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March
1, 2004 issue
Copyright © 2004
The American Conservative
No End to War
The Frum-Perle prescription would
ensnare America in endless conflict.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
On
the dust jacket of his book, Richard Perle appends a Washington
Post depiction of himself as the “intellectual guru of the
hard-line neoconservative movement in foreign policy.”
The guru’s
reputation, however, does not survive a reading. Indeed, on putting
down Perle’s new book the thought recurs: the neoconservative moment
may be over. For they are not only losing their hold on power, they
are losing their grip on reality.
An End to
Evil: How to Win the War on Terror opens
on a note of hysteria. In the War on Terror, writes Perle, “There is
no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.” “What is
new since 9/11 is the chilling realization that the terrorist threat
we thought we had contained” now menaces “our survival as a nation.”
But how is our
survival as a nation menaced when not one American has died in a
terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11? Are we really in imminent
peril of a holocaust like that visited upon the Jews of Poland?
“[A] radical strain
within Islam,” says Perle, “ ... seeks to overthrow our civilization
and remake the nations of the West into Islamic societies, imposing
on the whole world its religion and laws.”
Well, yes. Militant
Islam has preached that since the 7th century. But what are the odds
the Boys of Tora Bora are going to “overthrow our civilization” and
coerce us all to start praying to Mecca five times a day?
In his own review
of An End to Evil, Joshua Micah Marshall picks up this same
scent of near-hysteria over the Islamic threat:
The book conveys
a general sense that America is at war with Islam itself anywhere
and everywhere: the contemporary Muslim world .... is depicted as
one great cauldron of hate, murder, obscurantism, and deceit. If
our Muslim adversaries are not to destroy Western civilization, we
must gird for more battles.
To suggest Frum and
Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take seriously the
threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from dirty bombs,
or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder truck or
container ship. Yet even this will never “overthrow our
civilization.”
In the worst of
terror attacks, we lost 3,000 people. Horrific. But at Antietam
Creek, we lost 7,000 in a day’s battle in a nation that was
one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every
week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. We Americans did not curl up
and die. We did not come all this way because we are made of sugar
candy.
Germany and Japan
suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II,
with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Both came
back in a decade. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of devastation
when they are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and the
shoe bomber?
In the war we are
in, our enemies are weak. That is why they resort to the weapon of
the weak—terror. And, as in the Cold War, time is on America’s side.
Perseverance and patience are called for, not this panic.
In 25 years,
militant Islam has seized three countries: Iran, Sudan, and
Afghanistan. We toppled the Taliban almost without losing a man.
Sudan is a failed state. In Iran, a generation has grown up that
knows nothing of Savak or the Great Satan but enough about the
mullahs to have rejected them in back-to-back landslides. The
Iranian Revolution has reached Thermidor. Wherever Islamism takes
power, it fails. Like Marxism, it does not work.
Yet, assume it
makes a comeback. So what? Taken together, all 22 Arab nations do
not have the GDP of Spain. Without oil, their exports are the size
of Finland’s. Not one Arab nation can stand up to Israel, let alone
the United States. The Islamic threat is not strategic, but
demographic. If death comes to the West it will be because we
embraced a culture of death—birth control, abortion, sterilization,
euthanasia. Western man is dying as Islamic man migrates north to
await his passing and inherit his estate.
Said young Lincoln
in his Lyceum address, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves
be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live
through all time, or die by suicide.”
In his first
inaugural address, FDR admonished, “[T]he only thing we have to fear
is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which
paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Fear is what Perle
and his co-author David Frum are peddling to stampede America into
serial wars. Just such fear-mongering got us into Iraq, though, we
have since discovered, Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda,
no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no plans to
attack us. Iraq was never “the clear and present danger” the authors
insist she was.
Calling their book
a “manual for victory,” they declaim:
For us, terrorism
remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil,
our generation’s great cause. We do not believe that Americans are
fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they
are fighting to win—to end this evil before it kills again and on
a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is
victory or holocaust.
But no nation can
“end evil.” Evil has existed since Cain rose up against his brother
Abel and slew him. A propensity to evil can be found in every human
heart. And if God accepts the existence of evil, how do Frum and
Perle propose to “end” it? Nor can any nation “win the war on
terror.” Terrorism is simply a term for the murder of non-combatants
for political ends.
Revolutionary
terror has been around for as long as this Republic. It was used by
Robespierre’s Committee on Public Safety and by People’s Will in
Romanov Russia. Terror has been the chosen weapon of anarchists, the
IRA, Irgun, the Stern Gang, Algeria’s FLN, the Mau Mau, MPLA, the
PLO, Black September, the Basque ETA, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad,
Hamas, the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, SWAPO, ZANU, ZAPU, the Tupamaros,
Shining Path, FARC, the ANC, the V.C., the Huks, Chechen rebels,
Tamil Tigers, and the FALN that attempted to assassinate Harry
Truman and shot up the House floor in 1954, to name only a few.
Accused terrorists
have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Begin, Arafat, Mandela. Three lie in
mausoleums in the capitals of nations they created: Lenin, Mao, Ho.
Others are the fathers of their countries like Ben Bella and Jomo
Kenyatta. A terrorist of the Black Hand ignited World War I by
assassinating the Archduke Ferdinand. Yet Gavrilo Princep has a
bridge named for him in Sarajevo.
The murder of
innocents for political ends is evil, but to think we can “end” it
is absurd. Cruel and amoral men, avaricious for power and
“immortality,” will always resort to it. For, all too often, it
succeeds.
But what must
America do to attain victory in her war on terror?
Say the authors:
“We must hunt down the individual terrorists before they kill our
people or others .... We must deter all regimes that
use terror as a weapon of state against anyone, American or not”
[emphasis added].
Astonishing. The
authors say America is responsible for defending everyone,
everywhere from terror and deterring any and all regimes that might
use terror —against anyone, anywhere on earth.
But there are 192
nations. Scores of regimes from Liberia to Congo to Cuba, from
Zimbabwe to Syria to Uzbekistan, and from Iran to Sudan to the
Afghan warlords of the Northern Alliance who fought on our side—have
used torture and terror to punish enemies. Are we to fight them all?
Well, actually, no.
Excepting North Korea, the authors’ list of nations that need to be
attacked reads as though it were drawn up in the Israeli Defense
Ministry. By the second paragraph, Perle and Frum have given us a
short list of priority targets: “The war on terror is not over, it
has barely begun. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas still plot murder.”
Now al-Qaeda was
responsible for 9/11. But when did Hamas attack us? And if Israel
can co-exist and negotiate with Hezbollah, why is it America’s duty
to destroy Hezbollah? Iran and North Korea, the authors warn,
“present intolerable threats to American security. We must move
boldly against them both and against all other sponsors of terrorism
as well: Syria, Libya and Saudi Arabia. And we don’t have much
time.”
“Why have we put up
with [Syria] as long as we have?” the authors demand. They call for
a cut-off of Syria’s oil and an ultimatum to Assad: Get Syrian
troops out of Lebanon, hand over all terrorist suspects, end support
for Hezbollah, stop agitating against Israel, and adopt a “Western
orientation”—or you, too, get the Saddam treatment.
But what has Syria
done to us? And if Assad balks do we bomb Damascus? Invade? Where do
we get the troops? What if the Syrians, too, resort to guerrilla
war?
Bush’s father made
Hafez al-Assad an ally in the Gulf War. Ehud Barak offered Assad
99.5 percent of the Golan Heights. Why, then, must Bashir Assad’s
regime be destroyed—by us?
“We don’t have much
time,” say Frum and Perle. But what is Assad doing that warrants
immediate attack? Is he, too, buying yellowcake from Niger?
Colonel Khaddafi is
now paying billions in reparations for Pan Am 103, giving up his
weapons of mass destruction, and inviting U.S. inspectors in to
verify his disarmament. Why is it imperative we overthrow him?
While the Saudis
have been diffident allies in the War on Terror, they are not
America’s enemies. They pumped oil to keep prices down in the first
Gulf War. They looked the other way as U.S. fighter-bombers flew out
of Prince Sultan Air Base in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet the Saudis
are directed to provide us “with the utmost cooperation in the war
on terror,” or we will invade, detach their oil-rich eastern
province, and occupy it.
But why? If the
monarchy falls and bin Laden’s acolytes replace it, how would that
make us more secure in our own country?
What did Iran do to
justify war against her? According to Perle and Frum,
Iran defied the
Monroe Doctrine and sponsored murder in our own hemisphere,
killing eighty-six people and wounding some three hundred at the
Jewish community center in Buenos Aires—and our government did
worse than nothing: It opened negotiations with the murderers.
But that atrocity
occurred a dozen years ago, long before the reform government of
President Mohammad Khatami was elected. And if Iran was behind an
attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, why did
Argentina and Israel not avenge these deaths? Why is retribution our
responsibility? It was not Americans who were the victims, and the
attack occurred 5,000 miles from the United States.
The Frum-Perle
invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is both cynical and comical. If
they were genuinely concerned about violations of the Monroe
Doctrine, why did they not include Cuba on their target list, a
“state sponsor of terror” 90 miles from our shores that has hosted
Soviet missiles and, according to Undersecretary of State John
Bolton, is developing chemical and biological weapons? Why did Saudi
Arabia make the cut but not Cuba? Might it have something to do with
proximity and propinquity?
For Iran, there can
be no reprieve. “The regime must go,” say our authors, because
Ayatollah Khamenei has
… no more right
to control ... Iran than any other criminal has to seize control
of the persons and property of others. It’s not always in our
power to do something about such criminals, nor is it always in
our interest, but when it is in our power and interest, we should
toss dictators aside with no more compunction than a police
sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker.
But where in the
Constitution is the president empowered to “toss dictators aside”?
And if it took 150,000 U.S. soldiers to toss Saddam aside, how many
troops do Frum and Perle think it will take to occupy the capital of
a nation three times as large and populous and toss the ayatollah
aside? How many dead and wounded would our war hawks consider an
acceptable price for being rid of the mullahs?
As South Korea
favors appeasement, they write, we must take the lead, demand that
North Korea surrender all nuclear materials and shut down all
missile sites. If Kim Jong Il balks, we should move U.S. troops back
to safety beyond artillery and rocket range of the DMZ and launch
preemptive strikes on known North Korean nuclear sites and impose a
naval and air blockade. As for the South Koreans, they should
probably brace themselves. “We have no doubt how such a war would
end,” say the authors. They also had no doubt how the Iraqi war
would end.
Is the Perle-Frum
vision for the suffering people of North Korea a future of freedom
and democracy? Not exactly:
It may be that
the only way out of the decade-long crisis on the Korean peninsula
is the toppling of Kim Jong Il and his replacement by a North
Korean communist who is more subservient to China. If so,
we should accept that outcome.
Swell. America is
to fight a second Korean War that could entail a nuclear strike on
our troops, but, when we have won, we should accept a communist
North Korea that is a vassal of Beijing. How many dead and wounded
are our AEI warlords willing to accept to make Pyongyang a puppet of
Beijing?
But the Frum-Perle
enemies’ list is not complete. France, if she does not shape up, is
to be treated as an enemy.
From every page of
this book there oozes a sense of urgency that borders on the
desperate for action this day: “We can feel the will to win ebbing
in Washington, we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of
complacency and denial.”
The neocons are not
wrong here. With the cost of war at $200 billion and rising, with
deaths mounting, and with the possibility growing that Iraq could
collapse in chaos and civil war, President Bush appears to be
experiencing buyer’s remorse about the lemon he was sold by Perle
and friends.
They promised him a
“cakewalk,” that we would be hailed as “liberators,” that democracy
would take root in Iraq and flourish in the Middle East, that
Palestinians and Israelis would break bread and make peace. With
Lord Melbourne, Bush must be muttering, “What all the wise men
promised has not happened, and what all the damn fools said would
happen has come to pass.”
What do Perle and
Frum see as our decisive failing in Iraq?
But of all our
mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness to allow
the Iraqi National Congress, Iraq’s leading anti-Saddam resistance
movement, to form a provisional government after the fall of
Baghdad. In 1944, we took care to let French troops enter Paris
before U.S. or British forces. We should have shown equal tact in
2003.
Thus, we are in
trouble because Ahmad Chalabi was not allowed to play de Gaulle
leading his war-weary, battle-hardened Free Iraqis into Baghdad.
Why was Perle’s
protégé passed over? Because the “INC terrified the Saudis and
therefore terrified those in our government who wished to placate
the Saudis.” The damned Arabists at State did it again.
Hastily written,
replete with errors, with no index, An End to Evil is a brief
in defense of neoconservatives against their impending indictment on
charges they lied us into a war that may prove our greatest disaster
since Vietnam. And the charge of deliberate deceit is not without
merit.
In mid-December
2001, in a column distributed by Copley News, Perle asserted that
Saddam “is busily at work on a nuclear weapon .... it’s simply a
matter of time before he acquires nuclear weapons.”
Naming Khidir Hamza,
“one of the people who ran the nuclear weapons program for Saddam,”
as his source, Perle gave credence to Hamza’s tale of 400 uranium
enrichment facilities spread all over Iraq. “Some of them look like
farmhouses, some of them look like classrooms, some of them look
like warehouses. You’ll never find them.” Only “preemptive action”
can save us, said Perle.
By the end of 2001,
according to Perle, the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam was
imminent:
With each passing
day he comes closer to his dream of a nuclear arsenal. We know he
has a clandestine program, spread over many hidden sites, to
enrich natural uranium to weapons grade .... And intelligence
sources know he is in the market, with plenty of money, for both
weapons material and components as well as finished nuclear
weapons. How close is he? We do not know. Two years, three years,
tomorrow even?
When he wrote this,
Perle, as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, had access to secret
intelligence. So the question cannot be evaded: did Hamza
deliberately deceive Perle, or did Perle deliberately deceive us?
For those
unpersuaded that Saddam was a strategic threat, there were his links
to the 9/11 massacre. Saddam’s “collaboration with terrorism is well
documented,” wrote Perle, “Evidence of a meeting in Prague between a
senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the September 11
ringleader, is convincing.”
Thus did the
neocons get the war they wanted. And after America fought the war
for which they had beaten the drums, how do Perle & Co. explain why
it did not turn out as they assured us it would?
Answer: any
disaster in Iraq, the authors argue, will be due to the venality and
cowardice of the State Department, CIA, FBI, retired generals, and
ex-ambassadors bought off by the Saudis. “We have offered concrete
recommendations equal to the seriousness of the threat, and the
softliners have not, because we have wanted to fight and they have
not.”
Which brings us
back to the point made at the outset: the neocon moment may be
passing, for they appear to be losing their grip on reality as well
as their influence on policy. Rather than looking for new wars to
involve us more deeply in the Middle East, Bush and Rumsfeld seem to
be looking for the next exit ramp out of our Mesopotamian morass.
“No war in ‘04” is said to be the watchword of Karl Rove.
Moreover, Americans
are coming to appreciate that, all that bombast about “unipolar”
moments and “American empire” aside, there are limits to American
power, and we are approaching them. U.S. ground forces of 480,000
are stretched thin. There is grumbling in Army, Reserve, and
National Guard units about too many tours too far from home. Backing
off his “axis-of-evil” rhetoric, Bush said in this year’s State of
the Union, “We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire.”
The long retreat of
American empire has begun.
In Washington,
there are rumors of the return of James Baker and the imminent
departure of Paul Wolfowitz. As Frederick the Great, weary of the
antics and peculations of his house guest Voltaire, said, “One
squeezes the orange and throws away the rind.”
Moreover, the
radicalism of their schemes for two, three, many wars, seems, given
our embroilment in Iraq, not only rash but also rooted in unreality.
Before Bush could take us to war with any of these regimes, he would
have to convince his country of the necessity of war and persuade
Congress to grant him the power to go to war. Yet absent a new
atrocity on the magnitude of 9/11, directly traceable to one of the
regimes on the Perle-Frum list, the president could not win this
authority. Nor does it appear he intends to try. And were the United
States to attack Libya, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, we would alienate
every ally in the Islamic world and Europe—including Tony Blair’s
Britain. To fight these wars and occupy these nations would bleed
our armed forces and mandate a return to the draft. But how would
any of these wars make us more secure from terrorism here at home?
Indeed, it is
because Americans cannot see the correlation between the wars the
authors demand and security at home that Frum and Perle must resort
to fear-mongering about holocausts, the end of civilization, and our
demise as a nation.
If it is America we
defend, An End to Evil makes no sense. The Perle-Frum
prescription for permanent war makes sense only if it is the mission
of the armed forces of the United States to make the Middle East
safe for Sharon—and here we come to the heart of the quarrel between
us.
On Sept. 11, al-Qaeda
attacked us. Al-Qaeda is our enemy, not Syria, Libya, or Saudi
Arabia. And the way to cut off al-Qaeda and kill it is to isolate it
from all Arab and Islamic nations and centers of power including
Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.
None of these
nations had a hand in 9/11. All have a vital interest in not being
linked to an al-Qaeda for whom an enraged superpower is on the
mortal hunt. Thus, no matter the character of these regimes, we have
interests in common. And if Bush can use carrots to get Bashir Assad
to help us find and finish al-Qaeda—as his father got Assad’s father
to help us expel Iraq from Kuwait—let us make Syria an ally rather
than another enemy of the United States.
But here is the
rub: The neocons do not want to narrow our list of enemies. They do
not want to confine America’s war to those who attacked us. They
want to expand our list of enemies to include Israel’s enemies. They
want to escalate and widen what Chris Matthews calls “the Firemen’s
War” into a war for hegemony in the Middle East. They had hoped to
exploit 9/11 to erect an empire, and as they see the vision vanish,
their desperation knows no bounds.
That great American
military mind Col. John Boyd once described strategy as appending to
yourself as many centers of power as possible and isolating your
enemy from as many centers of power as possible.
This was the
strategy used by Bush I in the Gulf War. He persuaded Russia and
China to sign on in the Security Council, Germany and Japan to
finance his war, Syria and Egypt to send soldiers, Britain and
France to help us fight it. By giving everyone a stake in an
American victory—call it imperial bribery, if you will—Bush I lined
up the world against Iraq. As did George W. Bush, brilliantly, in
Afghanistan.
But what Frum and
Perle are pressing on him now is an altogether opposite strategy.
They want Bush to expand the war, broaden the theater of operations,
multiply our enemies, and ignore our allies. If Bush should adopt
this strategy, it would be America and Israel against the Arab and
Islamic world with Europe neutral and almost all of Asia rooting for
our humiliation.
Let it be said: it
is vital to victory over al-Qaeda, to the security of our country,
the safety of our people, and our broader interests in an Arab and
Islamic world of 57 nations that stretches from Morocco to Malaysia
that we not let the neocons conflate our war on terror with their
war for hegemony.
Neocons
believe the Palestinian Authority must be crushed, Arafat
eliminated, and the Golan Heights, West Bank, and East Jerusalem
held by Israel forever. They want Hezbollah eradicated, Syria
denatured, the Saudi monarchy brought down. Let them so believe. But
their agenda is not America’s agenda, and their fight is not
America’s fight.
There is no vital
U.S. interest in whose flag flies over the Golan or East Jerusalem,
when Barak was willing to give up both. But if we allow the
neoconservatives to morph our war on al-Qaeda into Israel’s war for
Palestine, our war will never end. And that is the hidden agenda of
the neoconservatives: permanent war for their permanent empowerment.
As Frum and Perle concede, this is “our generation’s great cause.”
“Who are those
guys?” Butch and Sundance asked. Indeed, who are these men who would
plunge our country into serial wars of preemption and retribution
across the arc of crisis from Libya to Korea?
Frum
is not even an American. He is a Canadian who did not become a
citizen until offered a job in the Bush speechwriting shop. He was
cashiered after one year when his wife bragged on the Internet that
David invented the “axis-of-evil” phrase. Expelled from the White
House, Frum ratted out his old colleagues in a “hot” book and got
himself hired by National Review, where he produced a cover
story about a dirty dozen “Unpatriotic Conservatives” who hate
neocons, hate Bush, hate the GOP, hate America, and “wish to see the
United States defeated in the War on Terror.”
Frum
ordered all 12 purged from the conservative movement. (And we must,
in fairness, report that all three editors of this magazine and four
regular writers were among the 12 who went to the stake.)
Who is Perle?
Unlike Frum, a cipher on foreign policy, Perle has been a serious
player since the Nixon era. But throughout those years he has
betrayed a passionate attachment to a foreign power. In 1996, Perle
co-authored “A Clean Break,” a now-famous paper urging Benjamin
Netanyahu to dump the Oslo Accords, seize the West Bank, and
confront Syria. The road to Damascus lies through Baghdad, Perle
told the receptive Israeli Prime Minister.
Then an adviser to
Republican candidate Robert Dole, Perle was thus secretly urging a
foreign government to abrogate a peace accord supported by his own
government. In 1998, he and other neoconservatives signed a letter
to then President Clinton urging the United States to initiate
all-out war on Iraq and pledging neoconservative support if Clinton
would launch it.
Query: why is Perle
permitted to retain his post at the Department of Defense while
agitating for wars on four or five countries, including Saudi
Arabia, a friend of the United States? Why does President Bush put
up with this? His father would never have tolerated it.
The neocons have
also begun to injure their reputations and isolate themselves with
the nastiness and irrationality of their attacks. French cannon once
bore the inscription ultima ratio regum, the last argument of
kings. The toxic charge of “Anti-Semite!” has become the last
argument of the neocons. But they have wheeled out that cannon too
many times. People are less intimidated now. They have seen men look
into its muzzle and walk away.
Gen. Anthony Zinni,
former head of Centcom, is a hero of Vietnam. He opposed war with
Iraq, arguing that the U.S. military was overstretched and we would
unleash forces we could not control. In an interview, Zinni related
his astonishment at the vapidity of the Wolfowitz clique with which
he had to deal at the Department of Defense:
The more I saw,
the more I thought that this [war] was the product of the neocons
who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc
there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who
never had had an idea that worked on the ground .... I don’t know
where the neocons came from—that was not the platform [Bush and
Cheney] ran on .... Somehow, the neocons captured the president.
They captured the vice president.
National
Review’s response was to brand Zinni an
anti-Semite. In a separate column, NR regular Joel Mowbray not only
accused the general of having “blamed the Jews,” he insisted that
the term neocon, in common usage for 25 years, is now an
anti-Semitic code word for Jews:
Neither President
Bush nor Vice-President Cheney ... was to blame. It was the Jews.
They captured both Bush and Cheney …. Technically, the former head
of the Central Command in the Middle East didn’t say ‘Jews.’ He
instead used a term that has become a new favorite for
anti-Semites: ‘neoconservatives.’
Mowbray
and National Review thus slandered a brave and brilliant
soldier who has bled for his country. Such slanders do the neocons
no good but only add to their isolation and the burgeoning
detestation of their tactics.
New York
Times columnist David Brooks has also
begun to smear critics of the neocons as anti-Semites. In the word “neocon,”
he writes, the “con” stands for conservative and the “neo” stands
for Jewish.
But the problem for
neocons is not that so many are Jewish, but that so few are
conservative. Lawrence Kaplan, a Perle colleague who co-authored a
book with William Kristol, after reading An End to Evil,
declared: “This is not conservatism. It is liberalism, with very
sharp teeth.”
If the neocons
purport to see ethnic hatred in everyone else’s motives, is it
unfair to explore for an ethnic affinity in their own? Why does
every grand strategy neocons advance, from “American empire” to
“benevolent global hegemony” to “a Pax Americana” to “world
democratic revolution” have as its centerpiece solidarity with
Sharon and a vigorous wielding of American power against all the
enemies of Israel?
Why is every peace
plan proposed or endorsed by a president to give the Palestinians a
home of their own—the Rogers Plan, the Oslo accords, Camp David, the
Taba Plan, the Saudi Plan, the Mitchell Plan, the Road Map—a Munich
sellout? Why is any American patriot, who demands that Ariel Sharon
stop building settlements on Palestinian land and walling off
Jerusalem, a State Department Arabist, a pawn of the Texas oil
lobby, a Coughlinite, an anti-Semite, or a bought-and-paid-for
lickspittle of the Saudis?
The United States
remains committed morally and politically to the security and
survival of Israel and to providing her with the weaponry to
guarantee it. No president is going to back off that commitment. But
because Israel is a friend does not mean that the Sharonites have
preemptive absolution to settle or seize Arab lands or permanently
to deny Arab peoples the rights we preach to the world. In our own
national interests, we must say so—in the clear.
This is a time for
truth. With a mighty and hostile Soviet Empire no longer militarily
present in the Maghreb and Middle East, U.S. and Israeli strategic
interests have ceased to coincide. And with nightly pictures of
Palestinian suffering on Al Jazeera, they have begun to collide.
Thus between
traditional conservatives and neoconservatives a breach has been
opened and an irreconcilable conflict has arisen. We of the Old
Right only have one country. We believe U.S. foreign policy must be
determined by what is best for America. And what is best for America
is what our forefathers taught: If you would preserve this Republic,
stay out of foreign wars, avoid “permanent alliances,” beware of
“passionate attachments” to nations not your own.
In 1778, Washington
rejoiced in the alliance with France. But when victory was won, that
alliance became an entanglement that could drag the Republic into
Europe’s wars. American statesmen who had celebrated the French
alliance now sought to sever it, and, under Adams, succeeded.
With the end of the
Cold War, an alliance with Israel has ceased to be central to U.S.
interests. Indeed, our reputation as armorers and allies of Israel
only damages us as Sharon rampages through the West Bank and Gaza
walling off Arab land and denying to Palestinians that very right of
self-determination we Americans espouse. Sharon is making hypocrites
of us, and we are cowards for permitting it.
To the neocons,
however, Zionism is second nature. They cannot conceive of a foreign
policy that is good for America that does not entail absolute
solidarity with Israel. They are dangerously close to imbibing the
poisonous brew that drove Jonathan Pollard to treason: If it is good
for Israel, it cannot be bad for America.
To evade admission
of the transparent truth, neocons have begun to rationalize their
passionate attachment, to sublimate it. “The Arab-Israeli quarrel is
not a cause of Islamic extremism,” Frum and Perle protest.
But when every
returning journalist and diplomat and every opinion survey says it
is America’s uncritical support for Israeli repression of the
Palestinians that makes us hated in the region, how can honest men
write this? Have they blinded themselves to the truth because it is
too painful?
We stand by Israel,
writes Irving Kristol, because America is an “ideological” nation,
“like the Soviet Union of yesteryear.” We and Israel are
democracies, the Arab countries are not, and that is all there is to
it.
That is why it
was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and
Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to
defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No
complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are
necessary.
But this is
nonsense, and Kristol knows it. When Britain and France declared war
on Hitler on September 3, 1939, FDR did not “come to the defense of
France and Britain.” He delivered a fireside chat that night
promising the nation America would stay out. There will be “no
blackout of peace” here, FDR promised us.When France fell in
May-June of 1940, pleading for planes, FDR sent words of
encouragement. Not until 18 months after the fall of France did we
declare war on Hitler and not until after Hitler declared war on us.
Thus, we did not go to war to defend democracy in Britain or France.
We went to war to smash the Japanese Empire that attacked us at
Pearl Harbor. Kristol is parroting liberal myths.
In the Cold War the
United States welcomed as allies Chiang Kai-shek, Salazar, Franco,
Somoza, the Shah, Suharto, Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee and the
Korean generals, Greek colonels, military regimes in Brazil,
Argentina, and Turkey, Marcos, and Pinochet because these autocrats
proved far more reliable than democratists like Nehru, Olaf Palme,
Willy Brandt, and Pierre Trudeau. When it comes to wars that
threaten us, hot or cold, we Americans are at one with Nietzsche, “A
state, it is the coldest of all cold monsters.”
India is democratic
and 200 times the size of Israel. Yet in India’s wars with Pakistan,
we tilted toward Pakistan. Why? Because the Pakistanis were allies,
and India sided with Moscow. That India was democratic and Pakistan
autocratic made no difference to us.
As for Israel, has
America really given her $100 billion and taken her side in every
Arab quarrel because she is a democracy?
Tell it to Tony
Judt. When this British historian proposed—given the impossibility
of separating Arabs from Jews on the West Bank—that Israel annex the
West Bank, become a bi-national state, and give Palestinians equal
rights, neocons went berserk.
Frum
called Judt’s idea “genocidal liberalism” that would leave Jews
exposed to slaughter. John Podhoretz declared it “unthinkable” and
“the definition of intellectual corruption.” “[H]aughty and ugly,”
said the New Republic, which hurled Judt from its masthead.
But if the just
solution to the South African problem was to abolish bantustans and
create a one-man, one-vote democracy, why is that not even a
debatable solution to the Palestinian problem?
In temperament,
too, neoconservatives have revealed themselves as the antithesis of
conservative. In the depiction of scholar Claes Ryn, they are the
“neo-Jacobins” of modernity whose dominant trait is conceit.
Only great
conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony. The
ideology of benevolent American empire and global democracy
dresses up a voracious appetite for power. It signifies the ascent
to power of a new kind of American, one profoundly at odds with
that older type who aspired to modesty and self-restraint.
The Perle-Frum book
is marinated in conceit, which may prove the neocons’ fatal flaw. In
the run-up to the invasion, when critics were exposing their
plotting for war long before 9/11, the neocons did not bother to
deny it. They reveled in it. They boasted about who they were, where
they came from, what they believed, how they were different, and how
they had become the new elite. With Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush
marching to their war drums, one of them bellowed, “We are all
neoconservatives now!”
But it is always
unwise of courtiers to boast of their influence with the prince. And
now the neocons have outed themselves. We all know who they are. We
all have the coordinates. We all have them bracketed.
With the heady days
of the fall of Baghdad behind us and our country ensnared in a
Lebanon of our own, neocons seem fearful that it is they who will be
made to take the fall if it all turns out badly in Iraq, as McNamara
and his Whiz Kids had to take the fall for Vietnam.
And this one
they’ve got right.
March 1,
2004 issue
Copyright © 2004
The American Conservative
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