Obama Can't Attack McCain's Neocons Because He Needs Jews
Yesterday Vladimir Putin said that he likes George Bush, it is the people around him he can't stand. A king is no better than his court. This is a reference to the neoconservatives, who gave us Iraq and helped to give Georgia Ossetia. Joe Klein says the same thing about McCain in scatological terms: "It's been really enjoyable watching the neoconservatives splash and play in the mud and defecation of the McCain campaign."
You'd think this is a clear wedge issue between Obama and McCain. McCain is in bed with the foolish neocons who gave us Iraq. Yet Obama has never said it. I think I heard Biden say neocons once last week. But it's not in ads. You'd think that such an appeal would have more resonance out in America than Ron Rosenbaum's idea that Obama should run against the hedge fund guys on Wall Street who screwed up the economy. And it would. Americans don't like the Iraq War. They'd like to guillotine the idiots who gave it to us. The same braintrust that is now serving McCain.
The reasons that Obama is not pushing this issue are: Neoconservatism, which came out of the Jewish intellectual community, is seen as a code word for Jewish, and neoconservatism is actually widely adhered to across the Democratic party. By neoconservativism, I mean the idea that Arab societies must be made into democracies in order to solve the terrorism problem in the Middle East. That idea is widely shared, by Mel Levine Democrats, the former Joe Lieberman Israel-first wing of the Democratic Party that has not gone over to McCain. Robert Wexler, Howard Berman, Steven Grossman, Marty Peretz. And yes, obviously, there is a Jewish component to this wing (which justified the Iraq war because Saddam paid for suicide bombers in Israel) and it is simply too important financially to the Democratic Party to alienate in any way. Jewish money, said Seymour Hersh.
So to repeat, the reason that Obama is not going after the neocons, a potential 70-30 wedge issue among the American people who would like to know how we got into the mess in Iraq, is that: Jews are mobbed-up with neoconservatism and the Democratic Party is mobbed-up with Jews. Simple, true answers, I'm afraid. Are all Jews mobbed up with neoconservatism? No. Just look at Dean Velvel's valiant attack on the Jewish neocon bastards who gave us the Iraq War, whom he deems a disgrace to his religion. Just look at Joe Klein's valiant attack on the Jewish neocons who promulgated the benign domino theory of making Israel safe by invading Iraq. Look at Glenn Greenwald's attacks on the neocons, and David Bromwich. But these are all brave smart outlier Jews. Even Jacob Heilbrunn who wrote a whole frikkin book on the Jewish neocons didn't have the balls to call them out as Joe Klein has. And even Joe Klein took 6 years to tell us about his conversations with the best and brightest of Iraq, and did so only because he was worried they were gonna torch Iran.
Neoconservatism continues to be embedded in the larger liberal Jewish community for a few reasons: We all know neocons. It's not like Christian anti-abortion fundamentalists we've never met--no Marty Peretz gave every smart liberal Jewish journalist work. All the neocons were once liberals anyway; they sit at our dinner tables just like the nutjob members of other families who the rightthinking ones might raise their eyebrows over but would never denounce publicly. But it goes further: the neocons are licensed, even by progressive Zionists, because they are out there fighting for Israel. Because even liberal Jews have come to accept what Henry Herskovitz discovered when he saw the shocking militarism of Israel and came back to scream angrily at his own synagogue: violence is a vital tool of the Jewish state, and liberal Zionists turn a blind eye to it. Which is to say, in the U.S., liberal Jews out of love of Israel give a pass to the neocons. The Democratic Party platform refers to an undivided Jerusalem, a neocon principle. And when you ask liberal Jews why we're in Iraq, they almost invariably offer The Single Gunman theory: George Bush did it.
All this will change. Walt and Mearsheimer will change it. The students at Yale will change it. Velvel will change it, David Bloom and I will change it. We are driving a wedge inside the Jewish community and asking, What has Zionism done to you? This is a grassroots intellectual activist process. The battle in the synagogues over Tony Kushner's amazing script for "Munich" was precisely this issue: How long must the cycle of violence in the Middle East escalate in the name of the Jewish state? And only when that schism has actually taken place, when the American Jewish community divides over the costs of Zionism, will Obama be able to take on the neocons. He needs a lot of landsmen behind him. Because Jews are simply too important to the political process and he cannot alienate them. 2012?
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