2002-08-11 - 4:18 a.m.
Just now I was sitting here at the family computer, which has an Internet connection, working on a piece of my Israel travelogue. I haven’t given up on it, some seven months after leaving that country. Except now it’s do-or-die, as it will automatically unsat at the end of next week, I think. It’s the most critical of several incomplete assignments I’m working on from home this week, and I am getting something done on them, although not as much as I should be or need to.
I took a break from my work to surf the Internet for a while. I haven’t checked The New Republic web site for a while, a guilty pleasure, so I went there. It was about what you would expect--that same timid ‘we need a national debate on Iraq’ stuff that is the best Democrats can do these days. "[L]eaving Saddam in power means allowing him to build more weapons in the future--with even greater destructive capacity, and with even more opportunities to shield them from our reach," read the article, titled "First Strike: Four bad reasons to attack Iraq--and one good one."
As I clicked away from the article, the byline caught my eye: Holy shit. The author of this pro-attack job toured Israel alongside me, a member of our Project Interchange group. I knew he’d gotten an intern position at TNR (a position I considered applying for myself) but didn’t know he was writing.
I flashed back to Israel, and I conveniently have my notes in front of me. We had met with the Israel correspondent for the New Republic. One speaker in particular came to mind, Colonel-Dr. Eran Lerman, who in his retirement form the military is the director of operations of the American Jewish Committee in Israel.
Lerman brought up Saddam again and again: Saddam as Hitler, nationalizing industry and resources; Saddam as puppet of Soviet Union, accepting aid and weapons; Saddam as anti-American role model for the Middle East, spreading his ideology and cash around the region; Saddam as anti-Israel leader, sending scud missiles and cash to suicide bombers. Saddam destroyed the CIA’s infrastructure in Northern Iraq in 1986; Saddam "needed resources to stand up to America" in the late ’80s, and borrowed money from the Kuwaitis, then rather pay it back he "took his tank to the bank"--to "the applause of the non-Gulf states," Lerman added. Saddam also had his son shot in the crotch.
The point of all this is not to find the same phrase in my notebook and in the article, although that was the original goal. Rather, I find myself thinking more insidious thoughts. Maybe it's because I recently finished Jimmy Breslin’s The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez, an account of a Mexican immigrant's death at a Brooklyn construction site run by greedy, money-grubbing Jews (the adjectives are in the subtext). This member of our group was actually the only one who is Jewish; he came from Brooklyn, and had lived in Jewish communities all his life. Going to Israel set off a self-identity experience for him.
The New Republic, one of the oldest leftist journals in the United States, has always, I think, been associated with Jews. Their vehement support for Israel has been consistent for the last twenty-something years ("Probably the only thing they have been consistent about," Professor Doenecke grumbled to me once when the subject came up.)
Moreover, The New Republic took to the task of opposition to President Bush. However, on the issue of war with Iraq, they cannot have their cake and eat it too. TNR can’t keep saying "President Bush is right to want to take out Saddam--but for the wrong reasons."
On the remote chance the left is going to manage to stop this war, we’re going to need all the ideological components to be in place. If a sizable portion of the left breaks off--for their own reasons--then the bottom ten percent of high graduates are again off to the Persian Gulf.
I predict the New Republic will eat their cake.
Read the article: First Strike: Four bad reasons to attack Iraq--and one good one
Could I be Jealous that someone I know, in an internship that I considered but didn’t apply to, is now getting published in the New Republic? Maybe. It’s actually not in the magazine itself, but in the "Daily Express," their Internet-only daily column. Ha. Except this person also has already had his article about this experiences in Israel published in the New York Observer, where he has contributed sporadically for the past few years. The New York Observer is a Jew-dominated publication, and in a hysterical and unreasoned editorial a few months ago, denounced Cornel West as an anti-Semite--not in the subtext. It said "Cornel West is anti-Semitic." If they can toss around accusations like that, so can I.
