F. Leon and others ought to read this article; it is opportune to have appeared at this very moment.

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  neocon-conspiracy - a myth

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    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).

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Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education