By Laurent Guyénot

April 09, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  “What’s a neocon?” clueless George W. Bush once asked his father in 2003. “Do you want names, or a description?” answered Bush 41. “Description.” “Well,” said 41, “I’ll give it to you in one word: Israel.” True or not, that exchange quoted by Andrew Cockburn[1] sums it up: the neoconservatives are crypto-Israelis. Their true loyalty goes to Israel — Israel as defined by their mentor Leo Strauss in his 1962 lecture “Why We Remain Jews,” that is, including an indispensable Diaspora.[2]

In his volume Cultural Insurrections, Kevin MacDonald has accurately described neoconservatism as “a complex interlocking professional and family network centered around Jewish publicists and organizers flexibly deployed to recruit the sympathies of both Jews and non-Jews in harnessing the wealth and power of the United States in the service of Israel.”[3] The proof of the neocons’ crypto-Israelism is their U.S. foreign policy:

“The confluence of their interests as Jews in promoting the policies of the Israeli right wing and their construction of American interests allows them to submerge or even deny the relevance of their Jewish identity while posing as American patriots. […] Indeed, since neoconservative Zionism of the Likud Party variety is well known for promoting a confrontation between the United States and the entire Muslim world, their policy recommendations best fit a pattern of loyalty to their ethnic group, not to America.”[4]

The neocons’ U.S. foreign policy has always coincided with the best interest of Israel as they see it. Before 1967, Israel’s interest rested heavily on Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe. From 1967, when Moscow closed Jewish emigration to protest Israel’s annexation of Arab territories, Israel’s interest included the U.S. winning the Cold War. That is when the editorial board of Commentary, the monthly magazine of the American Jewish Committee, experienced their conversion to “neoconservatism,” and Commentary became, in the words of Benjamin Balint, “the contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative right .”[5] Irving Kristol explained to the American Jewish Congress in 1973 why anti-war activism was no longer good for Israel: “it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States. […] American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”[6] This tells us what “reality” Kristol was referring to, when he famously defined a neoconservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality” (Neoconservatism: the Autobiography of an Idea, 1995).

With the end of the Cold War, the national interest of Israel changed once again. The primary objective became the destruction of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East by dragging the U.S. into a third world war. The neoconservatives underwent their second conversion, from anti-communist Cold Warriors to Islamophobic “Clashers of Civilizations” and crusaders in the “War on Terror.”

In September 2001, they got the “New Pearl Harbor” that they had been wishing for in a PNAC report a year before.[7] Two dozens neoconservatives had by then been introduced by Dick Cheney into key positions, including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith at the Pentagon, David Wurmser at the State Department, and Philip Zelikow and Elliott Abrams at the National Security Council. Abrams had written three years earlier that Diaspora Jews “are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart — except in Israel — from the rest of the population.”[8] Perle, Feith and Wurmser had co-signed in 1996 a secret Israeli report entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to break with the Oslo Accords of 1993 and reaffirm Israel’s right of preemption on Arab territories. They also argued for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as “an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.” As Patrick Buchanan famously remarked, the 2003 Iraq war proves that the plan “has now been imposed by Perle, Feith, Wurmser & Co. on the United States.”[9]

How these neocon artists managed to bully Secretary of State Colin Powell into submission is unclear, but, according to his biographer Karen DeYoung, Powell privately rallied against this “separate little government” composed of “Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith, and Feith’s ‘Gestapo Office’.”[10] His chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, declared in 2006 on PBS that he had “participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council,”[11] and in 2011, he openly denounced the duplicity of neoconservatives such as Wurmser and Feith, whom he considered “card-carrying members of the Likud party.” “I often wondered,” he said, “if their primary allegiance was to their own country or to Israel.”[12] Something doesn’t quite ring true when neocons say “we Americans,” for example Paul Wolfowitz declaring: “Since September 11th, we Americans have one thing more in common with Israelis.”[13]