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This Week on the
Right
A Meeting of Minds and Policy
By
Tom Barry
(Excerpted from an analysis published by
Inter Press Service on February 7. See Right Web’s special report The Foreign Policy Disapora -- From Jerusalem to Washington (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2005/0502sharansky.php)
for a full treatment of the Bush/Sharansky relationship.
There is little doubt that George W.
Bush and Natan Sharansky, a Soviet émigré who is a top political official in Israel,
share a similar perspective about international
affairs, especially in the Middle East.
Following his inaugural address, the U.S. president said
that Sharansky's book ”The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome
Tyranny and Terror”, published last September, confirmed what he already
believed. He added that the Israeli author's thinking was ”part of my
presidential DNA.”
Sharansky and Bush appear to enjoy a mutual admiration
society. Sharansky, who is Israel's Minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora
Affairs, praised Bush's June 24, 2002 speech on his new Middle East policy --
which aligned Washington with the Likud party's agenda -- as one of ”the two
greatest speeches of my lifetime”, the other being former U.S. president Ronald
Reagan's speech casting the Soviet Union as an ”evil empire.”
After perusing galleys of Sharansky's book, President Bush
invited the Israeli minister for a personal meeting at the White House on
November 11, 2004. The November session between Sharansky and the president was
not the first time that Bush had met Sharansky. On an official visit to Israel
in 1998, Bush, then governor of Texas, met with then Foreign Minister Ariel
Sharon, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Industry Minister Sharansky.
According to Bush, who had dinner with Netanyahu and was personally escorted on
a helicopter tour of the occupied territories by Sharon, ”Israel has got a
tremendous amount of talent -- smart folks -- many of whom have immigrated from
Russia.” Sharanksy, one of those immigrants, gave Bush an overview of the
existing U.S.-Israeli business relationships and new opportunities, especially
in the defense industry.
In Israel and across the Middle East, Sharansky is widely
regarded as a right-wing Zionist and hawk, who positions himself to the right
of Ariel Sharon.
The coherence between the Likud party's agenda and that of
the Bush administration was clearly on display at the December 2004 ”Herzliya
Conference on National Strength and Security in Israel,” which featured
Sharansky and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Sharansky said that President Bush shared his own belief
that there could be no peace in the Middle East or resolution of the
Palestinian issue until the Arab world adopted economic and political reforms
in line with those promoted by the Bush administration and the Likud party.
The United States and Israel have much in common, according
to Sharansky. One of the links, he said in a speech at a forum sponsored by the
American Enterprise Institute, which was the basis for an article in
Commentary, the journal of the American Jewish Committee, is the spreading
scourge of anti-Semitism. ”Anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and
anti-Americanism in Europe are in fact linked,” argues Sharansky, because ”both
bear an uncanny resemblance to anti-Semitism.”
In his essay titled ”On Hating Jews,” Sharansky writes:
”America embodies a different-a nonconforming-idea of the good, and refuses to
abandon its moral clarity about the objective worth of that idea.” According to
Sharansky, the Jews have long held that they were chosen to play a special role
in history, to be what their prophets called ”a light unto nations” -- not
unlike the United States, a nation that has long regarded itself as entrusted
with a mission to be what John Winthrop in the 17th century called ”a city on a
hill” and Ronald Reagan in the 20th century parsed as a ”shining city on a hill.”
*Tom Barry is policy director of the International
Relations Center (IRC), online at http://www.irc-online.org.
He directs the IRC's Right Web program.
Featured
Profiles
*Neocon Gladiator: Elliott Abrams embodies neoconservatism. Perhaps more
than any other neoconservative, Abrams has integrated the various influences
that have shaped today’s neoconservative agenda.
Right Web Profile: Elliott Abrams: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/abrams/abrams.php
*A Perfect Fit: Although not part of the new right's militarist and
neoconservative camps, Zoellick's personal arrogance, his unilateralism, and
his loyalty to Bush and the Republican Party's new radical elite make him a
perfect fit for Bush's new foreign policy team.
Right Web Profile: Robert Zoellick: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/zoellick/zoellick.php
*Follower, Not a Leader. Rice
is expected to realign the State Department so that it reflects the directions
set by the administration’s foreign policy team based at the Pentagon and the
vice-president’s office.
Right Web Profile: Condoleezza Rice: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/rice/rice.php
*Author, Activist, and
Gov’t Minister: In Case for Freedom,
Natan Sharansky describes U.S. policy as a continuum involving many of his
closest friends and collaborators in the United States, including Abrams,
Perle, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, outgoing Undersecretary of Defense for
Policy Douglas Feith, and Cheney's chief of staff "Scooter"
Libby. "If you check their background, most of them were connected
either to Senator Jackson or to the Reagan administration, or both," wrote
Sharansky.
Right Web Profile: Natan Sharansky: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/sharansky/sharansky.php
Featured
Analysis
Natan Sharansky and
George W. Bush:
The Foreign Policy Diaspora—From Jerusalem to Washington
As Minister of Jerusalem and
Diaspora Affairs, Natan Sharanksy advocates the “in-gathering of Jews” in
Israel. In a letter published by the Israel Citizens Information Council, a
project of his ministry, Sharansky wrote: “In Israel there is no such
thing as an ‘ordinary citizen.’ This country consists largely of immigrants,
but immigrants only in the sense that they were born someplace else, just to
return home, to Israel, later. The community we have created -- a diverse,
vibrant and growing democracy -- is best represented by its citizens.”
Sharansky describes himself as “the representative of the government and
people of Israel to the Jewish world.”
Right Web Analysis: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2005/0502sharansky.php
Neocons and Liberals Together, Again
The neoconservative Project
for the New American Century (PNAC) has signaled its intention to continue
shaping the government’s national security strategy with a new public letter
stating that the “U.S. military is too small for the responsibilities we are
asking it to assume.” Their January 28th letter advocates that House and
Senate leaders take the necessary steps “to increase substantially the size of
the active duty Army and Marine Corps.”
Joining the neocons in the
letter to congressional leaders were a group of prominent liberals giving
credence to PNAC’s claim that the “call to act” to increase the total number of
U.S. ground forces counts on bipartisan support. To the delight of the
neocons at PNAC and AEI, these liberal hawks share their vision of a world
order based on U.S. military supremacy and America’s presumed moral
superiority.
Right Web Analysis: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2005/0502ally.php
Letters
and Comments
(Editors Note: We
encourage feedback and comments, which can be sent for publication through our
feedback page, at: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/form_feedback.html.
Thank you.)
Re: Neocons and Liberals
Together, Again
I would suggest that a very
important element explaining why the formerly "liberal" neocons came
to be what they are is their sympathy for Israel and how that nation became
anathema to progressives because of its persecution of the Palestinians.
Related was the enmity of the Soviet Union again partially engendered by the
antagonism of that country towards Israel and the emigration of many of its
Jewish citizens.
- Morton Brussel (brussel@uiuc.edu)
Re:
Neocons and Liberals Together Again
Great article on PNAC's most
recent letter to Congress. However, I take issue with your claims that somehow
Trotskyism played a roll in the formation of this rightwing ideology. It is
simply dishonest; in fact, the original claims made to this effect were made by
*conservatives* whose ideological positions did not line up with the so-called
"neo-cons."
I would respect this website
tremendously if it offered retractions of this claim. A great place to start in
unraveling the lies that the neocons were "Trotskyists" can be found
in this article, which states: "The historical roots of neoconservatism: a
reply to a slanderous attack on Trotskyism," at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/shac-m23.shtml
- Michael de Socio desocimr@yahoo.com
(Editor’s Reply: No retraction.
Most neoconservative forerunners such as James Burnham and Irving Kristol,
among many others, became involved in politics as socialists who were
anti-Stalinists, anti-totalitarians, and members of Troskyite student
organizations and front organizations. They openly acknowledge this. And this
Trotskyite tradition continues in the affiliation of many neocons with
organizations such as Social Democrats/USA. It’s true that the traditional
conservatives, mainly the paleoconservatives, frequently point to the
Trotskyite and later liberal origins of today’s neocons, but these charges are
well-founded and result from having experienced the takeover of the
conservative movement by those whose political origins found in left-center
organizations and publications.)
Re: Robert Zoellick
and Condoleezza Rice
What everyone else should know is that Rice is not the strong personality the
Republicans like to present her as being. She's strongly emotionally
dependent on Bush as a father/brother/husband substitute. I read her
early biography closely--an only child who grew up under intense family
pressure, especially the hand of a somewhat narcissistic mother, groomed for
black greatness, denied a normal childhood and the kind of emotional nurture a
girl needs to succeed in love as an adult. The Bushes have been grooming
her (emotionally) for years, filling a void. Her religiously justified
neurotic sense of duty, to them as well as to her country, has impaired her
psychological autonomy.
I have considerable background in psychology. This is my interpretation
of the facts as presented by Antonia Felix. I refer you to the Sunday
(London) Times article, from 11/21/040:
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1367314,00.html
- Sharon Kass <KassSRI@aol.com>
