Beating up on neocons used to be a specialized sport without
wide appeal. With all due false modesty, I offer myself as an earlier
practitioner. Back in the mid-to-late '70s, when I had a weekly column in
the Village Voice, I used to have rich sport with that apex neo-con, Norman
Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, I nicknamed him Norman the Frother and
freighted him with so many gibes that he made the mistake of publicly
denouncing me in Commentary, exclaiming that "Cockburn's weekly pieces have
set a new standard of gutter journalism in this country," a testimonial I
still proudly feature on the back of my books.
The neo-cons' political hero in those days was U.S. Senator
Henry "Scoop" Jackson, much venerated in Israel and the corporate offices of
Beijing for his ardor and constancy in sluicing the U.S. taxpayers' money
into their treasuries. The neo-cons' great hope was Scoop for president, but
he failed to impress the voters in the Democratic primaries in 1976. To the
neocons' chagrin, the new occupant of the Oval Office was Jimmy Carter, whom
they construed to be soft on Communism and an Israel-hater. Carter threw
plenty of money at the Pentagon and stoked up the Cold War, but on a couple
of occasions he was downright rude to Menachem Begin, so the neo-cons
abandoned the Democrats and threw in their lot with Ronald Reagan. For them
a hard-line Israel has always been the bottom line.
Now here we are on the downslope of 2003, and George Bush is
learning, way too late for his own good that the neo-cons have been
matchlessly wrong about everything. One can burrow through the archives of
historical folly in search of comparisons and still come up empty-handed.
The neo-cons told Bush that eviction of Saddam would rearrange the chairs in
the Middle East to America's advantage. Wrong. They told him it would unlock
the door to a peaceful settlement in Israel. Wrong. They told him (I'm
talking about Wolfowitz's team of mad Straussians at DoD) that there was
irrefutable proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction inside
Iraq. Wrong. They told him the prime Iraqi exile group, headed by Ahmad
Chalabi, had street cred in Iraq. Wrong. They told him it would be easy to
install a U.S. regime in Baghdad and make the place hum quietly along, like
Lebanon in the 1950s. Wrong.
And, of course, the neocons, who have never forgiven the United
Nations for Resolutions 242 and 338 (bad for Israel), told Bush that he
should tell the U.N. to take its charter and shove it. Bush, who appreciates
simple words and simple thoughts, took their advice, and last Sunday night
had it served up to him by his speechwriters as crow, which he methodically
ate in his 18-minute speech, saying the United Nations has an important role
in Iraq.
Now many are gloating at the neocons' discomfiture and waiting
for their downfall. Click go Madam Defarge's knitting needles as she waits
beside the guillotine. Here come the tumbrils, inching their way slowly
through the rotting cabbages and vulgar ribaldry of Republican
isolationists. Here's a pale-faced Douglas Feith. Up goes the fatal blade,
and down it flashes. Behold, the head of a neo-con! The crowd bays, but this
execution merely whets the appetite. The next tumbril carries a weightier
cargo: Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams. Still not enough. Madam Defarge
knits on, and her patience is soon rewarded. First, Wolfowitz, then finally
Rumsfeld himself are dispatched, and the crowd moves off to torch the Weekly
Standard and string up its editor, Bill Kristol.
Maybe not all of them, but some neocon will surely pay the price
for dropping President Bush's approval rating into the low 50s. But will the
basic neocon political line, dominant for so long in Washington, suffer a
dent? Not in any fundamental way. To appreciate this one only has to look at
the current posture of prominent Democrats. Are they glorying in Bush's
political embarrassment and the humiliating and costly disaster for the U.S.
consequent upon its attack on Iraq? Take U.S. Senator Joe Biden. His
immediate reaction to Bush's speech last Sunday was to insist that the
president would need, and should get, more money than the $87 billion put on
the table.
Then Biden gave the neocons a lesson in how to pay lip service
to internationalism and "our allies": "What we need isn't the death of
internationalism or the denial of our stark national interest. What I want
to talk about today is a more enlightened nationalism that understands the
value of international institutions but supports the use of military
force -- without apology or hesitation -- when we must. An enlightened
nationalism that does not allow us to be so blinded by our overwhelming
military power that we fail to see the benefit, indeed the need, of working
with others . To begin moving this nation in the right direction I believe
we need to embrace a foreign policy of enlightened nationalism . First, we
need to correct the imbalance between projecting power and staying power.
America's military is second to none. It must and will remain second to
none."
Study the zigzag rhetoric of Governor Howard Dean, and you find
the same essential approach, though Dean has just outraged the neocons by
calling for an even-handed U.S. approach to any resolving of the Palestinian
issue.
With the exception of Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton and Carol
Mosely Brown, no Democratic candidate (and certainly not the supposedly
"antiwar" Howard Dean) is calling for anything other than that the United
States to "stay the course" in Iraq, with more money, more troops and, if
possible, the political cover of the United Nations. A few neo-con heads may
roll, but the policy won't change. It's fun to demonize the neo-cons and
rejoice in their discomfiture, but don't make the mistake of thinking U.S.
foreign policy was set by Norman Podhoretz, or even William Kristol.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
