Above: The Gilles de Rais of the Neocons.
Realism
- So-called ‘realists’ naively assume that, when they enter dialogue with our enemies, they are engaging other human beings — which just goes to show that they have no place in the foreign policy business.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
MOAR
As is so often the case when dealing with the writings of long-time neoconmen (and Ledeen has been a menace to civilization for thirty years now), it’s hard to know where to begin, how to approach the clusterfuck of insanity: it’s a Gladwellian instance where one’s first, most superficial, instinctive response — horror, disgust, revulsion — is correct, but how? — and why? I think Ledeen’s work inspires negative-overload because we of the lefty persuasion are hardwired to identify and then furiously react to what is Orwellian. And Ledeen’s shit is definitely Orwellian, with the telltale and de riguer touch of Strauss: which is just a pseudo-intellectual way of saying it’s so god-awful fucking backwards.
“Realists” are conservatives — especially in the dictionary sense of the term, but also in the political sense. Ledeen is far, radically far, to their right. “To the right of Attila the Hun” is a joke-cliche’, but Ledeen is self-admittedly far to the right of Henry Kissinger, a man whose genocidal tendencies can at least be mentioned in the same breath as Attila’s. In typical Overton Window fashion, Ledeen paints conservative “realists” as hopelessly naive idealists: Brent Scowcroft as a Quaker. Thus he accomplishes two goals: carving a spot out for himself as the true, serious rightwinger, worthy of being listened to, and at the same time, he pushes the Left off the cliff. So much for meta strategy, now for the actual substance.
Ledeen says the “realists” shouldn’t assume that “our enemies” are human beings who will respond rationally to traditional diplomatic negotiation. Typically, he’s arguing in the negative; he doesn’t say what he considers a sensible alternative. So one has to “discover” the implied alternative, an easy enough task. What does Michael Ledeen really mean? Answer: assume that “our enemies” are irrational and subhuman, which in turn implies… yes, “faster, please” to the preferred and completely typical neocon proposal to exterminate the brutes. Yet because of the style in which he argues, plausible deniability (albeit of the flimsiest sort) is maintained. Say what Ledeen really means, and he splutter-feigns outrage at your ‘strawman.’
He wasn’t always so careful. Back in the day, in the infamous eleventy-billion word article Ledeen wrote for Partisan Review (which ultimately divided the magazine by zero and was so toxic that it inspired poor Daniel Bell and Diana Trilling both to throw in the towel on the neoconservative movement), he argued:
[A]fter citing a French conservative about the necessity of “breaking the law from time to time,” Ledeen proposes a change in two laws that “forbid us” to conduct a minimal “counter-terrorism policy”: “One is a law that prohibits American officials from working with murderers; the other is an executive order, dating to 1975, prohibiting any official of the American government to conduct, order, encourage or facilitate assassination.” — quoted from Sidney Blumenthal’s Our Long National Daydream.
Another point, probably useless to make but I’ll do it anyway, concerns Ledeen’s consistency. Back in the Reagan Era, Ledeen, like nearly all neoconservatives, whole-heartedly signed on to the much-dread and now thankfully much-dead Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s formula that the United States could and should do business with “authoritarian” regimes (right-wing tyrants) not only because of their own supposed rationality and alleged ability to reform, but so as to sabotage the nefarious global designs of “totalitarian” regimes (left-wing, i.e. communist or “communist” tyrants, which could not, it was thought, ever reform). In the post I’ve shortered above, as in so much of his writing over the last decade or so, Ledeen has argued what is effectively the opposite: for if we accept his premise that the Iranian mullahacracy is a tyranny, what is it but a right-wing, religious one?
Still MOAR
Israel-Palestine is much in the news lately. Though this is a few years old, it’s quintessential Ledeen on the subject. In other words, it too implies that the first, best and Final Solution for ‘the enemy’ (in this case, it’s probably the Palestinians but he could mean any Arab group or, considering his obsessions, Persians) is extermination. Here are the nutjob grafs:
Yet, as our rabbi reminded us last Sabbath, many Jewish scholars believe the Israelites en route to the Holy Land performed an even greater sin when they believed ten of their twelve spies who said that the inhabitants of the land of Canaan were too strong, and that any effort to conquer them was doomed to failure. The other two, Joshua and Caleb, said that victory was possible.
For permitting themselves to become paralyzed by fear, for accepting a misleading intelligence assessment from the ten instead of listening to the clear-eyed reports of Joshua and Caleb, for refusing to confidently move forward against their enemies, an entire generation of Jews was compelled to wander in the wilderness.
[…]
The failure to pursue victory doomed the Jews of that generation to wander in the desert. They were denied freedom in the Promised Land, having proven themselves unworthy of it. I find that story doubly important for us, both because of its historical and moral significance, and because of its contemporary relevance. We are challenged to fight an enemy who wishes to deny us our freedom, and enslave us. We hear voices repeating the false intelligence of the ten, telling us that all is lost, that there is no hope. Iraq is lost, they say, and Iran must be appeased. I was just invited to a conference on “how to live with a nuclear Iran.” There will be more such voices, perhaps even a consensus that we cannot win, and must accept our doom.
Joshua and Caleb saw more deeply, realized that their war could be won, and their cause was just, and refused to surrender to the “consensus” of the ten. In the end, they were proven correct, the war was won, and the Jews became a free people.
The smear on modern Jewish “peaceniks” is explicit; more to the exterminationist point is what Ledeen leaves unstated while assuming that approving readers and fellow AEI “scholars” know the rest of the story; he knows they can complete the toxic analogy, and surely he is right about that. What did Joshua and Caleb advise doing to the (indigenous, it must be said) “inhabitants of Canaan”? What, indeed, did the Israelites end up doing to the Moabites and Amalekites? Anyone? Oh, you, geeky kid on the front row who doesn’t know you’re gonna get called an anti-Semite? Yes, it’s true. The correct answer is indeed divinely-assisted genocide. By the way, Ledeen, David Frum, Marty Peretz, and all the PODhoretz People have just denounced you as an anti-Semite. Anyway, everyone in Israel is familiar with analogies to the Amalekites (it’s sort of like “going Godwin” here* but exponentially worse and with a social cootie factor of bazillion); the only people who do it consistently are the Kahanist scumbags who amount to the Jewish version of the KKK; even most Likudists think it’s beyond extreme, but for Ledeen it’s just another day at the office.
In short, Michael Ledeen should suck shit and explode.
*Yes, I know that I have frequently “gone Godwin” here, in this very post, for instance.
