On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Seth Ackerman wrote:
> No, I really don't think this is right. In Kosovo, the leading lights of the
> neo-conservative movement - Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Paul Wolfowitz, the WSJ
> editorial board and many others - all had vehement anti-Serb and pro-KLA
> positions.
Yes, but there -- and in Afghanistan -- the enemy was real, old-fashioned communists. That trumps everything for old cold warriors.
(Just as a footnote, American Zionists supported attacks on the Serbs because of the Serbs = Nazis equation. And then on top of it they got to prove they weren't anti-Muslim, which made them feel like saints. It was irresistable. Right wing Israelis, BTW, felt exactly the opposite -- Serbs, historically, were the anti-Nazis, and the idea of supporting Croats, as in Bosnia, outraged them. Andit was only two days into the bombing when Sharon said, If we support this, what's to keep NATO from bombing us?)
> There's something specific about the Palestinians and the Arabs.
You know I completely agree with this. I just think it's true across the American political spectrum -- in the respectable mainstream (i.e., those who get on TV or in government) right, left and center *all* identify primarily with the Israelis. And then, when faced with trouble, they roll out their right, left or center scripts to deal with it. Being anti-Israel almost defines you in the country as being on the extreme fringe, whether the right or the left.
BTW, I don't know if you around a while ago when we were talking about the interaction of the holocaust with national political culture, but I have a couple of excellent papers by my friend Natan Sznaider -- one a review essay on Nozick's book, and one an excerpt from a longer paper -- that bear specifically how things changed in 1967, and then changed again from the Cold War to Kosovo. You might enjoy them.
Michael