If you were a member of the liberal media who wanted to discredit conservative thought in America, how would you do it? Here's an idea: Search for the most incompetent commentator in America, a guy who still hasn't figured out the Iraq War was a classic example of big-government bungling. Make sure this guy's not a self-made man; far better to hire someone who got his start in life thanks to a famous father. Better yet, make sure the father in question is one of the primary creators of a thoroughly wacky system of thought that has its roots in the fevered rantings of a Russian revolutionary.
So far, so good. And for a finishing touch, once you find this nutcase, you then label him your "conservative" columnist.
That's what the New York Times did the other day with the announcement that William Kristol will become a weekly columnist on the opinion page. Editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal tried to sugarcoat the announcement by stating that Kristol is "serious, respected conservative intellectual" in the words of Times.
Nonsense. Kristol is not serious, he's not respected and above all he's certainly not conservative.
Kristol is in fact a neoconservative and neoconservatism is, as conservative columnist George F. Will so aptly put it, "a spectacularly misnamed radicalism."
The radicalism of the neocons is rooted in the thought of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary whose theory of worldwide liberation was passed down to the lesser neocons by Kristol's father, New York intellectual Irving Kristol. (If you are not aware of this connection, please Google "Kristol and Trotsky" before you go any further).
Far from providing balance to the Times' editorial policy, Kristol fits squarely within it. The fight between the neocons and the liberals has always been an insiders' game between Manhattanites. Long before Kristol came along, the Times published the work of a neocon who had an even bigger role in leading us into the Iraq War than Kristol and his cohorts at the Weekly Standard.
That would be Judy Miller. The role of Miller in relation to the Iraq War is roughly equivalent to the role of William Randolph Hearst in relation to the Spanish-American War. Remember the Maine? If you do, then you realize that the hyping of that incident prior to the 1898 war was the equivalent of the hyping of so-called "weapons of mass destruction" prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
And the New York Times was right in the middle of it. It was reporter Miller who was the single most effective voice in hyping the WMD threat. Miller's work, subsequently retracted by the Times, was essential to the war effort in several ways.
For one, it made the neoconservative spin on Iraq acceptable to liberals. If even the New York Times accepted the theory that Saddam Hussein was a menace to the United States, then Democratic politicians had the go-ahead to vote for the war.
But the effect on conservatives was even more important. Saddam was a right-winger and we conservatives are right-wingers. Saddam was therefore a more likely ally than enemy. Saddam, for all his faults, was the leading opponent of Islamic fundamentalism in the Mideast and had in fact killed hundreds of thousands of Iranian fundamentalists in the 1980s, when he was a U.S. ally.
American conservatives therefore needed to be convinced that Saddam was a threat not just to his neighbors but to to the United States. Central to this campaign was the reporting of Miller, who was very close to Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and the rest of the now-discredited neocons who led the gullible George W. Bush into this war.
One old-fashioned conservative, the late Jude Wanniski of Morristown, wrote the following about Miller's reporting shortly after the war began:
"To any serious reader of her coverage in Iraq it has been plain for many, many moons that she is joined at the hip to the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute who cooked up the war, particularly Richard Perle and Laurie Mylroie."
Who's Laurie Mylroie? Here the plot thickens. Mylroie was the author of the conspiracy theory that helped convince Americans that Saddam was linked to the 9/11 attacks. He wasn't, of course, but the Weekly Standard did a tag-team with Vice-President Cheney to sell the notion that he was.
That notion was based on the writings of Mylroie, who was a fellow at the aforementioned American Enterprise Institute, the nutty neocon think tank that thought up this war. Like so many neocons, Mylroie has her roots in the left. She was an advisor to Bill Clinton on Iraq.
After the 1993 World Trade Center attack, Mylroie became the leading proponent of a conspiracy theory that pinned the blame for that attack on Saddam. She also tried to pin the 2001 WTC attack on Saddam and made a case that Al Qaeda was, as she put it, "a front for Iraqi intelligence."
In the run-up to the war, Mylroie's theories were trumpeted by Kristol's Weekly Standard. And Miller was not merely "joined at the hip" with Mylroie. She was joined at the publisher's office. In 1990, the two co-authored a book on Iraq that was published by the Times.
So the idea that Kristol's hiring by the Times represents some sort of break with tradition is pure nonsense. His hiring represents a continuation of a tradition that has been prominent at the paper since before the Iraq invasion. It wasn't just Miller. Neocon columnist William Safire was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the invasion. Meanwhile the supposedly "liberal" Thomas Friedman voiced neocon hopes for the region perfectly in a column two months before the invasion:
"It is not unreasonable to believe that if the U.S. removed Saddam and helped Iraqis build not an overnight democracy but a more accountable, progressive and democratizing regime, it would have a positive, transforming effect on the entire Arab world - a region desperately in need of a progressive model that works," he wrote.
What is the difference between that "liberal" view of Friedman's and the neocon rantings of Kristol?
The only difference I can think of is that Friedman was smart enough to recognize that the Bush administration was bungling the exercise. Kristol, meanwhile, was making idiotic comments like:
"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's been almost no evidence of that at all . Iraq's always been very secular."
As a real conservative commentator, one of the few non-neocons at a major newspaper, I for one don't mind in the least if the Times wants to hire another big-government left-winger for its opinion page. But don't call a radical a conservative.
Poster Comment:
For education and discussion (and bloody neocon bludgeoning) purposes only.