Stephen J. Sniegoski. The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel. Enigma, 2008. See here to purchase the book.
Stephen J. Sniegoski has a doctorate from the University of Maryland
and studied American diplomatic history. My review here will refer to
him as “S,” for short.
This book is about the American neoconservative movement. S goes from
its founding through its influential role in getting the U.S. into the
Iraq War, then he discusses the War’s aftermath. S’s argument is that
the neoconservative agenda regarding the Middle East is designed to
serve the interests of the state of Israel, as those interests are
articulated by the right-wing Likud party there. This agenda supports
weakening Arab nations surrounding Israel so that they cannot pose a
threat to her. According to S, the neoconservatives supported such an
agenda since their beginning as a movement, but 9/11 created an
opportunity for this agenda to become the foreign policy of the United
States during much of the Presidency of George W. Bush.
Here are some thoughts:
A. Looking broadly at the book itself, it is a standard narration of
the events surrounding and including the Iraq War. Like a lot of people,
I lived through that, so the sweeping narrative of the book was not
particularly new to me. The story is essentially that the U.S. went into
Iraq expecting to find weapons of mass destruction after 9/11, bombed
the country and found that were no WMDs, and traveled the difficult road
of trying to rebuild the country, amidst ethnic division, turmoil, and
opposition from Iraqis.
B. That said, there were some things that I learned from this book.
First, while neoconservatism is said to believe in spreading democracy
in the Middle East, it is not necessarily committed to democracy, per
se. Initially, it supported a new government of Iraq that would be led
by the traditional, pre-Saddam tribal authorities, who were not
democratic. Second, S seems to imply that even the war against the
Taliban in Afghanistan was unnecessary, since the Taliban initially
appeared cooperative in offering to help the U.S. to bring al-Qaeda to
justice. Third, there are neoconservatives who have supported
undermining even America’s allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi
Arabia. The different groups in Saudi Arabia was also interesting, for,
as S notes, Shiites hold a significant amount of control over Saudi oil,
even though the political establishment is Sunni. Fourth, S argues
rigorously against the idea that the U.S. launched the Iraq War to get
more oil. Saddam was offering U.S. oil companies opportunities to drill
in Iraq, plus oil companies did not want the oil infrastructure of the
country to be disrupted or shattered by war.
C. There were also things in the book that I was interested to learn
more about, even though I had a rudimentary understanding of them
before. For one, S chronicles George W. Bush’s changing views on foreign
policy, as he went from rejecting nation-building, while retaining a
tough stance, to embracing nation building. In the early days of the
Bush II Administration, long before the Iraq War, Condi Rice even
explained on news shows why regime change in Iraq would be a mistake at
that point. Second, S discusses the coalition that emerged to support
the war in Iraq. The neocons wanted to protect Israel, but Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld embraced the Iraq War as a way to showcase the
effectiveness of a lean military. Meanwhile, many Americans, frightened
after 9/11, supported the Iraq War as a way to keep the U.S. safe. And
Christian conservatives embraced the good vs. evil, pro-Israel stance of
neoconservative policy. Third, S strategically evaluates moves that the
U.S. made; for S, for example, the surge did not actually work, but
more stability emerged in Iraq as different ethnic factions became
separated from each other.
D. According to S, the Iraq War was a disaster. It stretched
America’s military, taking away resources that could have been used to
find Osama bin-Laden. Yet, Israel got something that it wanted as a
result: disarray among her Arab neighbors. An argument that S did not
really engage, as far as I can recall, is that the Iraq War placed
Israel even more in peril, since it increased the power of Iran by
allowing Iraq to serve as a proxy for Iranian interests.
E. For S, neoconservatism is concerned about the security of Israel.
Even its staunch Cold War policy is rooted in that concern, since the
U.S.S.R. tended to support Arabs over the Israelis. S acknowledges,
though, that there is more to neoconservatism that that.
Neoconservatives supported a strong U.S. military intervention in the
former Yugoslavia during the Clinton Administration, and neoconservatism
also maintains stances on domestic issues, such as welfare.
F. S is sensitive to any charges of anti-Semitism that may be
launched against his book. He emphatically denies that he is saying
there was a Jewish conspiracy to get the U.S. into Iraq, for he observes
that many Jews opposed the Iraq War. Moreover, S does not exactly
present the U.S. government as a Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG), for
the neoconservatives were long on the margins prior to the Presidency of
George W. Bush. Even under Bush II, the traditional national security
and intelligence apparatus was critical of the Iraq War, preferring more
multilateralism and a focus on stability in the Middle East. The
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), long a bogeyman of right-wing
conspiracy theorists, also had reservations about the Iraq War.
G. S largely depicts the Likud party in Israel, and neoconservatives,
as supporting Israel’s security as a nation, her protection, if you
will. At the same time, S argues that Israel in 2006 was acting
aggressively rather than defensively in its invasion of Lebanon, for
Lebanon had coveted water-supplies.
H. Near the end of the Iraq War, S demonstrates, neoconservatives
were calling on the U.S. to take an aggressive stance against Iran,
going so far as to bomb the country. That, of course, is an issue that
remains relevant today. S probably regards such a move as a mistake. At
the same time, he can understand why Israel would be apprehensive about a
nuclear-armed Iran. He thinks that Ahmadinejad has been incorrectly
understood to say that Israel should be wiped off the map, but S still
acknowledges that a powerful Iran could provide more support to the
Palestinians, which would trouble Israel. Although S understands this,
he seems to scorn the idea that Israel should get everything she wants
and have hegemony.
I. S is open to the possibility that neoconservatives believe that
their support for Israel is perfectly consistent with America’s
well-being. As S observes, the U.S. government since its founding has
had people who believe that partisanship towards a certain
nation—-Britain or France—-is not only good for its own sake but serves
the interests of the United States. S disputes, however, that
neoconservative policy is the only way to help the U.S. Could not one
argue, after all, that the U.S. would want to be on the Arabs’ good
side, with all the oil the Arabs have? This analysis may be a little
dated, since the U.S. now has some alternative sources of energy
(fracking), but S makes this point in evaluating the historical stance
of neoconservatism.