Where’s Joe McCarthy When You Need Him?
by Thomas Fleming

The misadventures of Douglas Feith.

VIEWS

A Third Way?
by Tom Piatak
When stupid and evil are the same.

Toward Real Conservatism
by Edward A. Olsen
Just say no to the neocons.

NEWS

Walking the Neocon Plank
by Timothy P. Carney
Total victory.

The Rise and Fall of the Texas Republican Party
by Tom Pauken
The Rove machine.

What Manufacturing Crisis?
by David A. Hartman
America for sale.

REVIEWS

Ditching the Cadaver
by Samuel Francis

Patrick J. Buchanan: Where the Right Went Wrong: 
How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution 
and Hijacked the Bush Presidency

plus

Bill Kauffman on Dominic Sandbrook’s Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar
 American Liberalism

Clark Stooksbury on Sen. Robert C. Byrd’s Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency

Fr. Michael P. Orsi on Hugo Bedau and Paul Cassell’s Debating the Death Penalty

Tobias J. Lanz on Philippe Beneton’s Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity
 as Confinement

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From England: The Hunt Is Up
by Michael McMahon

Letter From Victoria: Just Win, Baby
by Kevin Michael Grace

VITAL SIGNS

ECONOMICS: Can We Trust Economists on Free Trade?
by Ian Fletcher

DEMOCRACY: Democracy and God
by Thomas Storck

COLUMNS

BREAKING GLASS
by Philip Jenkins

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
Bright Young Things
by George McCartney

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WORLD
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
The Ballad Rode Into Town
by William Baer

ON THE COVER

Cover by George McCartney, Jr.  Inside illustrations
 by Melanie Anderson and Elizabeth Wolf.

For American manufacturing, however, the employment recession has been the longest and most severe since the Great Depression. From June 1998 to January 2004, 3.5 million workers lost their jobs—a decline of 19.7 percent.  As of May 2004, only 187,000 were reemployed, just one out of every 19 laid-off employees.

Since the 1950’s, manufacturing’s share of the U.S. economy has been in a relentless decline, and its current share of GDP is less than half of what it was in the 50’s. Employment in manufacturing, as a share of total U.S. employment, has fallen proportionately. (See Exhibit I.)

The origin of this downward trend can be explained partly by manufacturing’s relatively greater productivity and partly by the rapid growth of government and the “service” economy. Since the 1970’s, however, this trend has been exacerbated by the growing competitive advantage enjoyed by foreign competitors. In a follow-up article in the December issue, I will show that this advantage is largely the result of a system of border-adjusted taxation that is not available to U.S. manufacturers. As a consequence, the trade deficit in goods, which began in 1971, has increased ever since. To put the deficit in simple terms: U.S. companies today are only producing the equivalent of 4 dollars worth of every 5 dollars of manufactured goods consumed in the U.S. The U.S. trade deficit in goods for 2003 was more than $500 billion, the bulk of which was in manufacturing.

The United States has a sizable negative trade balance in goods with every principal nation and region. Although the negative balance in goods has been somewhat offset by exports of U.S. services, this positive balance has leveled off. The merchandise deficit is predicted to continue to grow through at least 2005, despite the recent devaluation of the dollar (which, according to conventional wisdom, makes U.S. goods more attractive to foreign customers). The trade deficit is currently more than five percent of GDP, and the net amount of U.S. assets now owned by foreigners is currently estimated at four trillion dollars. This figure is roughly comparable in scale to the total privately owned portion of the U.S. federal debt. The United States, which was the world’s largest creditor in 1982, has since become the world’s largest debtor—a consequence of the relentless growth of the trade deficit.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) warned earlier this year that “the country may be dropping below critical mass in manufacturing.” This is not hard to believe, as depressed manufacturing centers lose vital supporting services and as traditional industries provide neither the volume nor the financing required for the new factories and equipment that employ the newest and most productive technology. The United States is the leader in high-tech product innovation, yet current exports are only one third of the value of imports in electronic data processing and office products.

One crucial element in the trade deficit is American industry’s higher manufacturing costs. According to a study prepared by the Manufacturing Alliance/MAPI for NAM (December 2003), the U.S. cost of $24.30 per labor hour exceeds the $19.30 average of nine principal trade partners by $5 per hour. The study goes further to show that other disadvantages saddle U.S. manufacturers with added costs of regulation, energy, employee benefits (particularly health insurance), and a significant difference in corporate-income-tax rates that total an additional $4.45 per labor hour. This adds up to a $9.45 disadvantage.

What is not considered by the MAPI/NAM study is the effect of border-adjusted value-added taxes (VAT) imposed by U.S. competitors on imports from the United States and rebated on exports to the United States, which exceed the total of the average U.S. disadvantage in labor and burden costs identified by MAPI. The average VAT imposed on U.S. exports by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) trade competitors is 17.7 percent ad valorem, which, expressed as MAPI’s labor “raw cost” index, is the equivalent of $14.76 per hour, over half again more than the $9.45 total burden calculated in the study. A conservative estimate of average VAT rebated on OECD exports to the United States is $13.04 per hour, nearly 40 percent more than the total of all adverse cost factors identified by MAPI. This important advantage enjoyed by our competitors is the source of much of our misery, but it also points the way to the solution.

Many optimists look to our strong improvement in manufacturing productivity as the source for a restoration of U.S. competitiveness. However, a recent BusinessWeek article, “U.S. Factories Falling Behind,” showed that our principal trading partners are increasing their productivity at higher rates than the United States. The other straw the optimists grasp at is the devaluation of the dollar, which will supposedly right the trade balance, but such predictions have not proved reliable in past.

In an open world economy, in which neither commodity pricing nor capital is limited by borders, the parity achieved by devaluation is temporary. What devaluation does achieve is recurrent bargain-basement prices for the most strategic and productive American economic assets. In other words, “America is for sale and for a low, low price.” Once markets have adjusted to the new exchange rates, the principal burden of lower real prices is forced upon labor. In the area of corporate taxation, Arnold Harberger arrives at the same conclusion: The wedge of corporate taxation primarily impacts labor. When governments at the federal, state, and local levels raise taxes (unless they are border adjusted) to augment depressed revenues and pay for rising welfare costs, they only pour fuel on the fire. After World War II, the United Kingdom opted for the quick fix of devaluation. The effect was to prolong rather than to remedy the problems caused by their uncompetitive manufacturing sector. It was only by adopting competitive VAT policies and supply-side income-tax reductions that Britain became productive.

There are many experts who actually deny that a trade imbalance is a problem, since foreigners must reinvest their dollars in the United States if they do not buy our merchandise. However, those dollars invested in U.S. debt and equity securities or productive assets by foreigners have a price tag—the interest, dividends, and rentals that will leave the United States increasingly indebted.

Most neoconservative and libertarian economists think that the problems in manufacturing can be resolved by tax reforms that will provide greater saving for investment and lower composite marginal rates of taxation. But greater investment in manufacturing productivity in the 1990’s and lower marginal rates in the 1980’s did not reverse the downslide.

The crisis in manufacturing is being obfuscated by internationalists who are indifferent to American concerns and by those who profit from the trade advantage of foreign-produced goods in competition with U.S. manufacturers. The federal government has negotiated bilateral trade agreements that have exposed U.S. manufacturers and their workers while granting them no commensurate concessions in return. This is not in our national interest. Yet all who have profited from or gave their blessings to this folly are joined in a chorus of denying reality.

The deterioration of the U.S. manufacturing sector threatens the progress and prosperity of the American economy. It also poses a risk to our military security. Manufacturing has traditionally provided the technological advances that drive productivity across all sectors of the economy, and America’s military capability has been strengthened by the industrial development of new technology.

Industrial decline also threatens social stability. The declining employment and earnings in U.S. manufacturing are a principal cause of the declining incomes of blue-collar workers. The average factory wage per hour in real dollars declined 11.3 percent from 1978 to 2001, despite an increase of productivity by one half in the business sector and a doubling of productivity in manufacturing. The laid-off workers from manufacturing seeking re-employment in highly price-elastic service markets have brought further pressure to bear on blue-collar workers. The increasing share of income enjoyed by the top ten percent of wage earners is not the result of, as leftists would have us believe, excessive returns on physical and intellectual capital; it is the result of the stagnation of labor income, itself the result of the stagnant demand for manufacturing employment, which is exacerbated by the excessive immigration. It may be true that, in the years following World War II, labor (especially organized labor) was overpaid. Today, the opposite is the case: It often takes two workers to provide a family with a living income. The United States, which adopted the 40-hour work week in the 20th century, enters the 21st century with many families working an 80 hour week, often of necessity.

Many of the proposed remedies will do some good without actually solving the basic problem. Supply-side economic prescriptions—lower government spending, lower marginal-income-tax rates, and deferred taxation of saving for investment—though helpful, will not be sufficient to overcome the VAT advantages enjoyed by our competitors. Internationalists sometimes forget that we are not the only country in the world. Foreign competitors can also lower their own corporate income taxes relative to U.S. levels, and some of them are already undertaking fundamental tax reform. The Netherlands has adopted a system for expensing fixed investment, and Russia has adopted the flat tax.

As David Enger and Kevin A. Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute observed in their recent review of international corporate taxation, “[I]f current EU trends continue, the corporate income tax may virtually disappear and be replaced by revenue from the VAT in just a few decades.” And, if the United States fails to adopt border-adjusted taxation, the U.S. corporate income tax may all but disappear for a different reason—the loss of manufacturing corporations.

David A. Hartman, a retired banker, is chairman of the board of directors of The Rockford Institute.

This article first appeared in the November 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

I knew that no major national party had emerged since the Republican Party was formed in the 1850’s, helped along by the implosion of the Whig Party and the increasingly sharp divide between North and South.  I knew, too, that the most successful of all third-party candidacies, Teddy Roosevelt’s in 1912, accomplished little beyond the election of Woodrow Wilson.

There were more recent precedents, however, showing how third parties could effectively shift the national debate.  George Wallace’s 1968 campaign sounded the death knell for the great New Deal coalition that had dominated American politics since 1932.  Wallace’s campaign pushed the GOP to the right on social and cultural issues and laid the groundwork for millions of Southerners and ethnic Catholics to join Reagan and the Republicans in 1980.  Ross Perot’s 1992 bid forced both the Republicans and the Democrats to make at least an effort to address ballooning deficits and burgeoning debt, helping make the 1990’s a time of comparative fiscal restraint in Washington.  In fact, if Perot had not temporarily withdrawn from the 1992 race and if he had never begun talking about Republican dirty tricksters plotting to ruin his daughter’s wedding, he may very well have won: Most Americans had soured on Bush the Elder and were wary of Clinton, who was better known for the many scandalous rumors (most of them true) swirling around him than whatever he may have accomplished as governor of Arkansas.

I knew, too, that the major argument offered against conservative third parties by Republican propagandists—that the worst Republican candidate for president would always be better than the Democrat—was both unconvincing and, taken to its logical conclusion, a guarantor of the continued incremental leftward drift of American politics.  The flaw in this argument can be seen by examining a favorite specter raised by those making it, that of a Democratic president being able to nominate new justices to the Supreme Court.  Although we are always told that the Supreme Court hangs in the balance, this is seldom the case.  Republican commentators poured forth column after column in 2000, warning that Al Gore would get to pick three Supreme Court justices if he were elected.  In point of fact, he would have been able to appoint zero.  None of the current justices seems particularly eager to leave, and the only events that will reliably create a vacancy—death or disabling illness—are beyond the control of even Karl Rove.

More to the point, justices appointed by Republican presidents have repeatedly been responsible for the decisions that have caused the most distress to conservatives, beginning with Eisenhower appointee Earl Warren.  The two decisions of most concern to the GOP’s conservative base were both written by Republican justices: Roe v. Wade was authored by Nixon appointee Harry Blackmun; and Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, which struck down all statutes against sodomy, was penned by Reagan appointee Anthony Kennedy.  (Ironically, a Democratic appointee, Byron White, both dissented in Roe and wrote Bowers v. Hardwick, the opinion overturned by Lawrence.)  So many liberal justices have been appointed by so many Republican presidents that conservatives who insist that Bush will appoint only conservatives to the high court sound like nothing so much as a battered woman insisting that, “this time,” her drunken, abusive boyfriend will act differently.  After all, a Machiavellian Republican strategist might not want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, which would both risk the wrath of voters who want abortion to remain legal (a group that includes many major GOP donors and such figures as President Bush’s mother and wife) and perhaps allow some pro-life voters to declare “Mission Accomplished” and return to their ancestral home in the Democratic Party.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the Republicans’ standard argument against third parties also paves the way for a continued, incremental movement to the left in American politics.  If conservatives should vote for George W. Bush because he is better than John Kerry, shouldn’t they also support Rudy Giuliani for president?  Only when Republicans are made to realize that they cannot take conservatives for granted will Republicans regularly begin giving conservatives anything more than occasional rhetoric.

Unfortunately, my experience with Buchanan’s Reform Party candidacy—while not vindicating Republican arguments—fell far short of my hopes.  I underestimated the many practical challenges facing third parties.  I was not aware of the often fractious and occasionally unstable nature of some of the people attracted to third-party efforts.  Above all, I mistakenly believed that most Americans were interested in having presidential candidates willing and able to conduct a serious debate on the major issues facing the country.  These factors doomed Buchanan’s candidacy, and they threaten to doom any attempt to create a serious conservative third party in the foreseeable future.

Ballot access is a daunting challenge for a third-party candidate, consuming a large amount of his scarce resources: Third-party candidates need to be familiar with the election laws of all 50 states, and campaigns need to allocate many volunteers to gather the necessary petitions, pay professionals to do it, or both.  Furthermore, they must deal with the open hostility of the two major parties.  For a time, virtually all of Buchanan’s national campaign staff disappeared in 2000, because they were all in North Carolina gathering signatures to get Buchanan on the ballot.  Even though he had greater resources than other third-party candidates, Buchanan was unable to get on the ballot in all 50 states.  The GOP kept him off the ballot in Michigan, just as the Democrats are trying to keep Nader off the ballot in such places as Oregon and Pennsylvania this year.

Getting media access is also a challenge.  Media coverage is geared toward the horse-race aspects of campaigning, which means little attention is given third-party candidates, even those who regularly provide good copy, such as Buchanan.  In 2000, both Buchanan and Nader were shut out of the debates, even though there is little doubt that they would have enlivened them and forced Bush and Gore to confront issues of great concern to many Americans, including the impact of globalization.

Globalization is also directly related to another daunting obstacle—money.  In 1996, Buchanan was able to finance a credible run for the GOP nomination by raising small amounts from many individual donors, mostly through direct-mail solicitations.  This is how conservative candidates have raised money since the early 1970’s.  Buchanan enjoyed the support of only one Fortune 500 CEO.  By contrast, in 2000, George W. Bush almost wrapped up the GOP nomination before the first primary vote was cast by raising an unprecedented amount of money from many large donors throughout the country.  Estimates of the total cost of this year’s campaign near one billion dollars.  Any candidate skeptical of globalization (as any conservative third-party challenger likely would be) simply cannot compete in the money race with candidates enjoying ready access to corporate donors, which means that such candidates will find it increasingly difficult to compete in the primaries and almost impossible to run a third-party campaign.

Another obstacle facing third-party candidates can be the nature of some of the people drawn to third parties.  Both the Republican and Democratic parties tend to be relatively cohesive because those running the parties are motivated primarily by the prospect of enjoying monetary gain from holding office, lobbying those who hold office, and cashing in on connections made while holding office.  Few congressmen ever return to gainful employment (or even go home) after reaching Washington.  By contrast, third parties are often fractious, as shown by three of the third parties that competed in 2000: The Reform Party has split into two parties, the America First Party and the Reform Party; Nader has run away from the party that supported him last time, the Green Party; and the Natural Law Party, which attracted Reform Party members who opposed Buchanan’s nomination, has simply disappeared.

Such infighting takes a toll.  There is little doubt that Buchanan’s campaign was badly hurt by the protracted battle for the Reform Party nomination and the well-publicized walkout of malcontents from the party’s Long Beach convention.  In my experience, those who bitterly fought Buchanan were motivated not by ideology (which can be a cohesive force) but by personality: Fighting was what they enjoyed doing.  Indeed, Buchanan’s opponents gravitated toward the unlikely (and gravity-defying) figure of John Hagelin, an instructor in physics at a school established by the Transcendental Meditation movement in Iowa.  Hagelin, like other TM adherents, believes in “yogic flying,” which so far consists of crossing one’s legs and bouncing but is said to offer the possibility of effortless flight through the air.

The greatest obstacle facing a serious third-party effort on the right is not the suprarational beliefs of the likes of John Hagelin but the suprarational nature of politics today.  Our politics are at once acrimonious and meaningless.  The acrimony is obvious to anyone who spends five minutes watching cable TV.  The meaninglessness is shown by the nature of the debate between the major candidates.  They are in substantial agreement on such major issues as globalization, immigration, trade, the need for an interventionist foreign policy, and the need to continue expanding the federal government, differing largely on how best to tinker with the tax code.  They do not even have any fundamental disagreements over Iraq: Kerry voted for the war and has said he would cast his vote the same way today, even after we found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.  Can any debate be more meaningless than the one we have seen so far this year, with the liveliest discussion focusing on what John Kerry did or did not do in Vietnam 35 years ago?

At least since the beginning of the Clinton presidency, American conservatism has been characterized less and less by an interest in ideas and policies and more and more by intellectually disabling cults of personality—first, the negative cult of personality surrounding Bill Clinton; now, the more conventional one surrounding George W. Bush.  The left is following suit, as many Democrats now feel about Bush the way many Republicans feel about Clinton.  For each side, there is far more passion generated by the real or imagined misdeeds of the other candidate than by the policies advocated by their own candidate.

Presidential politics have become so bitter because the major differences between the candidates are now cultural, not ideological; many voters now treat the presidential campaign not merely as one front in the Culture War but as the only front.  This is dangerous for conservatives because the White House has not been the instrument of the left’s victories in the Culture War, and merely having a Republican in the White House will do little to alter the outcome of that struggle, especially when the President is committed to nothing more rigorous than “compassionate conservatism.”  As long as conservatives view voting for president as a way of registering which side they are on rather than as a way of advancing a meaningful agenda, there is little chance of building a credible third party focused on promoting conservative issues.

This article first appeared in the November 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Democrats did not get out in front on the sex issue until fairly late.  In fact, Southern Democrats were, if anything, more conservative than Midwestern Republicans on questions of divorce, pornography, and abortion.  Beginning with Playboy President John Kennedy, however, Democrats have embraced sexual liberation, in every form and combination, with a passion.  Of course, their speeches still resound with the fine old Democratic rhetoric of free speech, civil rights, and the Tenth Amendment, but these days, free speech means the rights of pornographers to abuse children; the only important civil right is a mother’s right to have her living baby hacked to death as it is being born; and the rights of the states are reduced to providing fake marriage certificates for homosexuals who want to shack up for three days or more.

Socialism, as every American knows, was embraced by the Democratic Party in 1932, and, despite a few dissident voices in the South, the party has not looked back since FDR won reelection in 1936, and, although neoconservatives would like us to look back nostalgically at Harry Truman, FDR’s Vice President was nothing better than a coarse-mannered machine politician who defended Alger Hiss.

The Democratic Party’s protection of treason and sedition did not begin with the employment of Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and other known communists and subversives.  Throughout World War II, the President had been protecting communists in America as part of his constructive engagement with Stalin.  Before Stalin, however, there was Churchill, and, partly as a result of FDR’s special relationship with Churchill, British agents were able to do as they pleased in the United States, and some agents assassinated their German counterparts in America; others kept tabs on influential American political figures who opposed U.S. entrance into the war.  Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, among the most prominent isolationists, was set up with a girlfriend and then blackmailed.

Far from blaming perfidious Albion for these activities, I salute the bravery and resourcefulness of patriotic Englishmen who helped to drag a reluctant America into the war.  Both interventionists and isolationists, however, should acknowledge that it was a mistake bordering on treason to allow foreign agents to ply their trade within the United States.

After the war, Democrats gave up their bellicosity and began slowly evolving into the party of appeasement.  By 1972, the imperialists had ceded control of the party to the appeasers, and, ever since, the American people have quite correctly regarded the Democratic Party as incapable of defending their interests or security.  On the one occasion in over 30 years that Democrats have gone to war—Mad Albright’s illegal bombing of the civilian population of Yugoslavia—they picked the wrong side.  American money was spent, and American lives risked, to put Islamic Albanian terrorists—the allies of Osama bin Laden—into power in Kosovo.

Small wonder that many patriotic Americans, who think that the Bush administration has simultaneously botched the “War on Terror” and the economy, are refusing to support the party of John Kerry.  Kerry is a study in deceit: a Catholic who supports infanticide and keeps mum on the subject of homosexual “marriage”; a soldier who returned from Vietnam and denounced his comrades-in-arms for political gain; a senator who voted for the Iraq War and yet reserves the right to attack the war without every changing his position.  So far from voting for such a representative of such a party, I would not even let him enter my house.

Then why not swallow hard and vote to give President Bush four more years?  He is no conservative, but the Republican Party has never been the conservative party that some of its members have wanted to believe in.  Of its presidential candidates since the election of 1940, only two would qualify as to any extent conservative by a reasonable definition: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.  Willkie and Dewey were clones of FDR; Eisenhower had no discernible political ideology.  Russell Kirk’s famous response to the Birchers—Ike’s not a communist, he’s a golfer—comes close to defining the prince of managers, whether as general or as statesman.  Nixon never claimed to be a conservative and believed that the only reason conservatives ever supported him was his prosecution of Alger Hiss.

Despite their lack of principle and incoherence, Republican presidential candidates have typically represented the lesser of two evils.  On economic matters, Republicans have been uniformly better than their rivals.  Where the Democrats have always been good at spending money, Republicans have usually spent their lives making money, which is a far more difficult business.  Even when Republicans engage in deficit spending, it is not out of a desire to extend the socialist state.  Republican presidents are typically driven to extravagance by a Democratic Congress, by political necessity, or by a mistaken belief that “deficits don’t matter.”  Yes, it is true that the Republican Party’s free-trade ideology is destroying our manufacturing base, but the Democratic Party is in the grips of exactly the same ideology—if somewhat different lobbyists.  The same might be said of the two parties’ actual positions on immigration, as well as on most social and cultural issues.  There is hardly George Wallace’s dime’s worth of difference between them, and a dime does not buy what it did 35 years ago.  It was not, after all, a Democratic NEH chairman who wrote a pornographic lesbian novel: It was Lynne Cheney, the wife of the current Vice President.  Mrs. Cheney, who sold herself to the neoconservatives in her first year at the NEH, is just smart enough to block the republication of Sisters but not smart enough not to have written it.

And yet, for all the cowardice, vice, corruption, and lack of principle among Republican leaders, the Republican Party continues to represent the more nearly normal elements of American society, and, despite the trade policies that are throwing Americans out of work and the Iraq War that was apparently engaged without sufficient cause and continues to be fought without conspicuous success, I would be tempted to vote for George W. Bush: Kerry and Bush are both spoiled Yalies, but Bush’s bubba persona, whether real or feigned, is less hard to take than a stuck-up prig who talks through his nose down to ordinary Americans.

Then why are so many conservatives so reluctant to hold their noses one more time?  During the summer, an old friend came to my office and wanted my opinion on the election.  He had been a Republican all his life and had cast his first vote in a presidential election for Thomas Dewey.  This time, he was ready to support Kerry, if only to rid the GOP of the pernicious influence of the neoconservatives.  Although he has always supported the U.S. alliance with Israel, he was particularly disgusted with the obvious pressure that Israel’s government is able to exert on our foreign policy through such prominent neoconservatives as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith.  I told him I did not think a man of good conscience could vote for Kerry.  He could, however, choose not to vote at all.  I have had the same conversation with not a few conservatives, some of whom are determined to vote for Kerry—or Ralph Nader, who has been denounced by the Christophobic ADL for describing George Bush as the puppet of Ariel Sharon.

My friend’s suspicions must have been aggravated when, a few weeks later, it was revealed in the press that the FBI was engaged in a two-year investigation of Lawrence Franklin, of the Office of Special Plans in the Department of Defense.  Franklin, who had served in the Defense Intelligence Agency and as military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, is suspected of passing secrets to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and to the government of Israel.  Longtime neoconservative policy analyst Michael Ledeen calls the charge “nonsensical,” but then Ledeen—best known these days as the most hysterical imperialist at National Review Online—is widely rumored to be implicated in the leakage.  He is also a contractor hired by Feith.

The real issue is not Franklin himself: He is only a small cog in a vast network of Israeli influence that extends to the highest circles of the Bush administration.  Franklin reports to Douglas Feith, undersecretary for policy and thus the number-three man in the Department of Defense.  It is Feith who put Franklin in a position to damage his country’s national security, and it is Feith who should be held accountable.

Feith is an amazing character.  Like many American bureaucrats, he has gone through the usual revolving door between public and private, but Feith’s door has also opened on to Tel Aviv.  His law-firm, Feith and Zell, which does the predictable lobbying for Israeli interests, allied itself with the Israeli firm Zell and Goldberg, in order to better serve their Israeli clients.

In 1996, Feith was one of the principal sources (along with Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser, James Colbert, and Charles Fairbank) of a policy paper drawn up for then-prime minister Netanyahu, the Likud Party extremist who continues to denounce Ariel Sharon for his timidity.  The paper, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” advocates an aggressive, no-compromise approach to the Palestinians.  That was to be expected.  What is disconcerting, however, is the American authors’ decision to speak in the first person when describing Israeli interests:

We have for four years pursued peace based on a New Middle East.  We in Israel cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent.  Peace depends on the character and behavior of our foes.  We live in a dangerous neighborhood, with fragile states and bitter rivalries.  Displaying moral ambivalence between the effort to build a Jewish state and the desire to annihilate it by trading “land for peace” will not secure “peace now.”  Our claim to the land—to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—is legitimate and noble.  It is not within our own power, no matter how much we concede, to make peace unilaterally.  Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, “peace for peace,” is a solid basis for the future.

Meyrav (Mrs. David) Wurmser is an Israeli national (like the wife of Douglas Feith), and she has a perfect right to lobby for Likud, but her husband (Dick Cheney’s advisor on the Middle East), Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle—American citizens who have served the government of the United States as high-level advisors on security and foreign policy—are not only advising Netanyahu to reject U.S. policy in the Middle East but speaking as spokesmen for Israel and the Likud Party.  If they have been misrepresented, they have not apparently said so.

The provision of “A Clean Break” that has attracted most attention is the recommendation to oust Saddam Hussein:

Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.  This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.

The authors also advised Netanyahu to make a “clean break” with American independence and to turn away from Israel’s status as American dependent to that of a mature ally, “formulating the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel.”  In other words, manipulate American opinion by appealing to Cold War anxieties.  This is exactly what Ariel Sharon did in the weeks following September 11, when he and his adherents rang endless changes on the theme: “Now Americans know what it is like to be Israelis.”

When Feith is not advising Israeli politicians on how to manipulate the United States, his supposed expertise is in areas of military intelligence: It was Feith who was in charge of setting guidelines for the new, more aggressive methods of interrogation used on Iraqi prisoners, and it was Feith who brilliantly suggested that the United States was not bound by the Geneva Convention—the two biggest p.r. blunders of the war in Iraq.  Feith also failed to deliver accurate intelligence to the commanders who led the invasion of Iraq.  Gen. Tommy Franks was so disgusted with the quality of the intelligence he received that he told Bob Woodward that Feith is “the f---ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth.”  Bush’s neoconservatives seem to elicit obscenity.  In the build-up to the war, Colin Powell, according to BBC reporter James Naughtie, referred to the lot of them as a bunch of “f---ing crazies.”

Feith hardly ever talks in public about Israel per se or about his own strong connections with the Likud Party; he justifies his total opposition to negotiating with the Palestinians on the grounds of their violations of human rights.  Israel’s denial of basic rights to Christians, however, never seems to come up.  In 1997, the Zionist Organization of America honored Douglas Feith along with his father, Dalck Feith.  Who is Dalck Feith?  A follower of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and a member of Jabotinsky’s fascist youth group, Betar.  Jabotinsky was no liberal Zionist or even a Likudnik like Ariel Sharon.  He boldly called for the elimination of Palestinian Arabs as a people.  Ridiculing the more moderate Zionists who hoped to live in peace with Arabs, Jabotinsky demanded that the Zionists emulate the Americans who destroyed the Plains Indians and eliminated their cultural identity.

In other words, Feith comes out of a Zionist tradition that even Begin and Sharon would rather not talk about, and, as a senior official in the Department of Defense, he has never ceased to advocate policies designed to promote Israeli, not American, interests.  In this, however, he is no different from Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Ledeen, and the entire neoconservative network of think tanks and publications that have dominated the foreign policy of the Bush administration.  When Feith wanted to put out the disinformation that the CIA had clinched the connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, he leaked his own memo to the Weekly Standard, whose bogus article was then quoted triumphantly by Dick Cheney—a disinformational triple play.  (See Laura Rozen’s “Ye of Little Feith,” American Prospect Online, May 18, 2004—though some caution may be needed in treating statements from Karen Kwiatkowski.)

Ronald Hatchett, retired U.S. Air Force colonel and arms negotiator, worked under Feith from 1984 to 1988 and knew him well.  In an interview, Hatchett describes Feith as pure Machiavellian.  “He is almost Straussian in his contempt for the public.  Tell them whatever is necessary, he would say, all we need is plausible denial.  The important thing is to win.  The public always supports a winner.”  Hatchett added that Feith was completely devoted to two things: surrounding himself with like-minded associates (whom he referred to as “true patriots”) and promoting the security of Israel.  “He did believe that America should be kept strong, but the main reason was to support the security of Israel.”

In his combination of arrogance and incompetence, Feith is just another neoconservative policy expert.  One thing does distinguish Feith from his colleagues: He lost his first job at the National Security Council in the first Reagan administration when he fell under suspicion of passing secrets to Israel.  National Security Advisor Richard Clark gave as grounds for dismissal that Feith “had been the object of an inquiry into whether he had provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.”  Pentagon officials from those days (and others in the Reagan administration) told me they were shocked to learn that Feith’s disgrace was only a temporary setback, since his mentor Richard Perle, another Netanyahu advisor, got him rehired at the Department of Defense six months later.  This proved, as one Pentagon source told me, that Perle was virtually omnipotent.  Ever since, Feith has been obsequious in his obedience to Perle.

I do not at all blame the Israelis for the espionage and treason they have instigated in the United States.  On the contrary, I salute them for their bravery and their patriotism.  In Israel, I met many solid supporters and advisors of the Likud Party.  They love their country the way Crockett and Travis loved America, and they would, as they say in Texas, rather fight than run.  I think they are quite wrong, but I can only admire them.

Most governments, from time to time, practice espionage against foes and keep tabs on their friends.  There is this difference, however: Israel depends upon the United States for her very existence, and the Mossad is not an occasional eavesdropper on diplomatic conversations.  Israel has been spying on her principal benefactor for decades, counting on the fact that American governments will not retaliate by cutting off the aid and loans that subsidize Israel’s lavish welfare state—and her expensive war machine.  A few years ago, I spoke with a man who retired from the CIA decades ago, because of the steady leakage to Israel.  The worst part of it, he said, was not the treason committed by agents more loyal to Israel than to the United States but the fact that Israel used some of her stolen intelligence as bargaining chips with countries that were enemies of the United States.  Such deals could ruin an operation and put agents at risk, but, after repeated complaints, he concluded that the CIA was never going to stop the leaks.  That was four decades ago; now, the problem is worse.

Why blame Sharon for crimes committed by American citizens and ignored by the American government?  If the Mossad is more effective than the CIA, so much the better for the Israelis.  When we discover their agents—like Jonathan Pollard or, if he is guilty, Lawrence Franklin—they should be prosecuted exactly the same as if they were agents of China or Iran.  We should also consider punitive measures against any country caught spying on the United States.  We should not, however, fall into the trap of blaming “the Jews” for the crimes committed by a few ultra-Zionists, nor should we allow the lunatic fringe at Commentary and the ADL to get away with the claim that they represent Jewish-Americans.

On the other hand, espionage and influence-peddling are very serious matters.  People such as Douglas Feith and Richard Perle have time after time displayed their loyalty to a foreign power, and, even if their activities may fall short of treason and espionage, they are clearly unfit to be trusted with any important position in government.

Instead of weeding out these agents of influence, however, the Bush administration continues to rely on them for guidance on the Middle East.  First Iraq, then Iran, then Syria.  And even when the FBI was on the verge of arresting Lawrence Franklin, Attorney General John Ashcroft apparently decided to postpone the arrest and to reduce the charge to something less than espionage.  Ashcroft’s reluctance to antagonize AIPAC two months before the election may be politically justified, but Republicans cannot expect the support of patriotic conservatives until they clean out the nest of vipers in the Department of Defense.  If President Bush would only promise to fire, in order, Franklin, Feith, and Wolfowitz—along with the man who hired them and bungled the war in Iraq—he would have their support.  Until then, I do not see how he can even look them in the eye.

This article first appeared in the November 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.