Neoconservativism and Paleoconservatism: Defininition and Origins Thereof

Neoconservatism is a conservative movement with origins in the Old Left that has been very influential in formulating hawkish foreign policy stances by the United States.

The intellectual founders of neoconservatism, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and most prominently Irving Kristol, were all alumni of City College of New York, known then as the "Harvard of the proletariat" due to its highly selective admissions criteria and free education. They emerged from the (largely Trotskyite) Old Left and retained these origins in the factional New York intellectual debates of the 1930s. The Great Depression radicalized the student body, mostly children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants sometimes on the edge of poverty, who were introduced to the new and revolutionary ideas of socialism and communism.

Later to emerge as the first important group of social policy critics from the working class, the original neoconservatives, though not yet using this term, were generally liberals or socialists who strongly supported the Second World War. Multiple strands contributed to their ideas, including the Depression-era ideas of former Trotskyites (world socialist revolution parallels their desires today to spread democratic capitalism abroad often by force), New Dealers, and trade unionists. The influence of the Trotskyites perhaps left them with strong anti-Soviet tendencies, especially considering the Great Purges targeting alleged Trotskyites in Soviet Russia.

The original "neoconservative" theorists, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were often associated with the magazine Commentary and their intellectual evolution is quite evident in that magazine over the course of these years. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the early neoconservatives were anti-Communist socialists strongly supportive of thecivil rights movement, integration, and Martin Luther King. However, they grew disillusioned with the Johnsonadministration's Great Society. They also came to despise the counterculture of the 1960s and what they felt was a growing "anti-Americanism" among many baby boomers, in the movement against the Vietnam War and in the emerging New Left.

According to Irving Kristol, former managing editor of Commentary and now a Senior Fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington and the Publisher of the hawkish magazine The National Interest, a neoconservative is a "liberal mugged by reality." Broadly sympathetic to Woodrow Wilson's idealistic goals to spread American ideals of government, economics, and culture abroad, they grew to reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish these objectives following decolonization and the entry of many African and Asian states into the United Nations, which tilted the body toward recognizing Third World interests. As the radicalization of the New Left pushed these intellectuals further to the right in response, they moved toward a more aggressive militarism. Admiration of the "big stick" interventionist foreign policy of Theodore Roosevelt remains a common theme in neoconservative tracts as well. Now staunch anti-Communists, a vast array of sympathetic conservatives attracted to their strong defense of a "rolling-back" of Communism (an idea touted under the Eisenhower administration by traditional conservative John Foster Dulles) began to become associated with these neoconservative leaders. Influential periodicals such as Commentary, The New Republic, The Public Interest, and The American Spectator, and lately The Weekly Standard have been established by prominent neoconservatives or regularly host the writings of neoconservative writers.

Academics in these circles, many of whom were still Democrats, rebelled against the Democratic Party's leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s, especially after the nomination of George McGovern in 1972. Many clustered around Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront charges of Soviet expansionism.

Generally they supported a militant anticommunism, minimal social welfare (to the consternation of extreme free-market libertarians), and sympathy with a traditionalist agenda. Its feud with the traditional right, especially William F. Buckley'sNational Review over the welfare state (although the staff of the present National Review are recognisably neo-conservative) and the nativist, protectionist, isolationist wing of the party, once represented by ex-Republican Pat Buchanan, separated them from the old conservatives. But domestic policy does not define neoconservatism; it is a movement founded on, and perpetuated by a hawkish foreign policy, opposition to communism during the Cold War and opposition to Middle Eastern states that pursue foreign and domestic policies which do not align with U.S. interests. Thus, their foremost target was the oldRichard Nixon approach to foreign policy, peace through negotiations, diplomacy, and arms control known, détente and containment (rather than rollback) of the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the process that would lead to bilateral ties between the People's Republic of China and the US. There is still, today, a rift between many members of the State Department, who favor established foreign policy conventions, and the neoconservative hawks.

Led by Norman Podhoretz, these "neoconservatives" used charges of "appeasement", alluding to Chamberlain at Munich, to attack the foreign policy orthodoxy in the Cold War, attacking Détente, most-favored nation trade status for the Soviet Unionand supporting unilateral American intervention in places like Grenada and Libya. These activists condemned peace through diplomacy, arms control, or inspection teams, comparing negotiations with relatively weak enemies of the United States as appeasement of "evil".

During the 1970s political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick increasingly criticized the Democratic Party, of which she was still a member, since the nomination of the antiwar George McGovern. Kirkpatrick became a convert to the ideas of the new conservatism of once liberal Democratic academics. During Ronald Reagan's successful 1980 campaign, he hired her as his foreign policy adviser and later nominated her US ambassador to the United Nations, a position she held for four years. Known for her anticommunist stance and for her tolerance of right wing dictatorships, she argued that Third World social revolutions favoring the poor, dispossessed, or underclasses are illegitimate, and thus argued that the overthrow of leftist governments (such as the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile) and the installation of rightwing dictatorships was acceptable and essential. Under this doctrine, the Reagan administration actively supported the anti-Communist dictatorships such as Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and the racist white rulers of South Africa.

Some have attacked these views as simplistic and extreme, especially in light of theVietnam War, which was by no means a revolution being orchestrated by the Soviets from Moscow, long a charge of neoconservatives who view Third World liberation struggles as illegitimate. The Vietnam War, for instance, was in many ways a direct successor to the French Indochina War, fought to maintain control of their colony in Indochina against an independence movement led by Communist Party leader Ho Chi Minh. After the Vietnamese communist forces, or Viet Minh, defeated the French colonial army at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the colony was granted independence. According to the ensuing Geneva settlement, Vietnam was partitioned, ostensibly temporarily, into a communist North and a non-Communist South. The country was then to be unified under elections that were scheduled to take place in 1956. However the elections were never held and the South fell under a US-backed military regime representative of the small, middle class Christian minority.

Neoconservatives, however, have tried to counter these points, arguing that the chances of democratization in a Communist state were slight, in contrast, from their standpoint at least, to the authoritarian but pro-Western South Vietnam. Neoconservatives argued that in unstable situations the United States should try to align itself with the "less offensive" regime or armed faction, which almost certainly would be any faction or regime hostile to a pro-Soviet rival, rather than stay out of the conflict altogether, as some liberals advocated. Neoconservatives thus argued that Communist states could not be democratized and must be "rolled back" to further US strategic interests, which were shaped by the domino theory during the Cold War era.

Before the election of Reagan, the neoconservatives sought to stem the antiwar sentiments caused by the U.S. defeats in Vietnam and the massive casualties that the war induced; and indeed this was a difficult task, which they have ostensibly accomplished, considering the hawkish mood of the US public after the September 11th attacks. The lowest casualty estimates, based on the now-renounced North Vietnamese statements, are around 1.5 million Vietnamese killed. Vietnam released figures on April 3, 1995 that a total of one million Vietnamese combatants and four million civilians were killed in the war. While liberal thinkers tended to point to the massive civilian deaths as a direct result of America's involvement in the war, neocons saw the loss of life from a different perspective. In their view, the millions of war casualities, and more importantly the millions of executions and tourtures that had occurred in the post-war Communist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia, proved that America had failed to follow through on her commitment to her non-Communist allies in the region. They saw the Vietnam war as a series of mismangements, led mostly by a left-leaning congress sympathic to the extremely vocal (and in their view, largely unimformed) anti war movement. Thus, while Vietnam created great distaste among many Americans for ever trying to intervene in a third world war again, to neo cons, the war simply proved that America must never fail again.

Reagan, however, did not move toward protracted, long-term interventions to stem social revolution in the Third World. Instead, he favored quick campaigns to attack or overthrow leftist governments, favoring small, quick interventions that heightened a sense of post-Vietnam quagmire military triumphalism among Americans, such as the attacks on Grenada andLibya, and arming rightwing militias in Central America seeking to overthrow radical leftist governments like the Sandinistas. Moreover, the Reagan administration's hostile stance toward the Soviet Union, the so-called "evil empire" (despite significant changes since the Stalin-era), the abandonment of Détente would force the Soviets to greatly improve their productive capabilities in order to reciprocate the new arms build-up, especially amid talks of "star wars" missile defense. By the timeGorbachev would usher in the process that would lead to the political collapse of the Soviet Union and the resultant dismantling of the Soviet Administrative Command System with Glasnost (political openness) and Perestroika (economic restructuring), the Soviet economy suffered from both hidden inflation and pervasive supply shortages and was in little position to be able to match US spending on armaments.

Many critics charged that the neoconservatives lost their raison d'étre following the collapse of the Soviet Union. During the1990s, neoconservatives were once again in the opposition side of the foreign policy establishment, railing against the post-Cold War foreign policy of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, which reduced military expenditures and was, in their view, insufficiently idealistic. They accused it of lacking "moral clarity" and the conviction to unilaterally pursue US strategic interests abroad. In the writings of Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Boot, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, William Bennett, Peter Rodman, and others influential in forging the foreign policy doctrines of the Bush administration, the history of appeasement with Hitler at Munich in 1938 and the Cold War's policies ofDétente and containment (rather than rollback) with the Soviet Union and the PRC, which they consider tantamount to appeasement at Munich, are constant themes. Also particularly galvanizing to the movement was George H.W. Bush andColin Powell's decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power and what they viewed as a betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds.

Early in the George W. Bush administration, neoconservatives were particularly upset by Bush's non-confrontational policy toward the PRC and Russia and what they perceived as Bush's insufficient support of Israel, and most neoconservatives perceived Bush's foreign policies to be not substantially different from the policies of Clinton. Following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon, however, the influence of neoconservatism in the Bush administration appears to have increased. In contrast with earlier writings which emphasized the danger from a strong Russia and the PRC, the focus of neoconservatives shifted from Communism to the Middle East and global terrorism.

In his well-publicized piece "The Case for American Empire" in the conservativeWeekly Standard, Max Boot argued that "The most realistic response to terrorism is for America to embrace its imperial role." He countered sentiments that the "United States must become a kinder, gentler nation, must eschew quixotic missions abroad, must become, in Pat Buchanan's phrase, 'a republic, not an empire'," arguing that "In fact this analysis is exactly backward: The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation."

Neoconservatives won a landmark victory with the Bush Doctrine after September 11th. Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute(AEI), an influential conservative thinktank in Washington that has been under neoconservative influence since the election of Reagan, argued in his AEI piece "The Underpinnings of the Bush doctrine" that "the fundamental premise of the Bush Doctrine is true: The United States possesses the means"—economic, military, diplomatic"—to realize its expansive geopolitical purposes. Further, and especially in light of the domestic political reaction to the attacks of September 11, the victory in Afghanistan and the remarkable skill demonstrated by President Bush in focusing national attention, it is equally true that Americans possess the requisite political willpower to pursue an expansive strategy."

The Bush Doctrine, a radical departure from previous US foreign policy, is a proclamation of the right of the United States to wage pre-emptive war, regardless of international law, should it be threatened by terrorists or rogue states. The legitimacy of this doctrine, though questioned by many in the US and especially abroad can be seen as a change from focusing on thedoctrine of deterrence (in the Cold War through Mutually Assured Destruction) as the primary means of self-defense. There is some opinion that preemptive strikes have long been a part of international practice and indeed of American practice, as exemplified, for example, by the unilateral US blockade and boarding of Cuban shipping during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The doctrine also states that the United States "will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." This is designed to create a deterrence to countries that seek to use military might to oppose the United States' policy.

In contrast to more conventional foreign policy experts who argued that Iraq could be restrained by enforcing No-Fly Zonesand by a policy of inspection by United Nations inspectors to restrict his ability to possess chemical or nuclear weapons, neoconservatives attacked this policy direction as appeasement of Saddam Hussein on the grounds that the policy was ineffectual. Proponents of war sought to compare their war to Churchill's war against Hitler, with speakers like United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld comparing Saddam to Hitler, while comparing the toleration shown to Saddam to the1930s appeasement of Hitler. Prior to the 2003 war in Iraq, Bush compared Saddam Hussein to Stalin and Hitler and harked to the theme of "appeasement." Like the Nazis and the Communists, Bush said, "the terrorists seek to end lives and control all life." But the visage of evil conjured up by Bush during his European trip was not that of Bin Laden, who still lives and threatens, but that of Saddam Hussein. Iraq's dictator was singled out as the "great evil" who "by his search for terrible weapons, by his ties to terrorist groups, threatens the security of every free nation, including the free nations of Europe."

However, these sweeping comparisons have been questioned due to the initial support of Iraq by the United States and a history of legitimate conflict with Kuwait. The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran threatened to divert Iraq from the secular nationalism of the Sunni-dominated Ba'athist regime. In addition, Iraqi Shiites, many of whom were sympathetic to Iran's Ayatollah, accounted for the majority of Iraq's population. The pretext for the bloody, protracted Iran-Iraq War was a territorial dispute, but most attribute the war as an attempt by Saddam, supported by both the US and the USSR, to have Iraq form a bulwark against the expansionism of radical Iranian-style revolution. The war with Iran left Iraq bankrupt. No country would lend it money except the United States and borrowing money from the US made Iraq its client state. Iraq had also borrowed a tremendous amount of money from other Arab states, including Kuwait, during the 1980s to fight its war with Iran. Saddam Hussein felt that the war had been fought for the benefit of the other Gulf Arab states as much as for Iraq, and so all debts should be forgiven. Kuwait, however, did not forgive its debt and further provoked Saddam by slant drilling oil out of wells that Iraq considered within its disputed border with Kuwait. In 1990 Saddam Hussein complained to the United States State Department about Kuwaiti slant drilling. This had continued for years, but now Iraq needed oil money to pay off its war debts and avert an economic crisis. Saddam ord ered troops to the Iraq-Kuwait border, creating alarm over the prospect of an invasion. After talks with April Glaspie, the United States ambassador to Iraq, assured him that the US considered the Iraq-Kuwait dispute an internal Arab matter, Saddam sent his troops into Kuwait. Thus, the actual historical record would seem to cast doubts on the view among neoconservatives that Saddam's wars have been tantamount to Hitler's. However, the grain of truth coming with the idea was that Saddam promoted his invasion of Kuwait as an Arab reunification, similiar to the abolition of the artificial internal border of Germany, that had been approved by the U.S. at just that time. Glaspie had not rejected that comparison.

Neoconservative foreign policy pundits, however, emphasize an abstract evil in their polemics, de-emphasizing the complexities of autocratic governance in the Developing World. Today, the most prominent supporters of the hawkish stance inside the administration are Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Neoconservatives perhaps are closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party today since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon than any competing faction, especially considering the nature of the Bush Doctrine and the preemptive war against Iraq.

However, at the same time, there have been limits in the power of neoconservatives in the Bush administration. The Secretary of State Colin Powell is largely seen as being an opponent of neoconservative ideas, and while the neoconservative notion of tough and decisive action has been apparent in U.S. policy toward the Middle East, it has not been seen in U.S. policy towardCommunist China and Russia or in the handling of the North Korean nuclear crisis.

Neoconservatism has been influential in conservative agenda in the United States, emphasizing desires to increase defense spending significantly, the agenda to challenge regimes hostile to US interests and values, desires to push free-market reforms abroad, and the general support for a policy of militarism to ensure that the United States remain the world's sole superpower.

The neoconservatives also support a robust American stance on Israel. The neoconservative influenced Project for a New American Century called for an Israel no longer dependent on American aid through the removal of major threats in the region.

The interest in Israel, and the large proportion of Jewish neoconservatives has led to the question of "dual loyalty." A number of critics, such as Pat Buchanan, have accused them of putting Israeli interests above those of America. In turn these critics have been labelled as anti-semites by many neoconservatives (which in turn has led to accusations of professional smearing, and then paranoia and so on).

However, one should note that many prominent neoconservatives are not Jewish, such as Michael Novak, Jeanne Kirkpatrick,Frank Gaffney, and Max Boot. Second, neoconservatives in the 1960s were much less interested in Israel before the June 1967 Six Day War. It has only been since this conflict, which has raised the specter of Israel's military invincibility, that the neoconservatives have become preoccupied by Israel's security interests. They support Israel's role as the strongest ally of the United States in the Middle East and as the sole Western-style democracy in the region.

Moreover, they have long argued that the United States should emulate Israel's tactics of pre-emptive attacks, especially Israel's unprovoked, pre-emptive unilateral attacks in the 1980s on nuclear facilities in Libya and Iraq. Despite (or perhaps because of) condemnation by the United Nations, neoconservatives have admired such Israeli adventures, arguing that the United States, like Israel, should act in its national interests, regardless of international law.

The partisan support for Likud would suggest that their support for Israel is not merely motivated by blind ethnic loyalty, and the criticism of their critics of American politicians judged to be too friendly to Britain or the Soviet Union would suggest that dual loyalty is a genuine fear amongst Old Right conservatives.

There is conflict between neoconservatives and libertarian conservatives. Libertarian conservatives are distrustful of a large government and therefore regard neoconservative foreign policy ambitions with considerable distrust.

There has been considerable conflict between neoconservatives and business conservatives in some areas. Neoconservatives tend to see Communist China as a looming threat to the United States and argue for harsh policies to contain that threat. Business conservatives see mainland China as a business opportunity and see a tough policy against China as opposed to their desires for trade and economic progress. Furthermore, business conservatives appear much less distrustful of international institutions.

The disputes over Israel and domestic policies have contributed to a sharp conflict over the years with "paleoconservatives", whose very name is taken as a rebuke to their "neo" (new) brethren. There are many personal issues but effectively the paleoconservatives view the neoconservatives as interlopers who deviate from the traditional conservative agenda on issues as diverse as States Rights, free trade, immigration, isolationism and the welfare state. All of this leads to their conservative label being questioned.

1. Elliott Abrams
2. Daniel Bell
3. William Bennett
4. Max Boot
5. Jeb Bush
6. Linda Chavez
7. Dick Cheney
8. Midge Dector
9. Douglas Feith
10. Steve Forbes
11. Francis Fukuyama
12. Nathan Glazer
13. David Horowitz
14. Irving Howe
15. Robert Kagan
16. Jeane Kirkpatrick
17. Irving Kristol
18. William Kristol
19. Richard Perle
20. Norman Podhoretz
21. Peter Rodman
22. Max Shachtman
23. Paul Wolfowitz

• Mark Gerson, ed., The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader (Perseus Publishing, 1997) ISBN 0201154889 (paperback) or ISBN 0201479680 (hardback)

• Donnelly, Thomas, "The Underpinnings of the Bush Doctrine", AEI Online. February 1, 2003.

• Wallerstein, Immanuel, "The Eagle Has Crash Landed: Pax Americana is over". (An alternative position to that of the AEI.)

• Eden, Amid, "Now it's Trotsky's fault?" - A sceptical look at the existence of a Trotskyite - Neoconservative link.

• Zmirak, J.P., "America the Abstraction", A conservative critique of neoconservatism.

Isolationism Redux

Executive Summary

In this paper, leading American historian Ronald Radosh describes how the antiwar protests that emerged during the Iraq intervention revived the slogans and clichés of the isolationist movement in America before the Second World War. In both cases, opponents of military action concentrated on allegations that war was motivated by illegitimate economic interests, that America was abusing its power, that imperialism was becoming the focus of American policy, that militarism and repression were increasing, and that America risked making new enemies in the world. Although claims that Iraq was a quagmire also echo the protest idiom of the Vietnam era, such charges had also, originally, been voiced at the end of the 1930s. Professor Radosh's arguments links these to a dangerous, anti-democratic alliance of ultra-leftists and neo-fascists.

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.” –ThomasPaine, The Crisis, 1776

It had to happen. The naysayers opposed to the campaign for liberation of Iraq, and the doomsday scenario they laid out, struck those of us with knowledge of history with an eerie sense of déjà vu. The isolationism that was employed to undermine American will and self-confidence in fighting the fascist and militarist aggressors in World War II has been revived, this time targeted against our President and our commitment to the liberation of Iraq. Let us examine, in this historical context, the isolationist arguments, which we hear repeated time and time again in op-eds, press conferences, and protest statements.

There is a common set of arguments, echoed over and over.

First and foremost: “No Blood for Oil.” The implication is that the United States acts at the behest of its largest corporations, in this case, the ever-greedy oil lobby. We were told that access to Iraqi oil fields alone motivated U.S. policy. Our critics said American boys were going to be sacrificed for wealthy business interests.

Second: Our Enemies are Victims. The opponents of intervention said that people whose identity, livelihood and well-being have been harmed by precipitous American action, including no-fly zones and an embargo on trade, will now face suffering in the hundreds of thousands, including scores of civilian deaths as a result of both the strategic bombing of Iraq and armed invasion. They declared that nothing that Saddam Hussein has done compares to the evil that will be inflicted on the people of the Middle East as a result of U.S. military action.

Third: The Hegemonic U.S. Empire Expands. Our opponents claim a drift to war is a result of the mechanism of the American Empire — acting to thwart the efforts of competing powers to dominate the trade and investment patterns of the world. The U.S. is merely new imperialism, acting to advance its interests throughout the world.

Fourth: War means militarism and repression at home. This is alleged to include erosion of civil liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and the transformation of the United States into a repressive authoritarian regime similar in nature to that of our proclaimed enemy’s regime.

Fifth: The U.S. is the Enemy. Antiwar activists claim the present Bush administration, not Iraq or any other foreign power harms the interests of the American people, as well as that of all peoples around the world. As the International ANSWER group that runs the peace marches, proclaimed: “the real threat of nuclear war and the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction arises within the U.S. administration.” The administration’s goal is described as a simple one, to “conquer the oil, land and resources of the Middle East.” The result will be a “catastrophe,” a “war of aggression” in which social programs will end, as government funds are exclusively used in the attempt to “take control of and profit from the oil of the Persian/Arabian Gulf.”

The enemies of liberation in Iraq, speaking from U.S. soil, warned that rather than victory, the U.S. would once again be blindly sucked into a useless and unwinnable war turning the rest of the world against our nation. The U.S., as Pat Buchanan so plainly put it, is acting in a “triumphalist” fashion leading to “an imperial war on Iraq.” And, of course, Buchanan argued that the U.S. is fundamentally manipulated by the Israeli government, which hopes that war with Iraq will give Israel an excuse to return to Lebanon and “settle scores with Hizbollah.” The Jews, now as in the past, are projected as the driving force pushing the U.S. to accept their agenda and endanger the peace of the world.

These themes are all reminiscent of those offered in the years before the outbreak of World War II, when home-grown isolationists in protest movements and pressure groups, backed by a hardy group of supporters in Congress, argued that a sound American policy was one that put “America First.” This gave the name to the most wide ranging and representative American isolationist group. Indeed, Pat Buchanan’s demagogy about Israeli influence calls to mind Charles Lindbergh’s 1941 accusation that the drive to enter the war against Hitler emanated from “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” Jewish interventionists (neo-conservatives, Buchanan now says) were powerful, according to Lindbergh, because of their “large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”

In a fashion strikingly similar to Buchanan, the former conservative, now left-wing writer Michael Lind, has come out with his own virtually anti-Semitic conspiracy theory seeking to explain what lay behind the war against Saddam Hussein. He sees policy being made by “neoconservative defense intellectuals” who are “products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement … which morphed into a kind of militaristic and imperial right.” According to Lind, they support “preventive warfare,” which he argues is based on “Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zioninsm.” They are the center, he argues, of a “metaphorical ‘pentagon’ of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think tanks, foundations and media empires.” It is a virtual new neoconservative conspiracy theory, which as political scientist Robert J. Lieber writes, is a “sinister mythology … worthy of the Iraqi Information Minister, Muhammed Saeed Al-Sahaf, who became notorious for telling Western journalists not to believe their own eyes as American tanks rolled into view just across the Tigris River.”

In an analysis similar to that made by Lind, the left-wing journalist Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation, has stressed that “the war has put Jews in the showcase as never before;” and like Lind, he asserts that a cabal of Jews, including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith make up the “neoconservative” triumvirate who along with their “media cheerleaders” William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Martin Peretz have become the “primary intellectual architects” of war against Saddam Hussein.

On both Left and Right, therefore, we see a new conspiracy theory emerging — one that shows the mindset of classical antiSemitism; ie, as Lieber puts it, “a small, all-powerful but little known group or ‘cabal’ of Jewish masterminds is secretly manipulating policy.” Under their influence, the nation has supposedly shifted away from a policy based on protecting the people’s interests to one that is subversive of that interest — and that benefits primarily the right-wing Zionist leadership of the Likud in Israel.

A striking parallel between today and the 1930’s is the blending together of opposition to a forceful American foreign policy by remnants of both the Old and New Left and the Old Right. Early in the Cold War, Harry S. Truman advisor Joseph P. Jones wrote that “most of the outright opposition” to Truman’s new bi-partisan interventionist foreign policy came from “the extreme Left and the extreme Right … from a certain group of ‘liberals’ who had been long strongly critical of the administration’s stiffening policy toward the Soviet Union, and from the ‘isolationists,’ who had been consistent opponents of all foreign-policy measures that projected the United States actively into World Affairs.”

Some fifty years later, opposition to a forceful U.S. response to new international threats, comes from the same pair of elements. Once again, Left and Right stand on common ground, active in what some have called “the Red-Brown coalition” — after the creation in post-Soviet Russia of an alliance of extreme nationalists with old Communists. Today, Old Right descendants and imitators gather around Pat Buchanan and his journal, The American Conservative, which joins the Left in the fight against so-called U.S. “global hegemony.” Their anti-Americanism has become so visceral and extreme that one of the journal’s contributors, Dennis “Justin” Raimondo, actually wrote, in the Russian newspaper Pravda, that the claim that “America is a civilized country” is false, and, referring to World War II, he argued “the wrong side won the war in the Pacific.” And like the conspiratorial anti-Semitic Arab newspapers, Raimondo also writes that “Israel had foreknowledge of 9/11,” a claim that puts him in league with the most extremist anti-Semites in the Arab world.

Let us look more closely at the claims outlined herein as they appeared in the years before U.S. entry into the Second World War, when isolationist sentiment was overwhelming, and the advocates of a forceful U.S. response to fascist and militarist aggression were fighting a rearguard battle. Just as the opposition to war with Iraq called for lifting the sanctions imposed against Saddam Hussein — sanctions he successfully mitigated by business deals with nations like Russia and France — pre-World War II isolationists argued that sanctions against Japan did not have the effect of forcing a cessation of Japanese aggression, but rather — as the historian Charles Beard wrote at the time — the “application of sanctions to Japan … would end in war” and represented a move by the President to seek “war in the Pacific.” Isolationists then opposed sanctions as a step in the road to war, used unnecessarily by an administration hell bent on military action. When Japan finally attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, Beard and others saw that attack as an act to which Japan had been driven by an intransigent American policy. Even Pearl Harbor, to the isolationists, was America’s fault. And as today, the isolationists argued that the U.S. was approaching war because of the dire influence of big business. There was, in other words, no legitimate interest in protecting our nation’s national security.

There are so many similarities, in the pre-World War II arguments of the opponents of interventionism, to those made today by opponents of any military action against Iraq. Let us take up the argument that waging war means the onset of fascist repression at home. Lindbergh’s statements appear eerily similar to many made today. We are frequently warned that if we go to war against Saddam Hussein, we will be saddled with an endless commitment to Iraq, in effect a permanent occupation. Speaking in 1939, Lindbergh argued “if we enter in the quarrels of Europe during war, we must stay in them in time of peace as well.” Substitute Middle East for Europe, and the concept is the same. He went on: “If we enter the fighting for democracy abroad we may end by losing it at home;” or, as many argue today, the result at home of war with Iraq will be increased militarization, repression and an end to all individual liberty.

There was, of course, a desire for oil. Contrary to the protester’s current chant, “No War for Oil,” the oil industry wanted to continue with its purchases of Iraqi oil, and favored an end to sanctions which harms the flow. And just as nations like France and Russia desired to maintain their cozy business relations with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — including access to its oil — in the period before World War II Japan was set to strike against Dutch and British possessions in East Asia, because of its desire for Indonesian oil. Indeed, the Roosevelt administration let Japan occupy Indo-China. But it drew the line at a takeover of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya — much as George W. Bush has drawn the line with his insistence that Saddam Hussein must seriously disarm.

Then, as now, there were polls. In Europe a large majority of the public recently favored peace over resistance to tyranny — just as they did before the Second World War, when the young and the brightest signed the Oxford Union Pledge that they would not fight “for King and country.” In late 1940, the U.S. faced a similar situation. Gallup polls showed that while 60 percent of the American public favored aid to Britain, less than 13 percent were willing to see the U.S. go to war with Nazi Germany, even if it meant that Britain would lose. FDR acted against the tide, daring to show true leadership by advancing policies that would deal with the actual threat, while skillfully avoiding the wrath of the isolationist lobby and Congress. Today, George W. Bush showed his ability for comparable leadership, by moving ahead to do what was necessary, taking the nation with him, and ignoring the protestors, the disgruntled opposition anti-war Democrats, and the fierce opposition of the French and German governments.

One difference between then and now, however, was that a large portion of the intellectual community then formed committees in favor of intervention against the Nazi menace. These groups countered large and influential anti-war lobbies exemplified by the American First Committee. And just as today, opponents of war smeared the President, arguing, as Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana did, that the President sought to “plow under every fourth American boy,” since his aim was to get the U.S. into war, and not to keep it out. To the isolationists, Franklin D. Roosevelt was not a democratically elected President, but a virtual dictator, who if the U.S. went to war, as Senator Robert A. Taft put it, would become “a complete dictator over the lives and property of our citizens.” Like the left today, Taft claimed that the President was presiding over a state that allegedly had become fascist, and in which the President showed “a complete lack of regard for the rights of Congress,” and in which he was making policy “in violation of the people’s will.” Today, George W. Bush is accused by his opponents on the far Right and far Left of being an unelected President, a virtual dictator who seeks wars to validate his Presidency.

And in the 30’s, as today, the proponents of intervention are labeled the forces of big business and oil, those who seek profits above all. Taft argued in 1941, “the most conservative members of the [Republican] party — the Wall Street bankers … the plutocratic newspapers, and most of the party’s financial contributors,” who favor “intervention in Europe.” On the other hand, it was “the common people, the farmer, the workman … the small business man — who are opposed to war.” Then, it was the “big business interests of the East” who feared “destruction of our foreign trade” who sought war; now, in the 21 st Century, the same arguments are being made, and we hear again and again how the business interests desire war, while the common people — millions through Europe demonstrating in the streets — want peace.

Today, we hear the argument that the American cannot and should not be global policemen, intervening the long and bloody European wars. It is also a familiar argument. Speaking in 1939, historian Charles A. Beard told Congress that “the Orient from Siberia to Singapore is not worth the bones of one American soldier,” and that Americans were not “smart enough to solve the problems of Europe which are encrusted in the blood rust of fifty centuries of warfare.” Although Beard acknowledged that a threat existed from Germany and Italy — much as those opposed to war with Iraq argued that Saddam Hussein is a threat but could be dealt with by avoiding war — Beard argued that the rest of Europe outnumbered the fascist states by three to one, and were superior in both armed forces and material. Moreover, like those who today condemn the United States as no better than many dictatorships — essentially regarding the U.S.A. as evil itself and our President as the equivalent of Saddam Hussein — Beard claimed that the Western nations opposed to Hitler were quarreling “over the spoils of empire.” It is a refrain echoed today in the claim of the antiwar protesters that America’s reason for wanting to disarm Saddam stems from its own imperial goals — particularly oil for American firms. As for freeing those who live under the rule of a monstrous tyrant, the argument today is that such action is not America’s business — much as Beard argued that it was not the job of the U.S. to suppress all opponents of democracy and peace.

We are now at a stage in which many wish to emulate the discredited policy of appeasement — as defined by the British during the Chamberlain era — and in which opponents of war against tyranny argue that the old isolationist arguments were essentially correct. Then and now, their claim was simple; the U.S. should seek peace by only narrowly defending itself against direct attacks; it could and should not allow any President to use his power to maneuver the nation into war; nor should it seek to try and spread democracy elsewhere in the world, no matter how tyrannical a government that has challenged the U.S. may be.

Just as Neville Chamberlain called the Munich treaty the essence of “peace in our time,” a sentiment shared by all the would-be “progressive” and “right-thinking” people in Europe, who saw handing over to Hitler the territory he sought as a strategy that would satisfy the dictator and guarantee the pace — today’s leftwing and rightwing isolationists — the Red/Brown coalition — argue that the Bush administration with its bellicose behavior ignores popular sentiment. The British journalist Alistair Cooke, a young man at the time of Munich, recently recalled that almost 11 million British subjects had signed a “peace ballot” expressing their opposition to war and confrontation with Hitler. Their noble slogan was “Against War and Fascism;” almost eerily similar to the cry of today’s left-wing opponents of war. When they use the term Fascism, they are referring to the U.S. Government — and they remain silent about the monstrous regime and practices of Saddam Hussein. No wonder Alistair Cooke says today “so many of the arguments mounted … today … are exactly what we heard in the House of Commons debates and read in the French press” in the 1930’s. Even after Hitler began his invasion of Europe, the British and French peace advocates called only for “negotiation.” They were so successful, Cooke quips, that the French ended with “their whole country defeated and occupied.” As for the British, each advance by Hitler’s armies produced only a new call for disarmament and for leaving any response to the League of Nations.

We all know what happened. The League was incapable of responding to violations of its own rule of law, and sat idly by as Japan invaded China and Italy, massacred the Ethiopians and as the mechanized brutes summoned up by Hitler marched through Europe. The League did nothing to protect the fragile Spanish Republic, as its civilian men and women bared their breasts to the bombs of the Nazi Luftwaffe. The fate of the League was sealed, and its irrelevancy led to its final collapse. When the Bush administration and Tony Blair in Britain, supported by the gallant Spanish and Portuguese, sought to move the United Nations against Saddam Hussein, and thus to hold him to account for the requirements the UN itself mandated — instead, its members and the European public argued that must be avoided above all, and that the Iraqi dictator should be given more time. Each obfuscation and avoidance of compliance led the antiwar opponents not to support tough measures that might affect Saddam Hussein, but to counsel avoidance of war above all else. As Cooke points out, when Churchill warned that Hitler had built a giant army and superior air force, the peace movement retorted — “But he’s not used them.” The British Left and the American isolationist Right stood together against intervention.

And so, as Cooke says, “the voices of the 30s are echoing through 2003.” This was made most clear in the speech presented to the U.S. Senate given in late February by Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. The new antiwar movement was so impressed with Byrd’s presentation that they e-mailed it to their supporters throughout the country. Evidently they find it the most eloquent statement of their current beliefs and arguments. Yet it is strikingly similar to a speech given by Robert A. Taft in May 1940 — a speech correctly disdained at the time as the epitome of isolationism.

The essential problem is that the new isolationists not only emulate and imitate their 1930’s predecessors, but in some cases, acknowledge this and are proud of those who preached appeasement in that earlier era. Thus Pat Buchanan, in a forum held on Frontpagemag.com, argued that “there was nothing immoral, or unwise, about the isolationists’ position of 1940-41.” Calling the effort made by the discredited America First Committee as helping the U.S. “stay out of the war” until late after it had started, which Buchanan calls “courageous.” Thus those whose actions would have prevented the U.S. from readying itself for a necessary fight against that generation’s evil, are today praised by the new isolationists, who seek as they did in the 30’s, to build an antiwar movement uniting the left-wing and conservative opponents of military action.

Of course, the left-wing opponents of intervention have their own agenda. When Bill Clinton was President, and acted unilaterally against Saddam Hussein — however weakly and ineffectively — many on the political Left either supported Clinton’s brief attempts to deflect terrorism — such as threatening Iraq and bombing a purported chemical factory in Sudan — or remained silent. Approve or disapprove, they favored the Democratic President, and said not a word. In the 1930s, one saw formation of a united front of pro-Soviet groups with “progressive” isolationists like Senator William Borah of Idaho. Indeed, the draft — introduced in Congress as the Selective Service Act of 1940 — almost did not pass. The Roosevelt administration’s victory was achieved by only one vote.

In the 1930s, isolationists sought to protect the U.S. by naively believing that America could stand aside as totalitarianism swept the globe, and make pragmatic alliances with evil dictators that would keep our homeland out of the war. In Britain the result was the Munich Pact; in America it was congressional obstruction of measures sought by the President to aid our British ally.

Now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, a new form of totalitarianism — Islamist extremism — threatens the security and well-being of our people. The danger is that our nation will be unable to meet the challenge facing it, if the protestations of the new isolationists are heeded.

When the remnants of the Old Right and the ever diminishing political Left unite against American “global hegemony” and American “imperialism,” even their language is the same. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s logical and devastating account of Saddam’s evasions and acquisition of banned arms — so similar to the secret re-armament forbidden by the Versailles Treaty and carried out by Hitler with the West’s acquiescence — put an end to any chance that the American government would pursue the policy advocated in the 1930s by Neville Chamberlain. After Pearl Harbor, the anti-interventionist movement collapsed overnight. Will our military action against Iraq lead today’s “peace movement” leaders to cease nattering and scurry off into the darkness? Not any time soon.

About the author: Ronald Radosh, Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York, is an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy. He is the co-author of The Rosenberg File and The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism, as well as Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964-1996, and Prophets On the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism. He is a frequent contributor to The New Republic, National Review and the New York Sun among others.

(Ronald Radosh in The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, June 25, 2003)
http://www.defenddemocracy.org/publications/publications_show.htm?doc_id=179156&attrib_id=7395

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