Jack Ross responds to the post above about Marty Peretz:
I wonder if Chas Freeman represents the horrible shattering of Marty's
illusions that he or the cadre he trained could make things better on
the inside, and that he can't keep up the ghost about Obama
for long. Indeed, in marveling at the Republicans' sheer idiocy in
their tack against Obama's economic plans, I realized that they haven't
had very much to say about his foreign policy moves thus far – a huge
watershed!Also, what can one say to Peretz's invocations of the Christian Zionism
of the two awakenings – "both religious and secular"! I've said
before that the only thing I can conclude from seeing the invocations
of that history is that those who do it are secret followers of Shabtai
Tzvi. Perhaps its also analogous to the retreat into mysticism of
post-Hitler intellectual fascists.Also: He says something like "someone so totally illiberal would be completely new to a Democratic administration". Hogwash. Generally speaking, the height of Cold War
support for right-authoritarians was under Kennedy, it was under Reagan
that there was a substantive reversal toward greater support for
democracy in the world.But as to "Arabism" specifically, the
most forthright opponents of Zionism in the State Department were found
under Truman, not Eisenhower, and were the very architects of the
Marshall Plan and of Cold War liberal policy. In addition to Marshall
and Acheson, these included Henry Byroade, a critical player in the Marshall Plan who would become notoriously friendly with [Ross's biographical subject] Rabbi Elmer Berger.The only really compelling example of a Republican "Arabist" is John Foster Dulles, whose early distinction had been as the chief foreign policy adviser to Tom Dewey and thus the leading advocate of a "me too" foreign policy for the Republicans in the 40s.
