pp. 445-449
The word cabal is
derived from the Hebrew word Kabbalah, meaning “received doctrine.” Modern usage of cabal denotes a secretive group with mystical power and
often insidious influence. For the past decade, in U.S.foreign policy the word
has been associated specifically with neoconservatism and in particular with a
narrow group of pro-Israeli neoconservatives with occupations in government,
think tanks, academia, and the news media.
A true cabal is opaque and mysterious, not transparent. Yet Stephen Sniegoski
has aptly and refreshingly titled his latest book The
Transparent Cabal (Norfolk, Va.:Enigma Editions, 2008).
The individuals who most convincingly articulated a
need for war in Iraq and who strategized a U.S. mission to replace the Iraqi and
other governments in the Middle East at gunpoint did not keep their vision
veiled.Instead, they loudly trumpeted, persistently drummed, and publicly
paraded it in the offices, conferences, and reading rooms of the American
political elite for many years.
Sniegoski relies on publicly accessible material to
introduce and support his thesis, which is that a close relationship exists
between U.S. neoconservatives and the Israeli Likudnik right and that
neoconservatives view U.S. foreign-policy interests through the lens of Israeli
interests as perceived by the right-wing parties influential in Israel’s own
democracy (pp. 3–7).
The idea that American neoconservatives have conflated U.S. security
interests in the Middle East with the international-security perspective of
ardent right-wingers in Israel has generated inflammatory and angry reactions
from pro-Israel quarters in Washington. It is academically and politically a
dangerous contemplation, as Sniegoski recognizes and as analysts of recent U.S.
foreign policy in the Middle East know.
A brief and heavily footnoted assessment entitled “The
Israel Lobby,” by respected realists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (London Review of Books, March 23, 2006), not only was initially denied a U.S.
publisher in 2006, but also gave rise to a sustained and somewhat hysterical
smear campaign against both authors, replete with public accusations of
anti-Semitism and calls for their removal from both academia and public life.
Far from a polemic, “The Israel Lobby” is a benign and politically dry review
of the actions and impact of the various organizations that actively promote
Israel’s interests in Washington, including the Likud-leaning American-Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents ofMajor Jewish
Organizations.
Mearsheimer and Walt’s report on the power that American advocates for
Israel exert in shaping policy and increasing financial, military, and moral
support for Israel reads much like any of the expository speeches given at the
annual AIPAC policy conference held each spring in Washington. The difference,
of course, is one of perspective.
Rather than self-congratulatory and self-promoting, Sniegoski’s perspective,
like that of other critics of modern Israel-centric influence in U.S.
foreign-policy making, leans to U.S. constitutionalism and traditional ideas of
U.S. democracy. The Transparent Cabal is not a direct inquiry into the controversial role of
the “Israel Lobby.” Instead, Sniegoski specifically examines the rationale for
the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq; the sustaining philosophies of American
neoconservatives; their role in “selling” the war to the American people,
Congress, and the administration; and the degree of linkage between the
neoconservatives themselves and the Likud Party and political Zionism.
To
carry out this examination, Sniegoski takes the reader on an eye-opening
excursion into the history of neoconservatism in U.S. politics, exploring the
evolution of security philosophy in Israel during the twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries.
In tracking the political and academic evolution of neoconservatism, the
author revisits the plethora of public statements, advocacy letters, and
campaigns, as well as the numerous articles and books written by key U.S.
neoconservatives, including Irving and William Kristol, Norman and John
Podhoretz, Michael Ledeen, David Frum, and Richard Perle.
More significant, and perhaps for the first time in a mainstream U.S.
research report, Sniegoski also tracks what was going on contemporaneously in
Israeli politics and security strategy. This aspect of The
Transparent Cabal is the most fascinating and
represents the author’s most significant contribution to the history of U.S.
policy in the Middle East.
With a degree of detail not found elsewhere, Sniegoski
reviews the infamous 1996 “Clean Break” document written by prominent American
neoconservative Jews for Israeli politician and present-day Israeli prime
minister Bibi Netanyahu. He also explains how the disruption and destruction of
Arab states, scattering them into sectarian and ethnic “statelets,” can be
seen—and has been seen for decades by Likud and other right-wing Zionist parties
in Israel—as good for Israel’s security (pp. 45–56).
This unemotional, factbased, and heavily footnoted
analysis is particularly useful for students of foreign policy because it places
the well-known U.S. neoconservative language of Middle
East strategy and objectives in relief against equally
well-publicized but far less familiar Likud language regarding Israeli security.
Beyond the contextual comparison, The
Transparent Cabal closely tracks the political and rhetorical history of
the George W. Bush administration’s 2002–2003 promotion of the need to invade
Iraq. Sniegoski systematically explains the neoconservative push for regime
change that had been voiced and promoted since the early 1980s, throughout the
Iraq-Iran War.
Inasmuch as the United States overtly backed Saddam
Hussein during this conflict, an effort to weaken Iraq was not national policy;
as Henry Kissinger infamously observed, “It’s a pity they both can’t lose.”
At that time, Washington viewed secular Iraq under
Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship as a bastion against radical anti-American Shi’ism
fermenting in Iran. Israel took Iran’s side and opposed Iraq, seeing Saddam’s
Baath nationalism and industrialization as a greater security threat than the
backward mullahs farther east, and worked militarily and economically to assist
Tehran.
Sniegoski reminds us that the same
neoconservatives who today demonize Iran and advocate U.S.-led destruction of
Iran’s economy and government were appeasers of Iran’s mullahs in the middle to
late 1980s. He notes that the names of many neoconservatives employed by or
close to George H. W. Bush’s administration, including Michael Ledeen and Eliot
Abrams, werealready vaguely familiar to Americans who recalled the embarrassing
and hypocritical Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration.
When the Iran-Iraq War ended, the United States continued a
diplomaticrelationship with heavily indebted and economically devastated Iraq,
to the extent that U.S. ambassador April Glaspie clearly indicated to Saddam
Hussein that Washington would consider any action he took against Kuwait
regarding possible slant drilling and economic gamesmanship over oil production
as an internal matter.
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and
pro-Israeli groups wrote and advocated in favor of a military response and that
the Persian Gulf War was successfully promoted in the media and operationally
successful, up to a point. In this examination of U.S. policy history, he
reminds us of the many falsehoods (and their sources) leveraged by advocates of
the 1990s war, including notoriously false congressional testimony and the use
of doctored imagery within government channels used to convince the House of
Saud to allow U.S. military basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
Falsified evidence, imaginative and oft-repeated reports of atrocities, and
coordinated government and media storytelling are typical fare in research for
wars of choice, whether a country is led by a king, a prime minister, a
parliament, or a popularly elected and constitutionally constrained president.
We study the public justifications for the Spanish-American War, the one-sided
reporting of the sinking of the Lusitania designed to bring the United States into World War I,
the Roosevelt administration’s political agitation to join World War II and
political foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, the Gulf of Tonkin incident,
and of course Nixon’s unitary executive-style expansion of the Vietnam War into
Cambodia and Laos. None of these examples involved neoconservatism, yet all U.S.
wars in the past century
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote
and advocated in favor of a military response and that the Persian Gulf War was
successfully promoted in the media and operationally successful, up to a point.
In this examination of U.S. policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods
(and their sources) leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including
notoriously false congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within
government channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military
basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote
and advocated in favor of a military response and that the Persian Gulf War was
successfully promoted in the media and operationally successful, up to a point.
In this examination of U.S. policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods
(and their sources) leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including
notoriously false congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within
government channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military
basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote
and advocated in favor of a military response and that the Persian Gulf War was
successfully promoted in the media and operationally successful, up to a point.
In this examination of U.S. policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods
(and their sources) leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including
notoriously false congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within
government channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military
basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69). Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and
pro-Israeli groups wrote and advocated in favor of a military response and that
the Persian Gulf War was successfully promoted in the media and operationally
successful, up to a point. In this examination of U.S. policy history, he
reminds us of the many falsehoods (and their sources) leveraged by advocates of
the 1990s war, including notoriously false congressional testimony and the use
of doctored imagery within government channels used to convince the House of
Saud to allow U.S. military basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote
and advocated in favor of a military response and that the Persian Gulf War was
successfully promoted in the media and operationally successful, up to a point.
In this examination of U.S. policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods
(and their sources) leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including
notoriously false congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within
government channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military
basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69). Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and
pro-Israeli groups wrote and advocated in favor of a military response and that
the Persian Gulf War was successfully promoted in the media and operationally
successful, up to a point. In this examination of U.S. policy history, he
reminds us of the many falsehoods (and their sources) leveraged by advocates of
the 1990s war, including notoriously false congressional testimony and the use
of doctored imagery within government channels used to convince the House of
Saud to allow U.S. military basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote
and advocated in favor of a military response and that the Persian Gulf War was
successfully promoted in the media and operationally successful, up to a point.
In this examination of U.S. policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods
(and their sources) leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including
notoriously false congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within
government channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military
basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
have been guided by forms of Wilsonian idealism, the muscular version of
which is directly associated with neoconservatism. Ideas do matter, and language
often matters even more.
Sniegoski’s thoughtful and calm analysis helps reveal both the ideological
and the value-laden semantic roles played by political advocates for the 2003
invasion of Iraq and other U.S. military activities throughout the Middle East.
Absent the threat of global communism, U.S. wars of choice in the Middle
East have remained a hard sell for most Americans, and such wars have no
substantial domestic economic or political interest to push for them. Some
evidence indicates a cohesive advocacy of Middle Eastern wars within the oil
industry (leverage and access), by the military-industrial complex (consumption
and growth), and among some sectors of American fundamentalist, millennial, and
Zionist forms of Christianity.
Sniegoski assesses each of these potential
centers of domestic advocacy and finds them lacking. Here students of the 2003
invasion of Iraq may look askance, in part because of the body of work that
explores structural imperatives for the invasion, including William Clark’s
Petrodollar Warfare (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society, 2005), Eugene
Jarecki’s The American Way of War
(New York: Free Press, 2008), and
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine
(New York: Metropolitan Books,
2007).
As many observers and analysts across the political spectrum have noted,
the attacks of September 11, 2001, unified a large part of the U.S. populace
(and, according to Sniegoski, steeled the resolve of a previously ambling and
directionless George W. Bush). The “war on terror” justification accurately
explained the popularity of U.S. vengeance on Afghanistan’s Taliban. Better
than most analysts, Sniegoski explains not only why, but how the false linkage
of 9/11 to Saddam Hussein and others was launched and promoted, and how popular
American belief in that false linkage lasted just long enough to allow the
destruction of Iraq as a single powerful Arab state (pp. 221–22).
This revelation is both timely and of particular interest as Americans begin
to come to terms with the role and aims of the Bush administration’s treatment
and torture of Muslim detainees in 2001 and 2002. Overall, the lack of a popular
American constituency for Middle Eastern meddling remains a longstanding problem
for neoconservatism in America—and perhaps this condition makes more
understandable the tendency toward knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism
whenever the neoconservative-Likudnik axis is discussed.
Sniegoski has produced a clear, straightforward, and extraordinarily
well-documented text that should be welcomed by historians, politicians, and
taxpayers on both neoconservative and nonneoconservative sides of the aisle. He
accurately portrays American Jewry, with frequent and well-documented references
to the overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews who do not support the Israeli
political right and who prefer peaceful, noncoercive, and market-based solutions
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The bulk of the antiwar effort today is led
and informed by Jews, and Jewish representation in and support of movements for
peace, justice, human rights, responsible government, and honest media are
significant.
Sniegoski’s assessment of the “transparent cabal” is told largely in the
words of prominent neoconservatives themselves, men
not known for their religious fervor or ethnicity, but for their political
inclination, which is increasingly out of step with that of most Americans
today.
This group of politically and media connected ideologues was instrumental
in ensuring that the United States toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. It may also
be fairly credited with the chaos and calamity experienced by Iraqis, U.S.
soldiers, and the region in the ongoing aftermath of that invasion. Might the
outcome have been different?
Sniegoski significantly points out that the traditional foreign-policy
elite—perhaps a far less transparent cabal—was aware of and in opposition to the
neoconservative propaganda and to the eventual U.S. policy informed by that
propaganda.
Among the hundreds of interesting quotes the author gives by leading
neoconservatives is Richard Perle’s observation that “[i]f Bush had staffed his
administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker,
which might well have happened, then it could have been different” (p. 115).
It was, however, not different, and to understand the often confused
and undeniably expensive reality of U.S. policy in the Middle East, one must
understand the neoconservatives’ thinking and political history. Stephen
Sniegoski has provided a thoroughly researched and unemotional, yet fascinating
and fast-paced analysis, and he effectively supports his thesis. In doing so, he
has clearly raised both the level and the quality of debate about
neoconservatism in the United States.
This book should become foundational reading in academic and research
circles, enlightening students about how foreign-policy decisions may be made in
a massive warfare-oriented yet ostensibly popularly ruled state. In an era when
congressional representatives worry about widespread constituent perceptions
that they are foreign-policy rubes and when they backpedal to remember which
administration fibs they were told and when, the time is right forthe Transparent Cabal to be read and discussed by members of the U.S.
political and media elite as well as by those who wish to hold them
accountable.
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote
and advocated in favor of a military response and that the Persian Gulf War was
successfully promoted in the media and operationally successful, up to a point.
In this examination of U.S. policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods
(and their sources) leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including
notoriously false congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within
government channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military
basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69). Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and
pro-Israeli groups wrote and advocated in favor of a military response and that
the Persian Gulf War was successfully promoted in the media and operationally
successful, up to a point. In this examination of U.S. policy history, he
reminds us of the many falsehoods (and their sources) leveraged by advocates of
the 1990s war, including notoriously false congressional testimony and the use
of doctored imagery within government channels used to convince the House of
Saud to allow U.S. military basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).Sniegoski reminds us
that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote and advocated in favor of a
military response and that the Persian Gulf War was successfully promoted in the
media and operationally successful, up to a point. In this examination of U.S.
policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods (and their sources)
leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including notoriously false
congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within government
channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military basing in
Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
The word cabal is
derived from the Hebrew word Kabbalah, meaning “received doctrine.” Modern usage of cabal denotes a secretive group with mystical power and
often insidious influence. For the past decade, in U.S.foreign policy the word
has been associated specifically with neoconservatism and in particular with a
narrow group of pro-Israeli neoconservatives with occupations in government,
think tanks, academia, and the news media.
A true cabal is opaque and mysterious, not transparent. Yet Stephen Sniegoski
has aptly and refreshingly titled his latest book The
Transparent Cabal (Norfolk, Va.:Enigma Editions, 2008).
The individuals who most convincingly articulated a
need for war in Iraq and who strategized a U.S. mission to replace the Iraqi and
other governments in the Middle East at gunpoint did not keep their vision
veiled.Instead, they loudly trumpeted, persistently drummed, and publicly
paraded it in the offices, conferences, and reading rooms of the American
political elite for many years.
Sniegoski relies on publicly accessible material to
introduce and support his thesis, which is that a close relationship exists
between U.S. neoconservatives and the Israeli Likudnik right and that
neoconservatives view U.S. foreign-policy interests through the lens of Israeli
interests as perceived by the right-wing parties influential in Israel’s own
democracy (pp. 3–7).
The idea that American neoconservatives have conflated U.S. security
interests in the Middle East with the international-security perspective of
ardent right-wingers in Israel has generated inflammatory and angry reactions
from pro-Israel quarters in Washington. It is academically and politically a
dangerous contemplation, as Sniegoski recognizes and as analysts of recent U.S.
foreign policy in the Middle East know.
A brief and heavily footnoted assessment entitled “The
Israel Lobby,” by respected realists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (London Review of Books, March 23, 2006), not only was initially denied a U.S.
publisher in 2006, but also gave rise to a sustained and somewhat hysterical
smear campaign against both authors, replete with public accusations of
anti-Semitism and calls for their removal from both academia and public life.
Far from a polemic, “The Israel Lobby” is a benign and politically dry review
of the actions and impact of the various organizations that actively promote
Israel’s interests in Washington, including the Likud-leaning American-Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents ofMajor Jewish
Organizations.
Mearsheimer and Walt’s report on the power that American advocates for
Israel exert in shaping policy and increasing financial, military, and moral
support for Israel reads much like any of the expository speeches given at the
annual AIPAC policy conference held each spring in Washington. The difference,
of course, is one of perspective.
Rather than self-congratulatory and self-promoting, Sniegoski’s perspective,
like that of other critics of modern Israel-centric influence in U.S.
foreign-policy making, leans to U.S. constitutionalism and traditional ideas of
U.S. democracy. The Transparent Cabal is not a direct inquiry into the controversial role of
the “Israel Lobby.” Instead, Sniegoski specifically examines the rationale for
the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq; the sustaining philosophies of American
neoconservatives; their role in “selling” the war to the American people,
Congress, and the administration; and the degree of linkage between the
neoconservatives themselves and the Likud Party and political Zionism.
To
carry out this examination, Sniegoski takes the reader on an eye-opening
excursion into the history of neoconservatism in U.S. politics, exploring the
evolution of security philosophy in Israel during the twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries.
In tracking the political and academic evolution of neoconservatism, the
author revisits the plethora of public statements, advocacy letters, and
campaigns, as well as the numerous articles and books written by key U.S.
neoconservatives, including Irving and William Kristol, Norman and John
Podhoretz, Michael Ledeen, David Frum, and Richard Perle.
More significant, and perhaps for the first time in a mainstream U.S.
research report, Sniegoski also tracks what was going on contemporaneously in
Israeli politics and security strategy. This aspect of The
Transparent Cabal is the most fascinating and
represents the author’s most significant contribution to the history of U.S.
policy in the Middle East.
With a degree of detail not found elsewhere, Sniegoski
reviews the infamous 1996 “Clean Break” document written by prominent American
neoconservative Jews for Israeli politician and present-day Israeli prime
minister Bibi Netanyahu. He also explains how the disruption and destruction of
Arab states, scattering them into sectarian and ethnic “statelets,” can be
seen—and has been seen for decades by Likud and other right-wing Zionist parties
in Israel—as good for Israel’s security (pp. 45–56).
This unemotional, factbased, and heavily footnoted
analysis is particularly useful for students of foreign policy because it places
the well-known U.S. neoconservative language of Middle
East strategy and objectives in relief against equally
well-publicized but far less familiar Likud language regarding Israeli security.
Beyond the contextual comparison, The
Transparent Cabal closely tracks the political and rhetorical history of
the George W. Bush administration’s 2002–2003 promotion of the need to invade
Iraq. Sniegoski systematically explains the neoconservative push for regime
change that had been voiced and promoted since the early 1980s, throughout the
Iraq-Iran War.
Inasmuch as the United States overtly backed Saddam
Hussein during this conflict, an effort to weaken Iraq was not national policy;
as Henry Kissinger infamously observed, “It’s a pity they both can’t lose.”
At that time, Washington viewed secular Iraq under
Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship as a bastion against radical anti-American Shi’ism
fermenting in Iran. Israel took Iran’s side and opposed Iraq, seeing Saddam’s
Baath nationalism and industrialization as a greater security threat than the
backward mullahs farther east, and worked militarily and economically to assist
Tehran.
Sniegoski reminds us that the same
neoconservatives who today demonize Iran and advocate U.S.-led destruction of
Iran’s economy and government were appeasers of Iran’s mullahs in the middle to
late 1980s. He notes that the names of many neoconservatives employed by or
close to George H. W. Bush’s administration, including Michael Ledeen and Eliot
Abrams, werealready vaguely familiar to Americans who recalled the embarrassing
and hypocritical Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration.
When the Iran-Iraq War ended, the United States continued a
diplomaticrelationship with heavily indebted and economically devastated Iraq,
to the extent that U.S. ambassador April Glaspie clearly indicated to Saddam
Hussein that Washington would consider any action he took against Kuwait
regarding possible slant drilling and economic gamesmanship over oil production
as an internal matter.
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and
pro-Israeli groups wrote and advocated in favor of a military response and that
the Persian Gulf War was successfully promoted in the media and operationally
successful, up to a point. In this examination of U.S. policy history, he
reminds us of the many falsehoods (and their sources) leveraged by advocates of
the 1990s war, including notoriously false congressional testimony and the use
of doctored imagery within government channels used to convince the House of
Saud to allow U.S. military basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
Falsified evidence, imaginative and oft-repeated reports of atrocities, and
coordinated government and media storytelling are typical fare in research for
wars of choice, whether a country is led by a king, a prime minister, a
parliament, or a popularly elected and constitutionally constrained president.
We study the public justifications for the Spanish-American War, the one-sided
reporting of the sinking of the Lusitania designed to bring the United States into World War I,
the Roosevelt administration’s political agitation to join World War II and
political foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, the Gulf of Tonkin incident,
and of course Nixon’s unitary executive-style expansion of the Vietnam War into
Cambodia and Laos. None of these examples involved neoconservatism, yet all U.S.
wars in the past century
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote
and advocated in favor of a military response and that the Persian Gulf War was
successfully promoted in the media and operationally successful, up to a point.
In this examination of U.S. policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods
(and their sources) leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including
notoriously false congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within
government channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military
basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote
and advocated in favor of a military response and that the Persian Gulf War was
successfully promoted in the media and operationally successful, up to a point.
In this examination of U.S. policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods
(and their sources) leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including
notoriously false congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within
government channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military
basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote
and advocated in favor of a military response and that the Persian Gulf War was
successfully promoted in the media and operationally successful, up to a point.
In this examination of U.S. policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods
(and their sources) leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including
notoriously false congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within
government channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military
basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69). Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and
pro-Israeli groups wrote and advocated in favor of a military response and that
the Persian Gulf War was successfully promoted in the media and operationally
successful, up to a point. In this examination of U.S. policy history, he
reminds us of the many falsehoods (and their sources) leveraged by advocates of
the 1990s war, including notoriously false congressional testimony and the use
of doctored imagery within government channels used to convince the House of
Saud to allow U.S. military basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote
and advocated in favor of a military response and that the Persian Gulf War was
successfully promoted in the media and operationally successful, up to a point.
In this examination of U.S. policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods
(and their sources) leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including
notoriously false congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within
government channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military
basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69). Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and
pro-Israeli groups wrote and advocated in favor of a military response and that
the Persian Gulf War was successfully promoted in the media and operationally
successful, up to a point. In this examination of U.S. policy history, he
reminds us of the many falsehoods (and their sources) leveraged by advocates of
the 1990s war, including notoriously false congressional testimony and the use
of doctored imagery within government channels used to convince the House of
Saud to allow U.S. military basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote
and advocated in favor of a military response and that the Persian Gulf War was
successfully promoted in the media and operationally successful, up to a point.
In this examination of U.S. policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods
(and their sources) leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including
notoriously false congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within
government channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military
basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
have been guided by forms of Wilsonian idealism, the muscular version of
which is directly associated with neoconservatism. Ideas do matter, and language
often matters even more.
Sniegoski’s thoughtful and calm analysis helps reveal both the ideological
and the value-laden semantic roles played by political advocates for the 2003
invasion of Iraq and other U.S. military activities throughout the Middle East.
Absent the threat of global communism, U.S. wars of choice in the Middle
East have remained a hard sell for most Americans, and such wars have no
substantial domestic economic or political interest to push for them. Some
evidence indicates a cohesive advocacy of Middle Eastern wars within the oil
industry (leverage and access), by the military-industrial complex (consumption
and growth), and among some sectors of American fundamentalist, millennial, and
Zionist forms of Christianity.
Sniegoski assesses each of these potential
centers of domestic advocacy and finds them lacking. Here students of the 2003
invasion of Iraq may look askance, in part because of the body of work that
explores structural imperatives for the invasion, including William Clark’s
Petrodollar Warfare (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society, 2005), Eugene
Jarecki’s The American Way of War
(New York: Free Press, 2008), and
Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine
(New York: Metropolitan Books,
2007).
As many observers and analysts across the political spectrum have noted,
the attacks of September 11, 2001, unified a large part of the U.S. populace
(and, according to Sniegoski, steeled the resolve of a previously ambling and
directionless George W. Bush). The “war on terror” justification accurately
explained the popularity of U.S. vengeance on Afghanistan’s Taliban. Better
than most analysts, Sniegoski explains not only why, but how the false linkage
of 9/11 to Saddam Hussein and others was launched and promoted, and how popular
American belief in that false linkage lasted just long enough to allow the
destruction of Iraq as a single powerful Arab state (pp. 221–22).
This revelation is both timely and of particular interest as Americans begin
to come to terms with the role and aims of the Bush administration’s treatment
and torture of Muslim detainees in 2001 and 2002. Overall, the lack of a popular
American constituency for Middle Eastern meddling remains a longstanding problem
for neoconservatism in America—and perhaps this condition makes more
understandable the tendency toward knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism
whenever the neoconservative-Likudnik axis is discussed.
Sniegoski has produced a clear, straightforward, and extraordinarily
well-documented text that should be welcomed by historians, politicians, and
taxpayers on both neoconservative and nonneoconservative sides of the aisle. He
accurately portrays American Jewry, with frequent and well-documented references
to the overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews who do not support the Israeli
political right and who prefer peaceful, noncoercive, and market-based solutions
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The bulk of the antiwar effort today is led
and informed by Jews, and Jewish representation in and support of movements for
peace, justice, human rights, responsible government, and honest media are
significant.
Sniegoski’s assessment of the “transparent cabal” is told largely in the
words of prominent neoconservatives themselves, men
not known for their religious fervor or ethnicity, but for their political
inclination, which is increasingly out of step with that of most Americans
today.
This group of politically and media connected ideologues was instrumental
in ensuring that the United States toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. It may also
be fairly credited with the chaos and calamity experienced by Iraqis, U.S.
soldiers, and the region in the ongoing aftermath of that invasion. Might the
outcome have been different?
Sniegoski significantly points out that the traditional foreign-policy
elite—perhaps a far less transparent cabal—was aware of and in opposition to the
neoconservative propaganda and to the eventual U.S. policy informed by that
propaganda.
Among the hundreds of interesting quotes the author gives by leading
neoconservatives is Richard Perle’s observation that “[i]f Bush had staffed his
administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker,
which might well have happened, then it could have been different” (p. 115).
It was, however, not different, and to understand the often confused
and undeniably expensive reality of U.S. policy in the Middle East, one must
understand the neoconservatives’ thinking and political history. Stephen
Sniegoski has provided a thoroughly researched and unemotional, yet fascinating
and fast-paced analysis, and he effectively supports his thesis. In doing so, he
has clearly raised both the level and the quality of debate about
neoconservatism in the United States.
This book should become foundational reading in academic and research
circles, enlightening students about how foreign-policy decisions may be made in
a massive warfare-oriented yet ostensibly popularly ruled state. In an era when
congressional representatives worry about widespread constituent perceptions
that they are foreign-policy rubes and when they backpedal to remember which
administration fibs they were told and when, the time is right forthe Transparent Cabal to be read and discussed by members of the U.S.
political and media elite as well as by those who wish to hold them
accountable.
Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote
and advocated in favor of a military response and that the Persian Gulf War was
successfully promoted in the media and operationally successful, up to a point.
In this examination of U.S. policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods
(and their sources) leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including
notoriously false congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within
government channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military
basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69). Sniegoski reminds us that neoconservative and
pro-Israeli groups wrote and advocated in favor of a military response and that
the Persian Gulf War was successfully promoted in the media and operationally
successful, up to a point. In this examination of U.S. policy history, he
reminds us of the many falsehoods (and their sources) leveraged by advocates of
the 1990s war, including notoriously false congressional testimony and the use
of doctored imagery within government channels used to convince the House of
Saud to allow U.S. military basing in Saudi Arabia (p. 69).Sniegoski reminds us
that neoconservative and pro-Israeli groups wrote and advocated in favor of a
military response and that the Persian Gulf War was successfully promoted in the
media and operationally successful, up to a point. In this examination of U.S.
policy history, he reminds us of the many falsehoods (and their sources)
leveraged by advocates of the 1990s war, including notoriously false
congressional testimony and the use of doctored imagery within government
channels used to convince the House of Saud to allow U.S. military basing in
Saudi Arabia (p. 69).
