Taki Magazine

The Transparent Cabal

by Paul Gottfried on December 23, 2008

Last week Michael Flynn, editor of the IPS website, posted a long review of Steve Sniegoski’s until now largely ignored investigation of the role of neocon journalists and foreign policy advisors in greasing the skids for the American invasion of Iraq. I myself wrote the long introduction to this work in which I stressed its dispassionate tone and mountains of damning evidence. A somewhat improbable characterization for describing this book, The Transparent Cabal, is that it is full of “relentless, partisan rhetoric.” Nonetheless, that is exactly what Flynn says about it.

It is in fact hard for me to see how this work, which the liberal-neocon network has predictably ignored, is anything other than a clinical exercise in fact-gathering and, as Flynn himself observes, in the integration of staggering amounts of material. It shows about as much emotionality as a nineteenth-century German dissertation on the mating habits of Old World tussock moths. In his review, Flynn frequently agrees with the conclusions drawn from Steve’s research; and he is struck by the “conscientious” way in which Steve pursues his topic page after page. To the extent that even a generally positive reviewer is patronizing toward his work, even while underlining its considerable strength, one may assume that Flynn has noticed where the author is coming from, namely right field.
He considers it “tedious” that Steve “checks off all the boxes about the leftist origins of many early neoconservatives,” and he seems vexed that he leaves out “a fuller assessment of how racists have exploited the Jewish backgrounds of many neoconservatives to stoke anti-Semitism.” By this standard, one should not criticize Stalin’s tyranny because Lazar Kaganovich and other henchmen of the Soviet mass murderer were Jewish. Significantly, Steve goes out of his way to stress the discrepancies between the neocons and the conventional leftist politics of most American Jews. He repeatedly tells us that Jews in the US opposed the invasion of Iraq, because they stood on this and other issues with the Democratic Left. 

The reason Steve’s book has enjoyed so little resonance has nothing to do with the fact that he dared to criticize part of the Israeli Right. Lots of liberal journalists have done exactly this, and they review each other’s denunciations with gushing admiration. Steve’s problem is that he has reached critical conclusions from the wrong side of the political spectrum; and his scholarship is therefore unworthy of discussion.

But since he also raises some valid points, an isolated leftist blogger has reviewed his work in detail and with restrained praise, even while warning us counterfactually that the book is full of rage. All of this reminds me of another story that I recently heard concerning my own person. A colleague of mine who was invited to a conference on Weimar Germany at the University of Wisconsin (to which I was specifically not invited) elicited a noteworthy response from another participant when my friend told him that I might have been interested in attending. The other participant, who was an antifascist leftist of the garden-variety sort, looked at my friend a bit uncomfortably and then responded: “Professor Gottfried has some interesting things to say. I’d like to debate him, and in fact I would do so, if he ever invites me to his campus.” My response, in addition to a string of unprintable expletives, is that I would debate this jerk on his home turf, if he had the guts to bring me there. Furthermore, since he’s working as a full professor at an illustrious academic address, our discussion would have more impact on his campus than among the Amish farmers of Central Pennsylvania.

But getting back to Steve and his fate, clearly his book might still have a chance for success if he announced on page one that he’s a homosexual and a feminist and that he objected to the way the Israeli government victimized others with special lifestyles needs. Once having given such sparkling credentials, Steve would be able to get on to all the usual talk shows—and even on to the Murdoch TV channel, as a debating partner for some neocon hack. What make his scholarship unmentionable are its source—and perhaps his rightwing word processor.

Note there are things in his work that one could properly criticize. Steve is a bit too laid back in describing truly outrageous behavior. One comes away from reading his tome with the impression that it’s perfectly normal for neocons to run the country with their natural slaves. If they screw up, then it is not their guys but GOP morons who catch hell, while the neocons can set up shop in the other party with new bacterial hosts. From Steve’s lugubrious perspective, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. And he may have a point here.

Recently while in New York for Taki’s lively Christmas party, I chanced upon an Australian couple in my hotel, who swooned in ecstasy at the sight of a woolen cap that I had just bought and decided to wear. It had blazoned over the front the words “President Obama: We Did It.” The wife explained that everyone on their continent adored our president-elect, and when I asked why, she responded “because he’ll get rid of the neocons.” Whereupon I noted that it would take nothing short of a global nuclear conflagration to achieve that happy result. Actually I’m not sure that even that would work after wading through Steve’s book.

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