The second, overlapping trend--overlapping because it involved many of the same people--was more narrowly focused on Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors. Right-wing Jewish neocons--and most prominent neocons are right-wing Jews--tend to be pro-Israel zealots who believe that American and Israeli interests are inseparable (much to the alarm of liberal, pro-peace Jews, whether in America, Europe or Israel itself). Friends of Ariel Sharon's Likud, they tend to loathe Arabs and Muslims. For them, the cause of "liberating" Iraq had little to do with the well-being of Iraqis, just as the cause of "liberating" Iran and ending its nuclear program--recently advocated by Shimon Peres in a Wall Street Journal editorial--has little to do with the well-being of Iranians. What they wished for was an improvement in Israel's military and strategic environment.
The Iraq crisis has made their names and organizations familiar to every newspaper and magazine reader: Wolfowitz and Feith, numbers 2 and 3 at the Pentagon; Richard Perle, former chairman and still a member of the influential Defense Policy Board, sometimes known as the neocons' political godfather and around whom a cloud of financial impropriety hangs; Elliott Abrams, senior director of Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, with a controversial background in Latin America and in the Iran/contra affair; and their many friends, relations and kindred spirits in the media, such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan of The Weekly Standard, and in the numerous pro-Israel think tanks, such as Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, the American Enterprise Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Project for the New American Century, the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (born out of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and many others. As has been observed by several commentators, 9/11 provided the neocons with a unique chance to harness (some would say hijack) America's Middle East policy--and America's military power--in Israel's interest by succeeding in getting the United States to apply the doctrine of pre-emptive war to Israel's enemies.
Patrick Seale The Nation July 2 2003
