James Kirchick: The Upheaval in Egypt Reveals True Divide Between Israelis and Neocons
[James Kirchick is a New Republic contributing editor and writer at large with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty based in Prague.]
Herzliya, Israel—For years, American neoconservatives have been accused of being lackeys for Israel, namely the Likud party. In 2008, Time’s Joe Klein wrote, “The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives—people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary—plumped for [the Iraq] war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.” In 2004, University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole alleged that there existed a neocon cell within the Bush administration Defense Department, which attempted “to use the Pentagon as Israel’s Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv.” Google neocons likud and you get over 40,000 results....
Putting pressure on the Middle East’s sclerotic and corrupt governments to liberalize is the touchstone of the U.S. neoconservative foreign policy project, as embodied in the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy of 2002 and made manifest with the war in Iraq. With regard to Egypt, one of the earliest and most persistent critics of the Mubarak regime was Robert Kagan, the preeminent neoconservative intellectual. Over a year ago, Kagan formed a bipartisan Working Group on Egypt that issued a stream of reports and statements warning about the potential for mass volatility in the country. In June, he co-authored a Washington Post op-ed alleging that the White House was “repeating the mistake that Cold War-era administrations made when they supported right-wing dictatorships—right up until the point when they were toppled by radical forces.” “The delegitimizing of Mubarak began with the neocons,” Kramer explains....
Democracy in the Middle East, Ganor and others say, must be about a liberal culture that respects the rights of women and minorities—and acknowledges the presence of a Jewish State. But they are skeptical this is possible anytime soon, in Egypt or elsewhere. “It’s important not to be an Orientalist, to think that we can change the culture of the Middle East,” notes Yaakov Amidror, program director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and a former commander of the Israeli Defense Force’s National Defense College. “This turns out to be presumptuous and unrealistic.” A prominent Israeli hawk invoking Edward Said to denounce the core idea behind neoconservative foreign policy: Could there be a starker illustration of just how mistaken the neocon-Israeli conflation always was?
Read entire article at The New Republic
Herzliya, Israel—For years, American neoconservatives have been accused of being lackeys for Israel, namely the Likud party. In 2008, Time’s Joe Klein wrote, “The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives—people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary—plumped for [the Iraq] war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel.” In 2004, University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole alleged that there existed a neocon cell within the Bush administration Defense Department, which attempted “to use the Pentagon as Israel’s Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv.” Google neocons likud and you get over 40,000 results....
Putting pressure on the Middle East’s sclerotic and corrupt governments to liberalize is the touchstone of the U.S. neoconservative foreign policy project, as embodied in the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy of 2002 and made manifest with the war in Iraq. With regard to Egypt, one of the earliest and most persistent critics of the Mubarak regime was Robert Kagan, the preeminent neoconservative intellectual. Over a year ago, Kagan formed a bipartisan Working Group on Egypt that issued a stream of reports and statements warning about the potential for mass volatility in the country. In June, he co-authored a Washington Post op-ed alleging that the White House was “repeating the mistake that Cold War-era administrations made when they supported right-wing dictatorships—right up until the point when they were toppled by radical forces.” “The delegitimizing of Mubarak began with the neocons,” Kramer explains....
Democracy in the Middle East, Ganor and others say, must be about a liberal culture that respects the rights of women and minorities—and acknowledges the presence of a Jewish State. But they are skeptical this is possible anytime soon, in Egypt or elsewhere. “It’s important not to be an Orientalist, to think that we can change the culture of the Middle East,” notes Yaakov Amidror, program director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and a former commander of the Israeli Defense Force’s National Defense College. “This turns out to be presumptuous and unrealistic.” A prominent Israeli hawk invoking Edward Said to denounce the core idea behind neoconservative foreign policy: Could there be a starker illustration of just how mistaken the neocon-Israeli conflation always was?
The upheaval in Egypt revealed the true divide between Israelis and U.S. neocons.