The Pushback Against Neoconservative Hijacking of American Foreign Policy

I was glad to see this commentary by Joe Klein in his Time magazine blog "Swampland,", analyzed approvingly by Daniel Levy on the TheHuffingtonPost:

"There is a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who unsuccessfully tried to get Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and then successfully helped provide the intellectual rationale for George Bush to do it in 2003... Happily, these people represent a very small sliver of the Jewish population in this country...I remain proud of my Jewish heritage, a strong supporter of Israel...But I am not willing to grant these ideologues the anonymity they seek...I believe there are a small group of Jewish neoconservatives who are pushing for war with Iran because they believe it is in America's long-term interests and because they believe Israel's existence is at stake. They are wrong and recent history tells us they are dangerous. They are also bullies and I'm not going to be intimidated by them."

Klein has been viciously attacked by Jewish neoconservatives such as John Podhoretz, Jr. for his apostasy, or more colloquially, for his chutzpah in displaying such a shanda fur die goyim. As one who sympathizes with the plight of Israel, as unorthodox as that may be in modern liberal circles (lay it off to my love of George Gershwin and Philip Roth - I don't care), I have been distressed by the co-opting of right wing Jewish intellectuals such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby and, of course, the Senator from Israel, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, in Bush's scorched earth policies in the Middle East. Co-opting, of course, is too mild a word. They were active participants. I have always considered their influence fundamentally misguided and a near-disaster for Israel's image in the American liberal community. By throwing their lot in with George W. Bush's hamfisted, incompetent, violent approach to his "freedom agenda," they have made it more difficult to discuss rationally what is actually in Israel's long-term strategic (and existential) interest, particularly because Bush, in his monomaniacal focus on stabilizing Iraq by force no matter what the cost, abandoned the peace process in the actual Middle East (Palestine-Israel) in favor of an "Axis of Evil" bellicosity.

The American public, charming folk that they are, are often about as astute in discerning subtle distinctions as a kitten watching a string swinging before its face. Since these big Neocons represent the apparent weight of opinion in the American Jewish community, the tendency is to deduce that all American Jews have become, mutatis mutandis, Right Wing. This is simply not the case, as Klein and Levy point out, neither here nor in Israel. I have had occasion to refer admiringly to the "South Jerusalem" blog, for example, but one can multiply such examples endlessly. The Neocons are Jewish extremists. The identification of American Jewry with the worst aspects of Bush's foreign policy, such as the constant war drumming for a war with Iran, also gives those Americans with anti-Semitic tendencies, who were looking for something to hang their Jewish hatred on anyway, a "rational" hook for their bias. Lieberman, in his transparent cheerleading for yet another use of the American military in a preemptive war in the Middle East, is committing a form of treason, in my book, and the evidence for such a serious charge is supported by his shameless appearance at John Hagee's Christians United for Israel hullabaloo. Does he represent the USA, Israel, or does he just want to see the End Times roll?

Anyway - mazeltov to Joe Klein. I think what he's doing is therapeutic and heroic. Let's not forget that the official position of the U.S. intelligence agencies is that Iran is not working on development of an atomic bomb, and that as signatories to the Nonproliferation Treaty (unlike India or Pakistan, to name two examples without naming the third), they are currently within their rights to enrich unranium. Am I reassured by such legalities? No, I'm not, but it would be a welcome change if the United States operated within the bounds of treaties it has already signed. Bush's habit of ignoring all legalities (his unilateral rejection of the ABM treaty has been a disaster in American-Russian relations, for example) comes into play once again. If it is not permissible for Iran to enrich uranium, then change the damn treaty. It's nuts to threaten war over the legal exercise of an international right. It breeds utter contempt for American actions, which under Bush have become a series of ad hoc, unilateralist, rogue spasms apparently dictated by whatever his Magic 8 Ball tells him to do that morning.

Not an approach that any country, or ethnic group, should want to have anything to do with.