a gloomy analysis of the middle east coflict, page-2

Both the IRA and Israel enjoy support from expatriates in the US;

Bilmon

January 08, 2004
This Thing of Ours

I finally got around to reading David Brooks' latest exercise in reality denial -- his New York Times column on the neocons and their critics. It certainly seems to have scratched a nerve with some people.

I mean, it's pretty bad when a mild-mannered soul like Josh Marshall uses words like "thuggish," "dishonest," and "tendentious," to describe the work of a fellow pundit. And I have it on reliable information that Brooks' column has given him a significant boost in MWO's Media Whore of the Year contest (although it appears Tim Russert remains the runaway favorite.)

It's true, Brooks' piece is filled with the most ridiculous sophisms:

In truth, the people labeled neocons (con is short for "conservative" and neo is short for "Jewish") travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another. The ones outside government have almost no contact with President Bush. There have been hundreds of references, for example, to Richard Perle's insidious power over administration policy, but I've been told by senior administration officials that he has had no significant meetings with Bush or Cheney since they assumed office. If he's shaping their decisions, he must be microwaving his ideas into their fillings.

The whole top half of the column is a bag of similar rhetorical devices. It's like the stage business that distracts the audience while the magician does his sleight of hand trick.

Take the passage I just quoted: There's the "neo is short for Jewish" riff -- a subtle way of backing into the underlying accusation of anti-Semitism. There's the deliberate focus on Perle -- as opposed to, say, the number two and number three guys in the Pentagon, the Undersecretary of State, the head of the NSC's Middle East desk and the Vice President's chief of staff -- all of whom are very much inside the government and presumably do have significant meetings, both with each other and with Bush and Cheney.

Heck, for all we know, one of these, um, people-labeled-neocons may even be the "senior administration official" who vouched for Perle's non-influence.

Nobody here but us chickens.

Then there's the bit about messages being microwaved into dental work. It's a rather predictable tip off to where Brooks is trying to go. He might just as well have thrown in a crack about tinfoil hats and fluoridated water -- or the Bavarian Illuminati. As it is, he does manage to describe the Project for a New American Century as a conspiracist's version of a "Yiddish Trilateral Commission."

(This is also another example of artful framing: Brooks uses PNAC, with it's piddling five staffers, as his stereotypical organization-labeled-neocon, rather than the current neocon mothership, the American Enterprise Institute, which is one of the big three Washington think tanks.)

There certainly are people out there who resemble Brooks' stereotype of the paranoid conspiracy theorist. And some of them have wedged the neocons -- excuse me, people-labeled-neocons -- into their fantasy worlds. There are also plenty of old-fashioned anti-Semites who honestly would like to turn "neo" into a synonym for Jew.

But the current conservative line -- the neocons don't exist, and anyone who thinks they do must be a Jew hater -- is so far beyond plausible it's humorous. Brooks column isn't even the most ludicrous example of the genre. Joel Mowbray gets that prize:

Discussing the Iraq war with the Washington Post last week, former General Anthony Zinni took the path chosen by so many anti-Semites: he blamed it on the Jews ...

Technically, the former head of the Central Command in the Middle East didn’t say "Jews." He instead used a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites: "neoconservatives" ...



To me, this rhetorical gambit bears more than a passing resemblance to the late Joe Columbo's efforts to convince the world the Mafia didn't exist -- and to con the media into playing along.

Columbo was the leader of an eponymous New York crime family back in the early '70s. And like many of his fellow dons, he was having difficulties with the Justice Department. In fact his son, Joe Jr., had just been arrested by the FBI -- for illegally melting down coins to sell the silver therein.

Now Joe Sr. thought busting his son for a trivial crime like defacing the currency was a chicken sh*t move on the part of the Feds -- amounting to a form of persecution. So he created, more or less out of thin air, a protest group called the Italian American Anti-Defamation League, and staged a noisy rally in front of the FBI's headquarters in Manhattan.

This, of course, was back in the heyday of what many people-labeled-neocon like to call "identity politics." You had your black liberation; you had your women's liberation; you even had your gay liberation. Joe must have figured, why not wise guy liberation?

Why not indeed. For a time, Columbo's movement flourished. Joe did the usual press conferences and TV talk shows, explaining to anybody who would listen that the Mafia was just an ugly ethnic stereotype, invented by the establishment to justify the oppression of the toiling Italian American masses. Right on!

I found a pretty good account of the consequences of Joe's campaign on the Court TV web site:

Attorney General John Mitchell ordered the FBI to stop using the words "Mafia" and "Cosa Nostra" in their reports. The producers of the film The Godfather had to delete all reference to the word "Mafia," which was akin to making a movie about Jesus and not using the word "God" anywhere in it. The New York Times banned the use of the words. It was deleted from any TV production. The League grew and prospered. In November 1970, Frank Sinatra and other top stars performed at a Madison Square Garden benefit and raised $500,000. Most of which went straight to the Mafia...

By the end of 1970, Colombo had achieved a minor miracle -- the League had grown to 150,000 members, with over 50 chapters across the country, and raised more than $1 million, most of which went straight to the founder. Joe had perpetrated the ultimate rip-off: a million-dollar racket that was all above board.



This went on for about a year, until some fellow people-labeled-Mafiosos began to get nervous about all the publicity Columbo was attracting to their non-existent crime society. In June 1971, just as Joe was arriving at a big Italian American Anti-Defamation League rally, he got wacked -- possibly on orders from Carlos Gambino, the non-existent don of another eponymous but non-existent crime family.

When Columbo died, the notion that the Mafia doesn't exist pretty much died with him. By the 1980s, the era of "Dapper Don" John Gotti, wise guys didn't really try to hide the fact they were Mafia -- they gloried in it, even as the FBI was finally gaining the upper hand in its war against the mob.

At this point, I should probably make it crystal clear that I'm not comparing the neocons to the Mafia. For one thing, directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese aren't likely to make any great movies about the neocons -- unless they start giving themselves names like Pauli Weasel and Ricky the Undertaker.

The ethnic dimension is also different. I don't know if it's truth or just movie myth that you can't be a bona fide made guy unless you're Sicilian on both sides of the family, but I think everybody acknowledges that the Mafia was a product of Italy. It's a historical fact -- one only an inspired con artist like Columbo would try to deny.

Neoconservatism, on the other hand, isn't a specifically Jewish phenominon -- not unless there's something in the family backgrounds of Jeane Kirkpatrick, James Woolsey, Bill Bennett, John Bolton and Scooter Libby that I don't know about. But it's true that many well-known neocons are Jewish -- and that passionate, hardline support for Israel has long been a prominent part of the neocon policy world view. These are also historical truths, which only a con man (or a columnist hoping to camouflage the truth) would try to deny.

However, as I mentioned in this post, it is easy to abuse the term -- to turn neocon into a generic label for people you don't agree with or don't like. Brooks has a point when he criticizes the general tendency on both the left and the right to reduce political distinctions to a single dimension:

If you can give your foes a collective name — liberals, fundamentalists or neocons — you can rob them of their individual humanity. All inhibitions are removed. You can say anything about them. You get to feed off their villainy and luxuriate in your own contrasting virtue.

There is no neocon Politburo -- not that I'm aware of, anyway. Not all neocons think alike. But it's silly to pretend ideological camps don't exist -- or that examining the common views and policies advocated by those camps is an illegitimate form of inquiry. Historians do it all the time So do journalists.

In fact I'm sure if I went back and checked Brooks' clip file, I'd find plenty of references to "liberals," or the "extreme left," or the "New Democrats," followed by some brief summary or analysis of positions that Brooks thinks those groups support or oppose.

Neocons (or, if you prefer, people-labeled-neocons) are a force to be reckoned with in American politics, and even more so in American foreign policy. Their arguments and actions -- in or out of government -- are legitimate subjects for debate. And the rather unique relationship between America and Israel, plus the rather unique dual role some neocons have chosen to play in that relationship, make it even more important for the debate to be vigorous and unrestrained.

If that means giving anti-Semitic bigots an opportunity to pollute the public forum with warmed-over tidbits from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, so be it. Fools we will have with us always But I can't believe any intelligent person would demand that we all emulate Joe Columbo, and simply pretend one of the most important foreign policy factions in the world doesn't exist.

Even most wise guys are more honest than that.