Instead of highlighting the differences between some neocons and the Israeli right, Ross focuses [...]]]>
Instead of highlighting the differences between some neocons and the Israeli right, Ross focuses on the way neoconservatives try to have it both ways: promoting democracy (taking credit for Egypt as a after-effect of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq) and staunchly opposing figures like Mohammed ElBaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood. The contrast is between the “freedom crowd” and the “Islamophobes.”
Ross:
What accounts for this divide in neoconservative discourse? Nuances abound to be sure. For instance, while the case of Leon Wieseltier seems to be a horrified response to the fear that the Egyptian revolution bodes ill for Israel, a deeper pathology seems to be at work with the doctrinaire neoconservatives clustered around Commentary magazine. In a curious legacy of neoconservatism’s roots in Trotskyism, the neocon core seems to be characterized by a pathological insistence upon its internationalism, which leads them to their insistence that they are in fact witnessing the birth of a global democratic revolution. This also, it should be noted, seems to supersede any petty scores to be settled in defense of the Bush administration. Dana Perino amply covered that ground on Fox News, even to the point of embracing the Muslim Brotherhood.
On the other hand, the Anti-Islamist Scare that has gained full steam since the election of Obama appears to be a completely distinct phenomenon from historic neoconservatism, notwithstanding how opportunistically it has been embraced by figures like Bill Kristol and the Liz Cheney-led Keep America Safe. It is a phenomenon straight from the pages of Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style In American Politics. Whereas Hofstadter famously pointed to projection in the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan who “donned priestly vestments and constructed an elaborate hierarchy and ritual,” the backlash against the so-called Ground Zero Mosque—with its frank talk of “sacred ground”—reflected the desire to construct an American holy of holies.
Examining this same divergence, Daniel Luban has a similar article up at IPS. He explores the evolution of neoconservatism on democracy promotion, which brings the current divide into focus and hints at some disingenuousness among the ‘pro-democracy’ crowd. (Elliott Abrams, Dan notes, supported undemocratic regimes in Latin America when the region was in his portfolio during the Reagan administration.)
Luban (with my links):
“The U.S. should make clear in an unambiguous way that a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt is a danger to American interests and could even lead to American intervention,” David Wurmser, former Vice President Dick Cheney‘s senior Middle East [adviser], told the “Forward”, the largest-circulation Jewish weekly, Thursday.
This ambivalence among neo-conservatives over Egypt may reflect a deeper ambivalence over democracy promotion. Both neo-conservatives and their critics often portray democracy promotion as the central tenet of the movement, but the historical record undercuts this portrayal.
The early tone of the movement regarding foreign policy was set by Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1979 essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which argued for supporting “friendly” authoritarian governments against their left-wing enemies. Kirkpatrick’s vision helped guide neo-conservative foreign policy throughout the 1980s, when neo-conservatives – notably including Elliott Abrams – helped prop up or defend military dictatorships throughout Latin America, and even apartheid South Africa, as Cold War allies against the Soviet Union.
While the movement became more explicitly committed to democracy promotion in recent decades, its democratisation efforts have unsurprisingly been far more focused on hostile, rather than friendly, regimes – left-wing governments during the Cold War; more recently, governments that are seen as antagonistic to either the U.S. or Israel.
When elections have brought enemies rather than allies into power – as occurred in 2006 when Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections – neo-conservatives have been among the first to call for punitive actions.
Thus, when John Bolton, the hawkish former U.S. ambassador to the UN, cited Jeane Kirkpatrick in a Thursday interview with Politico to argue that the U.S. should support Mubarak, he could stake a claim to being as much the legitimate heir of neo-conservatism as the anti-Mubarak neo-conservatives themselves.
I’m still figuring this all out for myself, but these two commentaries are certainly helpful. (I’m traveling next week, but hopefully will have time to blog some of my developing ideas.)
But I will note that on the point of Dan’s original post — the split between Israel and the neocons — I do view with skepticism some commentaries (most of which come from neocons) that tout the narrative of: ‘Look! Neocons are not in the thrall of the Likud.’ (As a rule, because of his history of dissembling, I take anything Abrams writes with a grain of salt.)
This line, from the horse’s mouth, is attacking a straw man. We neocon-watchers at this site, at least, have never said that U.S. neoconservatives take marching orders from Likud, but rather that neocons are closely aligned with the rightist Israeli party.
Furthermore, if a Democrat criticizes something done by the Democratic Party (as happens quite regularly), it would be specious to say, ‘Look! She is not a Democrat at all!’
Likewise, I don’t think that neocons are a monolith, and this split between them reveals so much because it is public, whereas neocons, a politically adept group, have usually displayed great messaging discipline.
Nonetheless, the neoconservative disagreements on this issue (both among themselves and with Likud) seem to show that the upheaval in Egypt is coming home to the U.S. discourse on Middle East policy. Here’s hoping the shift is productive.
]]>In the wake of the backlash, Cheney’s defenders seem to have decided to drop their original allegations that the DOJ lawyers were active al-Qaeda sympathizers (the clear upshot of the ad’s question “whose values do they share?”) and instead portray the controversy as a mere transparency issue. It’s not that they are accusing the DOJ lawyers of being a pro-Qaeda fifth column, the Keep America Safe crowd now tells us, but simply that they think the public has a right to know that backgrounds of all government officials.
If Keep America Safe was hoping to moderate its image, however, Andy McCarthy didn’t get the memo. The former prosecutor and frequent National Review Online contributor (also a fellow at the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies) weighed in on Saturday, writing that “I believe many of the attorneys who volunteered their services to al Qaeda were, in fact, pro-Qaeda or, at the very least, pro-Islamist”. He later softens the accusation slightly, suggesting that “the relevant question with respect to progressive lawyers is not so much whether they are pro-Qaeda as it is whether, as between Islamists and the U.S. as it exists, they have more sympathy for the Islamists.” On the contrary, I would think that the question of whether the U.S. Department of Justice is “pro-Qaeda” is in fact highly relevant.
This is, of course, not the first time that McCarthy has wandered off the reservation. As National Review has attempted in recent months to impose some semblance of intellectual standards, and purge the outright nutters and conspiracy theorists from the “respectable” right, McCarthy’s colleagues have frequently been forced to scold him publicly for indulging in tropes from the lunatic fringe. (I’ve recounted some of McCarthy’s exploits here and here.)
In October 2008, at the height of the presidential campaign, McCarthy penned the all-time classic “Did Obama Write “Dreams from My Father” … Or Did Ayers?,” which suggested that former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers may have been the real author of Obama’s first book. This forced fellow NRO contributor Jonathan Adler to remark that McCarthy’s accusations were “outlandish” and “nutter-territory stuff”. In June 2009, in the wake of Iran’s post-election crisis, McCarthy suggested that Obama was intentionally siding with Khamenei and Ahmadinejad against the protesters, because “as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.” He speculated that Obama’s first choice would have been to “issue a statement supportive of the mullahs,” but because this was politically impossible he settled for “the next best thing: to say nothing supportive of the freedom fighters.” This prompted National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry to step in and tersely dismiss McCarthy’s allegations.
The kicker came in July 2009, after National Review published an editorial attempting to squelch the “birther” phenomenon once and for all. While the editors were likely hoping to increase their respectability by silencing the far right (just as magazine founder Bill Buckley famously expelled the John Birch Society from the mainstream conservative movement), McCarthy quickly put to rest any hopes that the birthers would go quietly into the night. McCarthy responded with a long critique of the editorial. As I wrote in July:
While conceding the craziness of the allegation that Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate was a fake, McCarthy raised a host of new allegations against the president. These include, in no particular order: that Obama was secretly adopted by his mother’s second husband; that he was a secret Muslim in his youth (although McCarthy concedes that he is now a “professed” Christian); that he was (and remains) an Indonesian citizen; that he made a “mysterious” trip to Pakistan in his youth; that he intervened in the 2006 Kenyan election in an attempt to install “a Marxist now known to have made a secret agreement with Islamists to convert Kenya to sharia law”; finally, that his pitching abilities mark him as “something less than Sandy Koufax.”
This time, it was NRO contributor Kevin Williamson’s turn to step in and try to talk sense into McCarthy; he accused McCarthy of making common cause with “kooks…[who] engage in intemperate, paranoid, hysterical speculation, and not always from the best of motives.”
Somehow, I doubt if McCarthy’s latest intervention is going to do much to help Keep America Safe’s sagging fortunes. The real questions: when will the right stop treating him as its go-to guy for stories related to detainee policy, and when will mainstream media outlets like the New York Times stop treating him as a credible source? The Times ran a lengthy profile of McCarthy in February which contained no mention of its the man’s history of nutty statements — a history that makes clear that he is, to be perfectly blunt, a crank.
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