AEI scholar Michael Rubin recently took to the blog of the neoconservative flagship Commentary and attacked Tehran Bureau, an excellent resource on all things Iran, for linking to what he called “fake biographies of conservatives,” which, he suggested, warranted a Congressional investigation. His reference was to profiles on the website Right [...]]]>
AEI scholar Michael Rubin recently took to the blog of the neoconservative flagship Commentary and attacked Tehran Bureau, an excellent resource on all things Iran, for linking to what he called “fake biographies of conservatives,” which, he suggested, warranted a Congressional investigation. His reference was to profiles on the website Right Web (RW), a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive DC think tank.
If Right Web sounds familiar to our readers, that’s because we often link to RW profiles. In fact, though he never mentioned it, the two Tehran Bureau articles with RW links Rubin mentioned were written by us (one by Ali on his own; the other co-authored). We’ve also both contributed to RW’s illuminating features section (that’s called disclosure, kids). Needless to say, we think RW is a useful website and a valuable resource.
Rubin, obviously, does not share our view. In his post, he wrote:
Someone at [PBS's] Frontline website has been substituting fake biographies of conservatives written by an organization called Right Web for legitimate institutional biographies.
That someone, of course, is us. Rubin‘s feigned ignorance of our work is comical. He’s raised his objections of our coverage in person before at an AEI event, asserting to Ali that he was not an “Iran hawk,” and, while researching an article last November, Ali e-mailed Rubin with an interview request to which he replied:
Ali, the more you link to Right Web, the less you have credibility as a journalist. I’ll pass.
Rubin appears to have been waging a private jihad against RW for some time. In his initial Commentary post, Rubin cited a 2009 correspondence with RW’s director, Michael Flynn (Rubin refers to him as the “editor”). The actual correspondence, which RW reprinted on its website, demonstrates that Rubin mischaracterized Flynn’s response to an inquiry. (The e-mails contained this lovely rebuttal to Rubin‘s objection to being called an ‘Iran hawk’: “In our humble opinion, suggesting assassinating a country’s leader is tantamount to attacking that country.”)
RW rightly called Rubin‘s attacks “smears” against the website. The profiles are all fully sourced and based on publicly available news clips. And they were hardly “substitut(ed)” for “legitimate institutional biographies.” In a letter to the editors of Commentary (which Flynn reproduced in an article on Right Web after Commentary failed to respond to his queries), Flynn wrote that RW profiles
do not attempt to be comprehensive, nor do they try to mislead readers into thinking that they are somehow “official” biographies. At the top of each profile we state, “Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.”
Again, that statement is at the top of every single RW profile.
A few days after Rubin‘s attack, Tehran Bureau appended an editor’s note to the two pieces Rubin mentioned. Part of the note read:
After reviewing the matter, we find that the biographies on the Right Web site are not at all fake or fabricated, and seem to be well-sourced.
Rubin, predictably, threw a hissy fit in a second Commentary post:
That the editors at PBS Frontline are unable to differentiate between assertions of opinion on hard-left blogs and fact-checked news sources suggests an unfortunate lack of judgment and professionalism and an organization undeserving of tax-payer subsidy.
By way of an example, Rubin attempts to deconstruct the RW page for the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a short-lived and controversial outfit in George W. Bush’s Defense Department that was widely criticized as a nexus of neoconservative ideologues who selectively spread intelligence to the White House and the press in order to build a case for war against Iraq.
Rubin attacks the integrity of Robert Dreyfuss, a veteran national-security reporter for the The Nation whose work is cited in the RW profile of OSP. Rubin, as he always does, dredged up Dreyfuss’ past work for controversial conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine. That bit is true, but Dreyfuss long, long ago disassociated himself from the LaRouchie scene, and has since distinguished himself as an excellent reporter on U.S. foreign policy.
Rubin goes on to attack a retired air force officer and whistle blower; impugns the credibility of legendary investigative reporter Sy Hersh (because of one admittedly bizarre speech); and cites a Pentagon Inspector General report that he claims exonerated OSP and officials involved therein. The IG report actually states that the OSP was not directly involved in the intel scandals that provoked the investigation, but rather had become a generic term to refer to the work of the Office of the then-Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, led by Douglas Feith, whose intel work the IG characterized as “inappropriate” and misleading. Rubin, of course, does not mention these rather important and relevant findings, which are, however, mentioned in Feith’s RW profile).
Rubin criticizes our piece in Tehran Bureau for asserting that Pentagon analyst Harold Rhode “worked in the” OSP, an assertion we actually never made. We wrote that he had been “involved with” OSP’s work, as has been widely reported and as one would expect given his very close and long-standing ties with Richard Perle who helped Feith get his job. (Feith’s son, David, currently an assistant editorial features editor at — surprise! — the Wall Street Journal, helped Perle and David Frum research their 2003 neo-conservative classic, An End to Evil when he was still in high school, according to the book’s acknowledgments.
Does it sound like Rubin is doing more than looking out for the integrity of news sources that receive federal assistance? It should: He’s actually defending his career. What Rubin omits, and as his actual institutional biography and RW page demonstrate, is that he in fact worked in the Defense Department at the time. He was closely associated with other ideological neoconservatives involved with OSP who have been blamed for misleading Americans on the Iraqi threat (WMD’s and Al Qaeda ties) and worked as a political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority. The latter was the U.S. occupation government in the early days of Iraq, at the time when the U.S. mismanaged the situation there and missed — or selectively didn’t report to the U.S. public — the rising signs of the deadly impending sectarian violence and eventual civil war. With a track record like that, perhaps one can’t blame Rubin for highly selective disclosure (‘Heckuva job, Rubin‘).
Lastly, Rubin takes a shot at RW director Michael Flynn’s CV:
Let’s hope that the editors of PBS Frontline never fact-check the editor of Right Web’s claim that he has published in the Washington Post because neither LEXIS-NEXIS nor WashingtonPost.com seem to have any record of any such article.
That’s funny: We’re not even ‘scholars’ at any institution (let alone under the tutelage of Danielle Pletka), and yet, through cunning research skills, we were able to quickly search the Post‘s website and turned up an abstract of Flynn’s 2005 article. (If Rubin wants to read the whole thing without paying, he can find a copy here — or get a new research assistant.)
Not only did Michael Rubin’s government service coincide with the run-up to and botched execution of the Iraq occupation, and not only does his research acumen leave something to be desired, but he’s also proven himself a less than stellar military analyst. When he was still vigorously boosting Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, Rubin was a early, vociferous and persistent critic of Gen. David Petraeus’s attempts to co-opt the Sunni insurgency. What Rubin denounced as “appeasement” — as opposed to the now-discredited “deBaathification” pushed by Chalabi and his neoconservative allies at Rubin’s and Perle’s American Enterprise Institute — turns out to have salvaged the war. Over his opposition, the Petraeus-led table-turning made the general a hero among Rubin’s ideological comrades.
His attacks on Tehran Bureau, Right Web and us are only the latest chapters of a less-than-sparkling career in punditry for Michael Rubin. Despite calling for a Congressional investigation into PBS’s linking to Right Web profiles and an end to PBS’s federal funding, Rubin fails to show how any of the profiles are “fake” or “conspiracy-riddled.”
Rubin’s blog posts attacking our articles and RW are indicative of the sensitivity that he must feel, along, we would imagine, with many of his colleagues, over RW’s well-sourced and factual descriptions of neoconservatives’ (including Rubin’s) and other militarists’ careers in both the public and private sectors.
Michael Rubin‘s own career suggests misjudgment after misjudgment. And yet, he’s calling for a Congressional investigation into a news outlet based on their sources. If Rubin were to better explain and own up to some of his dubious contributions to U.S. foreign policy over the last decade — as outlined in his RW profile — instead of sweeping them under the rug, his criticisms might hold more weight.
]]>During the recent upheavals across the Greater Middle East, the various iterations of the neoconservative line—the optimistic [...]]]>
During the recent upheavals across the Greater Middle East, the various iterations of the neoconservative line—the optimistic pro-democracy, the paranoid Islamophobic, or the brazen combination of both—have all tended to share a single major fallacy: that the opposition movement in Iran, the so-called Green movement, is a movement that seeks the same goals as neoconservatives and their allies. This central premise presumes a number of unsupportable notions, including that the Green movement seeks to abolish the Islamic Republic, opposes the Iranian nuclear program, and wants to overhaul Iranian foreign policy.
Jack also observes:
Newtonian physics suffices to explain why Iran is poised to fill the vacuum created by an increasingly and inevitably receding U.S. presence in the region. It is also true this has made Iran a natural candidate for American superpower anxiety. Iran is the civilization that invented both chess and backgammon—they know how to play the long game and they have been doing it masterfully for some time. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be crazy, but he is also crazy like a fox. His dalliances with holocaust denial and other affronts to liberal piety would appear to demonstrate that he knows how to play the West, and especially the neocons, like a violin.
Seen in this light, the neoconservative tendency to reject reason and embrace a fabulous version of the Green movement seems a mere byproduct of Iran’s success at making itself into a bête noire of its adversaries in Israel and the West—which may even be a strategic goal of the Islamic Republic. And since much of the U.S. political elite shares this same malady, it allows the Iran opposition fiction to go unchallenged.
Read the rest of Jack’s post here.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>McConnell, in an article for Right Web, traces the Tea Party’s foreign policy pronouncements back to Sarah [...]]]>
McConnell, in an article for Right Web, traces the Tea Party’s foreign policy pronouncements back to Sarah Palin and her close relationship with neoconservative heavyweight Bill Kristol. Kristol, as described by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, “discovered” Palin the summer before John McCain put her on the Republican national ticket.
McConnell writes:
McCain enlisted influential neoconservative Randy Scheunemann as a policy advisor, and in turn Scheunemann brought on Steve Biegun as her chief foreign policy staffer. Palin’s previous foreign policy pronouncements had been vague and scattered, but she became an eager student. She made hawkish noises during the campaign: while she spoke more loosely than expected about the possibility of war with Russia, she forthrightly supported an Israeli strike on Iran. Despite efforts by paleoconservatives to reach out to her and provide some counterinfluence, she stayed on message—which would have considerable significance as she became a political star in her own right.
Palin has continued to hit neoconservative talking points even while the Tea Party movement has, at times, called for cuts in government spending and rejected the Bush administration’s military adventurism.
McConnell observes:
She reliably echoes neoconservative talking points about war with Iran. When addressing the Tea Party Convention in Nashville last February, she hit neocon talking points by citing Ronald Reagan, “peace through strength,” and “tough action” against Iran.
And
Wearing an Israeli flag pin, she charged that President Obama was causing “Israel, our critical ally” to question our support by reaching out to hostile regimes.
But Palin’s apparent willingness to uphold Bush’s “freedom agenda” of spreading democracy has not always been received with enthusiasm by Tea Party audiences who embrace small-government.
McConnell writes:
Even David Frum, the prominent neoconservative writer and Iraq war enthusiast who has expressed deep skepticism regarding Palin and the Tea Party, praised the foreign policy segments of her speech, claiming that she sounded as “somebody who knew something of what he or she was talking about.” Live blogging her talk, Frum tellingly observed that Tea Partiers sat on their hands during these segments: “Interesting—no applause for sanctions on Iran. No applause for Palin’s speculation that democracies keep the peace.”
While Tea Party members are, understandably, skeptical of the benefits of “nation building,” neoconservatives such as Frank Gaffney have capitalized on the movement’s nativist leanings by hyping the threat of “creeping Shariah.” Islamophobic fear mongering has proven itself a more effective tool for bringing, otherwise isolationist, Tea Partiers behind the neoconservative’s foreign policy.
And besides, a militarist foreign policy is far less expensive—dare I say “more fiscally responsible”?—if the nation building is cut from the budget.
McConnell writes:
]]>Asked at a recent Washington forum whether the new Congress would support or oppose an attack on Iran, Colin Dueck, author of Hard Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World War ll, quipped that if you do air strikes you don’t have to do nation building. In this sense, the budget constraints which Tea Party candidates worry about may be much less a barrier to near term neoconservative foreign policy ambitions than might be imagined.