IS THE NEO-CONS' STAR FADING? THE MEANING OF THE SPLIT AT "THE NATIONAL INTEREST"

Sunday's New York Times carried a report of a split in the hitherto neo-con journal The National Interest, with a mass resignation of the neo-cons from its editorial board. What does this split portend for the future of American neo-conservatism? We asked our friend, the distinguished scholar Norman Birnbaum -- who has long sparred with the neo-cons, and who has previously contributed to DIRELAND -- to give us his considered evaluation of the neo-cons in light of the split announced in the Times story. Norman is University Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University Law School, and author--most recently--of After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism In The Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press), among other books. He was a founding editor of New Left Review, was on the editorial board of Partisan Review, and is on the editorial board of The Nation. Norman, who got his doctorate in sociology from Harvard, has also taught at the London School of Economics, Oxford University, the University of Strasbourg and Amherst College, has had academic appointments in Italy and Germany, and has been a consultant to the National Security Council. Here, exclusively for DIRELAND readers, is his comment on the neo-cons:

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 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.

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