Neocon spat

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://direland.typepad.com/

The Ruling Class And Its Intellectual Servants

by Norman Birnbaum

The idea that the universities -- which have given us Brzezinski, Bundy, 
Huntington, Kissinger, McNamara, Rice, James Schlesinger, Shultz, and 
Wolfowitz -- are dominated by the left is one of those untruths 
systematically propagated to serve a political purpose. When, some decades 
ago, Irving Kristol informed businessmen that they should not support our 
Ivy universities since they were so anti-capitalist, the last vestiges of 
Keynesianism had already been rooted out of economics departments. 
(Kristol?s son, William, went to Harvard, and he did not leave Cambridge as 
a dogmatic leftist.) Take a broad look at American intellectual life: much 
of it is exceedingly remote from the American democratic and radical 
tradition which -- in the person of great figures like Beard and Dewey -- 
once actually induced foreigners to read American books.

In the present landscape, the neo-conservatives occupy a special place. 
Their noise level is out of proportion to their depth, originality and 
personal elegance. (I found a discussion with Robert Kagan one too many: he 
behaved like a boor.) It is evidence only of their eagerness to impress 
upon the ruling class their usefulness, even indispensability. Their 
aggressivity has served them well. They, and not President Bush, perfected 
pre-emptive strikes. They denounced those likely to criticize them as 
unmodern, weak and deficient in loyalty to our country. When all else 
failed (or their own divided allegiances were questioned) they resorted to 
the sordid charge of anti-Semitism.

In this sense, the most conspicuous of the neo-conservatives is President 
Lawrence Summers of Harvard. He is an economist with little apparent talent 
for historical or moral reflectiveness, more at home with numbers than 
human beings. His first serious quarrel at Harvard was with Cornel West, 
and the explanation for it is to be found in his response to questions 
raised by his professors and students about the university's investments in 
Israel. To question the moral probity of the state of Israel, he declared, 
was the objective equivalent of anti-Semitism. A Jewish president of 
Harvard opened his term by attacking a black scholar. The continuing 
quarrel over his casualness about data when dealing with the situation of 
women scientists is yet more evidence that we confront at the head of our 
nation?s most prestigious university not just a philistine but a parvenu. 
He will remain at his post, however, because the elite which owns Harvard 
thinks him a useful figure---and he will be discarded the moment that elite 
thinks him compromised by excessive zeal, to reassure conventional opinion 
that Harvard is no danger.

True, most neo-conservatives have now attached themselves to the Republican 
party, and Summers served the Democrats. Figures like Lieberman (with his 
oleaginous displays of piety) or Al From (with his astonishing capacity to 
repeat on our opinion pages as his own every cretinous cliché) are no less 
neo-conservative than their Republican contemporaries. Recent episodes, 
however, raise the possibility that some in the Republican Party, acting as 
a self confident ruling class, consider that the neo-conservatives are no 
longer of much use.

In the NY Times News of the Week on March 13, David Kirkpatrick reported on 
a dispute which has led to the liquidation of the entire editorial board of 
what was an interesting foreign policy journal, The National Interest. 
Founded as a flagship for the neo-conservatives, the journal has since been 
taken over by the Nixon Center. Robert Ellsworth and Dmitri Simes of the 
Center, in the first issue under their control, declared that 
"over-zealousness in the cause of democracy (along with a corresponding 
underestimation of the costs and dangers) has led to a dangerous 
overstretch in Iraq." They added that the US might at times have to 
cooperate with undemocratic regimes.

Nixon opened relations with the Chinese People?s Republic and actively 
pursued co-existence with the old USSR. Under Nixon and Ford, Kissinger as 
Secretary of State had no more bitter adversaries than an early 
neo-conservative group, led by Norman Podhoretz and Richard Perle, then 
senior adviser to Senator Henry Jackson (Jackson sought the Democratic 
Presidential nomination, with the support of the Israel lobby?grateful for 
his work in sabotaging arms control agreements with the USSR to pressure it 
into allowing Jewish emigration to Israel.) Now, ten members of the former 
editorial board of The National Interest have resigned to protest the Nixon 
Center?s assumption of the journal. The Center in turn has dismissed two 
who chose not to resign, Charles Krauthammer and Daniel Pipes. Krauthammer 
has long been particularly insistent on the early and frequent use of 
military force, and Pipes has made a career of attacking Israel?s critics 
in the universities in terms which remind us of McCarthyism.

The Nixon Center?s statement follows a very systematic criticism of the 
Bush foreign policy?and especially those moralizing and absolutist elements 
of it congenial to the neoconservatives---by Bush Senior?s National 
Security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. Scowcroft flew in combat during the 
Korean War. The more strenuously a neo-conservative calls for military 
action, the greater the probability that he will not have experienced it. 
The over-extension of the armed forces is what many senior serving officers 
and military thinkers object to. They object equally to Rumsfeld?s plans to 
convert the military into a force for fighting a global civil war.

Now the Washington Center for Strategic and International Studies has 
issued a report,"From Conflict to Cooperation: Writing a New Chapter In US 
Arab Relations." It takes a position at a considerable distance from the 
Israel lobby?s constant denigration of Islam and Arab capacity to enter the 
modern age. The National Interest controversy follows, too, a phrase in one 
of Bush?s recent statements on the Israel-Palestine conflict, in favor of a 
viable Palestinian state with contiguous territory. The Israel Wall as 
presently planned is intended to reduce that territory, as well as to cut 
off the Palestinian state from East Jerusalem.

Whether the administration really intends to confront Israel on this issue 
is very unclear. Last week, Administration sources let it be known that it 
was reluctantly ready to admit that Hezbollah could be a legitimate 
political interlocutor in Lebanon. That obviously dismayed Israel and the 
House of Representatives, which always identifies the views of the Israel 
government with the US national interest--yesterday the House passed a 
resolution reiterating that Hezbollah is a terrorist group. Bush repeated 
that today---after the successful anti-Syrian rally in Beirut, which is 
apparently the new site of the eternal struggle between good and evil (even 
if, on the map, it is some hours drive north of the biblical Armageddon.)

Still, the wavering of the Administration must alarm the neo-conservatives, 
whose anti-Arab fervor would qualify them to live in Hebron. No doubt, they 
can attribute the Hezbollah episode to the "Arabists" (translated as "the 
goyim") in the foreign policy apparatus---but what will they do when, 
finally, the nation recognizes that the Arabs, too, have rights? The 
neo-cons are clearly discountenanced by the gestures Bush has made to 
cooperation with the European Union in negotiations with Iran. These may be 
nothing but gestures?but the fact that they have been made at all suggests 
that Bush and Rice may be at some point willing to risk a clash with the 
neo-conservatives, for whom the Europeans are cowardly, unreliable, and 
corrupt.

Now Brzezinski, Fukayama and Eliott Cohen (a professor at Johns Hopkins 
School of Advanced International Affairs) are starting their own journal, 
The American Interest. Brzezinski has hitherto kept a certain distance from 
the neo-conservatives. As Carter?s national security adviser, he saw in the 
difficulties of the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan a great opportunity to 
harm the USSR. The regime was attempting land reform, and to secularize the 
position of women. By encouraging a Taliban revolt, Brzezinski did start in 
motion a chain of events which led to the defeat of the USSR---and a good 
deal else, beside.

This new journal will have as a foreign member of its board Dr. Josef 
Joffe, an editor of the German weekly Die Zeit. Joffe is a very prominent 
European ally of the neo-conservatives. In Commentary recently, he 
explained that criticism of the US in Europe was a cloak for anti-semitism. 
In the NY Times, in 2000, reviewing Frances Stonor Saunders? excellent book 
on the extensive bribery of European intellectuals during the Cold War by 
the CIA with funds channeled by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Joffe 
declared that the intellectuals were right to take the money in so good a 
cause. One assumes he thinks the war on terror as good a cause as The Cold 
War. Fukayama has said that the new journal will be open to foreign views 
of the US. One hopes that these will not all be fabricated in Langley, 
Virginia.

The National Interest story, then, may have far broader implications than 
that of a family quarrel amongst those who comment on foreign policy. All 
of these persons live not for, but from, our imperial system---but the 
neo-conservatives have in recent years furnished us with a convincing 
example of Chutzpah in claiming the exclusive right to define American 
policy and values. Perhaps recent events are the beginning of a process 
long overdue, in which they are reduced to their actual moral and political 
size---small.

Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org