Unpatriotic Conservatives: A war against America

"The Bush administration should not only ignore the advice of such characters as Mr. Ledeen and Mr. Podhoretz but consider placing them under surveillance as possible agents of a foreign power."

-- samuel francis, in chronicles, december 2002

Who was the first paleo to blame Israel for 9/11? It's a close call, but Robert Novak seems to have won the race. His column of September 13, 2001, written the very day after the terrorist attack, charged that "the hatred toward the United States today by the terrorists is an extension of [their] hatred of Israel." Novak lamented that, because of terror, "the United States and Israel are brought ever closer in a way that cannot improve long-term U.S. policy objectives."

The next day, Scott McConnell quoted Malcolm X on Justin Raimondo's website: "The chickens have come home to roost." Raimondo himself soon began work on a book that alleged that 9/11 was in the broadest sense an Israeli plot.

"Whose war is this?" Buchanan demanded to know on September 26, 2001: "Powell's war -- or Perle's?" "Judging from President Bush's State of the Union message," Sobran lamented on January 31, 2002, "what began as the War on Terrorism will now be broadened to become a War to Crush Israel's Enemies."

"In private conversation with Hagel and many other members of Congress," Robert Novak wrote on December 26, 2002, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon "leaves no doubt that the greatest U.S. assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime. That view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason U.S. forces today are assembling for war."

The accusations culminated in a March 2003 article by Buchanan in The American Conservative that fixed responsibility for the entire Iraq war on a "cabal" of neoconservative office-holders and writers: "We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity."

Who were these war-mongering "neoconservatives"? At a June 2002 conference sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review, the leading Holocaust-denial group, Joe Sobran defined "neoconservatism" as "kosher conservatism." And in his March cover story, Buchanan seasoned Sobran's definition with his own flavorful malice. "Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud."