Neocons as a "foreign import"

Posted by Jan Frel at 3:20 PM on March 24, 2006.

So Iraq is a "failure." Everyone on the right from conservative godfather Bill Buckley Jr. to Reagan's National Security Agency chief William Odom have said it.

But who do we blame? That's the question that a lot of political figures on the right's margins and traditional center have answered with increasingly transparent references: Jewish "neocons," or at least ones with a "passionate attachment to Israel," as Patrick Buchanan put it.

I don't track the conservative press for this stuff, but I do read around, and I've watched the Jews-as-scapegoats argument evolve from old-fashioned "Mein Kampf"-style conspiracy theories into something that at first glance sounds pretty mainstream, following the lines of how ole' fashioned trade protectionists railed against NAFTA and CAFTA. Here's the most recent entry, March 20. Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan Treasury official, whose column is picked up on the xenophobic and anti-immigration site Vdare as well as Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn's online mag, CounterPunch, and Justin Raimondo's Antiwar.com:

"[Neocons] are a foreign import and do not share our American values... It is our duty to defend our country and to oppose these evil people." Much like Hondas and chinese-manufactured deck chairs that flood American markets, neocons are an import, apparently. Shall we protect ourselves from these "imports" and raise tarriffs, or, more to the point, set quotas on our H1-B visas we grant to a certain country abroad? That's where the Jews-as-neocons-as-Iraq-scapegoats argument looks to be moving.

And believe me, it's moving. Watch it push marginal far-right characters into more traditional conservative channels. Here's a clear example. When was the last time you saw David Duke appear in anything close to the mainstream media? I saw him just a few days ago on MSNBC's Scarborough Country:

Joe Scarborough: ...[A]re you surprised, Mr. Duke, that Harvard, one of the most liberal universities, certainly the most esteemed universities in America is now agreeing with your position?

David Duke: Well, I see many people converging on this. I see conservatives like Patrick Buchanan and myself converging on this one issue. We see — I’m against the Iraq war because I’m a patriotic American. I don’t like the idea of American soldiers being maimed, killed, blinded, crippled, and disfigured, for a lie. And this war was for a lie. It was not about America.

Scarborough: You say it’s not about America. You say it’s about Israel. You say it’s -

Duke: This is the war for Israel.

Scarborough: You say this Jewish conspiracy led us into war, and I tell you a lot of people in Washington, DC were saying that also. How do you explain — you have George Bush, a gentile, Dick Cheney a gentile, Condi Rice, a gentile and you got Rumsfeld. I mean, these were the four people that led us into this war. Were they just gentile -- Jewish cabal?

Duke: How do you explain this? I think -- in fact Ralph Nader said that once. I think they are puppets. I think that George Bush knows which side of the bread it’s buttered on. I think he knows what the political power in this country is economically in terms of campaign contributions. The Wall Street Journal itself talked about 50 percent of the contributions for Republicans and even more for Democrats, come from Jewish sources.

Can you imagine introducing Duke on your show as anything other than a "racist"? Scarborough introduced Duke as merely "controversial." And Duke is right to say that his views and Pat Buchanan's are converging. As the war started in Iraq back in 2003, Buchanan had already started laying the groundwork for finding a way to blame for the war in Iraq on you-know-who without sounding like he was:

Indeed, it is the charge of “anti-Semitism” itself that is toxic. For this venerable slander is designed to nullify public discourse by smearing and intimidating foes and censoring and blacklisting them and any who would publish them. Neocons say we attack them because they are Jewish. We do not. We attack them because their warmongering threatens our country, even as it finds a reliable echo in Ariel Sharon. ...

They charge us with anti-Semitism—i.e., a hatred of Jews for their faith, heritage, or ancestry. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a “passionate attachment” to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America. ...

What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel. They want the peace of the sword imposed on Islam and American soldiers to die if necessary to impose it.

Basically, it's an undercurrent that we went into Iraq for Israel, not for oil, empire or any other reason. If that's established as some kind of public truth -- the same kind of "truth" that linked Iraq with 9/11 -- then there are specific people and kind of people to blame. Here's a more recent entry (July, 2005) from Buchanan's rag, The American Conservative. Titled, "How They Get Away with It, Three reasons Washington’s empire-builders don’t have to worry about ’60s-style dissent" -- the article's #2 reason blamed... American Jews sympathetic to Israel:

A second reason for the low ebb of dissent is an attitudinal shift in the American Jewish community, particularly among those active politically, a shift exemplified by the rise of neoconservatism. It is clear to anyone remotely interested in the question that the Old Left (the American Communist Party and its related organizations) was in great part Jewish, the New Left in great part the direct offspring of the Old. Without the radical Jewish children of radical parents, there would have been no early SDS, no Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, no New York kids going South for Freedom Rides to turn the civil-rights movement into a matter of national conscience. By the late 1960s, the Left was more ethnically diverse, but young Jewish radicals had been its leavening agent.

The Jewish turn from the New Left, marked by such signposts as the collapse of the black-Jewish alliance in the late 1960s and the recognition that the Pentagon and an airlift ordered by Richard Nixon might have been necessary to Israel’s survival in October 1973, may have been a turnabout in the mentality of no more than a few hundred activists and polemicists, but the effect on the political tone of the country shouldn’t be underestimated. The political biographies of Marty Peretz and David Horowitz, two emblematic figures of this sea change, with a corresponding shift in the mentality of thousands of politically astute and engaged people in their cohort, had a huge impact on the country’s political culture.

Of course, it is true that most American Jews are still politically liberal and a majority now tell pollsters they oppose the Iraq War. But this is beside the point. Nowadays, political passion, engagement, and activism are as likely to be found on the Jewish Right—at least a Right favoring a pro-war, pro-imperialist (and very pro-Israel) foreign policy—as they are on the Left. Nothing could be more different from 1968.

Scapegoating on Iraq is a natural reactionary reflex to the disaster it's become. It's going to happen for sure. It should be directed at the unaccountable power that a bunch of hacks wielded over the rest of the country -- that way we might address the breakdown of our national political system. But if it's about neocons as "foreign imports," expect a plague of anti-semitism dressed up as a patriotic push for American sovereignty.

Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.