Now, Paul is not a foaming-at-the-mouth neocon. But neither do his views on the Middle East seem likely fulfill the hopes that the Leveretts have for the Tea Party — namely, providing “the most outspoken congressional opponents of potential moves by the Obama Administration toward military confrontation with Iran.”

For a more fleshed out account of the direction of the Tea Party’s foreign policy, check out Scott McConnell’s piece at Right Web. McConnell, a founding editor of the American Conservative, described the different approaches of neoconseravtives and Tea Partiers who tend toward fiscally-conservative restraint and writes:

Thus far, the neoconservatives appear to be parrying the challenge effectively. The question is, can the neocons, as they have with other political factions in the past, successfully co-opt this new political force in such a way as to make it amenable to their goals?

McConnell notes that Palin was discovered by neoconservative don Bill Kristol. Those Tea Partiers who have actually been successful (winning or garnering great followings and attention) have been courted by — and often seemed to please — Israel lobby forces and some neoconservative influences.

Take Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio, who will represent Florida in the Senate as of early January. The day after winning his seat, Rubio announced a visit to Israel. During the campaign, Rubio, much to the excitement of neoconservatives, said that the U.S. should attack Iran to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons. Likewise, Utah’s Senator-elect Mike Lee, another Tea Partier, met with Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu and ran on a platform that “military action [against Iran] would be justified.” Both Senators-elect said the U.S. should allow Israel to strike Iran.

The picture with Rand Paul is significantly more complicated than what the Leveretts present. Comments Paul made during the campaign in May sparked a minor blog squabble between various elements of the “old right” — the American Conservative‘s Daniel Larison and Antiwar.com‘s Justin Raimondo. (Both could claim the “old right” mantle before the Tea Party was even a glimmer in the eye of Rick Santelli or the Koch brothers.)

Just a week after the mid-term elections that elevated Rubio, Lee and Paul to the Senate, McConnell gave an updated breakdown of Paul’s views in his Right Web piece:

On the other hand, Rand Paul, the son of the isolationist icon and early Tea Party favorite Ron Paul, has studiously avoided discussion of foreign policy issues in his campaign. In October, a GQ article reported that after Paul’s primary win he met with prominent neoconservatives Bill Kristol, Tom Donnelly of AEI, and Dan Senor (cofounder of the Foreign Policy Initiative) in Washington to talk foreign policy. While he once criticized the Republicans’ “military adventurism,” opposed the war in Iraq, and “scoffed at the threat of Iranian nukes,” he may have begun changing his positions. Senor categorized Paul as “in absorption mode” and not “cemented in his views.” Paul later met with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where he reportedly “told them what they wanted to hear” and distanced himself from his father, who has been critical of the extent of U.S. support for Israel.

McConnell concludes by noting that the Tea Party has a strong “religious” right element as well as a “libertarian” one.

The “religious” element is likely aligned with Christian Zionists such as John Hagee and his Christians United for Israel (CUFI), whose views on the Middle East profess a Greater Israel Zionism even more fervent and violent than one finds in most public neoconservative quarters (the two groups are already strong allies). As with the neocons, Christian Zionists tend to take a moralistic worldview that finds any and all enemies of Israel (particularly Muslims) to be “evil” — unredeemable to the point of requiring extermination by force (otherwise known as Armageddon, or the final battle between good and evil, a central piece of Christian Zionist eschatology.)

Furthermore, the “libertarian” elements of the Tea Party might indeed include those who, confronted by the wider consequences of an attack on Iran, would recoil at the idea of a broad and unpredictable Middle East war. But neoconservatives — in attempting to build a diverse coalition for their aggressive policies — will constantly downplay these negative wider consequences of an assault. (As they did during much of the panel on the “kinetic option” at the big Foundation for Defense of Democracies Iran confab earlier this month.)

And as for fiscally minded small-government ideologues from either branch of the Tea Party, they will come to learn that the cost of a bombing run will only be the price of a warehouse full of ordinance, smart bombs, drones with Hellfire missiles, and the fuel to get it all into Iranian territory. That just ain’t that much dough.

If the Leveretts so choose, they can take heart that there might indeed be some Tea Partiers who, as they put it, “are stalwart in their criticism of the Iraq war and their determination that the United States not launch another ‘war of choice’ in the Middle East that will end up doing even greater damage to America’s interests and international standing.” But I’m not going to hold out hope on this score.

Tea Partiers who make it into the halls of power will likely have their principles watered down by that power. The opinions of Tea Party activists in the field won’t concern neoconservatives, who are known for focusing their efforts on elites — what journalist Sidney Blumenthal called the “Counter Establishment” in his 1986 book. Irving Kristol once said that with a magazine that has “a circulation of a few hundred, you could change the world.” (Some recent populist outreach on YouTube and other mediums notwithstanding.)

The Tea Party — or even a significant portion of it — seems to me to be an unlikely part of any coalition in Washington that will work to stop the United States from starting a war with Iran.

The alert reads:

Last week, after Ahmadinejad accused the US of perpetrating Sept. 11th attacks, Yale Univ. hosted him for dinner. Click Act Now to send your protest and demand a public apology from Yale.

Users who click the “Act Now” button will find an e-mail form — pre-addressed to Yale Spokeswoman Dorie Baker; Yale School of Management Professor James Levinsohn; the Yale University President’s office; and (on the BCC line) support@giyus.org — popup in their email client.

GIYUS, which is endorsed on a number of of Israeli embassy websites as “the online public diplomacy platform of Israel,” has been sending out increasing numbers of Iran related alerts and calls for action.

On August 29, GIYUS pointed users to an interview with “an ex-Mossad expert on Iran” that promoted a U.S. attack on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and suggested that negotiations with Tehran only serve to give Iran more time to develop a nuclear weapon. (I wrote about this interview here.)

The GIYUS operation is designed to manipulate social media platforms and target pro-Israel traffic to certain articles, polls, blog posts and YouTube videos. Megaphone, the program which GIYUS asks users to download, sends out links which appear as popups on users’ computers.

The number of alerts issued by GIYUS’s homegrown Megaphone software sharply increases during periods of crisis, such as the 2008-2009 Gaza War and the latest Lebanon War. The the program was first introduced during that 2006 clash with Hezbollah. Until recently, GIYUS has been rather quiet since its burst of activity surrounding the Gaza Flotilla in June.

GIYUS’s increased focus on Iran suggests it sees Israeli and U.S. policy towards Iran as the dominant public diplomacy challenge for Israel, and wants to leverage all networks at its disposal.

For foreign policy addicts, it’s worth it to put Blair’s latest blustering in context.In their Race for Iran Blog, Hillary Mann Leverett and Flynt Leverett pick up on Blair’s assertion to PBS’s Charlie Rose that “you can’t rule out military action” against Iran”. In comparing Blair’s rhetoric to the rest of Europe, they wonder about the continent’s value as a bulwark against yet more potential U.S. misadventures in the Middle East:

That Blair would say these things about Iran does not really surprise us—this is the same man who says that he “can’t regret” the Iraq war.  But we are struck that, while Blair’s position would put him squarely in the middle of the American foreign policy establishment regarding Iran, it is—in principle, at least—quite “un-European”.

Blair seems to advocate—in terms similar to the arguments of John Bolton, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and other Iran “hawks” in the United States—that the United States engage in “preventive war” against Iran because of a perceived risk that it might begin converting its (internationally safeguarded) nuclear activities into a weapons program and, then, give nuclear weapons to terrorists.  (Blair says he believes that, if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would not use it.  Why he doubts Iran would be sufficiently rational to refrain from giving a nuclear weapon to others who would use it is not clear.  But that’s another issue.)  Blair’s “case” for launching a “preventive war” against Iran is certainly not the “mainstream” European declaratory position.  Virtually all of the senior “continental” European officials with whom we’ve spoken agree with us that there is only a diplomatic path for addressing issues connected with the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.  From their perspective, for the United States or Israel to attack Iran because it is enriching uranium would be profoundly counter-productive, imprudent—and illegal.

[...]

That raises a series of questions which, for us, prompt serious doubt about Europe’s capacity to have a genuinely independent foreign policy.  (Interestingly, many of our Iranian interlocutors have already given up on this prospect.)  What would Europe do if Israel and/or the United States were to initiate military action against Iranian nuclear facilities?  Say that the action was illegal?  And then?  How quickly would Europe seek to “make peace” with America after an attack on Iran?

Smith’s pieces wear their ideology on their sleeve to such a degree that it hardly seems necessary to respond (although the Leveretts have, and Matt Duss has also picked the pieces apart). Regarding the Leveretts, I do not personally agree with all of their writings, and many Iran analysts whom I respect have criticized them for underestimating the Green Movement’s prospects of success. Still, their pessimism does provide a needed counterweight to much of the high-flown commentary we see these days claiming that the Islamic Republic will fall tomorrow if only the U.S. strikes the proper heroic pose, and they certainly deserve better than the transparent smear job that Smith produces, which all but accuses them of being Iranian agents of influence. It is quite obvious that the real reason the Leveretts are being targeted by Smith and his cohort is not they are pessimistic about the Green Movement, but rather that they are staunchly opposed to U.S. military action against Iran (which, ironically, is the main issue on which they agree with the Green Movement).

As for the attack on Parsi, it merely marks the continuation of a neoconservative campaign aimed at silencing any insufficiently hawkish Iranian voices. (I previously wrote about the campaign and its architects here, here, and here, among other places.) Like his allies, Smith drops insinuations of dual loyalty in a way that would clearly be deemed anti-Semitic if applied to a Jewish political figure. He also implies that Parsi is thin-skinned or conspiratorial for identifying his antagonists as neoconservatives — but nearly all of the critics Smith cites are, in fact, neocons, from Eli Lake to Michael Rubin to Reuel Marc Gerecht. (See Jim’s post from last week for more on Rubin’s and Gerecht’s recent antics.) Smith mentions Parsi’s award-winning book on the U.S.-Iran relationship, but bases his critique of the book entirely on reviews in Commentary and Daniel Pipes‘s Middle East Quarterly (the latter of which was written by — no surprise — Michael Rubin). Smith does quote a couple Iranians, one of whom, Hassan Daioleslam, is currently involved in a defamation lawsuit with Parsi and has already been dealt with extensively here. Multiple knowledgeable sources have identified Daioleslam as an associate of the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK) terrorist group, but he has become the Iranian face of an anti-NIAC campaign driven primarily by Washington neoconservatives. Another Iranian cited in the article, Pooya Dayanim, is an ardent regime change advocate and contributor to National Review Online.

Among the ironies of Smith’s article: he more or less accuses Parsi and the Leveretts of being Iranian agents, while relying heavily on Michael Rubin, a longtime shill for actual Iranian intelligence asset Ahmed Chalabi. He argues (against all evidence) that Parsi only shifted to a pro-human-rights stance in the wake of this summer’s Iranian election crisis, while taking anti-Parsi talking points from a magazine published by Daniel Pipes, who notoriously endorsed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prior to the June elections. (Unsurprisingly, Pipes has written a glowing review of Smith’s new book, the basic message of which — as Matt Duss correctly notes — is the familiar claim that Arabs only understand force.) He accuses Parsi and the Leveretts of indifference to the lives and wishes of the Iranian people, while sharing an institutional home with the likes of Norman “Bomb Iran” Podhoretz. And so on.

While Smith’s pieces are predictable pieces of neocon agitprop, the venue in which they were published is more interesting. Tablet is one of the new breed of Jewish cultural journals and websites that have sprung up in recent years, aiming to offer what it calls “a new read on Jewish life” more in tune with the sensibilities of the younger generation. Like its peers Jewcy and Heeb, Tablet is relentlessly progressive in its sensibility and politics — at least as far as domestic politics are concerned.

But foreign policy is another matter; insofar as the magazine offers political coverage of Israel and the Middle East, it is relentlessly conventional and nearly always hawkish. (Nearly all of their foreign policy articles are written by hawks of either the liberal or neocon variety — Adam Kirsch, Seth Lipsky, and Michael Weiss, etc.) Smith’s pieces, which could have been ripped from the Weekly Standard or Commentary, are, sadly, par for the course.

I suspect a lot of this has to do with money. Several people who have personal experience with Tablet and its predecessor, Nextbook, have told me that the group’s funders are both significantly older and more right-wing than the rest of the operation — a common pattern in such organizations. Hence the tendency to delegate all discussion of Israel to the hawks, in order to keep the funders satisfied. But while this sort of compromise might be necessitated by internal politics, it has clearly had a destructive intellectual effect on the magazine’s content. It’s hard to provide “a new read on Jewish life” when all discussion of Israel and foreign policy as a whole is confined within the narrow limits deemed acceptable by the right.