This is the second time this week I have posted an article by Alex Carnevale. Look at who he is:
alex carnevale ‘05 is the editor-in-chief of post-Brown Daily Herald. he writes about politics and the arts at www.neoliberal.blogspot.com.
Gives me hope for the future.
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neocons rising
By Alex Carnevale
Dr. Joshua Muravchik began his career as a student activist during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, when he was only in his teens. A scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a self-declared "neoconservative," Muravchik is the author of "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism" and his most recent book, "Covering the Intifada: How the Media Reported the Palestinian Uprising." He spoke to Post- about his young political life, Edward W. Said, Brown Professor Paul Buhle, and the future of the Middle East.
You were the head of the Young People’s Socialist League at one point. What was your political evolution to conservatism?
Even when I was a young socialist, it was the time of the student left, called the New Left. It sounds funny forty years later. Most of it was very much more extreme than I was. I disliked the tactics which were anti-civil libertarian and increasingly violent. It was common for radicals to prevent speakers from speaking, which offended me. I was anti-communist, and the new left was mostly pro-communist; not pro-Russian, but they romanticized the Third World communists. I was in strong disagreement with that, because I regarded communists, however dashing, as being brutal dictators. I was at odds with the New Left, and that had a certain conservatizing effect on me. The people I was fighting with were on the left, not on the right, even though I regarded myself as a leftist.
When I was younger I had a pristine view, something like Tony Blair’s third way. It was that capitalism was bad, communism was bad, and socialism was a third way. At some point, just from reading, I came to realize that this neat little symmetry was very childish. I didn’t change my opinion that capitalism was bad, I just grew to understand that they were not equal evils. As I read the accounts of communists murdering their own citizens, I realized capitalism’s faults paled in comparison to the horrors of communism. And I had to adapt a more nuanced position.
I came to think my idea of a socialist paradise was really an illusion, that this was just a model that didn’t exist anywhere. What mattered was democracy versus dictatorship, and once you had a democracy, different democratic governments could have different priorities. There was really nothing called a socialist society, just a democratic society where you could advocate for social programs.
I wondered what your reaction to the death of Edward Said was.
I think he was an evil and dishonest man. I won’t say I’m glad he’s dead, that would be horrible thing to say. But I had the lowest regard for him.
What are the motives of the "neoconservatives," who many allege are now in control of the Bush administration?
The irony of the search for underlying ideologies is that much more than most people who hold high office in the government, Paul Wolfowitz is a policy intellectual who has left a pretty clear paper trail. The motives behind the policies he advocates are more readily available than would be true for most holders of high office. If you try to figure out what Colin Powell thinks about foreign policy, I don’t know how you’d define that. The same is true for Donald Rumsfeld, and to a certain extent, Condeleeza Rice.
I’m not taking anything away from these people; they are outstanding public servants. But they are not policy intellectuals. Even Rice, who is an academic, is not someone who would describe as a policy intellectual, who sets out arguments for certain approaches to foreign policy.
The interesting thing about Wolfowitz which appeals to me is that he’s more of an idealist than virtually anybody else who is that high up. I mean idealist not in the everyday use of the world—not like all young people like you are supposed to be idealist—it’s the formal division in foreign policy between realists and idealists. I count myself very much an idealist in foreign policy. I associate myself with the tradition of Wilson.
Idealists tend to be overwhelmingly people on the outside, whereas people on the inside tend to be realists. I guess it’s a natural thing: it’s easier to be an idealist if you’re just a critic. If you have responsibility to the government, you have to be pragmatic. Of all the people in the foreign policy establishment, I regard Paul as one who is the most sympathetic to an idealistic view, though he is still more of a realist than I am.
Here’s an example. I was very involved in the mid 1990s in agitating against US inaction regarding Bosnia. The first Bush administration was a very realist administration, and they were very cold about Bosnia. The first Bush referred to Bosnia as "a hiccup," with which we would not involve ourselves. Secretary James Baker said, "We don’t have a dog in that fight." The situation got pretty awful with the mass killing of civilians. I and various others were issuing broadsides, and I went to a lot of meetings and groups to advocate that cause. And the one guy who threw in with us on that cause was Wolfowitz.
The other key figure—the "evil twin"—is Richard Perle. He also got involved. He’s been very influential in the government in terms of a service, but he’s always been more of a maverick, whereas Paul is a consummate insider.
You cited Brown’s Paul Buhle in a recent Commentary piece as an example of the kind of anti-Semitic rhetoric hurled at the neoconservatives. Do you think that this represents a new kind of anti-Semitism?
Buhle’s remark was obviously anti-Semitic. And I think it’s a great tragedy that a serious university like Brown would let someone like Buhle teach there. He said the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" [anti-Semitic text alleging Jews control the world] had an element of truth. This was a direct allegation of a Jewish cabal, without doubt an anti-Semitic statement.
The guy is also utterly disreputable in terms of complete disregard for scholarly standards in history. He has a complete disregard for evidence. For example, in that same piece, he referred to me by name as well as other people as neocons as being slotted into position in the neoconservative movement by my father. It’s hilarious because my father is alive and is still an active socialist. He’s completely opposed to my political ideas and to neoconservatism in general. I have a loving relationship with my dad, but we simply do not talk about politics.
There’s a fabulous story about Buhle. He wrote somewhere (he dabbles occasionally in Jewish issues) that a large number of the American volunteers who went to fight alongside members of the state of Israel in the War of Independence were members of the Communist Party. He wrote this in a historical journal, and a couple of the top historians of Communism read it with utter perplexity. According to their knowledge, which is quite expert, there was not a single American communist who died fighting. They wrote to Buhle, asking for his source. After many dodges, he cited some oral history, which they then got, and found it had nothing to do with the subject at all. Finally they challenged him and Buhle responded that with something incoherent to the effect that he would provide the evidence in the venue of his own choosing. The guy is really an unscrupulous fraud. Parents paying tuition at Brown ought to be complaining.
Your new book is called "Covering the Intifada: How the Media Reported the Palestinian Uprising." How can reporters better cover tyrannical regimes?
The big scandal here in the US was whether one sentence in the State of the Union message is misleading. The question is, was Bush being misleading by citing this report even though he had reason to know that the information contained in the report was perhaps untrue, or at least uncertain. This pretty tenous charge created a big scandal. Similarly Tony Blair in England is in a lot of trouble with three different investigations as to whether there was some effort again to be misleading, and the only question was whether some suppositions were being presented as firmer knowledge than they were. And I think that is how democracies work, that there is a democratic government to spin the news, but if they try to control it outwards, they get in big trouble.
In authoritarian countries, there are very great efforts to control the press through a combination of deception, intimidation, selectively granting access, and of course repression of other flows of information that might be embarrassing to the regime. I think that news organizations can cope with this if they face squarely the nature of the regime they are dealing with. The strange history is of reporters getting sucked in and going along in order to get along.
What is the short and long term prognosis for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Do you think Israel will attempt to exile or assassinate Yasir Arafat, and would that be a good thing?
I don’t think it would be a good thing if he was assassinated. I don’t know whether it would be a good thing if he were expelled, it might be. The best thing would be if he just died. I just attended a conference full of intense talks about this with Israelis and Palestinians. There certainly are people on the Palestinian side who want peace, how many, I don’t know. There are some among the Palestinian leadership who want peace.
The problem is, you can start roadmapping, but any scenario you work through for getting to peace or partial peace, you bump up against Camp David. There was a more generous deal from the Israeli way of looking at it offered there than is likely to be offered by the current Israeli government. And Arafat scorned it.
Whatever kind of scenario you try to put into place if you’re an American, if you play it out it goes nowhere. It eventually gets to Arafat, who has made clear he’s not ready for peace based on that. Therefore I think we’re at a logjam, a point of paralysis. Paralysis per se isn’t necessarily bad. I think it’s reasonable to say this conflict will take generations to solve. That would be all well and good if there wasn’t so much bloodshed. I don’t think going on like this for another twenty years is a bearable thought.
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