The Rise and Rise of Neocons

By Israel Shamir

 

(Review of Stephen Sniegoski’s The Transparent Cabal)

A much needed if scary book is about to be published by I.H.S. Press, the same people who published The Neoconned! Stephen Sniegoski follows the Rise and Rise of the Neocons, of the people who created Bin Laden, bombed Belgrade, gave you the Iraqi War and the Patriot Act; the people who boasted: “Creative destruction is our middle name”[1]. Sniegoski reveals the hidden origins of this warlike sect that hijacked the only superpower. Read this book because the Neocons are here to stay. Maybe they will have different names, or use somewhat different arguments, but the end of their rule is not to be expected any time soon. “The conjectures about their impending demise were completely off base. Far from being headed for the political graveyard, neoconservatives are poised to become even more powerful” says Sniegoski, quoting Jacob Heilbrunn.

 

Who are they? Neocons are mainly Jewish turncoats, who parted ways with the Left and became right-wing pro-Israel zealots because they felt that the Left was “bad for the Jews”. Despite some token Gentile presence, the movement has been Jewish inspired, Jewish-oriented, and Jewish-dominated. They are a leading party of Organised American Jewry, of sorts. Once, they were Democrats, until Ronald Reagan with his virulent hatred of communism and Soviet Russia (“Now we shall bomb Moscow”) hired them to win the ideological Cold War. The Neocons, the red-diaper babies, switched sides, betrayed the ideals of their fathers, and brought down the Left movement that got used to rely upon Jews.

 

“While traditional conservatives welcomed neoconservatives as allies in their fight against Soviet Communism and domestic liberalism, the Neocons in effect acted as a Trojan Horse within conservatism: they managed to secure dominant positions in the conservative political and intellectual movement, and as soon as they gained power they purged those traditional conservatives who opposed their agenda.” The old conservatives who invited them in the first place, were pushed out by the aggressive newcomers, and became irrelevant “Palaeo-Cons”.

Indeed, whoever tried to win a war while relying on Jewish help, he came to regret it – even if the war was won. If one needed a proof for this old adage, Stephen Sniegoski’s book supplies it.

 

President George Bush Sr. went to his war in Iraq using their abilities to mobilize the public opinion and make the Americans to support the war. He thought he could continue his own way after achieving victory, and refused to give Israel $10 b they demanded unless they stop their settlement activity. That was his mistake. While at power, the Neocons created their networks and infiltrated all levels of control. Stephen Sniegoski discloses that Neocons are not “seven or eight individuals” as per Seymour Hirsh, not even “some twenty five Jews”, as per Tom Friedman, but vastly spread networks of pundits, media, politicians, think tanks. When they decided that the president is not useful for them anymore, they brought Bush the Senior low by activating the networks against him. “And the George H. W. Bush who emerged from the Gulf War with an astronomical 90 percent approval rating went down to a humiliating election defeat.”

 

Stephen Sniegoski tells in detail about their connection to Israel, about their “Securing the Realm” war plan, where the ‘Realm’ in question is the Jewish state, while ‘securing’ should be done by and at the expense of the Americans. The reader will be surprised to learn why they chose Iraq as their first target. They claimed Iraq is the source of imminent and clear danger to Israel and even to the US, but Sniegoski proves that they chose Iraq because they considered it weak. In their war plan, they correctly surmised that Iraq can be broken into ethnic religious warring communities with relative ease. They also correctly assessed military and social weakness of Iraq and that is why they chose to attack the poor country.

 

It would be an error to think that the Neocons are just doing Israel’s asking. They are keen on war and strife everywhere. They admitted it cheerfully: “we are a warlike people and we love war. . . . What we hate is not casualties, but losing.”[2] Naturally, the “warlike people” in question are not Americans in general, but the Neocons’ own community, American Jews. Provided they and their sons hardly ever serve in the army, they may love war and disregard casualties with cavalier disdain.

 

Their first war was in Afghanistan. “The Neocons supported the provision of extensive military aid to the militant Islamic Afghan “freedom fighters” in their armed struggle against the Soviet occupation. The military aid, which had begun in the Carter administration, had been very limited. Richard Perle played a pivotal role in equipping the “freedom fighters” with the all-important shoulder-borne Stinger missiles, which proved to be lethal to the previously invincible Soviet helicopter gunships.[3] Ironically, the neoconservatives now portray these very same Muslims that they helped to militarize as a deadly terrorist threat to America and the world.”

 

Their next war was far from the Middle East, in the Balkans. They supported bombing of Serbia, but that was not enough for the “warlike people”. They demanded to send ground troops to fight the Serbs. “Members of the interventionist Balkan Action Committee, which advocated NATO ground troops for Kosovo, included such prominent neoconservative mainstays as Richard Perle, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Max M. Kampelman, Morton Abramowitz, and Paul Wolfowitz. Other announced proponents of a tougher war included Eliot Cohen, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Bill Kristol, William Kagan, and Norman Podhoretz. [4]”

 

Now they are all for smashing Iran, but destruction of the Saudi Arabia is on their plans, too.  “In August 2002, Max Singer presented a paper to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment in which he once again urged the dismemberment of Saudi Arabia.[5]  The July/August 2002 issue of Commentary contained an article titled “Our Enemies, the Saudis” by Victor Davis Hanson who claimed “that the Saudi subversives were already in the process of taking over the United States itself” and called “to spark disequilibrium, if not outright chaos” in Saudi Arabia. The leading neoconservative expert on Saudi Arabia was Stephen Schwartz, who posited a Saudi/Wahhabist conspiracy to take over all of Islam and spread terror throughout the entire world.” 

 

While these things are generally known to reading audience, and can be found in recent The Rise of the Neocons, by Jacob Heilbrunn, Sniegoski is at his scariest when he (correctly) explains the inevitability of Neocons’ program. They will get what they want for their powerbase – wealthy Jews and media lords – keeps all the options under control. Do you think that the problem is Bush the Dumb and Cheney the Vicious? Think again. Sniegoski takes us back to year 2000, when the Americans could have chosen John McCain.  

 

“For those who blame Bush and Cheney for the war on Iraq, a significant hypothetical question is: How would a President John McCain have responded to the September 11 attacks? Given his willingness to make war on a country (Serbia) that did not threaten America in the least, his advocacy of forcible regime change in Iraq, and his staunch support for the actual attack on Iraq in 2003 (and his later hawkishness on Iran),[6] there is no reason to think that a President McCain would have avoided a war on Iraq. In fact, he likely would have pursued a belligerent approach to Iraq even if a major terrorist attack on the United States had not taken place.

 

Moreover, Senator John McCain, Bush’s Republican rival in the primaries, was the favourite candidate for many leading neoconservatives in 2000. As Franklin Foer, editor of the liberal New Republic put it: “Jewish neoconservatives have fallen hard for John McCain.  It's not just unabashed swooner William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard. McCain has also won over such leading neocon lights as David Brooks, the entire Podhoretz family, The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz, and columnist Charles Krauthammer”.[7]

 

Democrats would lead the US to the same war, with the same (or different) Neocons. Albert Gore and Joe Lieberman were even more pro-Israeli and pro-war than Bush and Cheney. This repeated in 2004. “Even though the Democratic grassroots were heavily anti-war, the presidential election of 2004 offered little choice regarding Iraq, since John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, advocated virtually the same policy.[8]  In essence, the Kerry foreign policy would be neo-conservatism without neoconservatives, or at least without the same neoconservatives.”

 

One of the reasons for this inevitability is the Jewish media lords’ control over the US discourse. Sniegoski notes that “Murdoch’s News Corporation is the largest English-language news group in the world.  In 2004, it consisted of more than 175 newspapers (40 million papers sold each week) and 35 television stations.   During the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, all 175 Murdoch-owned newspapers worldwide editorialized in favour of the war.” Yes, Sniegoski notes that there are many Jews against the war, but alas, they do not own media.