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Left has been slinging around the "neoconservative agenda"
epithet for years. Nothing new here. It's one of those gems you
might find littered in fascinating periodicals with names like the
Journal of Canadian Studies.
Before 9/11,
anti-GMO terrorists (and surly assistant professors at Canadian
universities) loved to rile free-marketeers with the neocon slam
— as in, "Your tall skinny latté's got 'neoconservative
agenda' written all over it, man."
After 9/11,
terms like "neoconservative agenda" and "neoconservative"
have acquired a new frisson in the anti-war lexicon.
As is his wont,
Pat Buchanan fired the first fusillade. In an op-ed for USA Today
entitled, "Whose War is This?," he let fly at the "neoconservative
media," the "neoconservative line," and the "neoconservative
movement":
The war Netanyahu
and the neocons want, with the United States and Israel fighting
all of the radical Islamic states, is the war bin Laden wants,
the war his murderers hoped to ignite when they sent those airliners
into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
As the possibility
that President Bush might expand the war on terrorism gains momentum,
so too does the histrionics of the anti-war anti-neocons. Herewith
Hardball's Chris Matthews, writing in the San Francisco
Chronicle:
Who's writing
this script? Who hijacked our war?
The answer: a coterie of "neo-conservative" thinkers
led by Weekly Standard publisher William Kristol and deputy
defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
Out of the ashes of Sept. 11, they and their rightist associates
have found what they've long wanted: an American government heading
toward war in the Middle East. They have diverted the hunt for
bin Laden much as the Crusades of a millennium ago were diverted
from saving the Holy Land to idiotic conquests of Belgrade, Constantinople
and any number of targets along the way.Kristol and Wolfowitz
have wanted this for a long time.
Odd that. Chris
Matthews and Pat Buchanan. Two peas in a pod.
Neocons are
the newly fashionable targets of media derision. Middle East
News Online calls neoconservatives "consistent: they always
opt for war, the bigger the better." The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
says they "believe America as a righteous country ought to
impose its will on rogue nations throughout the world." Columnist
Don Feder says they're prone to "anti-Islamic triumphalist
warmongering." For neoconservatives, opined the International
Herald Tribune "acts of undeclared war are what win respect
for the United States and demonstrate its 'credibility.'"
And yet, statistically,
the notion that a cabal of neoconservative, fiercely pro-Israel
ideologists is singly driving the war's expansion doesn't compute.
An International
Herald Tribune/Pew Research Center poll of U.S. opinion leaders
in politics, media, business, culture, and government reports that
50 percent would support a U.S. attack against regimes, such
as Iraq or Somalia, if they were found to support terrorism. That's
a quantum leap beyond the combined staff at every right-leaning
periodical and every Reaganite think tank.
Sorry folks:
There's no vast right-wing conspiracy here.
Curiously,
though, the anti-war, anti-neocon cant continues. Neocons are "Washington's
War Party"; the neocons are implacable and blood thirsty; and
so on and so forth.
Not so long
ago, neoconservatives were a few estranged liberals, mugged by reality.
Now they're everywhere, mugging America's entire political agenda?
I don't think so.
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