same.
That’s why I also wrote earlier that it’s impossible not to understand the power of the neocons without understanding that their power is to a large extent drawn upon Jewish networking, invoking fear into other Jews to rally to their aid, by means of purging dissidents.
Judis is brave for defying them, but he is also in a clear Jewish minority(but that minority is growing! Friedman, Klein and the others).
Still, we can’t wait for a Jewish ‘awakening’ to happen.
These people have to ally with wise gentiles, like Fallows and Wright. And so far, only folks at the Atlantic are willing to go and butt heads with the neocons in considerable numbers on these issues among the people at the MSM.
TNR is an interesting case. After Chait(who is really a oldberg-style ‘liberal’) left TNR, it has gotten more liberal on the issue. Peretz leaving probably helped too.
But there are still too many fencesitters like Remnick at the New Yorker. He only reacts when there is a clear outrage. And in some respects, so are the others. And that is a reactive approach which will never threaten the neocons in the long run because they will just learn to pipe down, like they did in the early 90s and come back later in force.
Neocons are being hoisted by their own syllogism (er, petard), which is that undoubtedly some of the individuals calling the neocons puppet masters may be antisemitic, Maureen Daud calls the neocons puppet masters, therefore Maureen Daud is antisemitic.
How to silence the neocons? No more mincing words. Wherever they speak or appear, we take’em on publicly for the puppet master traitors that they are. The public’s ready for this. Watch them run for cover! Enjoy the spectacle!
And Fallows links a Paul Pillar piece at the National Interest asking, Why are the Neocons still around? Good question
Yes, a lot of journalists have asked that same question. A few have even remarked that the neo-cons have remained oblivious to their loss of credibility on the subject of Middle East foreign policy:
— Jacob Weisberg, Party of Defeat: AEI’s weird celebration, March 14, 2007
An excellent bit of research, Phil.
You may be right that, almost imperceptibly, the tide is turning on Israel/Palestine and things which even five years ago would never dare to be said are now being discussed openly in mainstream publications.
Alas, for the two state solution, I fear it’s all a decade or so too late…
you flatter by calling it research! thanks but i overheard two friends talking about judis’s score, and fallows!
This is nice to see. I’ll be happy when this kind of defense is regularly offered for “little people” who are not celebrity columnists, such as California students advocating BDS. But it’s a start.
Phil Italy Upholds CIA Rendition convictions. Witnessing some accountability for the crimes against humanity committed under the Bush and Obama administrations
The Americans – 22 CIA agents and one Air Force pilot – who are believed to be in the United States and were tried in their absence – are unlikely to serve their sentences. But they will be unable to travel to Europe without risking arrest.
It would be nice to see trials conducted in absentia for all of the key Israeli officials responsible for expanding the illegal settlements; the creeping annexation of “Jerusalem”, and etc. in the Hague. It would send a clear message to Tel Aviv that you will be a wanted fugitive for the rest of your life.
It would also curtail corruption like the “Bibi-Tours” scandal.
We can dream about justice. And push too
It’s about time that the bots got some pushback on the tarring and feathering shtick they have been practising for the last 100 years on anyone who dares contradict them.
Maureen Dowd could have been hounded out of her job like Norman Finkelstein and Helen Thomas.
She could have been murdered by the bots for what she said . Others have paid the ultimate price. Like Ghassan Kanafani, for example.
Maureen Dowd could have been …..
it ain’t over yet. unsheathing the knives at this moment may be a bit too obvious, even for the ham-handed likes of dershowitz and other character hashishin.
For what it’s worth, I know that the term “puppet-master,” which Dowd uses about the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Dan Senor, fits some anti-Semitic tropes. But it also is a normal part of English that has nothing necessarily to do with anti-Semitism. I remember hearing a college lecture about Iago’s role as “puppet-master” of Othello; one biography of J. Edgar Hoover had the title Puppetmaster. As a kid I read a Robert Heinlein sci-fi novel of the same name.
hurray. a small step towards taking back control of the english language, which is next to nothing without metaphor. is bernie madoff a deceitful, conniving parasite? why, yes he is, and his willful conduct made him so. ethnicity, religion or race have nothing to do with his personal decision to trade in his soul for a flaming paperbag of dog crap. did the neocons ‘conspire’ to ‘manipulate’ US foreign policy and public opinion? jeez, ya think? (the paradox of this nonsense is that the ‘offended’ are often simultaneously embracing while purportedly rejecting the insult. schizoid. maybe weiss is right: maybe a great big psychoanalyst is what’s needed.)
agreed re the language. i mean gosh, where’s the pleasure in words?
I counted the user comments at the New York Times, and the 233 commenters with the most user recommendations were all in support of Dowd’s points (all the way down to practically the bottom, two or three recommedations). I don’t recall any references to Jewishness in the comments — people were talking about US policy and its impact on the world.
I found out about the article because of Politico’s article ‘Maureen Dowd Meets the Anti-Semitism Charge,’ a takedown of her which argues that non-Jews were ‘credited’ with ‘responsibility’ for the Iraq War even though Dowd never said anything about Jews. In the user comments there, I counted dozens and dozens in support of Dowd with the most recommendations, even as the article attempts to persuade against her. Since Politico, like the magazines mentioned here, brought the topic of Jewishness into a debate where it hadn’t been before, at least four Jewish readers, using their real name, identified themselves as Jewish and said that Dowd’s column is not anti-Semitic.
This shows:
1. The major disconnect between the public of all races and the media elites;
2. The conflict is not over what is true or what people believe, but over what a highly circulated columnist is allowed to say;
3. The way the anti-Semitism charge is being used to dismiss critique of failed policies of central importance to the US’s fate, even if most Jewish-Americans were against the Iraq War from the beginning.
Jeffrey (Saddam linked to Al Qaeda) Goldberg has a lot to lose in that conversation!
they all have careers to loose. we’re not supposed to notice i suppose. we’re supposed to think of neocons as journalists instead of players.
sullivan:
really good post phil.
But you cannot both express this excitement and pose as “merely a reporter”. A person who is excited about being a player in a game of bluff that could lead to war or peace … is a player, not a reporter. And a player with real fire, with the lives and deaths of human beings at stake.
perfectly put. the picture painted of the ‘press’, by the ‘press’, that they are acting as a species of spiritual medium, simply passing on facts to the reading public, is hooey. whether advocating a particular political position, while feigning objectivity, or intentionally provoking a response from this or that public figure, and then ‘reporting’ on the response to the provocation, as if it were issued in a vacuum, are but two of their tactics.
It was not his “thinking out loud” that “offended” me, as he now tries to spin it. It was that his thinking out loud raised serious questions about his role as an objective reporter, who was caught musing hopefully about his having written a cover-story about Israel’s determination to go to war with Iran that was, in retrospect, fed by possible lies, bluffs and deceptions.
really, sullivan should move beyond the pose of the ‘offended’, and his analysis should avoid the ‘personal’ completely. goldenberg is not ‘offensive’, nor is this or that stupidity written by him separately and individually ‘offensive’; he is something else entirely, something more . . . and less; he is essentially, irredeemably corrupt professionally. every conversation about him should begin and end with the question already posed: ‘why should anyone take goldenberg the reporter seriously in the first place?’