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The neoconservative betrayal
Though it has not been widely understood, among the neoconservatives’ many betrayals of their former principles and allegiances in recent years has been their betrayal of Israel—a fact that, among other things, ought to clear them of the false, vicious, and stupid charge that everything they do, they do for the sake of the Jewish state. The neoconservatives have betrayed Israel for the same reason they have betrayed other neoconservative causes such as the fight against racial preferences and the fight against cultural radicalism: they now believe in nothing except the promotion and expansion of American power under the rubric of President Bush’s “forward strategy for democracy,” a policy that can be understood as a “peace process” applied to the entire Muslim world. Thus, since the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” has been absorbed into Bush’s “democratization” policy, they now support the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” as well, though they used to be highly skeptical about it. As part of this historic shift, they have backed the Bush administration’s push for the fraud of Palestinian “democracy,” they have supported the administration’s positive sounds toward Hamas in Gaza (a logical outcome of making “democracy” the One Ring to Rule Them All), and they have supported the Gaza pullout. In effect, Israeli security, which used to be the neocons’ chief concern in the Mideast, has been subsumed under the spread of “democracy,” just as the war against terror and Islamic radicalism has been subsumed under the spread of “democracy.” Yet the neocons have gone so far in their support for Bush’s and Prime Minister Sharon’s accommodation of Muslim enemies in the name of “democracy” that it is sparking signs of revolt in their own ranks. Thus Power Line, a website that has always put its unabashed fealty to neoconservatives front and center, is very uncharacteristically critical of a Charles Krauthammer happy-talk column in which he declared that the terror Intifada has been defeated, that the Gaza withdrawal is a success, and that the Palestinians have “matured” in their path toward self-government. Power Line finds no evidence for any of these conclusions, and describes Krauthammer’s column as “an amazingly poor performance from one of America’s most clear-eyed commentators on the Middle East.” Gradually, one by one, people who were initially drawn to neoconservatism because it stood for certain principles, are discovering to their dismay that it no longer stands for anything except for support for Bush and his expansion of U.S. power in the specious name of “democracy.”
See my 2003 commentary on Irving Kristol’s article, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” in which, as I show, he openly admitted what I’ve said above. Email entry |