My first encounter with the neoconservatives of today
came at youth programs of the Ethical Culture Society
of New York when I first came to America. Since then,
one might say, we grew from adolescence to old age
together. First and foremost, it must be realized that
the term neoconservative was a designated pejorative
put upon them by fellow liberals in order to indicate
their expulsion from liberalism's left ranks. Much has
been made by Michael Lind of the Trotsyist beginnings
of many of its founders. That is quite true, but it
goes far further back to WWII disillusion with
Stalinism by youths seeking an identity in a nation of
Anglo-Saxons that would not accept them.
Yet, the issue during WWII was that Stalin had his
"Jews" and FDR his; the question was where would the
preponderance of them go. Stalin lost, hence his
rather aggressive attitude towards FDR in his last
days and towards Truman. Our most effective Cold
Warriors were indeed Jews working form the ranks of
government and labor. Stalin's beginning of yet
another pogrom in his last days should make clear that
he saw Jews as pro-American, despite the Zionist
sympathies he had cultivated. The "Old Left"-- as the
"New Left" later called it, was marked by last ditch
efforts to stick with the Bolshevik class war with
America, despite Stalin's anti-semitism. The AFofL-CIO
provided many Jewish leftists a home where they could
fight for humanitarian labor causes while maintaining
their Bolshevik revolutionary elan fighting AGAINST
Communism. After 1956, the liberal-left Jewish "we can
get along" attitude towards the USSR served their
American civil rights emphasis. But, as Khrushchev
chose to side with the Arab nationalists and
Palestinians, the young future neoconservatives (a
small fraction of the Jewish population) began their
drift into a complex contradictory position of "New
Left" socialist student revolutionaries while
supporting Zionist nationalism and expansion by force
of arms. I recall the peculiar character of debate in
mid-1960s UC Berkeley, wherein the vituperative
criticism of the "neo-imperialism" of "Amerika" was
not to be allowed to extend to US support of Israel.
Our guns, in other words, were evil in the struggle
against Communist expansionism but highly moral in our
support of Israel. It is this contradiction which Bill
Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom played on to
discredit the Jewish left's opposition to our Vietnam
War.
Amongst many left Jews a rude awakening occurred--
well chronicled in Judy Klinghoffer's THE JEWISH STAKE
IN VIETNAM-- when in 1967 it was realized that Moscow
considered the Middle East a "second front" in the
global struggle. It is then that many leftist Jews
jumped to the right of the Democrat Party. Also, a
number of long time liberal Wilsonians who had
supported the LBJ-Meany global struggle against
Communism with a ferocious energy, now were ready to
support abandonment of Vietnam so that America would
be free to focus on the Middle East. Ironically, Nixon
had independently recognized during the 1967 June War
that America's involvement in Vietnam made it
incapable of defending Euro-American oil interests in
the Middle East. He favored a quick-fix resolution of
the Vietnam War through "linkage" and a more vigorous
defense of the Western stake in the Middle East. This
led to a more favorable view of him by many Jewish
liberals, abandoning their long tradition of hating
"Tricky Dick." However, they did not abandon Humphrey
in the 1968 election. It is only when Nixon squeaked
in as President and chose to model domestic affairs
after Prof. Moynehan, that they saw a way of marrying
their hawkish foreign policy perspective with their
liberal domestic agenda, under Nixon's tent. The
candidacy of McGovern in 1972 drove them fully (though
secretly) into the Nixon Camp, given McGovern
insistence on even-handedness in the Middle East. One
more critical item was the effort of "Soviet Jewery
Inc." to mobilize a massive campaign to force the Red
Bloc into permitting massive Jewish migration to
Israel in order to balance the very large Arab
population Israel had inherited after its 1967
conquests. Israel needed people, and the claim of
anti-semitism was deemed the best way to mobilize
support. Of course, the long time black allies of the
civil rights struggle were expected to vigorously jump
in. When they refused, an anti-black feeling exploded,
reciprocated by the submerged anti-Jewish feeling of
urban blacks of the North. This latter sentiment was
quickly exploited by Arab assets and funs, generating
strong anti-Zionist feelings amongst many sectors of
the black population.
What unleashed, as chronicled in the excellent book
TORN BY THE ROOTS, is a powerful popular Jewish
conservatism, distinct from the left-liberalism of
national rabbinical leaderships. This has brought
great political and financial power to the
neoconservatives at the very time when the funding of
the conservative movements from corporate Mongols was
drying up. The Reagan victory allowed much Jewish
money and support to keep alive otherwise moribund
conservative organizations and publications. With the
end of the Cold War, the foreign policy right was
rendered moot by the conservative tendency towards
domestic issues. Here the bankrolling by
neo-conservatism's sympathizers brought a new guard in
the right, much of it Jewish. Though vociferous on
issues of race relations and culture, these
neoconservatives prefer involvement in security and
foreign policy issues-- the "big stuff" that does not
require much dealing with minutia but rather lends
itself to ideological personalization...such as the
New Republic's Sullivan's reference to "Europe feels
that..."
9/11 created a vacuum in the know-how of the Bush
defense and diplomatic bureaucracy, one that Zionists
and the Likud rulers of Israel were quite familiar
with. That has enabled them to greatly influence US
policies. The neoconservatives, already muddled in
their Americanistic primacy by their equally strong
Zionism, served as a conduit for the Israeli right
into the White House. Before 9/11, Sharon was seen by
the Bush team as something of an unsavory character.
But 9/11 changed all that, and the neoconservatives
put their laboriously forged ties with the despised
Christian right to work, forming a radical flank to
neo-isolationist American conservatism. None of this
would have worked had Clinton not put America's global
position on hold for eight years. The neoconservative
argument about how much damage Clinton had done to
America's "unique [post-Cold War] moment" really
caught on in Republican circles and allowed the
neoconservatives to impose ideological arguments upon
America's frightened leadership. Doing to alQaeda what
Sharon was doing to the Palestinians felt right. It
was from there an easy jump through Israeli
intelligence dis-information to an attack of Iraq,
particularly in light of the unfinished job of Bush
Sr. (unfinished because in that way Bush got the war
paid for by the Arabs and could form a most desirable
coalition with them).
Bush Jr. failed to note the open ended "black hole"
into which he was allowing the neoconservatives to
drive him. By the time his Secretary of State
irrevocably told him that he had had enough (last
weekend), Bush realized that he had allowed himself to
be dragged where he could not afford to go. So now
appeals went out to Bush Sr. to provide moderate staff
that can undo the influence of the neoconservatives.
This will be reflected in the crushing firmness with
which Bush will be imposing the road map on Sharon.
The era of neoconservative "influence"-- not
domination-- of Bush has come to an end with Powell's
irreversible private announcement last week of his
plans to abandon Bush.
The writer is a Vietnam war foe of Left but very impressed with logic of its case on Mideast...which he
acted in as participant in events and journalist since 1967. He contributed above article to Media Monitors Network (MMN) from
New York, USA.
