Ronald Radosh's Blog, page 25

John Brennan Faces the Issue of the Drone War (Updated)

NBC investigative reporter Michael Isikoff got another major scoop last night. He posted online a secret Justice Department memo summarizing legal opinion given the White House for carrying out drone strikes against U.S. citizens abroad, leading to their immediate death without arrest, interrogation, or concerns for their constitutional rights. The 16-page memo, which you can read yourself in its entirety, says that a drone attack can take place if any “informed, high-level official” determines that a targeted individual “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” if capture is not feasible, and when the operation can take place “in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”

I have no objection to the use of drones if necessary, but one must consider the following problems concerning their use. There is always going to be major “collateral” damage, as when the al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki was killed — the drone also caused the death of another American who was a propagandist for al-Qaeda. In another strike, Awlaki’s 16-year-old son was killed. When asked about that at a press conference, then-White House press secretary Robert Gibbs answered: “He should have had a more responsible father.” Both were U.S. citizens abroad. Even the old Russian anarchists, ready to kill members of the czar’s entourage with a roadside bomb, stopped in their tracks when they saw that the monarch’s carriage carried not only the ruler, but his young nephews.

As viewers of Homeland know, drone strikes kill many innocent civilians as well as the guilty targets, even when the subjects are not U.S. citizens. The three major terms of use, however, are rather vague and leave many other issues raised, but not answered. As Isikoff writes, the attacks can be ordered “even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.” Isikoff writes:

The secrecy surrounding such strikes is fast emerging as a central issue in this week’s hearing of White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, a key architect of the drone campaign, to be CIA director. Brennan was the first administration official to publicly acknowledge drone strikes in a speech last year, calling them “consistent with the inherent right of self-defense.” In a separate talk at the Northwestern University Law School in March, Attorney General Eric Holder specifically endorsed the constitutionality of targeted killings of Americans, saying they could be justified if government officials determine the target poses “an imminent threat of violent attack.”

The legal brief, he explains, introduces a more expansive definition of self-defense or imminent attack than described by Brennan or Holder in their public speeches. It refers, for example, to what it calls a “broader concept of imminence” than actual intelligence about any ongoing plot against the U.S. homeland. The memo states:

The condition that an operational leader present an “imminent” threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.

Moving in Blue: The Terrific New CD from Danny Kalb

Moving in Blue: The Terrific New CD from Danny Kalb

 

 

If you came of age in the rock and roll years of the 1960’s, and were into music, you knew of Danny Kalb and the band he created, “The Blues Project.” Often referred to as New York City’s “Jewish Beatles,” the group was at first managed by Sid Bernstein, the same man who ran the Fab Four’s New York City tours. You might have heard them at the Paramount Theater in Times Square, where a new group, Eric Clapton and Cream, opened for them. Or you might have heard them play at Palisades Park Amusement Park, at one of Murray  the K’s (the most well- known NYC DJ)  weekend programs at the park. Most likely, however, you went to hear them at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, the place for folk, rock and blues.

Now, after years of living in the shadows, Kalb has come out with a masterful two-disc of his most recent work, and is starting to receive major reviews. The latest for his new album, “Moving in Blue” appears in The Morton Report, a major pop-culture review, and is written by its music critic, Bill Bentley. Calling Kalb “one of that decade’s musical linchpins,” Bentley writes that “his playing crossed blues with folk, rock, country and even jazz over the course of their albums, and before that he was one of the young white bluesmen who found nirvana in the music of Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Lightnin’ Hopkins and other originators, and honored their creation with dedication and deep spirit.”

The waves established by “The Blues Project,” he says, “spread waves far and wide.” In the new album, Kalb sets out to let you hear all the various musical directions he has absorbed into one unique style. You will hear songs by Muddy Waters, Tim Hardin, Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, a few of his own compositions, and some glorious blues licks and incredible finger-picking, magic on the guitar that only he is capable of. Kalb finds, as Bentley writes, an “inner beauty in everything he touches.”  His home, he concludes, “is a musical rainbow inside us all.”

Another additional treat are the insightful and beautifully written liner notes by historian and musicologist Sean Wilentz—yes, that same Wilentz who is a  historian at Princeton University, most well-known for his books on American history, as well as his meditation on our greatest singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan’s America. Kalb, whom he says “looks like a Jewish lumberjack Buddha,”  is “more like Mandrake” once he starts playing. He says that Kalb “stomps with through soulful joy through one genre after another.” He plays such tunes as Son House’s “Death Letter Blues,” the Muddy Waters classic “I Got My Mojo Working,” Leadbelly’s “Leaving Blues,” John Lee Hooker’s “Louise,” and Big Joe Williams “Baby Please Don’t Go.” Many will agree with Wilentz that his version of the traditional “Death Comes Creeping,” sung by many from Dylan to Mance Lipscomb, is done alone on acoustic guitar “more movingly” than interpretations by other past singers.

Accompanying Kalb on the album Is his brother Jonathan, himself a fine blues musician, on slide guitar and harmonica, his drummer from “The Blues Project” Roy Blumenfeld, bass player Jesse Williams and Lenny Nelson, and Sojourn Records co-founder, the label of Kalb’s CD, drummer Mark Ambrosino. There is, as listeners will find, some incredible keyboard and organ work by someone whose name does not appear, but who aficionados will think sounds suspiciously like the famous “Blues Project” keyboard man and founder of “Blood, Sweat and Tears” and sideman for most of Dylan’s earlier hits, Al Kooper. The absence of any credit for whomever is playing those awesome keyboards on the CD is rather, I must say, inexplicable. The man deserves credit!

So, go take a break from the TV, stop fretting over the world situation, and enjoy some heartfelt powerful music. Bring some joy into your life. You deserve it, and Danny Kalb deserves to be heard and listened to.

 

 

Edward I. Koch 1924-2013: Some Remembrances

I was proud to consider myself a friend of Ed Koch. Despite obvious disagreements, Koch remained supportive of my work, and very often I would get a brief email indicating how he appreciated what I had written about the need to support Israel and to criticize its opponents. I heard from him regularly, the last time on January 2 when he wrote to compliment me for a recent PJ Media column criticizing the nomination of Chuck Hagel and another on the anti-Israel positions of Tom Friedman: “Your commentaries on Hagel and Friedman were superb.” I have no doubt that were he still with us he would have been a lone Democrat who would have commented negatively on Hagel’s testimony yesterday.

Last year when I was openly critical of him for supporting Obama’s re-election, he responded simply that he saw things differently than I did, and he particularly disagreed with my assessment that Democrats were not defending Israel as boldly as Republicans were. Koch argued that he was sure I would not like it if he had insinuated I was against Israel’s interest because I wasn’t a Democrat, and that he thought it important that support of Israel come from both sides of the aisle.

I never felt comfortably calling him Ed, and would address him as “Mr. Mayor” or “Mayor Koch.” I last talked with him personally during the presidency of George W. Bush, when he attended a speech by the president at a fundraising dinner for a Jewish organization in Washington, D.C. Koch walked up to me, addressing me, as he often did when I saw him, as “the bravest man in America.” His judgment, which he often repeated, was not sarcastic, although hardly deserved. I think he admired me because when I spent time with him in 1987 — which I will soon turn to –  he appreciated my outspoken willingness to say what I thought about leftist demagogues when others were either silent or deferential in their presence. Koch, as we all know, always said what he thought, and more than often caught hell for doing so.

The last time I heard him speak publicly was during the counter-session (which Roger L. Simon also attended) at the United Nations to oppose growing anti-Israeli sentiment at the international body. It was there that Koch announced he had rescinded his critical editorial written a few days earlier in the New York Daily News on Barack Obama’s views towards the Jewish state. He had met with the president one day before, he told us, and Obama had assured him that he was a firm supporter of Israel. Koch believed, as he himself acknowledged a short while ago, that he always thought Obama would betray Israel, although as he put it, he didn’t think it would happen so quickly.

Back then, however, he seemed to really think his op-ed had convinced the president to change course, and he desperately wanted to believe that Obama was most sincere at his private meeting.

For those interested in a critical overview of Koch’s role as mayor of New York, so far the best assessments are by Benjamin Smith writing today on the website of the New York Sun and one by John Podhoretz today in Contentions. Also worthwhile is Matthew Cooper’s assessment of Koch’s new liberalism in the National Journal. You can, of course, all read the overview in the lengthy obituary in today’s New York Times.

What I want to mention, however, is an event that Koch sponsored while mayor that everyone seems to have forgotten about, although at the time the mayor was vigorously attacked for it. In 1987, at the time of escalating warfare in Central America, a growing revolutionary threat in El Salvador, and a civil war in Nicaragua between the Sandinistas and the contras (the armed opposition to the Sandinistas by peasants and business opponents of the country’s revolutionary junta), Ed Koch decided to see if he could contribute to the peace process introduced by Costa Rica’s President Oscar Arias by putting together a New York City mission to Central America.

So far, I have not seen it mentioned in any of the discussions of Koch’s mayoralty, and to a certain extent, it certainly was a footnote. But the very idea grated the New York liberals.

I recall editorials chastising the mayor for even implying that the city had its own foreign policy, and calling for him to disband the mission and to cancel his scheduled trip. Koch replied that he only was trying to work with President Arias and trying to see if he could in any way contribute to his effort. What really galled Koch, however, was his memory that years earlier he had welcomed Sandinista commandante Daniel Ortega (now president of Nicaragua) to New York City and, in a public ceremony at City Hall, given him the keys to the city. As a congressman, he had been a fierce opponent of the Somoza dictatorship and hence had welcomed its overthrow by the young revolutionaries, a decision he had come to deeply regret.

He, like other well-meaning liberals, had been conned by Ortega’s sweet talk, only to find he was a low-rent version of Fidel Castro.

Haymarket! Another Leftist Historical Myth Gets Destroyed

Every so often, a cherished myth of the Left’s historical narrative comes apart. That is why keeping the flame alive by repeating the myths gives sustenance to the Left’s chosen causes. I learned this the hard way when I wrote The Rosenberg File with Joyce Milton in 1983.

To the Left, it was imperative that the Rosenbergs — who were found guilty of “conspiracy to commit espionage” and sentenced to death by Judge Irving Kaufman after the trial — be innocent. If they were not, it would mean that they were not martyrs for peace, arrested and tried for their “progressive” and anti-war politics and their opposition to the impending fascism and anti-Soviet hysteria of the Truman administration. Rather, if actually guilty, it would mean that the United States had a right to protect itself against those who were working on behalf of the Soviet Union by seeking to ferret out atomic secrets on behalf of Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical regime.

To acknowledge the truth, in other words, meant that those on the Left would have to question their most cherished beliefs.

When the book came out, it was only thirty years after the Rosenbergs were executed at Sing Sing prison, and many of those who fought on their behalf were still around and active. Thus they engaged in a massive campaign to discredit our findings and to smear us as tools of the FBI and the Reagan administration, which they charged was trying once again to undermine the cause of peace and to seek war with the still existing Soviet Union.

That is the charge that the Nation magazine’s editor-in-chief, Victor Navasky, made in the magazine’s editorial. As for the American Communist Party, its chief Gus Hall attacked us for smearing the Rosenbergs, whom he tellingly referred to as “the sacred couple.”

Now, a brave left-wing historian named Timothy Messer-Kruse — despite his own self-proclaimed “social-democratic” politics — has walked into the minefield.

In the latest issue of National Review, writer John J. Miller has penned an article — “What Happened at Haymarket?” — that takes up one of the Left’s most longstanding historical myths: the one surrounding events that took place the night of May 4, 1886 at Haymarket Square in Chicago. Formerly, Messer-Kruse would tell his students:

A gathering of anarchists near Haymarket Square turned into a fatal bombing and riot. Although police never arrested the bomb-thrower, they went on to tyrannize radical groups throughout the city, in a crackdown that is often called America’s first Red Scare. Eight men were convicted of aiding and abetting murder. Four died at the end of a hangman’s noose. Today, history books portray them as the innocent victims of a sham trial: They are labor-movement martyrs who sought modest reforms in the face of ruthless robber-baron capitalism.

To the present day, those events have been a staple in the portrayal of the United States as a nation unjust to those it oppressed, which included workingmen who sought only to gain protection for their rights against rapacious capitalists.

Miller explains that a group of peaceful protesters had gathered to demand an eight-hour workday. Many were anarchists, but Messer-Kruse formerly believed:

They were mainly a peace-loving bunch who simply wanted to improve their wretched conditions. As police arrived to bust up the crowd, someone tossed a bomb. No one knows who did it — perhaps an anarchist agitator.

Howard Zinn wrote in his best-selling People’s History of the United States that it likely was “an agent of the police, an agent provocateur.” Police fired their guns, and seven of their group and some protesters lay dead. Authorities blamed the deaths on the radicals, who were rounded up and convicted without evidence; four were hung, one committed suicide, and three were later pardoned. The Left’s narrative is explained by Miller:

Ever since, Haymarket has occupied a central place in progressive lore. The international labor movement honors May Day as its holiday in part because of its proximity on the calendar to Haymarket’s anniversary. In the United States, Haymarket ranks alongside the cases of Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss, and the Rosenbergs as a fable of anti-radical persecution. Well into the 20th Century, its notoriety provoked violent rage. In 1969, Bill Ayers and an accomplice from the Weather Underground engaged in their own Haymarket terror, bombing a statue that honored the fallen policemen of 1886. “This is too good — it’s us against the pigs, a medieval contest of good and evil,” wrote Ayers of the affair in his memoir, Fugitive Days.

Historian Messer-Kruse believed the standard left-progressive mythology. But a student’s question about what happened during the trial led him to look anew at the events from that sad day in 1886. The result was his brave exploration of what had been until now the standard take on Haymarket. Just as most of the college textbooks portrayed the Rosenbergs as innocent, the Left’s narrative was repeated verbatim, and as Miller writes, “entered mainstream education.” The left-wing labor historian James Green explained in a 2006 account:

The Haymarket case challenged, like no other episode in the nineteenth century, the image of the United States as a classless society with liberty and justice for all.

Imagine Messer-Kruse’s shock when his own careful scholarly examination of Haymarket revealed that most of what the Left taught about the event was based on both shoddy scholarship and ideological wish-fulfillment.

What Was the Meaning of President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address?

No sooner did President Barack Obama finish his second inaugural address than the liberal pundits proclaimed it to be a speech of unity on behalf of all Americans. Yes, it is a platitude, but all of us do pause to reaffirm the greatness of our republic, and to celebrate the election of a chief executive with whom many of us may disagree but who nevertheless represents our country as a whole and is entrusted by us to make the tough decisions that all our countrymen will have to live with. The speech, however, left much to be desired, and my first take is that it will not be one that many will remember in future years.

The president took generalities with which we all agree and used them to imply that to carry on in the American tradition, “progressive” measures favored by his base need to be implemented.

Take the enthusiastic response by liberal columnist Matthew Yglesias writing at Slate. According to Yglesias, the president’s speech was “not even slightly” anti-capitalist, but instead was a defense of economic liberalism tempered by a “robust welfare state and select government interventions in the economy.” Obama, he thinks, came off not as any kind of socialist or statist, but as a pragmatist in the American tradition who believes that fidelity to the Constitution demands a “pragmatic response to changing circumstances.”

Thus the president said in his speech that a “free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.” Echoing the progressivism of the age of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, he emphasized that a “great nation must care for the vulnerable and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.”

Few would disagree, including most conservatives. But the devil, of course, lies in the details.

The problem is well spelled out by William Voegeli, who in the current issue of National Review warns Americans about the coming Swedenization of America. He notes the difference between European social democracies and the United States and our welfare state:

Our deeply rooted, don’t-tread-on-me Jeffersonianism means that we cannot be persuaded to buy even a relatively modest welfare state unless a significant portion of the purchase is financed with debt. In this we are unlike the Europeans, who want cradle-to-grave welfare states with enough to pay cash for them.

…

[The welfare state] creates strong incentives for individuals to have fewer children of their own and rely instead on aggregated financial support from everyone’s children, thereby putting social-security systems under intolerable strain.

The social-democratic project, already sinking in Europe and Scandinavia, cannot work here. Yet, by implication — arguing that it is only a pragmatic adjustment for today to our Constitutional obligations — the president is subtly suggesting that our nation continue down a forlorn path.

What was the Meaning of President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address?

No sooner than President Barack Obama finished his second inaugural address, the liberal pundits proclaimed it to be a speech of unity on behalf of all Americans. Now that you have had the chance to read it yourself, or actually watched it on television, it’s that time for our own evaluations.

Yes, it is a platitude, but all of us do pause to reaffirm the greatness of our Republic, and to celebrate the election of a Chief Executive with whom many of us may disagree, but nevertheless represents our country as a whole, and who is entrusted by us to make the tough decisions that all our countrymen will have to live with.

The speech, however, left much to be desired, and my first take is that it will not be one that many will remember in future years. What the President did, however, was to take generalities with which we all agree, and to use them to imply that to carry on in the American tradition, “progressive” measures favored by his base need to be implemented.

Take the enthusiastic response by liberal columnist Matthew Yglesias, writing in Slate. According to Yglesias, the President’s speech was “not even slightly” anti-capitalist, but instead, was a defense of economic liberalism tempered by a “robust welfare state and select government interventions in the economy.” Obama, he thinks, came off not as any kind of socialist or statist, but as a pragmatist in the American tradition, who believes that fidelity to the Constitution demands a “pragmatic response to changing circumstances.”

Thus the President said in his speech that a “free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.” Echoing the progressivism of the age of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, he emphasized that a “great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.”

Few would disagree, including most conservatives. But the devil, of course, lies in the details. The problem is well spelled out by William Voegeli, who in the current issue of National Review,warns Americans about the coming Swedenization of America, and notes that the difference between European social democracies and the United States and our welfare state is that “our deeply rooted, don’t-tread-on-me Jeffersonianism means that we cannot be persuaded to buy even a relatively modest welfare state unless a significant portion of the purchase is financed with debt. In this we are unlike the Europeans, who want cradle-to-grave welfare states with enough to pay cash for them.” The problem of the welfare state, he writes, is that it “creates strong incentives for individuals to have fewer children of their own and rely instead on aggregated financial support from everyone’s children, thereby putting social-security systems under intolerable strain.” The social-democratic project, already sinking in Europe and Scandinavia, cannot work here.

Yet, by implication—arguing that it is only a pragmatic adjustment for today to our Constitutional obligations- the President is subtly suggesting that our nation continue down a forlorn path. After repeating the generally accepted view of self-reliance, individuality and rejection of central authority, the President went on to make it clear he believes “times change,” and we must do, thus responding to new challenges through “collective action.” In one fell swoop, President Obama moved from giving lip service to free market ideology (thereby fooling people like Matthew Yglesias) to arguing against those supposed conservatives- straw men really-who supposedly want to do away with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and whom the President claims argue that they “sap our initiative,” rather than as he would have it, “strengthen us.”

In making the case in that manner, the President did not address the real central issue, whether our nation and economy can sustain an ever enlarged entitlement state, in which it never is limited, and is based on an ever growing deficit that will pass the burden on to our children and grandchildren. Instead, he made it appear that those he opposes want to end any sustenance for the poor, while he and his base want what is best for the poor and all Americans.  It is, as Ygelesias claims, an “attempt to offer a thorough response to the pseudo-Randian ideology currently ascendant on the right.”

To a liberal like Yglesias, Ayn Rand becomes a perfect boogeyman to bring out to clamp down on those who seek to bring up the issue of the necessity of fiscal responsibility so that a true and reasonable safety net is preserved, not an ever growing monolith that will end in collapse.  By never dealing with specifics, and leaving that to his party faithful and his new activist campaign organization now made permanent, the President managed the perfect parlor trick of seeming to be ecumenical and non-partisan while in fact, he was laying out the gauntlet for a very partisan push in the days to come of the new Congress.

The President spoke of seeking to support a “rising middleclass,” but referred as well to the injustice of the “shrinking few [who] do very well,” implying that the way to achieve the goals is to implement measures that affect the wealth of the famous 1 per cent, obviously through higher taxes that inevitably will fall upon the very middle class he seeks to help rise—but will inevitably be taxed at much higher rates, once it becomes clear that the taxes on the very rich have not helped solve our economic problems.

Lip service in one line about reducing the cost of health care and the “size of our deficit,” throwaway lines actually- are not what the President will be seeking in his second term in office. Rather, it will be programs along the lines of that which he began during his first term—cementing Obama Care, raising the taxes on the “wealthy,” taking administrative measures to implement unpopular gun control programs, drastically cutting the defense budget, and withdrawal from theaters of war in a manner that will risk the rise of our very real enemies abroad. And the President implied in his comments about climate change and “sustainable energy” that he will continue down the path of subsidies for green energy companies that have already proved to be a folly.

Yes, he pledged to “support democracy from Asia to Africa,” but what that means when replacing a tyrant in Syria, whom he at first claimed was a reformer, with a radical Islamist group that is likely to emerge with Assad’s defeat, as it is in Libya with Qadaffi now gone, is not addressed by reiteration of a rather meaningless pledge that we support democracy.

Yes, some will prefer to warm to Obama’s call to “act in our time” and to not “treat name-calling as reasoned debate.” But do we really expect those of our friends on the left to cease their own name-calling, and to rationally debate the issues? Somehow, I think my skepticism on this point is well-taken.

As Democrats party tonight in our nation’s capital at the various balls, and Republicans leave town and for a day retreat from the limelight, we all will soon face having to deal with the very real problems that at this moment remain to be solved. We move together as one people and nation, albeit one that is divided at the core, with half the nation favoring solutions that differ remarkably from those advocated by our Commander-in-Chief and his party’s base.

Let us wish that President Obama, with the help of a Republican House of Representatives and a Democratic Senate, manages to move in such a way that we do not in the next four years slip farther away from our moorings.

 

 

 

 

 

The Continuing Stalinist Delusions of Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick: A Final Assessment

The old totalitarian nations understood the importance of history. They believed, as Orwell wrote in 1984, that those who controlled the narrative of the past would be better able to rule the present and the future. That is why the Soviets continually rewrote the “Great Soviet Encyclopedia,” airbrushing out of the record former Bolshevik leaders who had been purged, and rewriting accounts of their own revolution to weed out positive references to the likes of Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and other old Bolsheviks.  That is why the Chinese Communists have to perpetuate the myth of Mao, whose leadership role has to remain firm, less their own legitimacy to rule China be questioned by their own people.

In their own way, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick are attempting the same kind of rewrite for their own country. Clifford May writes that “these days, documentaries, too, often are weapons of mass indoctrination. In addition to airing Homeland, Showtime has been broadcasting Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, a series that re-litigates the Cold War, finding Truman more to blame than Stalin, telling audiences that Americans not only aren’t ‘the good guys,’  but that we are ‘the wrong side.’”

“This debate is of far more than academic interest,” May adds:

It is hugely consequential at a time when Americans are trying to decide whether we should be robustly defending America and other free nations from those who proclaim themselves our enemies, or whether we should be attempting to address the ‘legitimate grievances’ of those we have supposedly wronged.

Hence, if you believe that the Cold War was caused by America’s imperial outreach, and that Stalin and his henchman took a tough line because of U.S. policy, you are likely to believe today that those who say our nation has very real enemies who have to be recognized are arguing on behalf of a myth, and that what the United States should do is unilaterally disarm, cut our military budget drastically, and reach out to our Muslim enemies, who would become friends if we only showed them respect and deference and, of course, put great pressure on Israel, whose provocative policies oppress the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors.

PJM readers know that I have been on a campaign to expose and challenge the so-called history offered to our countrymen by Stone and Kuznick. Aside from my many articles on this site, I penned an op-ed that appeared last week in The Wall Street Journal, which I wrote because I knew Stone and Kuznick would not ignore an article that appeared in a major newspaper, unlike those that have appeared here as well as the series in David Horowitz’s Frontpagemag.com. I am glad to report that now Conrad Black has joined in presenting his own major critique of the series, and now his readers will understand how important it is to challenge their account. In “The Real Henry Wallace,”  Black successfully demolishes the account of the principal hero of the TV series.

The Last-Ditch Attack Against Hagel’s Opponents: ‘McCarthyites’

There is a real, not-so-covert war going on in our nation’s capital: not the Obama administration’s attempt to select a secretary of Defense with a questionable record, but Chuck Hagel’s supporters’ attempt to end all opposition to him by raising the cry of “McCarthyism.”

That old standard bugaboo of the Left is being used again, this time as a mechanism to try to discredit all who have brought forth valid reasons as to why Senator Hagel should not get appointed to the position despite his nomination. For those who have not been paying attention, here is a brief summary of the various reasons presented by those who oppose Hagel’s nomination:

He has publicly spoken about how the “Jewish lobby” intimidates members of Congress. Of course, there is a pro-Israel lobby that has the support of most of the public in our country — and it is made up not only of Jews, but of many evangelical Christians and other Americans.
He not only opposed the Iraq war after first supporting it, but later voted against declaring Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups. He also argued on behalf of negotiations with them.
He seems to favor relying entirely on diplomatic measures to pressure Iran to stop its work on a nuclear bomb, despite the obvious failure to date of reliance on diplomacy alone.
Hagel opposed the successful surge in Iraq bravely instituted by George W. Bush.
Hagel’s nomination serves as a message to the mullahs that the Obama administration will not be tough against Iran if it proceeds with its development of a nuclear weapon. Iran has already noted its pleasure with the nomination.
Hagel’s position — as Democrats who supported the president such as Alan Dershowitz and Ed Koch have stated — undermines the position the administration purportedly supports, thus putting into a critical office a man opposed to the president’s announced policies.
Hagel voted as Senator against any sanctions to be applied against Iran

In 2008, the prescient Tom Gross made the following points about Hagel, when Obama was considering him for a post. What Gross wrote four years ago could be written now, without any changes:

However, of particular concern to supporters of Israel is that Obama, the Democratic Party candidate, is being accompanied by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel on his trip to Israel, one of only two senators Obama is traveling with (the other being Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island).

One pro-Israel observer said: “If Obama is getting advice from Hagel about Israel, then the American Jewish community has a lot to worry about. Of all the senators with whom Obama could have traveled with, Hagel’s record on Israel is one of the worst.

“The message is heard loud and clear. While Obama has chosen to visit Israel with one of the most anti-Israel senators, by contrast, on John McCain’s most recent trip to Israel, he chose to visit with Joseph Lieberman.”

The Democratic Party has itself previously (in March 2007) released to the press examples of Sen. Hagel’s abysmal record on Israel:

* In August 2006, Hagel was one of only 12 senators who refused to call Hizbullah a terrorist organization. * In December 2005, Hagel was one of only 27 who refused to sign a letter asking the Palestinian Authority to ban terrorist groups. * In June 2004, Hagel refused to sign a letter urging President Bush to highlight Iran’s nuclear program at the G-8 summit. * In November 2001, Hagel was one of only 11 senators who refused to sign a letter urging President Bush not to meet with the late Yasser Arafat until he ended violence against Israel. * In October 2000, Hagel was one of only four senators who refused to sign a Senate letter in support of Israel.

* And here’s what the anti-Israel group, CAIR, wrote in praise of Hagel: “Potential presidential candidates for 2008, like Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Joe Biden and Newt Gingrich, were falling all over themselves to express their support for Israel. The only exception to that rule was Senator Chuck Hagel” (Council on American-Islamic Relations, 8/28/06).

I mentioned in a previous dispatch:

When asked by Newsweek “Would you have Republicans in your cabinet?” Obama replied, “No decisions, but Dick Lugar embodies the best tradition in foreign policy. Chuck Hagel is a smart guy who has shows some courage, even though we disagree on domestic policy.”

 

Rather than deal with the vital questions raised by Hagel’s opponents — composed of both Republicans and Democrats — Hagel’s supporters have tried two tactics to undermine the ability of those who question the president’s choice to make their case known.

The first, as I said at the start, is to cry McCarthyism. That term was used by Eric Alterman in his weekly column in The Nation. Alterman praises Hagel as “well qualified,” as having learned the anti-war lessons of Vietnam as a volunteer GI in that conflict, and as a man who is “enormously respected by what remains of the old bipartisan foreign policy establishment.”

Of course, Alterman does not notice the irony of someone with his leftist views citing that establishment favorably. Nor does he stop and pause to note Hagel’s social conservative views on issues like abortion, gay rights, guns, and the like — the kind of weathervane issues that the Left would usually bring forth to try to kill the appointment of an individual with such positions.

Hagel, evidently, is being given a blank check simply because on foreign policy issues he takes positions akin to those of their comrades on the way-out, anti-interventionist left.

Hagel is praised for “personal courage” in deciding to turn against the Iraq war. Alterman then argues:

Hagel has been especially vocal in his support for negotiations rather than saber-rattling when it comes to Iran. No less conspicuously, he has refused to march in lockstep with the demands that Israel’s right-wing government has consistently made of Washington to support its program of illegal settlement expansion on the West Bank, and he has criticized its failure to offer the Palestinians a compelling reason to return to the bargaining table.

In other words, the very reasons for which the Left likes his positions should give us all alarm that he might be secretary of Defense. Note also the faulty belief that the Palestinians are not negotiating because of Israeli policy, when we all know that the reason they have turned down every Israeli proposal is because they will not recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state and will not give up the spurious “right of return.”

Finally, Alterman charges Hagel’s opponents with McCarthyism. He writes:

Hagel’s critics have been quick to unsheathe the McCarthyite tactics employed whenever opposition to any position of Israel’s right-wing government is at issue. The accusation is almost always “anti-Semitism,” but rarely has that charge proven as empty as in Hagel’s case. Leading the assault have been Pavlovian attack dogs like William Kristol and The Weekly Standard, Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post, ex–AIPAC flack Josh Block, the ADL’s Abe Foxman, Bret Stephens at The Wall Street Journal, and convicted criminal and former Reagan and Bush II official Elliott Abrams, now respectably ensconced at the Council on Foreign Relations.

No need on his part to deal with their arguments. Instead Alterman simply smears them, tying together people of diverse views.

Josh Block, a centrist Democrat, is equated with the Republican and conservative Elliott Abrams, whom he falsely calls a “convicted criminal.” How is that for smearing an opponent? Then Alterman attacks both “neocons and conservative professional Jews.”

What is the term “professional Jews”? What could it be, except an example of something that itself borders on anti-Semitism? I guess that Mr. Alterman, being a leftist and “peacenik,” is exempt from being a “professional Jew.” He himself is Jewish, and he always makes that quite clear when arguing that AIPAC and those who disagree with him do not represent real Jews like himself.

The Real Henry A. Wallace: The Truth About Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s “Unsung Hero.”

I did not mean to write again about Oliver Stone’s and Peter Kuznick’s Untold History of the United States, their Showtime documentary series and accompanying book.  Three things, however, have prompted me to once again address the series, and its continuing distortions and lies. 

First, in the January  10th issue of The New York Review of Books, the publisher of Stone and Kuznick’s book, Gallery Books, took out a full page ad, proclaiming the companion volume to the TV series an “Instant New York Times Bestseller,” although when I searched the paper’s list, I could not find it anywhere, even in their extended list of non-fiction bestsellers. The ad reproduces blurbs by a group of major U.S. historians- many of them leftists-but including some mainstream and well-known scholars. Lloyd Gardner of Rutgers University calls their book one that “many would consider impossible.” Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian (London) terms it a “counter narrative to the enormous tide of hogwash that dominates most public discussion of America.” Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post in her review says it is “grounded in indisputable fact.” Historian Doug Brinkley says that the two grapple “with the unsavory legacy of American militarism.” Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame calls it “brilliant, masterpiece!” And Pulitzer Prize winning historian Martin Sherwin, in a really over-the-top comment, calls it “the most important historical narrative of this century, a carefully researched and brilliantly rendered account.”  The century is rather young, and in fact it might be the only narrative yet to appear, but  anyone who reads it know that it is not well researched, and is nothing but a synthesis of long-standing leftist “revisionist” history.

 All of these writers and historians, in praising the Stone-Kuznick work in such glowing terms, reveal only their own total ignorance about the history of the Cold War. I doubt, in fact, if those who have given it such generous blurbs have actually even carefully read it. A clue as to the position of the authors is given by the first blurb, written by none other than Mikhail Gorbachev. The former Soviet premier writes that what is at stake “is whether the United States will choose to be the policeman of  ‘Pax Americana,’…or a partner with other nations….” It should come as no surprise that the U.S.S.R.’s last leader would praise a book and TV series that depicts the Soviet Union as being right in its foreign policy during World War II and in the Cold War. The others who have offered their unstinting praise have no such excuse.

 Second, C-Span has been airing After Words, their main book program, in which the Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin engages in an hour long conversation with both Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  Kazin, who once wrote one of the most devastating attacks on the work of Howard Zinn, treats Stone and Kuznick as major historians who have actually contributed something to understanding our past. Watch for yourself, and see the fawning and uncritical reception by Kazin to their work. Kazin is not a Cold War historian, and his inability to challenge the two reveals his own lack of familiarity with the major issues. He was undoubtedly chosen because he was acceptable to his former colleague, Kuznick, and because Kazin regards himself as a man of the Left.

 He correctly identifies Henry A. Wallace as the book’s and TV series main unsung hero, but pauses only to challenge a relatively unimportant point. Kazin argues that at the 1944 Democratic convention, Roosevelt did not really want Wallace on the ticket with him. But he never says anything to them about Wallace’s view of the Cold War, and in fact, seems to agree with them that he was a prophet before his time. It is indeed sad to see that a historian like Kazin melts in the presence of Oliver Stone, and lets his critical faculties entirely disappear when in the presence of the supposedly great director and his left-wing historian sycophant. 

On Saturday, Christopher Hayes of MSNBC’s weekend program, Up With Christopher Hayes,  had both Stone and Kuznick as guests. He too, and not surprisingly given that the network is the voice of the Left and that Hayes is on the staff of The Nation, lets them spend close to an hour telling audiences yet again how in this documentary they produce only facts, and tell the truth about the alternate world we might have had if only Henry A. Wallace had become president after F.D.R.’s death rather than Harry S. Truman.

 So let me begin by presenting the truly unknown Henry A. Wallace, in a way that somehow escapes the brilliance of Michael Kazin, Christopher Hayes, and all those sycophants who pretend to be giving Americans the real story. I start with pointing to the question raised at the end of the recent Whitaker Chambers symposium at Yale University by historian John L. Gaddis, the biographer of George F. Kennan and perhaps our nation’s outstanding Cold War historian. Towards the end of the panel he was on, Gaddis raises the following question: 

Gaddis started by noting that he wanted to raise a question that puzzled him, that of “the invisibility of Henry Agard Wallace.” On that he agrees with Stone and Kuznick that most Americans no longer remember the former Vice-President and Secretary of Commerce. But unlike Stone and Kuznick, Professor Gaddis notes that “there is Soviet documentation that Wallace was regularly reporting to the Kremlin in 1945 and 1946 while he was in the Truman administration,” and that later, when both Kennan in the State Department and Secretary of State George C. Marshall were considering a secret effort to approach the Soviets,” that was “blown wide open by Wallace when he was running for President on the Progressive Party ticket” in 1948. Gaddis then asked: “Who’s the real hero?” He continued to say that often Roosevelt gets “a bad rap” for “whatever reason” he had for dumping Wallace from the 1944 ticket and replacing him with Harry S. Truman. Instead, he noted, he sent Wallace “on an inspection trip to Siberia, where he confused Gulags with collective farms.” If you want to play the counterfactual game,” Gaddis said, “consider what might have taken place had Roosevelt not dumped Wallace and he became the President of the United States at the time all was breaking loose. What would have happened at that time?” ( Go to 58 minutes on the video to see the Gaddis comments)

 Professor Gaddis, who unlike those who praise Wallace as an unsung hero, knows the Cold War. He implies, correctly that had HAW become president, what would have happened is the reverse of what Stone and Kuznick think would have taken place. Wallace would have created an American foreign policy, run by Soviet agents he had installed in the White House- including Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, his former assistant at Commerce, the secret Communist and Soviet agent Harry Magdoff, (who wrote Wallace’s Madison Square Garden speech in 1946 that led Truman to fire him) -all of whom would have developed a policy meant to give Joseph Stalin precisely what he sought- control of  Eastern Europe and inroads into subversion of France, Italy and Great  Britain as well. The result would have been a deepening of Stalinist control of Europe, and a tough road that might well have made it impossible for the West to actually have won the Cold War and to have defeated Soviet expansionism.

 Moreover, as Gaddis suggests, new evidence has emerged that points to just how much Wallace was under the control of the Soviets, and how they were counting on him as the man in the United States best suited to serve their ends. In the Vassiliev papers, the KGB files that Alexander Vassiliev copied and brought from Moscow to London, an entry appears in the Vassiliev Notebooks dated February  10, 1945.  An NKGB agent,the Washington D.C. station chief, Anatoly Gorsky, reported to the NKGB head Lavrenti P. Beria, that he was enclosing a telegram from the intelligence agency’s station chief in Washington, D.C., held on Oct.24, 1945, about the station chief’s meeting with Henry  A. Wallace. (Go to the PDF of the Black Notebook, translated pdf)

 What the document reveals is that Wallace initiated a contact with a senior Soviet diplomat, who he more than likely knew was the resident KGB officer in the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. In his conversation, he explained that he supported a pro-Soviet policy, and was pushing for it in the United States government. For that task, he asked the Soviets for assistance. The context of Wallace’s comments reveal that he saw himself  as an ally of the Soviet Union and a collaborator with them in a common cause—not that of “a century of the Common Man” and an anti-imperialist, as Stone and Kuznick claim, but as a fervent believer in the Soviet Union who was asked for foreign intervention on their part in U.S. internal political fights. Here, from the Vassiliev papers, is the actual document:

  “To Comrade L.P. Beria”  “I am enclosing a telegram from the NKGB USSR station chief in Washington regarding his meeting with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wallace.” (Molotov’s decision: “Cde. Merkulov! This should be sent to Cde. Stalin without fail.  Molotov.  2.10.45.”  Vadim had been introduced to Wallace (the former Vice President) previously.  Wallace called him personally and invited him to breakfast at the Dept. of Commerce, which took place on 24.10.45. He was interested in what the reaction would be if the USA were to invite a group of Soviet scientists to become familiar with science in the USA. Truman wants Kapitsa very much  he is working on the atomic project.  Wallace was interested in the Soviet reaction to the discussion taking place in the USA regarding the safeguarding of the secret of atomic bomb production.

 “Safeguarding the tech. information pertaining to that question in the USA leads, in Wallace’s opinion, not only to a worsening of already highly strained Soviet-Amer. relations, but also gives the rest of the world the impression that the USA is the most potentially aggressive state on earth.

Wallace said that he has been trying within the government to get control over the use of atomic energy for military purposes handed over to the UN Security Council.  However, his attempts have so far been unsuccessful. Wallace described Johnson’s bill pertaining to this question, which was put before Congress, as a reactionary attempt by the War Department that was incited by the representatives of major industrial capital: ‘DuPont’, ‘General Electric’, ‘Union Carbide’, and ‘Carbon Corporation’.  Vadim asked how one could explain Truman’s diametrically opposite statements on this question.  

“Wallace faltered somewhat, before saying that Truman was a minor politico who had taken up his current post by chance.  He frequently has ‘good’ intentions but yields too easily to the influence of those around him.  Wallace explained that there were two groups currently fighting for Truman’s ‘soul’ (his expression word for word) a smaller one, in which he included himself, and a more powerful and influential one, of which he named only Hannegan (Postmaster General and Chairman of the Democratic Party), Tom Clark (Attorney General), Byrnes (Sec. of State), and Anderson (Sec. of Agriculture).  The smaller group believes that there are only two superpowers in the world: the USSR and the USA; the well-being and fate of all mankind is dependent on good relations between them.  The second group is very anti-Soviet (Wallace singled out Byrnes in particular) and sets up an opposing idea of the dominant Anglo-Saxon bloc (chiefly comprising the USA and England) which is decidedly hostile to the Slavic world that is ‘under Russia’s heel’.  With regard to this, Wallace blurted out: ‘You (i.e., the USSR) could help this smaller group significantly, and we have no doubt of your desire to do so’.  Wallace declined to specify what he meant by this statement, and I felt it would be awkward to press him.”

Then Wallace, of his own initiative, touched upon Anglo-American econ. talks.  “At the end of the conversation, Wallace mentioned that congressmen who had returned from trips to the USSR and around Western Europe were spreading a lot of anti-Soviet lies here.”

 In their book The Haunted Wood, Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev discuss the same document.  They call this meeting “one of the most remarkable and unexpected meetings of the period.”  Noting that Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov found it so important that he noted it had to be sent to Stalin, they write:

 That Wallace had chosen the Soviet intelligence chief in Washington as his conduit to the USSR leadership testified to the daring (and recklessness) of the man whom FDR had removed from the Democratic ticket in 1944 in favor of the more conservative Truman. Wallace’s proposal, considering the Truman Administration’s cooler relations with the USSR in past months, was also startling.  

They note the importance of Wallace’s suggestion to Gorsky that technical data about the a-bomb should not be kept in U.S. hands, a suggestion, they correctly write, that was “extraordinarily indiscreet.”  I would add that Wallace’s suggestion that he opposed Senator Edwin Johnson’s bill to keep control of the bomb in U.S. hands rather than transfer it to the U.N. Security Council, which he called a “reactionary attempt” created by “representatives of big industrial capital,” is precisely the argument used today to explain opposition to Wallace by Stone and Kuznick, who actually present old Soviet and communist arguments as their own contemporary original analysis. They also concur with Wallace’s statement to Gorsky that Harry S. Truman was a man who fell under “the influence of people around him,” a group which Stone and Kuznick keep repeating was made up of reactionary Southerners like James F. Byrnes who represented big corporate industry.

 Most important is that Weinstein writes that Wallace’s call for Soviet support on behalf of those who shared his views “reached beyond the fragile boundaries of discretion,” particularly because Wallace asked the Soviet to “help this smaller group considerably,” referring to himself and his supporters.

 Wallace, in other words, was a complete dupe of the American Communists, a group which as I showed in an earlier column, convinced him to run for president on the so-called Progressive Party ticket in 1948. Further evidence for Wallace’s myopia comes from the pen of my colleague and co-conspirator in the history of American communism and Soviet espionage, John Earl Haynes.  His material appears in Dubious Alliance: The Making of Minnesota’s DFL Party, and Red Scare: American Communism and Anti-Communism in the Cold War Era.

 Haynes writes:

 An incident I discuss took place in October 1946. Hubert Humphrey up to that point had greatly admired Wallace and at the 1944 national Democratic convention had led the Minnesota delegation in a demonstration for retaining Wallace as Roosevelt’s vice-president and, to the great irritation of the more regular Democrats in the MN delegation, had refused to shift to Truman even after Truman’s victory was clear.  After FDR’s death, he wrote an emotional letter to Wallace regretting that Wallace was not in a position to assume the presidency.   In September 1946 Truman filed Wallace for his criticism of Truman’s developing Cold War policies and in October Wallace made a nation-wide speaking tour, including an appearance in Minneapolis.  At the airport then Mayor Humphrey officially welcomed Wallace and sought a meeting with him to discuss the political situation in Minnesota.  That night Wallace met with Humphrey and a few of Humphrey’s close political aides.  After Humphrey explained his increasing difficult relations with secret Communists operating in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, Wallace told Humphrey that he personally knew of only one Communist active in liberal politics, Lee Pressman of the CIO.  Humphrey was taken aback by this because Wallace had ridden from the airport with a delegation of Minnesota Wallace supporters, including several well-known Communists (turning down Humphrey’s offer to escort Wallace to his hotel).   Worse, however, Wallace then suggested that Humphrey privately approach Soviet officials and ask that they order their Minnesota subordinates to behave with greater discretion.  Appalled by Wallace’s combination of naiveté and willingness to accept Soviet involvement in domestic American politics, Humphrey severed his ties with the man he once fervently hoped would be president of the United States.

 One other incident confirms Wallace’s complete naiveté about the Communist control of his own movement in 1948. His good friend, C.B. “Beanie” Baldwin, whom he knew from New Deal days, became his top advisor and campaign manager. Baldwin, unbeknownst to Wallace, was a secret Communist Party member.  A Congressman who was a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities wrote Wallace to inform him that he had information that the leaders of the Pennsylvania branch of the Progressive Party were both members of the C.P.U.S.A.  Wallace responded that he asked Beanie Baldwin about this, and Baldwin told him it was not true, that the men were independent progressives. Baldwin, who had appointed these two Communists to the leadership of the movement in Philadelphia, lied to Wallace.

 Had Henry A. Wallace become President in 1948, and had FDR let him stay on the ticket,  Wallace would have proceeded to implement policies favorable to Stalin in Europe. There would have been no Marshall Plan, no N.A.T.O.,  and U.S. policy would have been to formally support the Soviet take-over of Eastern Europe, including approval of the Czech coup that put the Communists in power after the killing of Jan Masaryk. As John L. Gaddis suggested, the future of the world would have been very different, since there would have been no Western opposition to Stalin’s expansion as he moved politically to create Communist regimes throughout Europe.

 In repeating a mythical history of the Cold War from the Soviet perspective, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick continually misinform the American public about the real history of the Cold War. That the American media have all had them on virtually every major television and radio talk show, without any challenge to the analysis they offer, is more than a major disgrace. It makes the talk show hosts who book them complicit in the spreading of lies about our own past, and hence does a great disserve to the public. It is bad enough that CBS has run their TV series on Showtime. To then allow them to spread their lies unopposed compounds the disgrace. We have equal time provisions usually honored for candidates. Where is the television or talk show host or news program brave enough to invite on anyone who can publicly challenge the portrait of the Cold War painted by Stone and Kuznick? Even conservative hosts like Joe Scarborough and Mike Huckabee have allowed themselves to give their programs over to these dishonest and ill- informed would-be historians.

 I have offered to appear with them in a debate, alongside someone like Prof. Wilson Miscamble of Notre Dame University, author of a serious book on the Cold War that proves how bad the history of Stone and Kuznick is, and another book on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan. To date, Stone and Kuznick have not replied to the challenge I laid out.  I think I know why. Both of them would not be able to handle real evidence and argument  that challenges many of the assertions and so-called “indisputable facts” they present. They are moral and mental cowards, willing only to appear on their own before hosts who do not know history, and before audiences of confirmed leftists who cheer them on.

 It is time Showtime, CBS and the programs that regularly book them on the air hear\from those of us who are disgusted with their propaganda barrage, and demand that others who hold a different perspective have the chance to counter their work.

 

 

 

 

 

The Meaning of Pat Buchanan’s Surpising Endorsement of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense

When Left and Right come together, it usually is quite revealing. The issue that binds them this time is the campaign to have the president continue the fight for Chuck Hagel to get the nomination as secretary of Defense.

First, a group of self-proclaimed foreign policy “realists”, including the usual suspects, have endorsed Hagel’s nomination. The group is best summarized by one of Hagel’s major supporters among the pundit class – Robert Wright of The Atlantic:

Hagel has now drawn support from liberals all across the foreign policy spectrum, from well left to center if not right of center: John Judis of The New Republic, Josh Marshall of TPM, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, Joe Klein of Time, Tom Friedman of the New York Times, Jim Fallows of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic (who, like Friedman, makes a pro-Israel argument for Hagel), etc. Hagel has also been embraced by many on the non-neocon right, as evinced not only by the politicos mentioned above, but by pundits ranging from paleocons to a bunch of libertarians. A few progressives are skeptical of Hagel because of his past conservative positions on issues with little bearing on foreign policy, but by and large this fight is between some neocons (plus a few reliable supporters) and everybody else.

Most importantly, the Washington Post ran a letter endorsing Hagel by the deans of the “realist” school: James L. Jones, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and Frank Carlucci. Hagel, they wrote:

 … is a rare example of a public servant willing to rise above partisan politics to advance the interests of the United States and its friends and allies.

You get the thrust: Hagel has widespread popular support among the foreign policy and media establishment. Therefore, the only ones contesting him are from the “Israel lobby”, led by the hated neocons, who are fighting a last ditch battle to show their power against those who truly represent America’s national interest.

On the Left, the Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan — in his usual hysterical tone — leads the charge against the neocon menace:

Because [William Kristol] operates on the premise that policy toward Greater Israel is not something that a president should have any serious control over. Policy in that respect is set in Congress aided and abetted by AIPAC and batshit crazy Christianist Zionists. Like the NRA, this lethal lobby will destroy any politician it can who stands in its way. It will also try to destroy the careers and reputations of any who criticize it. Nothing exemplifies this more clearly than the chilling, and repulsive headline in Kristol’s own magazine when launching this character assassination

One has come to expect this kind of talk; it avoids substance, and its authors engage in the very smear they accuse their opponents of carrying out.

The latest endorsement of Hagel should give the aforementioned some pause. It comes from none other than the paleo-conservative, isolationist, and anti-Israel zealot whose anti-Semitism is second to none, Pat Buchanan. In his column, Buchanan echoes all of the now familiar “realist” themes, but unlike the others — who try to distance Hagel from being crudely anti-Israel (indeed, they back him by making the argument his appointment would be better for Israel) — Buchanan wants Hagel precisely because he sees him as one who would stand firm against the Jewish nation.

Buchanan, like Walt and Mearsheimer, believes in the undue power of the insidious Israeli lobby, of which he says: “Its existence is the subject of books and countless articles”, and it always gets bills it supports passed — they are “whistled through” Congress whenever one comes up.

Hagel is opposed, Buchanan writes, because he does not “treat these [AIPAC] sacred texts with sufficient reverence,” and because Hagel “puts U.S. national interests first,” especially when “those interests clash with the policies of the Israeli government.”

One must understand, when reading these words, that Buchanan always believes that whatever Israel supports should be opposed by the United States.

He singles out, just as the Left does, the new settlement construction, which he describes inaccurately as “bisecting the West Bank”, and a move that will “kill any chance for a Palestinian state.” Evidently, Mr. Buchanan does not see any of the self-defeating rejectionist policies of both Fatah and Hamas as having anything to do with the failure of the Palestinians to get a state of their own.

Next, Buchanan argues in favor of talking with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, as if such talks have ever lead anywhere or would in the future. He uses the analogy of Harry Truman talking to Stalin. What he leaves out, circa Stone and Kuznick, is that Truman learned from recalcitrant Soviet behavior of the futility of such talks, and he proceeded to take a hard line in opposition to the growth of the Soviet empire.

In this case, what Buchanan and company favor is bending to Iran’s will and essentially allowing a nuclear Iran to develop. (After all, as others have argued, the mullahs need a bomb to protect themselves from Israeli aggression!)

Next, Buchanan uses the rather foolish argument — quoting Robert Gates — that our country would be foolish “to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East.” True enough.

Who, however, is arguing for that?

The case for being tough against Iran is not based on any consideration of an armed invasion of that country, only on taking tough measures — including the possibility of a strike against its nuclear facilities — should that become necessary.

Buchanan then asks how Hagel could be an anti-Semite, since “so many Jewish columnists and writers” are supporting his candidacy. I happen to think that those who are throwing out the canard that Hagel is anti-Semitic are wrong. But I believe the policies he favors would indeed be harmful to our country’s national interest. I would reverse Buchanan’s question, however. Why is a known anti-Semite like Buchanan endorsing Hagel? Does that tell us anything? What views which he thinks Hagel holds makes Buchanan see him in such a favorable light? Is not this something we should be concerned about?

So Buchanan concludes with the following analysis:

Neocon hostility to Hagel is rooted in a fear that in Obama’s inner councils his voice would be raised in favor of negotiating with Iran and against a preventive war or pre-emptive strike. But if Obama permits these assaults to persuade him not to nominate Hagel, he will only be postponing a defining battle of his presidency, not avoiding it.

President Obama, however, has told supporters like Alan Dershowitz and Ed Koch that he means what he says that he will do whatever is necessary to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, and that nothing is off the table to stop them. That is why they support the President. As Bibi Netanyahu has said as well, he believes Obama when he says that his policy is one meant to prevent Iran from getting a bomb. If that is the President’s policy, then what Hagel and Buchanan stand for is in fact against his own policy, as Obama has explained it.

Buchanan wants a Hagel appointment because he believes it will put a monkey-wrench in any tough policy option, should it become necessary. As he puts it, the “war party” of the neo-cons favors a “U.S. war on Iran in 2013.” To Buchanan and the isolationists- and evidently some of the “realists” as well- that is the issue—not Iran’s bellicose policy and the mullah’s war on their own people. So when he argues that the President should not “appease these [neo-con] wolves” he is really saying Iran should not be stopped. That is not surprising, since in his eyes, only Israel is the Middle Eastern nation that the U.S. should oppose.