NEOCON
DREAMS
Indeed,
the excoriation of his enemies, both real and imagined, has
been the leitmotif – and, it often seems, the chief pleasure
– of Podhoretz's career. Boy, did he have a good time at AEI,
where he managed to fit each and every one of them –
from Mary McCarthy to Pat Buchanan – into the hour or
so of his speech. It was a real stemwinder, alright, a clarion
call to arms for all those neoconservatives who go to bed
at night and dream of bombs falling on Baghdad.
The
subject of his talk, "whether 9/11 hurled us into a new era
of American history," Podhoretz approached with his characteristic
focus on the titanic ideological battles (and petty bitch-fights)
of the past, especially those in which he was personally involved.
Yes, it seems like the war spirit has finally been imbued
in the American people, he enthuses: just look at all those
flags out there! And there are other hopeful signs, he opines:
for much of the Left, the events of 9/11 and its aftermath
served as a kind of "inverse Krontstadt," a fundamental disillusionment
with their supposedly "anti-American" ideals: "What it did,"
says Podhoretz, "was raise questions about what one of them
called their inveterately 'negative faith in America the ugly.'"
Now
this is certainly an odd historical analogy to make before
an audience of ideologically-committed conservative policy
wonks and their monied patrons: a reference to an incident
that took place in the early days of the Bolshevik coup, whose
heroes and villains loom large in the Marxist iconography
but would seem obscure, to say the least, on the Right. But
that is the special conceit of the neocons, who like to flaunt
their leftist origins as if to say "we're not like the rest
of you right-wing rubes." The rubes love it.
A
LOW DISHONEST EVASION
Podhoretz
segues into a poem by W.
H. Auden, which, "although it contained hostile sentiments
about America left over from Auden's Communist period, but
the opening lines are so evocative of September 11, 2001 that
it is no wonder they were quoted so often in the early days
of this new war."
"I
sit in one of the dives
On
Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade."
A
PERFECT WORLD
This
"dishonest decade," though, turns out to be not the Clinton
years, but, incredibly, the 1960s. This is really the source
of the backlash that Podhoretz fears, and which he warns against
in his speech. Yes, the pro-war consensus and enforced intellectual
conformity of the post-9/11 era is wonderful, in Poddy's view,
because it harkens back to the 1950s, an era in which the
twin engines of the Welfare-Warfare State were roaring and
seemingly unstoppable. It was a time when the "End
of Ideology" had been proclaimed by Daniel
Bell and friends, and the formerly flaming ex-radicals
settling comfortably into the role of middle class parlor
pinks and right-wing social democrats – Podhoretz among
them – were fully prepared to believe they represented
the apotheosis of political and esthetic development. It was
a perfect, Podhoretzian world.
A
FAMILY TRAGEDY
Utopia
did not last long, however, and, adding insult (and autobiography)
to injury, Podhoretz claims it was toppled by a somewhat ragtag
movement, of which he was a "leader." Podhoretz, invariably
self-referential, illustrates this point by telling a story
about a meeting he once addressed that was attended by young
people described by a friend who turned to him and said: "Do
you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy
to some family or other?" As to what that said about the adults
present, one can only ruefully surmise. In any event, complains
Podhoretz, this is precisely why he can't "fully share
the heady confidence of my political friends" that the present
stultifying political atmosphere is "a permanent and not an
ephemeral change." Look, after all, at what those disheveled
juvenile delinquents were up against:
"The
ideas and attitudes of the new movement, cleaned up but essentially
unchanged, would within a mere ten years
turn one of our two major parties upside down and inside out.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy famously declared that
we would 'pay any price, bear any burden,' and so on, 'to
assure the survival and the success of liberty.' By 1972,
George McGovern, nominated for President by Kennedy's own
party, was campaigning on the slogan, 'Come Home, America.'
It was a slogan that almost perfectly reflected the ethos
of the embryonic movement that I had addressed in Union Square
only about a decade before."
A
CONSPIRACY THEORY
The
antiwar movement of the 1960s, as Podhoretz correctly points
out, "was bucking a national consensus that came close to
being universal." Yet Podhoretz has a conspiracy theory to
explain the popular backlash against that war, and he trots
it out once again as a warning that the same "elite" villains
who supposedly sold out the US last time are about to do it
again. The idea that the war was eventually unpopular – with
the military as well as people – because it was wrong to have
become involved in the first place, both strategically and
morally, is naturally dismissed out of hand by Podhoretz,
who further asserts that
"The
problem is that Vietnam was a popular war. At the beginning,
all the major media—from the New York Times to the Washington
Post, from Time to Newsweek, from CBS to ABC—supported
our intervention. So did most of the professoriate. And so
did the public."
A
FAILURE OF MEMORY
Podhoretz
assumes that the public will follow the pundits and the professoriate
wherever they decide to go: but it ain't so. Nor is it so
that the public was vehemently in favor of militantly prosecuting
a distant war in a strange land that it knew nothing about,
at least in the beginning: indeed, the public did not want
a military confrontation with the Soviet Union, over Vietnam
or anything else, as underscored by the effectiveness of Lyndon
Baines Johnson's infamous television ad attacking Barry Goldwater
as a warmonger. Who can forget the little girl picking daisies,
as a disembodied voice counts down: "Ten, nine, eight, seven,
six – " and the screen explodes in a flash of white light
as a mushroom cloud is superimposed over the girl's sweet
face.
Poddy's
memory, always selective, may simply be failing, and he blithely
barrels right along:
"No
matter. Even when all but one or two of the people who had
either directly led us into Vietnam, or applauded our intervention,
commenced falling all over themselves as they scampered to
the head of the antiwar parade, public opinion continued supporting
the war."
The
public didn't like the antiwar movement. That doesn't mean
they loved the war. Yet the myth of the Stab in the Back is
one that has been so assiduously cultivated by the neocons
that, by now, it is immune to challenge, at least in their
eyes: it has the fixed form of a traditional religious invocation,
which Pope Poddy, the Vicar of the Neoconservative Church,
renders with perfect pitch:
"But
public opinion had ceased to count. Indeed, even reality itself
had ceased to count. Consider the Tet offensive of 1968. It
was, as all now agree and some vainly struggled to insist
then, a crushing defeat for the Communists. But Walter Cronkite
had only to declare it a defeat for us on the CBS Evening
News, and a defeat it became."
This
is utter nonsense. To begin with, as John E. Mueller points
out in War,
Presidents, and Public Opinion, the American people
turned against the war in October of 1967, three months before
Tet. The first large-scale American military expeditions to
Vietnam were supported by large majorities: 61 percent in
1965. For the next 30 or so months, that majority dwindled,
until, in 1967, when 46 percent opposed the war, and 44 percent
approved of US policy. Yet the war dragged on for 5 more years.
IN
CHEROKEE COUNTY
As
for Walter Cronkite brainwashing the American people into
somehow believing that a great American "victory" was really
a terrible defeat, the anti-populist, elitist attitude of
the neocons is here displayed in all its contempt for the
ordinary American. Dean
Rusk displayed the same dull incomprehension when asked
to explain the political backlash at home after the alleged
"victory" of Tet:
"Even
though it was a considerable military set-back for the North
Vietnam-ese and Vietcong out there on the ground, it was,
in effect, a brilliant political victory for them here in
the United States. I'm not sure I fully understand the reasons
why that should have occurred, but it became very clear after
the Tet offensive that many people at the grass roots, such
as my cousins in Cherokee County, finally came to the conclusion
that if we could not tell them when this war was going to
end, and we couldn't in any good faith, that we might as well
chuck it."
In
order to win the war, American generals were asking for 200,000
more soldiers. But the decisive factor was that this war was
televised and brought home in a way that no other had been
before – or has since. Every night, on the television
news, the nation watched American grunts fighting and dying
in the green hell of Vietnam: the casualty lists shown at
the end of each broadcast were a silent parade of faceless
names that seemed to go on forever. Rusk's cousins in Cherokee
County didn't need Walter Cronkite or anyone to tell them
that what was visible on the screen: we were alien invaders
in a foreign country. Should we "pay any price, bear
any burden" for a godforsaken jungle on the other side
of the world? It wasn't the American people, after all, who
first conceived our crusade to stamp out Communism in Southeast
Asia, but "the
best and the brightest," as David Halberstam dubbed them.
THE
USUAL SUSPECTS
Podhoretz
blames the familiar bogeymen: the pointy-headed professoriate,
the public intellectuals, the artists, Hollywood, "the usual
suspects," but also is eager to point an accusing finger at
"administrators and bureaucrats" who themselves absorbed the
"anti-American" culture of defeatism, and went soft in the
end. In his view, it could happen again. How? The same intellectual
subversion that undermined the Golden Age of the pro-war 1950s:
"Now
here we are in the early days of another war that may well
be supported by an even larger percentage of the public than
Vietnam was at the beginning. Today, however, the numerically
insignificant opposition is stronger than it was in the early
days of Vietnam. The reason is that it now maintains a tight
grip over the institutions that had been surrendered to the
anti-American Left by the end of the 60's."
What
this all boils down to, then, is a conspiracy theory that
posits the existence of all-powerful elite – in government,
media, and academia – which simply lacked the will to fight
and conquer. Ordinary people were but powerless pawns in an
internal struggle engaged in by their betters. Podhoretz's
theory is based on a view of intellectuals and the media as
sorcerers whose job it is to bewitch and delude the masses
and whose power is practically unlimited.
YET
THE WAR DRAGGED ON
The
problem with this theory is that it cannot explain change,
either a slight shift in opinion or an all-out revolution.
Elite support for the Vietnam war was practically unanimous,
in the beginning, including in the universities: indeed, the
interplay of academia and the military and foreign policy
bureaucracy was a key complaint of the New Left, in its earlier
quasi-libertarian incarnation. If we look at the poll numbers,
and examine the commentary of the time, the argument could
be made that elite opinion trailed after popular opposition
to the war. By 1968, not only the kids but a growing number
of their parents opposed the war, and yet the war dragged
on in much the same way as Podhoretz's AEI speech.
SONTAG-BAITING,
AND OTHER SPORTS
"Drip
by insidious drip," as Podhoretz puts it, the poison of the
American Fifth Column was injected into the American bloodstream,
and our will – even that of the governing classes themselves,
who had, after all, started this war – was sapped by
the enemy within. And it is happening again, he warns, raising
the alarm that colleges and universities are now instituting
courses in Muslim studies, as if this could be some
potential center of terrorism, and as if the study of Arab
culture and languages could have an inherently subversive
effect.
He
takes the obligatory potshot at Susan
Sontag, in what seems to be the War Party's favorite sport.
"One of my old ex-friends, Susan Sontag, seized an early lead
in this contest with a piece in The New Yorker, in
which she asserted that 9/11 was an attack 'undertaken as
a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.'
Not content with that, she went on to compare the congressional
expressions of support for what she characterized as our 'robotic
President' to 'the unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory
bromides of a Soviet Party Congress.'"
Gee,
how is it that a supposed "leftist" is showing disdain by
referring to the enforced unanimity of a Soviet Party
Congress. Formerly a founding mother of Radical Chic, Sontag
was one of the left's earliest renegades: she was widely denounced
when she stood up for Lech Walesa and Poland's Solidarity
and, at a famous public meeting that I attended, bitterly
denounced Communism as "fascism with a human face." Indeed,
she was having "second thoughts" at roughly the same time
as David
Horowitz – albeit without becoming a rightwing version
of her former self. So his caricature of Sontag is a lie,
like so much of the war propaganda we are hearing today.
NO
SUBTLE DISTINCTIONS
But
Podhoretz, and the War Party, are not interested in such subtleties
and fine distinctions. They, after all, are dealers in caricature:
The "Axis of Evil," "national
greatness conservatism," "benevolent
global hegemony" – the grandiloquent phrases spring
forth from their keyboards with wild abandon, the commanding
tone brooks no disagreement or dithering, and speeches are
written in the style of extended ultimatums – "you're
either with us, or you're with the terrorists."
WHO
CARES ABOUT NORMAN MAILER?
I
won't bother with his riff on poor old Norman Mailer, and
the rest of the score-settling except to note how typical
this is of the author. I mean, why does anybody care
what Norman Mailer thinks about US foreign policy: the guy's
a novelist, fer chrissake, in other words he's a professional
liar. He makes up stories for a living. Podhoretz includes
him in his rogues gallery of alienated anti-American intellectuals,
but this just shows how completely out of touch and vindictive
poor old Podhoretz really is: he just includes Mailer out
of sheer personal pique, not because he represents anything
aside from his idiosyncratic self. But then devil figures
are an essential ingredient of any propaganda campaign, and
it helps that Podhoretz hates Mailer's guts.
HE'S
NO McCARTHY
In
describing Podhoretz's attempt to demonize unnamed college
professors, and perhaps their students, as a traitorous fifth
column, I won't compare him to the unfairly-maligned
Senator
Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy may have been a blowhard and
a publicity hound, but he was right in the basic thrust of
his campaign: the US government had been infiltrated
by the Soviets and their American sympathizers at the highest
levels, starting in the administration of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. Indeed, as the Soviet archives have revealed, the
extent of this infiltration was
wider and deeper than even McCarthy had ever dared imagine.
Podhoretz, though, is not half as good a polemicist: he cites
exactly three unnamed professors making outrageous
but suspiciously brief statements on 9/11, one expressing
a kind of astonished admiration for the direct hit on the
Pentagon. Podhoretz cites a report issued by Lynne Cheney's
"American Council of Trustees and Alumni," which has a list
– a list! – of supposedly subversive statements
made by college professors and others: of course, the implicit
threat is that such treason will cost them their (largely
government-funded) jobs. The New York Times thought
this rather gauche, says the outraged Podhoretz, who then
throws the rubes some right-wing meat:
"When
the ACTA report was issued, cries of 'McCarthyism'—that first
refuge of a left-wing scoundrel—were heard throughout the
land."
Norm,
I know about Senator McCarthy: Senator McCarthy was
a childhood hero of mine, and, let me tell you, you're no
"Tail-Gunner Joe"! The conspiracy you want to protect us from
exists largely in your own mind, and, no matter what you say,
does indeed seem like a theological dispute.
PODDY'S
HYMN OF HATE
Much
of Poddy's ire is directed at all those televised documentaries
that, he claims, supposedly "sanitized" Islam: why I can just
imagine old Norm sitting in his easy chair at home, hectoring
the television with something very like the following foam-flecked
diatribe:
"They
therefore never ceased heaping praises on the beauties of
that religion, about which few of them knew anything. But
it was from the universities, not from the politicians, that
the substantive content of the broadcasts derived, in interviews
with Muslim academics whose accounts of Islam were—how shall
I put it?—selectively roseate. Sometimes they were even downright
untruthful, especially in sanitizing the doctrine of jihad
or holy war, or in misrepresenting the extent to which leading
Muslim clerics all over the world had been celebrating suicide
bombers as heroes and martyrs."
In
other words, they were hiding the "fact" that the Muslim religion
is really vile, and violent, in its very nature. Of course,
if anyone even implied such a thing about Judaism, that person
would immediately, self-evidently, and quite rightly be tagged
as a vicious anti-Semite. But Norman Podhoretz is permitted
such things: it is, after all, the measure of his greatness,
of his towering stature, that he is above it all, beyond good
and evil.
TARGETS
ON THE RIGHT
Ah,
but there was one exception: Fox News, which, according to
Poddy, covered the war from "a pro-American perspective."
He goes on to take a swipe at Christians like Jerry Falwell
and Pat Robertson who said the events of 9/11 meant that God's
protection had been withdrawn from America on account of her
sins, but his main targets on the Right are Pat Buchanan and
columnist Robert Novak
"On
the secular Right, we had the columnist Robert Novak, along
with that born-again Coughlinite Pat Buchanan. In the opinion
of these two, and others of like mind, it was not our disobedience
to divine law but our friendliness toward Israel that had
brought this attack upon us. That bin Laden had never been
much concerned with the Palestinians made no difference to
Buchanan and Novak: they knew better."
Aside
from the idiotic epithet of "Coughlinite" – I wonder
if Poddy knows that Father Coughlin was a rabid left-winger
who once gave a sermon on the topic "Roosevelt
or Ruin"– the clear implication is that Buchanan
and Novak have a special antipathy for Israel. Since they
both supposedly "knew better," their real motives were
therefore questionable, if not outright incriminating. Except
that it is absurd to say bin Laden had never been much concerned
with the Palestinians. In a 1993 interview with bin Laden,
Peter Berger, author of Holy
War, Inc., reported the Evil One's own words:
"We
declared jihad against the US government because the US government
has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous, and
criminal whether directly or through its support of the Israeli
occupation of [Palestine]. And we believe the US is directly
responsible for those who were killed in Palestine, Lebanon,
and Iraq…."
BIN
LADEN ON PALESTINE
In
addition, bin Laden pointed to Israel's 1996 bombing of a
UN building in Qana, Lebanon, in which 102 Lebanese civilians,
mostly women and children, were killed by shelling. But what's
really curious is that Podhoretz's shining example of "pro-American"
journalism, Fox News, just
recently broadcast a four-part series raising the possibility
that Israel played clandestine role in 9/11. Besides engaging
in a massive spy operation, reported Carl Cameron of Fox News,
the Israelis may have had foreknowledge of the attacks – and
somehow neglected to warn us. All of which would seem to validate
the skepticism of Israel exhibited by Messrs. Buchanan and
Novak. So, along with Podhoretz, I say: hats off to Fox News,
and long may they prosper!
THE
OPPOSITION REGROUPS
While
David
Brooks thinks that Podhoretz is too pessimistic, because
the Left is a spent force, I agree with Podhoretz that opposition
is likely to reassert itself on a broad scale: and from the
Right, as well as the Left, and the Center. This opposition
is already forming, – from Chris
Matthews to Pat
Buchanan to the ordinary guy on the street – as the
warhawks prepare the nation for the extension of the "war
on terrorism" to states, such as Iraq, that even Podhoretz
admits have no links to the events of 9/11. The American people
want to get Osama bin Laden, but they do not envision the
conquest of the Middle East and an all-out war on over 1 billion
Muslims.
THE
ANTI-POPES
Brooks
may be correct that the Left is too intellectually exhausted
to put up much of a fight: what both Brooks and Podhoretz
leave out is that a
good deal of the Left has been in the interventionist camp
at least since the Kosovo war. Podhoretz surely knows better,
since he signed
all those appeals for US military intervention in Bosnia
and Kosovo that were also signed by prominent leftists: here
is a man who never saw a military adventure he didn't like.
That this shameless old narcissist, whose self-conscious pandering
after every intellectual fad over the years has brought him
into the conservative camp, is now honored as the veritable
Pope (or co-Pope, along with the semi-senile Bill Buckley)
of the Right is a sad commentary indeed. A more fitting Commander-in-Chief
of the War Party would be hard to imagine.
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