WASHINGTON - Almost exactly five years
after it reached its zenith with the invasion of
Iraq, the influence of neo-conservatives has waned
sharply in Washington, as their nemeses, the
"realists" in the national security bureaucracy,
have increasingly asserted control over US foreign
policy.
While battered, however,
neo-conservatives have not yet been forced from
the field. And while their hopes that President
George W Bush would "take out" Iran's nuclear
program before leaving office appear to have
diminished substantially, their hawkish voice is
still heard loud and clear both in the White House
- courtesy of Vice President Dick Cheney's office
and Deputy National Security
adviser Elliott Abrams - and
in this year's Republican presidential race, where
neo-conservative favorites include former New York
City mayor Rudy Giuliani, Senator John McCain,
and, until earlier last week, Fred Thompson.
Indeed, as pointed out in Jacob
Heilbrunn's new book They Knew They Were Right:
The Rise of the Neo-cons (Doubleday), the
neo-cons, despite the fiasco in Iraq, are already
trying to detach themselves from both Bush and the
Mesopotamian adventure they so avidly championed
and entrench themselves ever more deeply into
institutional Washington.
"Whether it's
the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies or
the National Endowment for Democracy, the Weekly
Standard or the New York Sun, the
neo-conservatives are battle-hardened fighters who
have created a permanent base for themselves. They
will not disappear," according to Heilbrunn, a
former neo-conservative himself and senior editor
at the Nixon Center's The National Interest
journal.
Heilbrunn's much-anticipated
book, which coincides with the publication of a
not entirely unsympathetic biography entitled
Prince of Darkness of the movement's most
influential hard-liner, Richard Perle, affirms a
number of central truths about neo-conservatism
that are generally ignored or avoided in
mainstream discussion of what he correctly calls a
"mindset" rather than an "ideology".
First, neo-conservatism "is in a decisive
respect a Jewish phenomenon", even if many
adherents - albeit a minority - are not Jewish and
even if, it should be added, most US Jews are not
neo-conservatives. Moreover, neo-conservatives,
both Jew and gentile, are bound by a "shared
commitment to the largest, most important Jewish
cause: the survival of Israel".
Second,
its substance is largely determined by the lessons
its followers draw from what they see as causes of
the Nazi Holocaust: the alleged failures of German
"liberals" in the Weimar Republic to stand up to
the twin challenges of Nazism and communism and of
the western European liberal democracies to stand
up to Adolf Hitler in the run-up to World War II;
and the necessity of having overwhelming military
power to crush any new Hitler pre-emptively.
As Heilbrunn, whose Jewish father fled
Germany before the war, correctly notes,
neo-conservatives "see new Munichs everywhere and
anywhere" - a reference to the 1938 Munich pact by
which Britain and France tried to "appease" Hitler
by ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Germany.
Indeed, it is characteristic of
neo-conservatives to depict virtually every
foreign policy challenge - from the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua 25 years ago to Iranian
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad - to US (or Israeli)
hegemony as a potentially cataclysmic replay of
the 1930s. The neo-conservatives, according to
Heilbrunn, "have shaped a romantic narrative for
themselves in which they are the new Churchills
staring down the forces of evil".
Fear
that Saddam Hussein intended a "second Holocaust"
against Israel served as one of the main
motivations for the neo-conservative promotion of
war with Iraq, according to Heilbrunn. "As Jews,
they [and their Catholic conservative allies] were
haunted by the memory that the allies had not
stopped the Holocaust - and they strongly believed
that it was America's obligation to act
preemptively to avert another one."
Third,
the movement's Trotskyist roots - incarnated by
its "founding father, Max Shachtman - among the
Jews from Central and Eastern Europe in the first
half of the 20th century not only imbued its
members with a distrust, even a hatred, of
liberalism (despite their latter-day purported
embrace of democracy promotion). They also largely
shaped their polemical and political tactics, even
as they moved rightward - into the Democratic
Party after World War II and thence, after the
traumas of the 1960s and early 1970s, including
two Arab-Israeli wars - into Ronald Reagan's
Republican Party.
"Their fling with
Trotskyism [endowed] them with a temperament as
well as a set of intellectual tolls that many
never completely abandoned - a combative temper
and a penchant for sweeping assertions and
grandiose ideas." The fact that they see
themselves as "a kind of aristocratic
intelligentsia", according to Heilbrunn, derives
from their Trotskyite origins.
Fourth,
"the social exclusion experienced by Jews at the
hands of the WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant]
elite" that persisted in the US into the early
1960s stirred a "deep resentment" among many of
the movement's most influential leaders, notably
Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz.
Indeed, Podhoretz, who edited Commentary
magazine from the early 1960s until the mid-1990s
and now advises Giuliani, sees the movement as the
war against the "WASP patriciate", according to
Heilbrunn.
Neo-conservatives "know that
they will never be accepted by the establishment",
he writes in a passage about Perle. "Indeed, they
outwardly revel in the knowledge that they are
outsiders. But beneath the veneer of confidence is
a seething rage at the government bureaucracy and
social elites."
These insights are the
strongest part of the book, but, unfortunately,
virtually all of them are made within the first
100 pages.
A lapsed neo-conservative
himself, Heilbrunn offers useful, if unoriginal,
accounts of the influences of German-Jewish
philosopher Leo Strauss and military strategist
Alfred Wohlstetter on the movement and its
worldview. But he gets lost in his recounting of
the evolution of the neo-conservatism and its
various factions - particularly the supposed
divides between the Straussean/realist wing led by
Irving Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick, on the one
hand, and the Podhoretz-Abrams wing - from the
moment it first enjoyed power during Ronald
Reagan's first term to the disastrous aftermath of
the Iraq war.
While the reason for the
subsequent incoherence of his account was probably
due to deadline pressures and poor editing, it may
also be attributable both to the ideological
contortions of the neo-conservatives themselves
and to the disappointing fact that Heilbrunn
accepts and endorses the narrative of their own
history. Indeed, his descriptions of liberal or
left-wing foes, from the New Left and the Black
Power movement to Democratic politicians, such as
George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and even Bill
Clinton, echo those of the most radical neo-cons.
Thus, Clinton's first
national security adviser Anthony Lake and
secretary of state Warren Christopher "apparently
saw the United States, not its enemies, as the
main problem in the world". And had the 1998 Iraq
Liberation Act, "which funneled money to ... Ahmed
Chalabi ... been heeded [by Clinton], it might
have helped avoid the chaos that the toppling of
the Saddam Hussein created."
Ultimately, Heilbrunn is
critical of the neo-conservatives, but he accepts
much of their worldview.
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