04/07/16 – Jim Lobe – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing the great Jim Loeb from lobelog.com.
Loeb like your earlobe. lobelog.com is his great blog.
And he's got a couple of very interesting articles here to discuss.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you?
I'm fine.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Really appreciate you doing us doing the show with us today.
Sure.
So you gave this great talk at the Israel's influence conference neoconservatism in a nutshell.
And well, actually piped in the speech live on the show.
I was still doing the live show at the time, and piped it in live.
And it really was great.
And I think you're pretty much the best there is Jim at explaining what is neoconservatism in a nutshell.
And, you know, I think back to even in my own history, I think I first interviewed you back in 2003.
And you explained to me why not everyone at AEI is a neocon, only some of them.
And I've had a really a pretty good grasp of the situation ever since then, in great part, thanks to you and all your great work at IPS news and, and your time on the show, etc, like that.
So I thought maybe I'd ask you to just come on and sum up for the audience for the people who think that neoconservatism just means conservatism nowadays, or something like that.
Maybe you could break it down and help explain.
Um, well, I'm mainly interested in foreign policy neoconservatism.
And that's mainly what neoconservatives now are known for.
I mean, there was a period in the 60s and 70s.
Where they got their name neoconservatism, because they were essentially breaking with liberal orthodoxy, particularly on on social policy, and domestic policy, but they really over the years, have become much, much more foreign policy oriented.
And I would say there.
But I don't know if conservative was ever the right adjective to apply to them.
I, you know, I think they have certain core principles and and priorities to which virtually all of them adhere on the foreign policy side, which have to do with the beneficence of American power, the importance of military power, above all, seeing the world through the lens of the 30s, and deriving certain lessons about the importance of military power, the weakness of liberalism, generally speaking, that they that they get from that period.
And then American exceptionalism and Israeli exceptionalism and the belief that that Israel essentially has to be able to defend itself.
And I think most neoconservatives are not wild about a real two state solution either, preferring that Israeli Jews control most of the land, but that's not a universal feeling.
But the sense in which Israel itself is an exceptional nation, a morally exceptional nation, and that the United States is morally exceptional, and that's why it should be able to do what it wants and not feel so constrained by international law or the UN Security Council.
All of that's pretty commonly held among neoconservatives.
And frankly, I don't see much that's conservative about any of that.
Right?
Yeah, there's a clip from a documentary World War Four, where Michael Ledeen had given an interview.
And he says that, yeah, what's so conservative about, you know, this world revolution?
Beats me.
I don't know.
So he agrees with you.
No, I mean, I think, I think, you know, again, the notion of neoconservative or new conservative comes out of the primarily out of domestic policy, where so many people who were originally quite left wing, in some case, even Trotskyite in orientation.
But most of them, liberals, in a classic sense, began to break from generally liberal ideas, particularly regarding, for example, welfare, and other social economic issues on the domestic front, and not so much on the foreign policy front.
I mean, in many ways, neoconservatives on the foreign policy front are what we would call liberal hawks, and they identify very closely with Harry Truman, and believe, you know, that there's always a present danger that the United States has to arm itself against and so on.
And they see the Democratic Party as having drifted off into an anti-war direction in the late 60s, early, early and mid 70s.
And that's when they broke off most of them, almost all of them broke off from the Democratic Party.
And yeah, you say that people make a lot of the Trotskyite influence here, because I guess Strauss and Wollstetter and Kristol and Podhoretz were all Trotskyists at one point.
But you kind of say that in this article, at least, that maybe people make a bit too much of that influence?
No, I mean, I think it's very interesting, because to some extent, it explains their temperament and their obsession.
That may be too strong a word, but their very great focus on power and the means by which to get power, which are kind of...
Also, on the polemics, you know, their polemical style is really quite Trotskyite in the sense that, you know, they use McCarthyite tactics, they create kind of front organizations that woo in, like liberal internationalists, and then they claim that they have a bipartisan, you know, support for whatever it is.
I mean, some of the characteristics can be seen as kind of relevant to Trotskyism and the Trotskyite means of organization.
But, you know, we're two generations past those original founders who were did, you know, who were part of various Trotskyite movements back in the 30s or 40s, and so it's really hard to describe them that way now.
But it's interesting, and Jacob Heilbron, among others, has done some, you know, really interesting writing about that.
So, Jim, tell us about the role of Catholics in the neoconservative movement, because, of course, if you ask the National Review or the Weekly Standard, they'll say it's an anti-Semitic term that people use just to basically smear Jewish conservatives as having dual loyalty or something like that.
Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of neoconservatives, or not a lot, but several influential ones have said at one time or another that for critics of neoconservatism, the use of the word neocon is really just another word for Jew.
Now, as a Jew, I'm particularly sensitive to that, but it's just not true on many different levels.
For one thing, since the beginning, there were people who were close to Irving Kristol and Podhoretz who were Catholic or Protestant.
I mean, Michael Novak was at one time a Protestant minister, and I think then he became Catholic, but he was very tight with the founders.
George Weigel, a more recent figure, more of my generation, did an authorized biography of Pope John Paul II.
He was always a neoconservative.
Bill Bennett, former education secretary, also Catholic, identified very closely with neoconservatism.
And Jean Kirkpatrick, who I don't believe was Catholic.
I don't know what her denominational preference was, but she certainly wasn't Jewish.
So on that level, there have always been non-Jews who have worked with neoconservatives very, very closely.
The publication, First Beginnings, is another example.
But the other problem with saying, well, when neoconservatives say that when critics use neocon as a synonym for Jews, is that the Jewish community itself is, by a large majority, not neoconservative.
Neoconservatives are a distinct minority, an influential minority, because more and more, especially as the Israeli government has moved ever rightward in the last 20 years, the mainstream Jewish organizations have been more or less taken over by people who, if not neoconservatives, they're kind of close to neoconservatives.
That is, they exalt Israel to a very high level and accord great importance to its military power and so on and so forth.
But the vast majority of Jews are not neoconservative.
They are generally very liberal in their outlook.
They vote overwhelmingly Democratic, whereas most neoconservatives vote Republican at this point, declared Republicans, served in Republican administrations.
So it's a very unfair charge for neocons or their fellow travelers to say that critics like me really mean Jews when they say neocons.
At the same time, I mean, it's clear that a majority of those who identify as neoconservatives are Jewish.
It's always been mainly a Jewish movement, as Jacob Heilbrunn and as, frankly, some of the neocons' own hagiographers, people like Mark Gerson, they themselves say that.
They're very clear about it.
So how many neoconservatives are there total?
If you take, you know, Bill Kristol and I don't know exactly, I guess Ledeen doesn't write for National Review anymore, but if you take the, you know, the Weekly Standard, the National Review, neocons, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post editorial pages and those guys, and then you also take, I guess, the other faction, or they're all kind of together, but the ones who actually get political jobs, right?
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams and all these guys who get real work done beyond just being pundits.
And I mean that in a, you know, kind of ironic way as far as work.
But anyway, I mean, how many people are we talking about total?
50 or 100 or 150?
I mean, if you're talking about the people who shape opinion, who have real impact on the national level, who write for national publications, you know, or publish in the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and so on and so forth.
I mean, I suppose there's something in the neighborhood of around 100 or so, but that's kind of a wild guess.
And that'd be including more or less the guys at the think tanks and the ones that worked for George W. Bush, etc. in that?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, and then add some polemicists who aren't necessarily affiliated with think tanks, like Charles Krauthammer or somebody like that.
But, you know, they have a larger following, mainly through the, well, through a number of things, in a number of ways.
I mean, first of all, leaders of Christian Zionism, people like Hege or previously Falwell, I mean, they adopted, you know, a neoconservative foreign policy.
Now, maybe going out of style, at least if we can judge by, say, what evangelicals, how evangelicals have been voting in the Republican primaries.
But they kind of adopted it kind of wholeheartedly without a great deal of reflection.
But also because the Israeli government has moved so far to the right, and there's so many Jews who are not just neoconservative, who are generally liberal in their outlook, but they feel very, very protective of Israel.
In some cases, many of them at the local level, you know, have moved in a neoconservative direction when it comes to foreign policy, especially U.S. policy toward the Middle East.
So, neoconservative in itself was never a mass movement, except unless you exclude kind of the Christian Zionists.
But again, for those who are particularly protective of Israel, as Israel has moved right in itself, I mean, Bibi Netanyahu is fundamentally a neoconservative, and was very influenced by neoconservatives in his long periods in which he lived in the United States.
And as the government of Israel has moved right, more Jews have adopted more neoconservative-like positions with respect to U.S. policy in the Middle East.
On the other hand, there are many, many more Jews now who are much more willing to be outspokenly opposed to Israeli government policy because they're offended by the rightward drift of the government's policies in Israel.
And by, you know, I mean, the discrimination and even incitement against Palestinians, the insistence on expanding Israeli-controlled territory in the West Bank, the settlements, the cynicism with respect to the Arab Spring.
I mean, Israel may be a democracy, but as Bob Kagan, of all people, has said, it's the only democracy that the Israeli government supports in the Middle East.
They're not interested in democratic movements.
They oppose democratic movements, and now they consider their greatest regional ally probably to be Saudi Arabia, which has led the counter-revolution against the Arab Spring.
And so it's kind of ironic when neoconservatives say, one thing, one reason we should support Israel virtually unconditionally is it's the only democracy in the Middle East, as Kagan himself has said.
You know, that's because it doesn't support democracy in the Middle East and wants to retain the exclusive rights to being the only democracy in the Middle East.
Sure.
And even then, you have to just ignore the occupation of the millions of people in the West Bank and Gaza and their lack of a right to vote for those who control them, you know, who rule them to even call Israel a democracy for that matter.
It is a fundamental contradiction.
And I've been one of the few critics of neoconservatism who has never swallowed the idea that these people are committed to democracy promotion and human rights.
I mean, in the last 20 years, a lot of people, even Francis Fukuyama, who at one time was described as a neocon, um, you know, has said what distinguishes neoconservatives is their Wilsonian outlook.
And I just considered the Wilsonian outlook to be pretty bogus.
I mean, I didn't see much evidence of a consistent promotion of democracy and human rights by neoconservatives over the last 45 years since they became a movement.
I just never saw that as a consistent part of their platform, with a few exceptions.
I think Bob Kagan, for example, is sincere about that.
I even think that Elliot Abrams actually kind of cares about that, but not very much compared to other principals.
I think Paul Wolfowitz is actually sincere about that, but I think they're so caught up kind of in their own beliefs.
They don't see some of the contradictions that creates.
I mean, Kagan and Wolfowitz, I think, do see the contradictions.
Abrams seems to be, he just seems not to be able to understand the point that you just made, that, you know, how can you talk about democracy promotion and human rights and defend Israel's, you know, actions in the West Bank and Gaza?
There's just a fundamental contradiction there, and somehow he doesn't see it.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so last question here.
It seems like there's, is it just a lack of competition on the right where they just, say, the Republican Party, they just have no one else to turn to other than the neocons, it seems like.
I mean, there are a few conservative, you know, realist writers at the National Interest, for example, a couple of places like that, but apparently not enough to staff an administration with, or certainly not enough to, you know, be the teachers of the politicians, you know, like the John Hay Institute, this kind of thing where the candidates go in to get their lessons on what it is they're supposed to think and say.
It seems like even after Iraq too, and the rest of their disasters, there's just nobody to push them out of the way.
Um, you mean within the Republican Party?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, because the Republicans have to see, geez, we lost in 2006, we lost in 2008, we lost in 2010, I guess they picked up a little bit in 10, lost the presidency, though they should have been able to beat Obama in 12, they couldn't.
And the reason why is because, in fact, I read a thing, Jim, at National Review, where, and I forget who it was, but he was saying, look, we understand you're mad that we weren't able to stop Obama from all the terrible stuff he did, but we really tried.
So please don't be mad and support Trump, you know, but nowhere in there is the recognition that they don't just hate you because you didn't stop Obama, they hate you because of the 2001 through 2009.
And the, you know, the so-called consensus of the George W. Bush years that, you know, did half of ruining everything between then and now.
And that's what people are so mad about, that they're willing to support Trump and all that.
But it just seems like the Republican Party, they don't have anyone to turn to for advice other than a bunch of National Review writers, basically, to tell them what's the truth and what they should do.
You mean on foreign policy?
Yeah, or well, really on anything, but yeah, especially on foreign policy, right?
Because, you know, this, as you know, this is the kind of thing most people really aren't interested at all.
Most even Washington, D.C. people, I, you know, gather aren't really very interested in it either.
The only experts are guys who are hell bent on something horrible.
Yeah, well, I think there are fewer and fewer of those people in the Republican Party.
I think most of them have fled the Republican Party.
That certainly would seem true in the U.S. Senate, for example.
I mean, like Lugar was lost.
And I mean, yeah, reasonable foreign policy people in the Republican Senate are very, very hard to find.
And the House, meanwhile, I think has just gone nuts and we can debate over or the Republicans in the House.
I just think, I mean, they're so far to the right.
I think one of the reasons is that neoconservatives have been very successful at using the charge of isolationism against anyone who questions why the U.S. should not have 700 or more bases around the world and why it should not be spending more than 20 times the, or then the combined defense expenditures of the next 20 most heavily armed countries.
So I think the charge of isolationism, because it's become such a dirty word, is very helpful in retaining their control.
I think also the fact that they really have forged ties to the aggressive nationalist wing of the party, which is under people like Cheney.
There's a Jacksonian element, which I think goes deep, especially in your part of the country, in the South, that they- I'm from Texas and Texas ain't the South.
Well, okay.
Okay.
I'll take your word for it.
I'm just playing with you.
Kind of Southern.
You're from New England to me, so, you know, it's all the same.
I'm from Seattle, so that's entirely different.
But I think their ability to kind of harness Jacksonian sentiment against, about hitting back hard against alleged enemies, like making the sand burn or whatever.
Or glow in the dark and all that.
Yes, we are Jacksonians.
Not Southerners, but we are Jacksonians here in Texas.
No doubt.
Yeah, I think the neocons have been very good at manipulating Jacksonian opinion that's deep in, let's say, Scott's Irish, and that's an important segment of the American population.
I also think that people, and I said this at the lecture you referred to at the outset, you know, there's a lot of research to be done, I think, in connections or associations between neoconservatives and the defense industry.
The kind of Washington arm of neoconservatism began in the office of Scoop Jackson, my senator from Washington State, who was also known as the senator from Boeing.
And a lot of the leading neocons have served as consultants to major defense industries.
And to the extent that neocons foster fear, the extent that the neocons are always talking about the 1930s, they believe like Adolf Hitler is always somewhere around the corner, or at least that's how I put it in the speech, calls for a kind of state of permanent mobilization.
And who benefits from a state of kind of permanent mobilization?
Incidentally, it was Moynihan who used that expression, is the defense industry.
And it would be interesting to probe ties between the defense, major defense contractors and neocons, and to what extent individual neocons are employed in some fashion or another, by defense, by major defense companies.
Well, it's certainly easy to find out, at least in the case of AEI and a couple of these others, where they get, you know, the where the think tanks get their money.
But you know, that that raised a really important question.
I wonder what you think is the best study of that that's ever been written, or has there been one?
I haven't seen one that's been devoted to that issue.
So the one I know, I know one of them, Jim, it's Richard Cummings wrote one for Playboy, you can find it at CorpWatch.org.
It's called Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
And it's about Bruce Jackson and the Committee to Expand NATO and the Committee to Liberate Iraq.
And he ties all of the Bush Jr. administration neocons, I believe every single one of them to Lockheed.
And the only one who didn't work directly for Lockheed at some point was Hadley, but he was a lawyer for the firm that represented Lockheed.
Well, I know, for example, Douglas Feith, who was house counsel or a counsel for Northrop Grumman, I think a couple of others have also, that article does ring a bell now that you mentioned it, I think it came out around 2004 or something like that.
Seven, I think.
But yeah, a long time ago.
Nine years.
Yeah.
Yeah, it does ring a bell.
But I mean, this is the perfect kind of thing for somebody to write a PhD dissertation on.
You hear that, listeners?
Jim Loeb has just given you an assignment.
They take you very seriously, as do I. I should appreciate your time again, Jim.
You're great, man.
Okay, Scott.
Thanks very much.
Talk to you soon.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Jim Loeb.
And hey, how about that challenge?
Students listening to write up a PhD thesis on the neocons and the arms manufacturers.
All right, Jim Loeb, the great Jim Loeb at loeblog.com.
And by the way, I'll urge you guys to search ipsnews.net neoconservatives.
And you will find, I think it's fair to say hundreds of articles by Jim going back 30-40 years about the neoconservatives.
He is the world's greatest expert, if you ask me.
Thanks.