A Letter To The Neocons

Dear Dick, Ron, Bill, Charles, Mark, VDH and others,

There isn't any rational being who actually believes that the neocon program has any steam left in it, now that we have the failures in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon. Three strikes and you're out, guys.

But that isn't stopping you ranting. Oh no.

Mark Steyn, the most bigoted conspiracy-theorist Islamophobe still writing a syndicated column, launched into another conspiracy laden tirade today in which he suggests that Israeli attacks on Lebanon are a form of just retribution for what happened recently in Seattle:

In the struggle between America and global Islam, it's the geopolitical bipolar disorder that matters. Clearly, from his own statements about "our people," for Pam Waechter's killer his Muslim identity ultimately transcended his American one. That's what connects him to what's happening in southern Lebanon: a pan-Islamist identity that overrides national citizenship whether in the Pacific Northwest or the Levant. Not for all Muslims, but for enough that things will get mighty "disproportionate" before they're through.

Twenty-eight dead civilians in a village from which 150 Katyusha rockets have been launched against Israel doesn't seem "disproportionate" to me. What's "disproportionate" is the idea that civilian life should be allowed to proceed normally in what is, in fact, a terrorist launching platform.

Here's the shorter version - "Israel should be congratulated for killing 20 civilians to every one Hizboullah manages, after all they are only untermench...in a worldwide conspiracy of evil genius...ummm" Honestly, you could collect Steyn's columns and publish them as "The Protocols of the Elders Of Islamism". It really is the same level of paranoid garbage.

Charles Krauthammer and others are finding it convenient to blame Ehud Olmert and other Israeli puppets who were egged on to dance to the neocon tune.

The United States has gone far out on a limb to allow Israel to win and for all this to happen. It has counted on Israel's ability to do the job. It has been disappointed. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has provided unsteady and uncertain leadership. Foolishly relying on air power alone, he denied his generals the ground offensive they wanted, only to reverse himself later. He has allowed his war cabinet meetings to become fully public through the kind of leaks no serious wartime leadership would ever countenance. Divisive cabinet debates are broadcast to the world, as was Olmert's own complaint that "I'm tired. I didn't sleep at all last night" (Haaretz, July 28). Hardly the stuff to instill Churchillian confidence.

His search for victory on the cheap has jeopardized not just the Lebanon operation but America's confidence in Israel as well. That confidence -- and the relationship it reinforces -- is as important to Israel's survival as its own army. The tremulous Olmert seems not to have a clue.

We all realise that when Charles writes "America" he thinks "we neocons". We're not fooled. Churchill - who wanted to see the UN have control of military forces exactly to prevent folks like you doing what you have - would be furious at the way you have co-opted his work to unChurchillian ends.

No-one has done more to tarnish Churchill's work by associating it with the neocon movement than Victor Davis Hanson who again tried to evoke Churchill's ghost this week as he wrote that if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, we should just look around at the current "appeasement" of the supposed Islamic conspiracy. As byblows, he also managed to parrot the neocon talking points that Hizboullah and other fourth generation enemies won't fight fair (when has an enemy ever done so and when has it ever solved the problem just to moan about it?) and that the Israeli leader let everyone down by not being bloodthirsty enough.

Hanson's comparison to 1938 is in any case hopelessly contrived. There is no military/industrial power with the scale of Germany or Japan, there is no actual enemy alliance of great powers bent on empire-building Axis but rather simply a rhetorical one (didn't he ever get taught that "the map is not the territory"?) and there will be no massive tank battles. The way WW2 was fought will never suit the war on terror. The neocons have insisted on brawling while our enemies use ju-jitsu and yet you wish us to believe that more force will work and that whining about it will force our enemies to fight your way?

And then there's Bill Kristol, who this week is blaming the Democrats in America for the failure of the neocon agenda while asserting that Bush is "a president who knows we are at war with jihadist Islam." The level of displacement involved in blaming a party that has been essentially powerless for six years while the neocon leaders in Bush's cabinet presided over your policy failure is as stunning as it is predictable. Sociopaths never see themselves as having made the mistakes when things go wrong.

Yet all of this sound and fury - signifying nothing of intellectual integrity - is no longer fooling all of the people all of the time. Even conservatives have caught on to the ways in which your cancer has killed their political parties in America and elsewhere. David Cameron, new leader of Churchill's Tory party wants nothing to do with your lies. In Israel, a new understanding of how the nation has been mislead by your movement and its partner hawks in Likud and the American Christian Right is evolving. Daniel Levy, a man with a wealth of experience in international affairs, recently wrote:

Finding themselves somewhat bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, the neoconservatives are reveling in the latest crisis, displaying their customary hubris in re-seizing the initiative. The U.S. press and blogosphere is awash with neocon-inspired calls for indefinite shooting, no talking and extension of hostilities to Syria and Iran, with Gingrich calling this a third world war to "defend civilization."

...Israel and its friends in the United States should seriously reconsider their alliances not only with the neocons, but also with the Christian Right. The largest "pro-Israel" lobby day during this crisis was mobilized by Pastor John Hagee and his Christians United For Israel, a believer in Armageddon with all its implications for a rather particular end to the Jewish story. This is just asking to become the mother of all dumb, self-defeating and morally abhorrent alliances.

Internationalist Republicans, Democrats and mainstream Israelis must construct an alternative narrative to the neocon nightmare, identifying shared interests in a policy that reestablishes American leadership, respect and credibility in the region by facilitating security and stability, pursuing conflict resolution and promoting the conditions for more open societies (as opposed to narrow election-worship). The last two years of the Bush presidency can be an opportunity for progress or an exercise in desperate damage limitation. It sounds counter-intuitive, but Israel should reflect on and even help reorient American expectations.

Here in the U.S., pundits, bloggers and policy wonks - from conservative as well as liberal circles - are agreeing with Brent Budowsky:

The mistakes of the Bush Administration in Iraq, and the mistake of the Olmert strategy in Lebanon, result from the fundamentally flawed neoconservative vision of when and how to wage war.

They both proceeded, without regard to the opinion of the democratic world and without regard to the opinion of the people affected by the conflict. They both proceeded without a clear strategy to win; they both proceeded with the combination of "shock and awe" bombing without adequate numbers of troops for the mission. They both indulged an "occupation mentality" that contradicts the movement of history, the logic of counter-insurgency, and the need for policy to be supported and sustained.

There is now an arc of chaos and civil war from Afghanistan, which has deteriorated; through Iraq, which has deteriorated to dangerous levels; to the West Bank and the broader Palestinian-Israeli issues, which have been neglected by obsession with Iraq and intransigence without serious diplomacy for the first time in generations; to Lebanon, who's cedar revolution for democracy is now threatened by devastation to the Lebanese infrastructure, the alienation of the Lebanese people, and the possible return to factional chaos; through Somalia, which is now almost completely neglected today and is a breeding ground and training camp for terrorists.

We have seen the result of the neoconservative narrative executed with political brilliance and catastrophic misjudgment; and the result is the neoconservative nightmare that is now imposed on all of us, on people through the region, only hurting the hopes for freedom and democracy and helping those recruiting new terrorists who thrive on mistakes such as these.

But it will be the voices of conservatives here in America who will ultimately sound your death knell. More and more are coming to conclusions not far from those reported by E.J. Dionne - that:

There is an increasingly bitter debate over whether it made any sense to wage war in Iraq in the hopes of transforming that country into a democracy. Conservatives with excellent philosophical credentials, including my colleague George F. Will, and Bill Buckley himself, see the enterprise as profoundly unconservative.

Buckley and Fukiyama have already disowned the movement they created. Other conservative serious thinkers are also dumping your manifesto in the trash can. In droves.

You should conduct the wake and funeral now. There's no point in waiting until '08 for only an imbecile would expect those who vote for the next incumbent of the White House to listen to anything such failures have to say. The next set of conservative hopefuls already know that.

Your movement is like any other dinosaur - dead but still moving because the brains haven't gotten the message through to the hindquarters yet - and will gasp its last belatedly wheezy breath the day Dick Cheney packs his bags and leaves the White House.