{"id":88656,"date":"2016-02-28T10:34:42","date_gmt":"2016-02-28T18:34:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=88656"},"modified":"2016-02-28T10:36:45","modified_gmt":"2016-02-28T18:36:45","slug":"another-jewish-neo-con-panics-about-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=88656","title":{"rendered":"Another Jewish Neo-Con Panics About Donald Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eliot A. Cohen writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

How on earth did this happen? Some, like Robert Kagan, think it is solely the result of a prolonged self-poisoning of the Republican Party. A number of shrewd writers\u2014David Frum, Tucker Carlson, Ben Domenech, Charles Murray, and Joel Kotkin being among the best\u2014have probed deeper. Not surprisingly, they are all some flavor of conservative. On the liberal (or, as they say now, progressive) end of the spectrum the reaction has been chiefly one of smugness (\u201cwell, that\u2019s what the Republicans are, we knew it all along\u201d), schadenfreude (\u201cpass the popcorn\u201d), and chicken-counting (\u201cnow we can get a head start on Hillary\u2019s first Inaugural\u201d). Their insouciance will be stripped away if Trump becomes the nominee and turns his cunning, ferocity, and charm on an inept, boring politician trailing scandals as old as dubious investments with a 1,000 percent return and as fresh as a homebrew email server. He might lose. He might, however, very well tear her to pieces. Clearly, he relishes the prospect, because he despises the politicians he has bought over the years.<\/p>\n

The conservative analysts offer a number of arguments\u2014a shifting class structure, liberal overreach in social policy, existential anxiety about the advent of a robot-driven economy, the stagnation since the Great Recession, and more. They note (as most liberal commentators have yet to do) Trump\u2019s formidable political skills, including a visceral instinct for detecting and exploiting vulnerability that has been the hallmark of many an authoritarian ruler. These insights are all to the point, but they do not capture one key element.
\nMoral rot.
\nPoliticians have, since ancient Greece, lied, pandered, and whored. They have taken bribes, connived, and perjured themselves. But in recent times\u2014in the United States, at any rate\u2014there has never been any politician quite as openly debased and debauched as Donald Trump. Truman and Nixon could be vulgar, but they kept the cuss words for private use. Presidents have chewed out journalists, but which of them would have suggested that an elegant and intelligent woman asking a reasonable question was dripping menstrual blood? LBJ, Kennedy, and Clinton could all treat women as commodities to be used for their pleasure, but none went on the radio with the likes of Howard Stern to discuss the women they had bedded and the finer points of their anatomies. All politicians like the sound of their own names, but can anyone doubt what Trump would have christened the Hoover Dam\u2014or the Washington Monument?
\nThat otherwise sober people do not find Trump\u2019s insults and insane demands outrageous (Mexico will have to pay for a wall! Japan will have to pay for protection!) says something about a larger moral and cultural collapse. His language is the language of the comments sections of once-great newspapers. Their editors know that the online versions of their publications attract the vicious, the bigoted, and the foulmouthed. But they keep those comments sections going in the hope of getting eyeballs on the page.
\nWinston Churchill recalls in his memoir how as a young man he came to terms with hypocrisy, discovering the \u201cenormous and unquestionably helpful part that humbug plays in the social life of a great people.\u201d Inconsistency between public virtue and private vice is not altogether a bad thing. No matter how nasty the realities are, maintaining respectable appearances, minding the civilities, and adhering to the conventions is part of what keeps civilization going.
\nThe current problem goes beyond excruciatingly bad manners. What we increasingly lack, and have lacked for some time, is a sense of the moral underpinning of republican (small r) government. Manners and morals maintain a free state as much as laws do, as Tocqueville observed long ago, and when a certain culture of virtue dies, so too does something of what makes democracy work. Old-fashioned words like integrity, selflessness, frugality, gravitas, and modesty rarely rate a mention in modern descriptions of the good life\u2014is it surprising that they don\u2019t come up in politics, either?
\nWilliam James, a pacifist who understood this point, argued in \u201cThe Moral Equivalent of War\u201d that \u201cintrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built\u2014unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt.\u201d Just so. Trump might have become a less upsetting figure if he had not wriggled through the clutches of the draft in the 1960s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Max Blumenthal wrote in 2012<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In 2005, a group of graduate students at Johns Hopkins University\u2019s School of Advanced and International Studies (SAIS) participated in the school\u2019s annual diplomatic simulation. The high-pressure scenario required the students to negotiate a resolution to a standoff with a nuclear-armed Republic of Pakistan. Mara Karlin, a student known for her hawkish politics on Israel and the Middle East, played President of the United States.<\/p>\n

Though most of the participants were confident they could head off a military conflict with diplomatic measures, Karlin jumped the gun. According to a former SAIS student, not only did Karlin order a nuclear strike on Pakistan, she also took the opportunity to nuke Iran. Her classmates were shocked. It was the first time in 45 years that a simulation concluded with the deployment of a nuclear weapon.<\/p>\n

That year, Karlin received a plum job in the Bush administration\u2019s Department of Defense where, according to her bio she was \u201cintimately involved in formulating U.S. policy on Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel-Palestinian affairs.\u201d Lebanon was a special area of focus for Karlin. She claims to have helped structure the Lebanese Armed Forces and coordinated relations between the US and Lebanese militaries.<\/p>\n

According to the former SAIS student, Karlin was a favorite of Eliot Cohen, an ultra-hawkish professor of strategic studies at SAIS, which is regarded in American foreign policy circles as a training ground for the neoconservative movement. Through Cohen\u2019s connections among the neocons occupying key civilian posts in Bush\u2019s Defense Department, the former student claims Cohen was able to arrange an attractive sinecure for Karlin. Besides Karlin, the ex-SAIS student told me Cohen has promoted the career ambitions of many former pupils, including Kelly Magsamen, who worked under Cohen in the Bush administration and now oversees the Iran portfolio in the Obama administration\u2019s State Department.<\/p>\n

Today, Cohen is among Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney\u2019s top campaign advisers. He is the primary author of Romney\u2019s foreign policy white paper, which attacks Obama for \u201ccurrying favor with [America\u2019s] enemies\u201d and \u201costentatiously shunning Jerusalem.\u201d<\/p>\n

The paper urges a policy of regime change in Iran including possible coordination with Israel on military strikes to prevent the Iranian regime from developing a nuclear weapon. It is an aggressive Republican election season document presenting a concoction of post-9\/11 unilateralism and unvarnished neo-imperialism as the antidote to a sitting president Cohen accused of \u201cunilateral disarmament in the diplomatic and moral sphere.\u201d More importantly, it suggests that a Romney administration\u2019s foreign policy might look remarkably similar to \u2013 and perhaps more extreme than \u2013 that of the Bush administration.<\/p>\n

Cohen rose through the ranks of the Republican foreign policy elite as a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Paul Wolfowitz.
\nStephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard University\u2019s School of Government who has been on the receiving end of aggressive attacks by Cohen, called Cohen \u201ca classic neoconservative.\u201d Walt said, \u201cHe is constantly fretting about alleged U.S. vulnerabilities, consistently supportive of increased defense spending, and generally inclined to favor U.S. intervention in other countries. Second, like virtually all neoconservatives, he is also deeply attached to Israel, as well as to the United States. I do not question his patriotism, but I think he tends to see U.S. and Israeli interests as more-or-less identical and doesn\u2019t see a trade-off between support for one and support for the other.\u201d
\nCohen rose through the ranks of the Republican foreign policy elite as a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Paul Wolfowitz, the former Assistant Secretary of Defense who is credited with playing a central role in the push for invading Iraq. In 1990, Wolfowitz secured a position for Cohen working beside him on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Three years later, when Wolfowitz was appointed dean of SAIS, he began using his influence to propel Cohen\u2019s career. According to a former State Department official who graduated from SAIS, it was through the beneficence of Wolfowitz that Cohen earned an endowed teaching position at SAIS as the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies.
\nIn 1997, Wolfowitz and Cohen joined forces to form the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative umbrella group that served as the key non-governmental vehicle for promoting the case for invading Iraq after 9\/11. In the immediate wake of al-Qaeda\u2019s attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Cohen took to the media to map out the next phase of a grand global military venture that he coined, \u201cWorld War IV.\u201d
\nDescribing Iraq as \u201cthe big prize,\u201d Cohen urged a unilateral invasion of Iraq that would advance the ambitions of the now-discredited political charlatan Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. Like so many of his neoconservative peers, Cohen claimed Saddam Hussein\u2019s regime maintained \u201ca connection with the 9\/11 terrorists.\u201d With the war deteriorating into a chaotic bloodbath and as his own son was called up for duty, Cohen criticized the Bush administration for \u201chappy talk and denials of error.\u201d However, he refused to admit fault for his role in selling Americans on the invasion.<\/p>\n

Despite mildly dissenting from the White House line, Cohen continued his ascent, replacing Philip Zelikow as counselor to then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in 2007. According to the former State Department official, Rice had almost no role in Cohen\u2019s appointment. Instead, Cohen was recommended for the position by Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz. Cheney\u2019s daughter headed the Iran Syrian Operations Group, a newly created, neoconservative-inspired initiative burrowed within the State Department\u2019s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. At the time of Cohen\u2019s appointment, Rice was attempting to open diplomatic lines to Iran, North Korea, and Syria \u2013 a move Cohen and the Cheneys fiercely opposed.<\/p>\n

A few months after Bush left office, the former State Department official said Cohen and Wolfowitz rewarded their neoconservative fellow traveler Eric Edelman \u2013 a former Defense Department official during the later Bush years \u2013 with a visiting scholarship at SAID. In private, Johns Hopkins alumni expressed outrage at the installment of Edelman, a career diplomat with no academic background, accusing the neoconservatives of exploiting SAIS to create a system of political patronage.<\/p>\n

Cohen advised that the \u201cUS actively seek the overthrow of the Islamic Republic\u2026through every instrument of U.S. power, soft more than hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cohen\u2019s extensive web of foreign policy and military connections forms a seamless line to Tel Aviv. There, on the top floor of one of the office buildings known as \u201cHaKirya,\u201d is the office of one of Cohen\u2019s former pupils,Aviv Kochavi. Kochavi is now the director of Israeli military intelligence, making him one of the most quietly influential figures in the country. In 2006, Kochavi, who also holds a philosophy degree, boasted to the Israeli architect and anti-occupation activist Eyal Weizmann about how he and his troops crushed Palestinian resistance cells in Nablus through the use of \u201cinverse geometry\u201d and \u201cmicro-tactical actions\u201d inspired by the theories of post-structuralist philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari. On February 2, Kochavi appeared at the annual Herzliya Conference to issue grave warnings about the rapid progress of Iran\u2019s nuclear program, suggesting that sanctions and diplomacy have failed, and that more aggressive action might be required.<\/p>\n

Despite Cohen\u2019s deep Israeli ties, he has proven extremely sensitive to critiques of the connection. When Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the latter a professor of International Relations at the University of Chicago, published their widely debated paper on the Israel lobby in 2006, Cohen authored one of the first attempts to discredit their thesis about a loose coalition of individuals and organizations creating political pressure to move US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. In an op-edin the Washington Post, Cohen accused the authors of \u201ckooky academic work\u201d and \u201cobsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCohen\u2019s rather hysterical reaction to our work was both typical and easy to explain,\u201d Walt remarked. \u201cGiven that he and other neoconservatives had played a key role in convincing George Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, he was understandably upset when we pointed this out and provided extensive documentation of their role in the run-up to this disastrous war. He could not refute our logic or our evidence, however, so he chose to misrepresent our views and smear us falsely as anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the last battalions of US troops preparing to redeploy from Iraq to other conflict zones, Cohen is homing in on Iran. In a September 2009 editorial for the Wall Street Journal, he dismissed diplomacy and sanctions as feasible means of curbing Iran\u2019s nuclear ambitions. \u201cPressure, be it gentle or severe, will not erase that nuclear program,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe choices are now what they ever were: an American or an Israeli strike, which would probably cause a substantial war, or living in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons, which may also result in war, perhaps nuclear, over a longer period of time.\u201d While not ruling out the necessity of an American strike on Iranian facilities, Cohen advised that the \u201cUS actively seek the overthrow of the Islamic Republic\u2026through every instrument of U.S. power, soft more than hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

As tensions between Israel and Iran rise to unprecedented levels, and Israel\u2019s leadership beseeches the US to join a military strike on Iran, Cohen\u2019s visions of regime change seem closer to realization than ever before. For him and the neoconservative policy elite, a Romney victory in November might deliver the next \u201cbig prize.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eliot A. Cohen writes: How on earth did this happen? Some, like Robert Kagan, think it is solely the result of a prolonged self-poisoning of the Republican Party. A number of shrewd writers\u2014David Frum, Tucker Carlson, Ben Domenech, Charles Murray, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29752,29611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-donald-trump","category-neoconservatives"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88656"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88659,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88656\/revisions\/88659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=88656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=88656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}