The Enemy of My Enemy
The war and the Administration’s general foreign policy toward the Middle East are creating some political tensions where they are least expected – in the far right precincts of the Republican party. A group of self-identified “paleo-conservatives” led by former Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan and columnist Robert Novak have stepped up criticism of the clique of so-called “neoconservatives” who have successfully pushed us into the confrontation with Iraq. The neos – (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Bill Bennett, former Bush speechwriter David Frum and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal) – are fighting back, challenging the patriotism of their conservative critics in terms usually reserved only for hated liberals.
Unfortunately, a development that should be greeted with glee by opponents of the President’s policy is tainted by the character of the criticism that the paleos have leveled. Buchanan, it will be remembered, is essentially an isolationist. He opposes free trade, he is extremely skeptical of any international agreements from arms control to UNICEF, and he has occasionally made statements to the effect that the US had no business declaring war on Germany (as opposed to Japan) during World War II. He has also been accused of anti-Semitism – a charge he denies, probably in good faith and conscience, but which has stuck to him throughout his political career.
In a sternly-worded editorial entitled “Whose War?” in this month’s American Conservative (a magazine he edits), Buchanan accuses the internationalist, interventionalist wing of the Republican party of divided loyalties – advocating not for the best interests of the United States, but for those of Israel. Says Buchanan:
We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.
Buchanan also squarely and forthrightly anticipates the charge of anti-Semitism, suggesting that this accusation is offered up merely as a way to silence him and other critics: “This venerable slander is designed to nullify public discourse by smearing and intimidating foes and censoring and blacklisting them and any who would publish them.” For Buchanan, the closest in ideology and temperament this country has seen to Joe McCarthy, to suggest that he is being blacklisted by Jews has a certain grim irony, but the distasteful quality of his accusations is not sufficient grounds to dismiss them out of hand.
The disconcerting truth is that a large number of the neoconservative ideologues running Bush’s foreign policy are Jews with well-established ties to the Israeli right. Buchanan goes on to make a plausible case that the activist, internationalist, almost utopian flavor of neoconservative ideology is merely a mirror-image reversal of the Marxism that many neocons embraced fervently in their youth before bolting to the right. This formulation neatly conforms to Buchanan’s own obviously visceral disdain for the Jewish arrivistes to his precious and pure nativist strain of conservatism, and ignores the millennial idealism of the fundamentalist Christian wing of the neocon movement – but is has the virtue that it will certainly be considered a mortal insult and slander by its intended targets.
In a purely objective sense, Buchanan’s larger point about the coincidence of interests between the neocons’ fervent desire to remake the Arab Middle East and the pie-in-the-sky wishlist of the Israeli right is worth exploring. Neither America nor moderate Israelis are well-served by the policies of the fanatical settlers who keep Sharon and the Likud party in power – to say nothing of the vast majority of Arabs and Palestinians who deserve some justice and consideration.
The problem with Buchanan’s argument is two-fold. First, in his haste to foster the retreat of America within its supposedly-safe borders, Buchanan ignores the very real threat that fundamentalist Islam poses to all democratic values. Iraq may not have much to do with 9/11, but Saudi Arabia and its Wahabist radical sect most certainly do, and to the extent that neocon geopolitics seeks to address this problem at its root, they cannot be dismissed as lacking serious purpose. Buchanan appears to have bought the Bin Laden line that US engagement in the Middle East – both in Saudi Arabia and in the Israel-Palestine issue – is the motivation behind Islamist hatred of America. Perhaps. But I am more convinced by the argument that they are motivated by less concrete and rational issues, and in any case, it is not worth modifying our policies to propitiate them.
Second, Buchanan appears aware, at least by implication, that there is a difference between general support for Israel’s right to exist (something shared by most American Jews) and specific support for the policies of Sharon and the Likud. However, Buchanan does not explicitly acknowledge a diversity of American Jewish opinion – perhaps because he does not credit progressive Zionists as any more worthy of support than the neocon Likudniks. Indeed, he does not seem to consider the involvement of Jews of any ideological stripe in the formation of US foreign policy toward the Middle East a welcome development, because, as he sees it, the whole issue represents an unnecessary entanglement for America. This lets him blame the neocons as the enemy of the moment without giving any credit to Jews who do not share their views, thereby, I suppose, avoiding an unnecessary entanglement for himself as well.
9:09:46 AM 
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