Is there any group in all of human history with a greater talent for their own victimization than American neocons? On the cover of The New Republic, Jeffrey Goldberg is worried that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer are trying to intimidate American Jews into silence. The irony actually hurts my tummy here, as Marty Peretz's entire three-decade tenure in running TNR (with his wife's fortune, of course) has been one long, largely successful effort to intimidate people, particularly American Jews, from disagreeing with their hawkish views on Israel. Most American Jews do disagree, according to polls by the American Jewish Committee, cited in my article here. But few are wiling to risk the opprobrium and personal insults that inevitably accompany merely giving voice to these views. Meanwhile, Roger Cohen's appearance on the Times op-ed page makes me nostalgic for the good old days of Times Select, when most people had no access to this nonsense. Cohen is sad, like his colleague on the page, that "neocons" are blamed for all their destructive accomplishments in Iraq, America, and elsewhere. Not everyone who supported this catastrophic war is a neocon, of course, or even a Bush supporter, but all of them are people who thought this war was worth empowering Bush and the neocons to carry out their nefarious plans. The fact that it was these malignant, incompetent ideologues who were going to be running this war was reason enough for sensible people to oppose it.
Read the whole Altercation here.