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The anti-neocon fever
James Kirchick, City JournalNot long ago, while visiting a friend at Oxford University, I found myself in a heated political discussion with a Scotsman. The subject of our dispute was the Iraq war, but the conversation turned toward the rise of latent anti-Semitism in once-respectable quarters of British opinion. Two years earlier, a story entitled A Kosher Conspiracy?, illustrated by a gold Star of David plunged into the heart of the Union Jack, graced the cover of Britains most prominent left-wing magazine, The New Statesman. Since then, the intellectual climate had only worsened. In response to my remark that many use the epithet neocon to describe Jews, my interlocutor replied, Id rather be an anti-Semite than a neocon. Today, no other political label gets thrown around as frequently, or with as much reckless abandon, as neocon. The most popular liberal blogs name and shame neocons, real or imagined, on a daily basis. The term is used in a fashion similar to the way communist was during the 1950san all-encompassing indictmentthis time indicating an imperialistic and warmongering, even an insane, worldview. The anti-neocon fervor has reached truly McCarthyite proportions: just a few months ago, Steve Clemons of the left-wing New America Foundation argued in favor of Purging the Neocons from the American Soul. . . . By now, neocon has mutated into a political curse word to discredit not just those who happily accept their status as neoconservatives, but also anyone who merely believes that the West should respond in muscular fashion to national security threats, such as those posed by the cooperation of Iran, Syria, and North Korea on nuclear weapons technology and the equipping of terrorist groups around the world. The chief purpose of this emergent rhetorical style is to cast aspersions on anyone who believes, say, that Iran must not attain nuclear weapons, even if it requires war. International Herald Tribune columnist Roger Cohen, for instance, notes that neocon has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian U.S. interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milosevic has a place, and still argues, like Christopher Hitchens, that ousting Saddam Hussein put the United States on the right side of history. Examples of this new, broader, definitional standard abound. In 2004, writing in The Nation, Michael Lind termed the National Endowment for Democracya nonpartisan institution that provides millions of dollars to democracy activists around the worldthe quintessential neocon institution. French intellectual Bernard Henri-Lévy deems Frances Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, a neoconservative, a label that the socialist Kouchner would likely find surprising. But Kouchner, who founded Doctors Without Borders and was one of the very few left-wing supporters of NATO intervention in the Balkans, recently observed that it is necessary to prepare for the worst against Iran, adding, The worst, its warenough to range him in the neocon camp, it seems. When Joe Lieberman, whose positions on domestic policy are indistinguishable from those of the majority of his colleagues in the Senate Democratic caucus, makes mere mention of Iranian or Syrian support for armed elements in Iraq, Matthew Yglesiasone of the most popular leftist bloggers, writing from his perch at The Atlanticduly calls the senator a neocon, a psychotic rightwinger, and a warmongerer. The long tradition of liberal anti-totalitarianism thus appears to have come to an end, at least in mainstream political rhetoric. What about human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch? Largely staffed by leftists, these days they escape the neoconservative charge because they generally presume moral equivalence between democracies and anti-American thuggocracies. . . . Freedom House, on the other hand, which rates countries on a scale from 1 (most free) to 7 (least free), and explicitly ranks some nations (invariably Western democracies) as more free than others, has long been the bane of the leftist human rights community. Welcome to the new political discourse. Posted by: Mike 2007-11-09 |
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