The End of the Neocons? At Least Get Rid of the Term

Nov. 14, 2006 — -- Does the departure of Don Rumsfeld mean the end of "neocon" influence in Washington?

Maybe not, but one can only hope that this development contributes to the long-overdue disappearance of the term "neocon" itself -- a dumb, destructive designation that, from the earliest days of the Bush administration, has been meaningless, misleading, insulting and irretrievably tinged with ethnic prejudice.

How many of the current policymakers or politicians identified as "neocons" or "neoconservatives" have ever embraced the title?

In the last six years, it's been employed as a form of insult and dismissal -- the same way that descriptions like "fundamentalist" or, in a previous era, "fellow traveler" or "communist sympathizer" might be cited to indicate affiliation with a suspect, cultlike fringe group.

To decry the current misuse of the term "neocon" isn't to deny the impact and influence of real neoconservatives about 30 years ago.

Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz (and their colleagues at their prestigious magazines, The Public Interest and Commentary) represented an important element in the Reagan revolution and the reinvigoration of right-wing ideas in the intellectual community.

These powerful thinkers traveled from left to right, rejecting the Trotskyite enthusiasms of their youth, embracing the muscular anti-Communism of Democrats like Sen. Henry Jackson, and, eventually, migrating into the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Irving Kristol famously described his political persuasion by explaining: "A neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality."

Once the neocons joined the Republican coalition, however, (by 1984 in all cases) they felt no need to constitute a distinctive, self-conscious faction with the party or in the conservative movement in general.

As a result, at no point prior to the second Bush administration did the mainstream media point to a "neocon" movement as a notable influence on Republican politics or governance.

In fact, Bill Kristol, son of founding neoconservative Irving Kristol, served as the chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle without any voices in the media pointing to neocon "infiltration" or "impact" on the Bush 41 administration.

In fact, the figure most frequently identified today as "neocon in chief" in the current Bush administration -- Vice President Dick Cheney -- also served in the prior Bush administration as the secretary of defense without generating stories about his utopian, Wilsonian urges to impose democracy on the Middle East and to change the world.

He worked effectively in the Pentagon and cooperated without apparent friction with Secretary of State James Baker and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell -- two figures more recently identified with the "realist" (and supposedly "anti-neocon") school of thought.

In fact, both Rumsfeld and Cheney worked in the Ford administration (with Cheney succeeding Rumsfeld as the president's chief of staff) and both men fought tirelessly to secure the 1976 nomination for Gerald Ford over the conservative insurgency of Ronald Reagan.

Both men also compiled careers in Congress (Rumsfeld before the Ford administration, Cheney afterward) in which they won reputations as "moderates," far more identified with the Nixon-Ford-Bush 41 "real-politik" wing of the party than with the more pro-military, "no-substitute-for-victory" Goldwater-Reagan tradition.

This history has been conveniently forgotten or obscured to facilitate the silly story line about the "neocons" coming to power in the second Bush administration and ruthlessly implementing their militarist schemes.

This widely accepted legend not only ignores the lack of neoconservative credentials of Rumsfeld and Cheney (neither of whom were ever leftists or liberals of any kind, and both of whom have always identified as mainstream, conservative Republicans) but also ignores the fact that the handful of people who might actually accept the neocon designation (clustered around the second-generation Kristol at his magazine, The Weekly Standard) ardently supported John McCain in the primary struggle for the Republican nomination against George W. Bush and so earned very few prominent positions with the new president.

So who were the all-powerful neocons who supposedly dominated the new Bush administration and pushed the unwitting president to invade Iraq?

The conspiracists who favor this explanation for American policy invariably point to the same three names -- Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, all of whom held secondary posts in the Defense Department under Don Rumsfeld.

Occasionally, the stories of neoconservative influence will also mention Cheney's chief of staff "Scooter" Libby (now indicted and resigned) and former, assistant presidential speechwriter David Frum.

Is it an accident that all five of these gentlemen happen to be Jewish -- and comprised the only visible Jews anywhere in the Bush administration (aside from former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer)?

According to the widely circulated theories about the neocon cabal, one of the characteristics of this worldview involves a fanatical devotion to the State of Israel (and an affiliation with Israel's right-wing Likud Party).

Those who denounce neoconservatives (from Michael Moore on the left to Pat Buchanan on the right) therefore focus on three otherwise obscure Defense Department officials (Wolfowitz, Feith and Perle) not because they played such a decisive role in the Bush administration but because of their visible Jewish identity.

In a government with such strong personalities (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice and Armitage) so clearly running defense and foreign policy, the focus on two relatively minor defense functionaries like Feith and Perle constitutes an obvious example of targeting by ethnicity.

As a matter of fact, in his first term President Bush failed to appoint a single Jew to his cabinet (Clinton at one time had five Jews serving simultaneously, plus a Jewish national security adviser) so the claims of "Zionist" or "neocon" influence as a dominant force on his administration made very little sense.

As a matter of fact, the recent elections demonstrate the undeniable fact that the Jewish community and its most prominent leaders continue to play a vastly more prominent role in Democratic and liberal politics than they ever have within the GOP or the Bush administration.

The Democrats coming to power in Congress will bring with them nearly a dozen Jewish committee chairs (Boxer, Levin, Feinstein, Lantos, Waxman, Frank, Lieberman and so forth) while the Republican Congress featured no Jewish chairs at all (Eric Cantor of Virginia is the only Jewish, Republican member of the House).

The Democratic sweep also brought two more Jewish senators to Washington -- Ben Cardin of Maryland and Bernie Sanders of Vermont -- for a total of 12 Jewish Democrats in the Senate (as opposed to two Republicans, Arlen Specter and Norm Coleman).

Of course, many of these Democrats (Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, Carl Levin) have been bitter opponents of the Iraq war from the beginning, giving the lie to the common notion that Jewish, "neocon" influence led American policymakers to strike Baghdad.

Just as ludicrous is the currently popular suggestion that President Bush, in order to correct his foreign-policy mistakes, is belatedly turning to veterans of his father's "realist" administration like the new defense secretary nominee, Robert Gates, and former Secretary of State James Baker.

Baker is the chair of the Iraq Study Group, which is due to deliver its recommendations before Thanksgiving.

In fact, nearly all of the key policymakers who shaped prior administration policies (very much including the Iraq war) were also prominent veterans of the first Bush administration, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Vice President Dick Cheney himself.

In short, the endless stories about feuding factions of "neocons" and "realists," as implacably opposed to one another as the Jets and the Sharks from "West Side Story," bear very little connection to the realities of recent history.

These tales may count as entertaining fiction, but with a new Congress and an obvious new direction for the administration on Iraq policy, it's high time to abandon the diverting but dishonest temptations of conspiratorial make-believe.