Hey, I find it equally distasteful that Powell and Rice serve them. But I don't hold it against anyone for pointing out, and examining the significance of, their ethnic background.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.


llevitt wrote:

> You call it an "ethnic political phenomenon," and those involved "a political clique . . . formulating policies and scheming in those regions," and fulminate over the fact that there happen to be some Jews, as discussed by Lieber, who have become neo-cons and have gravitated toward the Bush administration. Their political background certainly is relevant, for it points up the continuity of their dissonance from the majority of American Jews. Personally, I find it distasteful that those named have been serving the purposes of the Bush administration with such diligence; but as pointed out, they are certainly not the source of the policies (read right-wing Christian fundamentalist, a far larger, more influential, and more powerful political force, albeit not "ethnic"). Moreover,  they have every right -- however misguided -- to do so.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>   From: John Woodford
>   To: [log in to unmask]
>   Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2003 3:39 PM
>   Subject: Re: [CHOMSKY] Fw: Chronicle article: The Neoconservative-ConspiracyTheory:Pure Myth
>
>   This article is hardly a rebuttal. More like "white propaganda," albeit sophomoric in its flimsy logic.
>    The ethinc political phenomenon re Bush policy is there to be seen and analyzed, just as one would the
>   attempts to tilt toward Pakisan, Turkey, Miamia gusanos and so on have been analyzed when a poiltical
>   clique is formulating policies and scheming in those regions.
>     The issue has nothing to do with how empty a vessel Bush is compared with a Tsarina or what the
>   heritage of Chomsky or other anti-administration vooices may be. Or what the ethnic make-up of the top
>   offiicals is. All irrelevant.
>
>   llevitt wrote:
>
>   > F. Leon and others ought to read this article; it is opportune to have appeared at this very moment.
>   >
>   > This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
>   > (http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from:
>   >
>   >   [log in to unmask]
>   >
>   > The following message was enclosed:
>   >   neocon-conspiracy - a myth
>   >
>   > _________________________________________________________________
>   >
>   > This article is available online at this address:
>   >
>   > http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i34/34b01401.htm
>   >
>   >               - The text of the article is below -
>   > _________________________________________________________________
>   > _____________________________________________________________
>   >
>   >     The Neoconservative-Conspiracy Theory: Pure Myth
>   >
>   >   By ROBERT J. LIEBER   The ruins of Saddam Hussein's shattered tyranny may provide
>   >   additional evidence of chemical weapons and other weapons of
>   >   mass destruction, but one poisonous by-product has already
>   >   begun to seep from under the rubble. It is a conspiracy theory
>   >   purporting to explain how the foreign policy of the world's
>   >   greatest power, the United States, has been captured by a
>   >   sinister and hitherto little-known cabal.
>   >
>   >   A small band of neoconservative (read, Jewish) defense
>   >   intellectuals, led by the "mastermind," Deputy Secretary of
>   >   Defense Paul Wolfowitz (according to Michael Lind, writing in
>   >   the New Statesman), has taken advantage of 9/11 to put their
>   >   ideas over on an ignorant, inexperienced, and "easily
>   >   manipulated" president (Eric Alterman in The Nation), his
>   >   "elderly figurehead" Defense Secretary (as Lind put it), and
>   >   the "dutiful servant of power" who is our secretary of state
>   >   (Edward Said, London Review of Books).
>   >
>   >   Thus empowered, this neoconservative conspiracy, "a product of
>   >   the influential Jewish-American faction of the Trotskyist
>   >   movement of the '30s and '40s" (Lind), with its own "fanatic"
>   >   and "totalitarian morality" (William Pfaff, International
>   >   Herald Tribune) has fomented war with Iraq -- not in the
>   >   interest of the United States, but in the service of Israel's
>   >   Likud government (Patrick J. Buchanan and Alterman).
>   >
>   >   This sinister mythology is worthy of the Iraqi information
>   >   minister, Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who became notorious for
>   >   telling Western journalists not to believe their own eyes as
>   >   American tanks rolled into view just across the Tigris River.
>   >   And indeed versions of it do circulate in the Arab world. (For
>   >   example, a prominent Saudi professor from King Faisal
>   >   University, Umaya Jalahma, speaking at a prestigious think
>   >   tank of the Arab League, has revealed that the U.S. attack on
>   >   Iraq was actually timed to coincide with the Jewish holiday of
>   >   Purim.) But the neocon-conspiracy notion is especially
>   >   conspicuous in writing by leftist authors in the pages of
>   >   journals like The Washington Monthly and those cited above, as
>   >   well as in the arguments of paleoconservatives like Buchanan
>   >   and his magazine, The American Conservative.
>   >
>   >   Many of those who disseminate the new theory had strenuously
>   >   opposed war with Iraq and predicted dire consequences in the
>   >   event American forces were to invade. The critics had warned
>   >   of such things as massive resistance by the Iraqi military and
>   >   people, a quagmire on the order of Vietnam, Saddam's use of
>   >   weapons of mass destruction (though some of the same voices
>   >   loudly questioned whether Iraq had such weapons at all), Scud
>   >   missile attacks that would draw Israel into the fray,
>   >   destruction of Iraq's oil fields (thus creating an ecological
>   >   catastrophe), and an inflamed and radicalized Middle East in
>   >   which moderate governments would be overthrown by an enraged
>   >   Arab street.
>   >
>   >   Authors disparaged the notion that the Iraqi people could ever
>   >   welcome coalition forces as liberators. In words dripping with
>   >   sarcasm, Eric Alterman asked readers of The Nation, "Is
>   >   Wolfowitz really so ignorant of history as to believe the
>   >   Iraqis would welcome us as 'their hoped-for liberators'?" And
>   >   the inimitable Edward Said, writing in the London Review of
>   >   Books, offered a scathing denunciation not only of Wolfowitz
>   >   but of such apostates as Fouad Ajami, the Iraqi exile author
>   >   Kanan Makiya, and the exile opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi
>   >   for their "rubbish" and "falsifying of reality" in selling the
>   >   administration a bill of goods about a quick war. Instead,
>   >   Said asserted, "The idea that Iraq's population would have
>   >   welcomed American forces entering the country after a
>   >   terrifying aerial bombardment was always utterly implausible."
>   >
>   >   One of the less fevered explanations, as offered by Joshua
>   >   Micah Marshall in the April Washington Monthly, asserts that
>   >   the invasion of Iraq was not primarily about eliminating
>   >   Saddam Hussein, "nor was it really about weapons of mass
>   >   destruction." Instead, Marshall presents the war as the
>   >   administration's "first move in a wider effort to reorder the
>   >   power structure of the entire Middle East."
>   >
>   >   But more extreme versions of the argument are readily
>   >   available. For example, Alterman writes that "the war has put
>   >   Jews in the showcase as never before. Its primary intellectual
>   >   architects -- Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle (former aide to
>   >   Senator Henry M. 'Scoop' Jackson; assistant secretary of
>   >   defense in the Reagan administration; now a member of the
>   >   Defense Policy Board, an unpaid body advising Secretary of
>   >   Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld), and Douglas J. Feith (the No. 3
>   >   official at Defense) -- are all Jewish neoconservatives. So,
>   >   too, are many of its prominent media cheerleaders, including
>   >   William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Marty Peretz. Joe
>   >   Lieberman, the nation's most conspicuous Jewish politician,
>   >   has been an avid booster."
>   >
>   >   Alterman adds, "Then there's the 'Jews control the media'
>   >   problem. ... Many of these same Jews joined Secretary Rumsfeld
>   >   and Vice President Richard B. Cheney in underselling the
>   >   difficulty of the war, in what may have been a deliberate ruse
>   >   designed to embroil America in a broad military conflagration
>   >   that would help smite Israel's enemies."
>   >
>   >   Michael Lind's language is more overtly conspiratorial. In an
>   >   essay appearing in London's New Statesman and in Salon, after
>   >   dismissing the columnist Robert Kagan as a "neoconservative
>   >   propagandist," Lind confides the "alarming" truth that "the
>   >   foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made
>   >   by a small clique." They are "neoconservative defense
>   >   intellectuals," among whom he cites Wolfowitz; Feith; Lewis
>   >   Libby, Cheney's chief of staff; John Bolton at the State
>   >   Department; and Elliott Abrams on the National Security
>   >   Council.
>   >
>   >   Most of these, we are told, have their roots on the left and
>   >   are "products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist
>   >   movement of the 1930s and '40s, which morphed into
>   >   anti-communist liberalism" and now "into a kind of
>   >   militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American
>   >   culture or political history." Lind complains that in their
>   >   "odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for 'democracy,'" they
>   >   "call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism,' ... but it
>   >   is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled
>   >   with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism." Along with the
>   >   Kristol-led Weekly Standard and allies such as Vice President
>   >   Cheney, "these neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and
>   >   inexperience."
>   >
>   >   Lind's speculation that the president may not even be aware of
>   >   what this cabal has foisted upon him embodies the hallmarks of
>   >   conspiratorial reasoning. In his words, "It is not clear that
>   >   George W. fully understands the grand strategy that Wolfowitz
>   >   and other aides are unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe
>   >   that there was an imminent threat to the U.S. from Saddam
>   >   Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction,' something the leading
>   >   neocons say in public but are far too intelligent to believe
>   >   themselves."
>   >
>   >   Those themes are echoed at the opposite end of the political
>   >   spectrum, in The American Conservative, where the embattled
>   >   remnants of an old isolationist and reactionary conservatism
>   >   can be found. Buchanan, the magazine's editor, targets the
>   >   neoconservatives, alleging that they have hijacked the
>   >   conservative movement and that they seek "to conscript
>   >   American blood to make the world safe for Israel."
>   >
>   >   Even in its less fevered forms, the neocon-conspiracy theory
>   >   does not provide a coherent analysis of American foreign
>   >   policy. More to the point, especially among the more extreme
>   >   versions, there are conspicuous manifestations of classic
>   >   anti-Semitism: claims that a small, all-powerful but
>   >   little-known group or "cabal" of Jewish masterminds is
>   >   secretly manipulating policy; that they have dual loyalty to a
>   >   foreign power; that this cabal combines ideological opposites
>   >   (right-wingers with a Trotskyist legacy, echoing classic
>   >   anti-Semitic tropes linking Jews to both international
>   >   capitalism and international communism); that our official
>   >   leaders are too ignorant, weak, or naive to grasp what is
>   >   happening; that the foreign policy upon which our country is
>   >   now embarked runs counter to, or is even subversive of,
>   >   American national interest; and that if readers only paid
>   >   close attention to what the author is saying, they would share
>   >   the same sense of alarm.
>   >
>   >   A dispassionate dissection of the neocon-conspiracy arguments
>   >   is not difficult to undertake. For one thing, the Bush
>   >   administration actually has very few Jews in senior policy
>   >   positions and none among the very top foreign-policy decision
>   >   makers: the president, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of
>   >   State Colin L. Powell, Secretary Rumsfeld, and National
>   >   Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- all of whom are
>   >   Protestants. (British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the most
>   >   influential non-American, is also Protestant.)
>   >
>   >   But even identifying policy makers in this way carries the
>   >   insidious implication that religious affiliation by itself is
>   >   all-controlling. In reality, Americans of all persuasions have
>   >   exhibited deep differences about foreign policy and war with
>   >   Iraq. Before the war, public-opinion polls consistently showed
>   >   Jews about as divided as the public at large, or even slightly
>   >   less in favor of the war, and Jewish intellectual and
>   >   political figures could be found in both pro- and antiwar
>   >   camps. For example, the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, the
>   >   professor and author Eliot Cohen of the Johns Hopkins
>   >   University, and Senator Lieberman of Connecticut supported the
>   >   president, while opposition came from a range of voices,
>   >   including the radically anti-American Noam Chomsky, of the
>   >   Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the moderate-left
>   >   philosopher Michael Walzer, of the Institute for Advanced
>   >   Study in Princeton, N.J.; Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan; and a
>   >   bevy of leftist Berkeley and New York intellectuals -- Rabbi
>   >   Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine; Norman Mailer;
>   >   Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University; and
>   >   many others.
>   >
>   >   More to the point, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice are
>   >   among the most experienced, tough-minded, and strong-willed
>   >   foreign-policy makers in at least a generation, and the
>   >   conspiracy theory fails utterly to take into account their own
>   >   assessments of American grand strategy in the aftermath of
>   >   9/11.
>   >
>   >   The theory also wrongly presumes that Bush himself is an empty
>   >   vessel, a latter-day equivalent of Czarina Alexandra, somehow
>   >   fallen under the influence of Wolfowitz/Rasputin.
>   >   Condescension toward Bush has been a hallmark of liberal and
>   >   leftist discourse ever since the disputed 2000 presidential
>   >   election, and there can be few readers of this publication who
>   >   have not heard conversations about the president that did not
>   >   begin with offhand dismissals of him as "stupid," a "cowboy,"
>   >   or worse. An extreme version of this thinking, and even the
>   >   demonization of Bush, can be found in the latest musings of
>   >   Edward Said, as quoted in Al-Ahram Weekly: "In fact, I and
>   >   others are convinced that Bush will try to negate the 2004
>   >   elections: We're dealing with a putschist, conspiratorial,
>   >   paranoid deviation that's very anti-democratic." That kind of
>   >   disparagement has left critics ill prepared to think
>   >   analytically about the administration or the foreign-policy
>   >   imperatives facing the United States after 9/11.
>   >
>   >   Whether one favors or opposes the Bush policies, the former
>   >   Texas governor has proved himself to be an effective wartime
>   >   leader. The Bush Doctrine, as expressed in the president's
>   >   January 2002 State of the Union address ("the United States of
>   >   America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to
>   >   threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons") and
>   >   the September 2002 document on national-security strategy set
>   >   out an ambitious grand strategy in response to the combined
>   >   perils of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
>   >
>   >   Reactions to the doctrine have been mixed. Some foreign-policy
>   >   analysts have been critical, especially of the idea of
>   >   pre-emption and the declared policy of preventing the rise of
>   >   any hostile great-power competitor, while others (for example,
>   >   John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University) have provided a more
>   >   positive assessment. But the doctrine has certainly not been
>   >   concealed from the public, and the president and his
>   >   foreign-policy team have spoken repeatedly of its elements and
>   >   implications. While Bush's February 2003 speech to the
>   >   American Enterprise Institute, in which he articulated a
>   >   vision for a free and democratic Middle East, has been
>   >   criticized as excessively Wilsonian, its key themes echo those
>   >   found in the widely circulated Arab Human Development Report
>   >   2002, written by a group of Arab economists for the United
>   >   Nations Development Program, which decried Arab-world deficits
>   >   in regard to freedom, knowledge, and the role of women.
>   >
>   >   Partisanship aside, the president has shown himself to be
>   >   independent and decisive, able to weigh competing advice from
>   >   his top officials before deciding how to act. In August of
>   >   last year, for example, he sided with Secretary of State
>   >   Powell over the initial advice of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and
>   >   Cheney in opting to seek a U.N. Security Council resolution on
>   >   Iraq. Powell's own February 5 speech to the Security Council
>   >   was a compelling presentation of the administration's case
>   >   against Iraq, and well before the outbreak of the war, Powell
>   >   made clear his view that the use of force had become
>   >   unavoidable.
>   >
>   >   Conspiracy theorists are also naive in expressing anxieties
>   >   that the Defense Department may sometimes be at odds with
>   >   State or the National Security Council over policy. Political
>   >   scientists and historians have long described policy making as
>   >   an "invitation to struggle," and Richard E. Neustadt's classic
>   >   work Presidential Power characterized the ultimate resource of
>   >   the presidency as the power to persuade. Franklin D. Roosevelt
>   >   deliberately played his advisers against one another, the
>   >   Nixon presidency saw Henry Kissinger successfully undercut
>   >   Secretary of State William P. Rogers, and the Carter and
>   >   Reagan presidencies were also conspicuous for the struggles
>   >   between their national security advisers and secretaries of
>   >   state. In short, competing views among presidential
>   >   foreign-policy advisers are typical of most administrations.
>   >
>   >   Nor is Bush's support for Israel somehow a sign of
>   >   manipulation. From the time of Harry Truman's decision to
>   >   recognize the Jewish state in May 1948, through Kennedy's arms
>   >   sales, the Nixon administration's support during the 1973 Yom
>   >   Kippur War, and the close U.S.-Israeli relationships during
>   >   the Reagan and Clinton presidencies, this is nothing new.
>   >   American public opinion has consistently favored Israel over
>   >   the Palestinians by wide margins, and a February Gallup poll
>   >   put this margin at more than 4 to 1 (58 percent versus 13
>   >   percent). The strongest source of support for Israel now comes
>   >   from within Bush's own Republican base, especially among
>   >   Christian conservatives; and in addition to his own
>   >   inclinations, as a politically adroit president, he has
>   >   repeatedly shown the determination not to alienate his
>   >   political base.
>   >
>   >   Ultimately, the neocon-conspiracy theory misinterprets as a
>   >   policy coup a reasoned shift in grand strategy that the Bush
>   >   administration has adopted in responding to an ominous form of
>   >   external threat. Whether that strategy and its component parts
>   >   prove to be as robust and effective as containment of hostile
>   >   Middle Eastern states linked to terrorism remains to be seen.
>   >   But to characterize it in conspiratorial terms is not only a
>   >   failure to weigh policy choices on their merits, but
>   >   represents a detour into the fever swamps of political
>   >   demagoguery.
>   >
>   >   Robert J. Lieber is a professor of government and foreign
>   >   service at Georgetown University and the editor of Eagle
>   >   Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the Twenty-First
>   >   Century (Prentice Hall, 2002).
>   >
>   >   _________________________________________________________________
>   > Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

--
John Woodford
Executive Editor, Michigan Today
412 Maynard
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1399
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