Neo-pro, Neo-con

Daniel Larison recommended this article that attacks a claim made by a pundit for a respectable media outlet "that neoconservatives have been part of a broad foreign policy consensus dating back to the ’50s."

You know, I'm not entirely sure what neoconservatives are.  The pundit, Eliot Cohen, makes some risible statements, for example that "the two-generation-old American foreign policy consensus ... held that American interests were ineluctably intertwined with American values, and that when possible, each should reinforce the other, as when the promotion of liberty and human rights helped to weaken the Soviet Union."  Oh, yes, we all know how "American values" promoted liberty and human rights around the world, and continue to do so.  But Paul Pillar, Cohen's critic, has his own blind spots.

Dwight Eisenhower's presidency was one of foreign policy restraint. Ike didn't dive into Southeast Asia when the French were losing, he didn't attempt rollback in Eastern Europe, and he came down hard on the British, French, and Israelis during their Suez escapade. Richard Nixon's foreign policy was characterized by realism, balance of power, and extraction from a major war rather than starting one. Ronald Reagan, despite the image of standing up to the Evil Empire, didn't try to wage Cold War forever like some in his administration did. He saw the value of negotiation with adversaries, and when faced with high costs from overseas military deployments (think Lebanon in 1983-84), his response was retrenchment rather than doubling down. George H.W. Bush had one of the most successful foreign policies of all, thanks to not trying to accomplish too much with overseas military expeditions, and to his administration being broad-thinking and forward-looking victors of the Cold War.

I suppose most of these statements could be explicated in ways that would make them less absurd than they are at first glance, but that's because Pillar is overlooking, deliberately or through ignorance, facts that would complicate them, and perhaps undermine his argument.

Take his account of Eisenhower, who continued Truman's policy of massive support for the French war in Indochina, analogous to Obama's support for the current Saudi blitzkrieg in Yemen. True, when the French gave up Eisenhower didn't "dive in," if that's supposed to mean a direct invasion by US forces.  Instead Eisenhower undermined the political settlement that followed, by bringing in and supporting a viciously repressive client, which soon led to resistance by the Vietnamese and ultimately (less than a decade later) a direct US invasion by Eisenhower's successor.  Eisenhower also used covert action to overthrow govenments that he considered insufficiently cooperative with US "interests."  Guatemala and Iran were what he considered successful interventions, both involving the installation of singularly brutal dictatorships that the US supported for decades; Indonesia was such a failure that his administration did their best to ensure it would be forgotten, with considerable success.  It's currently fashionable to whitewash Ike, but his main success was minimizing US losses, while maximizing casualties in the countries he chose as targets.

As for Nixon, his "extraction from a major war" didn't happen.  He extended and escalated the war in Vietnam while starting a new one in Cambodia, again with minimal US losses and maximal losses among Cambodians.  I suppose Pillar has in mind Nixon's "Vietnamization" program, which was supposed to turn the work of waging the US to South Vietnamese forces, but the US remained involved in Vietnam throughout Nixon's tenure, and only got out under his appointed successor Gerald Ford.

Reagan, like Eisenhower, preferred "covert" (meaning, not publicized in the US but well-known elsewhere in the world) and proxy activity, but his first impulse was different.  (Why were US troops in Lebanon to begin with, for example?)  Bush the Elder invaded Panama and Iraq, again with minimal US casualties but maximal Panamanian and Iraqi losses.  His disinclination "to accomplish too much with overseas military expeditions" presumably refers to Bush's initial promise to support the Iraqi uprising against Saddam Hussein immediately after the Gulf War, and his subsequent inaction when that uprising was put down with harshness typical of US clients defending their turf. (It would not have required a military expedition to support the uprising, by the way; but letting Iraqi rebels use "captured Iraqi equipment" against Saddam wasn't acceptable to Bush.)  Bush's supposed aversion to overseas military expeditions is also belied by the unseemly haste with which he reacted with military force to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the first place.

So Pillar's critique seems to overlook important contrary evidence and considerations about the post-WWII US foreign policy consensus.  Whoever the neoconservatives are, US policy has mostly involved state terror, violence, direct military intervention when possible and covert intervention by repressive American proxies when discretion required it.  Whatever the neocons wrought, it seems to have differed from the consensus mainly in degree, not in kind.

The Rejection of Shame

I'm still reading Claudia Roth Pierpont's Roth Unbound, advancing chronologically through Philip Roth's career.  For some reason she skipped the long story "On the Air," which appeared in issue 10 of the paperback-magazine New American Review, back in 1970; I know I still have that issue around here somewhere.  It has almost never been reprinted, apparently because Roth himself hates it.  But it fits so neatly into that period, which includes several intentionally provocative works, from Portnoy to the Nixon satire Our Gang. And incidentally, one of the more amazing bits in Roth Unbound is a page-and-a-half excerpt from Nixon's White House Tapes, most of which I read before I realized that it was not a quotation from Our Gang but the real thing:

NIXON: Roth is of course a Jew
HALDEMAN: Oh yes ... He's brilliant in a sick way [73].

Anyway, I'm now reading Pierpont's discussion of Roth's middle period, initiated by The Ghost Writer in 1979.  This is the novel where the protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, meets a young woman who might or might not be Anne Frank, if Frank had survived Bergen-Belsen and immigrated to the US.  Roth was interested in her status as a sort of Jewish saint, had been wondering for years about her appeal.  As Pierpont explains it:

For all the tears that have been shed for Anne Frank, has her book really taught anybody anything?

The question may seem naive.  But Nathan, in the voice of his imaginary Anne, comes to an answer about the lessons of the book that accords, perhaps unsurprisingly, with Roth's defense of his stories years earlier.  The Diary has touched so many people -- and here Roth says "aloud" the most hazardous thing he felt he had to say -- because there was nothing notably Jewish about this mostly secular, Dickens-reading, European family who just happened to be Jews.  "A harmless Chankukah song" once a year, a few Hebrew words, a few candles, a few presents; there was hardly more to it than that.  They were in no way foreign, strange, or embarrassing -- and look what happened to them.  They were entirely charming, in fact, especially, of course, Anne.  And look what happened to her.  What did it take to provoke what happened?  "It took nothing -- that was the horror.  And that was the truth.  And that was the power of her book."  As Roth had once replied to the rabbis, it is impossible to control anti-Semitism through exemplary behavior, accomplishments, or charm.  Because anti-Semitism originates not in the Jew but in the anti-Semites.  Repression, pretension, "putting on a good face": all useless.  Anne's diary offered a double lesson, really.  For Gentiles, a lesson in common humanity, the nightmare made real because of how familiar Anne and her family seemed.  And for Jews, the fact that this familiarity had not done a thing to save them [118].

The stories Roth had to defend years earlier were in his first book, Goodbye Columbus, which had outraged many Jewish readers and spokesmen for (as they thought) airing Jewish dirty laundry where the Gentiles could see it.  At least once he was asked, "Mr. Roth, would you write the same stories you've written if you were living in Nazi Germany?" (14).  Roth was not living in Nazi Germany, of course.  His take on Anne Frank was in part an answer to that very stupid question.  For one thing, German Jews were among the most assimilated in Europe; all their efforts to minimize their differences made them no less vulnerable.  Hasidim who stood out were demonized in ways that often sound familiar from antigay propaganda now, but assimilated Jews were demonized as a Fifth Column, a secret menace pretending to be normal while burrowing away at the foundations of Western Civilization.  As Pierpont puts it, anti-Semitism (or any kind of bigotry, really) originates not in the Jew but in the anti-Semite.  I've argued before that trying to appease bigots by conforming to predominant gender norms is just as futile, for the same reason: flamboyant "stereotypical" queers will outrage many people, but others will be just as outraged by non-stereotypical queers who pretend to be normal.  This doesn't mean that all gay people or Jews should strive to be visible, only that it's useless to rationalize conformity as a remedy for bigotry.

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a fine piece yesterday that (among other things) addressed the same point for African-Americans.

When W.E.B. Du Bois, in 1897, claimed that the "first and greatest" step toward addressing "the Negro Problem," lay in correcting the "immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves" he was wrong. No amount of morality could have prevented the overthrow of Wilmington by white supremacists—the only coup in American history—a year later. When Booker T. Washington urged blacks to use "every iota of influence that we possess" to "get rid of the criminal and loafing element of our people," he was wrong. When Marcus Garvey claimed that "the greatest stumbling block in the way of progress in the race has invariably come from within the race itself," he was dead wrong. When Malcolm X claimed that "the white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community,” and asserted that black people "will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community," he was wrong. He knew the game was rigged. He did not know how much.

In his book The Condemnation of Blackness, the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad notes that a few years after Du Bois made his proclamations he was shocked to find himself cited by unreformed white supremacists.

Besides, many of the black people who were lynched in Du Bois' day were in fact responsible, disciplined, and successful: that was why the mobs targeted them.  (Again, like Jews -- stereotyped as rich -- and gay men -- ditto.)

That isn't to deny, of course, that many black people are irresponsible -- Coates addresses that elsewhere in the piece -- or that many gay people are.  But so are many white people, and many straights.  Whites may complain about low-class white trash, but they don't see the misconduct of other whites as invalidating their own privilege, and they certainly don't expect to be judged by it.  The same goes for straights versus gays, or Gentiles versus Jews, or Christians versus Muslims, or men versus women ... any such division, really.

In another book I read recently, What Is English and Why Should We Care? (Oxford, 2013), Tim Machan says that colonialists preferred that "natives" speak broken English, which could be despised as a symptom of laziness and/or inferior intellect, rather than fluent standard English, which caused the rulers anxiety on numerous levels.  This double bind persists, I think, in whites' contempt for poor blacks (or other Others -- it also applied to European immigrants a hundred years ago) combined with hatred of those who succeed in whites' domains.  This accounts for the racist hatred of Barack Obama, as can be seen in the memes which depict him as an African witch doctor or other "primitive" caricature.  But it can also be seen in white liberal middle-class caricatures of inbred rednecks and ignorant fundamentalists.  The Other is a mirror in which we try very hard not to see ourselves.

Because I'm the President, That's Why

Here's the context. And some comparisons:

The United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture, and so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

-- US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, 2009

On Fox News Sunday today, host Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney, “if the President, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?” “I think as a general proposition, I’d say yes,” replied Cheney.

--December 21, 2008

Some have called such operations “assassinations.” They are not, and the use of that loaded term is misplaced. Assassinations are unlawful killings. Here, for the reasons I have given, the U.S. government’s use of lethal force in self defense against a leader of al Qaeda or an associated force who presents an imminent threat of violent attack would not be unlawful — and therefore would not violate the Executive Order banning assassination or criminal statutes.

--US Attorney General Eric Holder, May 5, 2012