Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Neocons Shaken, But Not Deterred

Neocons Shaken, But Not Deterred 
 
by Jim Lobe 
Almost exactly five years after it reached its zenith with the invasion of
Iraq, the influence of neoconservatives has waned sharply in Washington,
as their nemeses, the "realists" in the national security bureaucracy,
have increasingly asserted control over US foreign policy.
While battered, however, neoconservatives have not yet been forced from
the field. And while their hopes that President George W. Bush would "take
out" Iran's nuclear program before leaving office appear to have
diminished substantially, their hawkish voice is still heard loud and
clear both in the White House – courtesy of Vice President Dick Cheney's
office and Deputy National Security adviser Elliott Abrams – and in this
year's Republican presidential race, where neoconservative favorites
include former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, Sen. John McCain, and,
until earlier this week, Fred Thompson.
Indeed, as pointed out in Jacob Heilbrunn's new book They Knew They Were
Right: The Rise of the Neocons (Doubleday), the neocons, despite the
fiasco in Iraq, are already trying to detach themselves from both Bush and
the Mesopotamian adventure they so avidly championed and entrench
themselves ever more deeply into institutional Washington.
"Whether it's the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies or the
National Endowment for Democracy, the Weekly Standard or the New York Sun,
the neoconservatives are battle-hardened fighters who have created a
permanent base for themselves. They will not disappear," according to
Heilbrunn, a former neoconservative himself and senior editor at the Nixon
Center's The National Interest journal.
Heilbrunn's much-anticipated book, which coincides with the publication of
a not entirely unsympathetic biography entitled Prince of Darkness of the
movement's most influential hardliner, Richard Perle, affirms a number of
central truths about neoconservatism that are generally ignored or avoided
in mainstream discussion of what he correctly calls a "mindset" rather
than an "ideology."
First, neoconservatism "is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon,"
even if many adherents – albeit a minority – are not Jewish and even if,
it should be added, most US Jews are not neoconservatives. Moreover,
neoconservatives, both Jew and gentile, are bound by a "shared commitment
to the largest, most important Jewish cause: the survival of Israel."
Second, its substance is largely determined by the lessons its followers
draw from what they see as causes of the Nazi Holocaust: the alleged
failures of German "liberals" in the Weimar Republic to stand up to the
twin challenges of Nazism and Communism and of the western European
liberal democracies to stand up to Adolf Hitler in the run-up to World War
II; and the necessity of having overwhelming military power to crush any
new Hitler preemptively.
As Heilbrunn, whose Jewish father fled Germany before the war, correctly
notes, neoconservatives "see new Munichs everywhere and anywhere" – a
reference to the 1938 Munich pact by which Britain and France tried to
"appease" Hitler by ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Germany.
Indeed, it is characteristic of neoconservatives to depict virtually every
foreign policy challenge – from the Sandinista government in Nicaragua 25
years ago to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – to US (or Israeli)
hegemony as a potentially cataclysmic replay of the 1930s. The
neoconservatives, according to Heilbrunn, "have shaped a romantic
narrative for themselves in which they are the new Churchills staring down
the forces of evil."
Fear that Saddam Hussein intended a "second holocaust" against Israel
served as one of the main motivations for the neoconservative promotion of
war with Iraq, according to Heilbrunn. "As Jews, they (and their Catholic
conservative allies) were haunted by the memory that the allies had not
stopped the Holocaust – and they strongly believed that it was America's
obligation to act preemptively to avert another one."
Third, the movement's Trotskyist roots – incarnated by its "founding
father, Max Shachtman – among the Jews from Central and Eastern Europe in
the first half of the 20th century not only imbued its members with a
distrust, even a hatred, of liberalism (despite their latter-day purported
embrace of democracy promotion). They also largely shaped their polemical
and political tactics, even as they moved rightward – into the Democratic
Party after World War II and thence, after the traumas of the 1960s and
early 1970s, including two Arab-Israeli wars – into Ronald Reagan's
Republican Party.
"Their fling with Trotskyism [endowed] them with a temperament as well as
a set of intellectual tolls that many never completely abandoned – a
combative temper and a penchant for sweeping assertions and grandiose
ideas." The fact that they see themselves as "a kind of aristocratic
intelligentsia," according to Heilbrunn, derives from their Trotskyite
origins.
Fourth, "the social exclusion experienced by Jews at the hands of the WASP
(White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elite" that persisted in the US into the
early 1960s stirred a "deep resentment" among many of the movement's most
influential leaders, notably Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz.
Indeed, Podhoretz, who edited Commentary magazine from the early 1960s
until the mid-1990s and now advises Giuliani, sees the movement as the war
against the "WASP patriciate," according to Heilbrunn.
Neoconservatives "know that they will never be accepted by the
establishment," he writes in a passage about Perle. "Indeed, they
outwardly revel in the knowledge that they are outsiders. But beneath the
veneer of confidence is a seething rage at the government bureaucracy and
social elites."
These insights are the strongest part of the book, but, unfortunately,
virtually all of them are made within the first 100 pages.
A lapsed neoconservative himself, Heilbrunn offers useful, if unoriginal,
accounts of the influences of German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss and
military strategist Alfred Wohlstetter on the movement and its worldview.
But he gets lost in his recounting of the evolution of the neoconservatism
and its various factions – particularly the supposed divides between the
Straussean/realist wing led by Irving Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick, on
the one hand, and the Podhoretz-Abrams wing – from the moment it first
enjoyed power during Ronald Reagan's first term to the disastrous
aftermath of the Iraq war.
While the reason for the subsequent incoherence of his account was
probably due to deadline pressures and poor editing, it may also be
attributable both to the ideological contortions of the neoconservatives
themselves and to the disappointing fact that Heilbrunn accepts and
endorses the narrative of their own history. Indeed, his descriptions of
liberal or left-wing foes, from the New Left and the Black Power movement
to Democratic politicians, such as George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and even
Bill Clinton, echo those of the most radical neocons.
Thus, Clinton's first national security adviser Anthony Lake and secretary
of state Warren Christopher "apparently saw the United States, not its
enemies, as the main problem in the world." And had the 1998 Iraq
Liberation Act, "which funneled money to ...Ahmed Chalabi ...been heeded
[by Clinton], it might have helped avoid the chaos that the toppling of
the Saddam Hussein created."
Ultimately, Heilbrunn is critical of the neoconservatives, but he accepts
much of their worldview.
While Heilbrunn's book is probably the best in the latest crop to explore
the neoconservatives, the most comprehensive account of neoconservative
thinking remains The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the
Culture Wars by Mark Gerson, a member of the board of directors of the
defunct Project for the New American Century.
(Inter Press Service)
 
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 Neocons Shaken, But Not Deterred
ma di che ci si stupisce? Questi sono come i nazi, te li devi andare a
prendere armi in pugno fino a Washington per farli smettere di
compiere crimini contro l'umanità..

 Am.
toh, questo sarebbe quello che era contrario alla guerra in
Iraq...chissà perchè difende quei criminali contro l'umanità che
l'hanno voluta...

 Am.
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
perche' è politicamente complice in quanto servo di quei criminali di
Bush e Blair.