As I mentioned the other day, David Rose in Vanity Fair has a good piece saying that neocons in high U.S. government positions prevented American overtures to the Sunni insurgents in 2004, nearly three years before such connections helped end the violence in Baghdad. Rose singles out Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, but does so without describing the religious component of their ideology: the concern for Israel's security and hatred of anyone who helped suicide bombers in Israel.
Rose should also have mentioned Michael Rubin, the Richard Perle protege, for his role. Jim Lobe connected the dots last year:
Of course, it was Rubin more than any other neo-con who repeatedly
assailed Gen. David Petraeus for trying to “appease” Baathists in his
efforts in 2004 and 2005 to pacify Mosul and al-Anbar provinces, as I
pointed out in a post
last October on the Likudist cast to Giuliani’s foreign-policy team. As
late as 14 months ago, Rubin, a de-Baathification hawk and Chalabi
acolyte from the get-go, was still complaining bitterly about Petraeus’
early efforts to co-opt the Sunni insurgency. That those efforts are
now given credit — even by Rubin’s fellow-neo-cons and most especially
Kristol, who named Petraeus the Standard’s “Man of the Year” just last
month — for what progress has been made in reducing the violence in
Iraq over the past year is ironic to say the least.
Remember the core lesson of Iraq: the former terrorist Sunnis now play an essential role in the Iraq government, and this model is portable: for it applies to Hamas becoming part of a Palestinian government.
The neocons fear just that. Lobe also reported that Doug Feith completely left out Palestine/occupied territories in his map of the Middle East in his recent book (which denied that neocons pushed the Iraq war, denied that Jewishness had anything to do with it).
Lobe's reporting, and my own, reflect Jewish efforts to explore the shadow side of neoconservatism: its Holocaust-rooted Zionism–notice "appeasement"– which the neocons themselves are never transparent about. As a rule, Jewish journalists have been afraid of this conversation breaking out in the American discourse. "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews," the nervous Forward editorialized about Walt and Mearsheimer's book two years back. And meantime Nick Goldberg in the LA Times writes that the neocons "possibly harbored dual loyalty to Israel." Of course they harbored that dual loyalty, and Jews understand this issue better than others, and ought to help to expose it, even if that means working with non-Jewish journalists on the matter.
Again and again in the 1890s Herzl was rebuffed by powerful Jews, and even by Zionists like Edmond de Rothschild, who felt that Herzl's plan to relieve Jewish suffering in Europe by creating a Jewish state in Palestine would throw a question over the "patriotism" of Jews in Europe. This has become an important, and fascinating, issue with the rise of neoconservatism. More light!
