[Peace-discuss] Joshua Muravchik

Wed Nov 15 09:47:04 CST 2006

To elaborate on the article from Foreign Policy
recently disseminated by Carl, below is the entry from
Right Web about Joshua Muravchik, who participated in
a spirited debate on Democracy Now today.

It's important also to note that he attempts to
identify critics of the neocons with anti-Semitism:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3602

The price of this success is that we are subjected to
relentless obloquy. “Neocon” is now widely synonymous
with “ultraconservative” or, for some, “dirty Jew.” A
young Egyptian once said to me, “‘Neoconservative’
sounds to our ears like ‘terrorist’ sounds to yours.” 

The neoconservative movement has always tried to
appropriate the historical suffering of the Jewish
people in order to support its claim to moral
rectitude in what it sees as a Manichean world,
beginning with the 1960s backlash to Black Power. But
its also important to understand, as Carl has
emphasized, that there is an unbroken continuum from
neoconservative to neoliberal perspectives, and in
fact liberals have been in general more supportive of
Israeli expansion and aggression--including the
Kucinich wing. It remains to be seen whether Rahm
Emmanuel--a hardcore Zionist--will play the
Israel/anti-Semitism card in order to undermine the
movement for withdrawal.

DG

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1302

Few of the pundits, essayists, and government insiders
who define themselves as “neoconservatives” can claim
as lasting an influence on the development of this
political tendency as Joshua Muravchik, a resident
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in
Washington, DC. 

Muravchik, former chairman of the Young People's
Socialist League, has been a perennial player in the
neoconservative advocacy world since as far back as
the mid-1970s, when he served as the director of the
Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a hardline
Democratic Party pressure group led by, among others,
Penn Kemble and Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson that aimed
to fight the influence of anti-war elements within the
party in the wake of the Vietnam War. Muravchik, like
many neocons, shifted to the Republican Party after
being largely ignored by his erstwhile Democratic
colleagues. In the early 1980s, Muravchik and a group
of like-minded hardline foreign policy elites tried to
build on the momentum of Ronald Reagan's presidential
election victory by forming the Committee for the Free
World, a group led by the likes of Midge Decter (who
is married to Commentary editor-at-large Norman
Podhoretz) and Donald Rumsfeld. The group was devoted
to promoting freedom “in the world of ideas” and
opposing the influence of those in and outside the
United States “who have made themselves the enemies of
the democratic order.” 

More recently, Muravchik has been associated with a
string of hawkish pressure groups supporting President
George W. Bush's war on terrorism and interventionist
policies in the Middle East. He signed multiple
letters published by the Project for the New American
Century (PNAC) advocating a broadened antiterror
fight; he supported the creation in 2002 of the
Coalition for Democracy in Iran, a group spearheaded
by Michael Ledeen and Morris Amitay that advocates
regime change in Iran; he was an advisory board member
of the now-defunct Committee for the Liberation of
Iraq; he is associated with the hawkish, pro-Israel
think tanks, the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy and the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs; he joined a plank of other neocons in forming
a revived version of the Cold War Committee on the
Present Danger; and he and a group of neoconservatives
serve as “international sponsors” of the Cambridge,
England-based Henry Jackson Society, an organization
that promotes a “forward strategy” aimed at assisting
democratization across the globe. 

His leading position in the neoconservative faction
was demonstrated in November 2006 with the publication
in Foreign Policy magazine of a “Memorandum” from
Muravchik to “My Fellow Neoconservatives.” Lamenting
the bad rap neoconservatives have gotten since the
Iraq War degraded into a bloody counterinsurgency
campaign, Muravchik attempted to revive the spirit of
his fellow neocons, many of whom he claimed have
attempted to distance themselves from the label.
“Where is the joie de combat?” pleaded Muravchik. “The
essential tenets of neoconservatism—belief that world
peace is indivisible, that ideas are powerful, that
freedom and democracy are universally valid, and that
evil exists and must be confronted—are as valid today
as when we first began. That is why we must continue
to fight. But we need to sharpen our game.” 

In outlining a new approach, Muravchik listed a number
of mistakes neoconservatives had made, a list which
notably did not include the group's efforts to drive
the country into an ill-advised war. Instead,
according to Muravchik, neoconservatives are guilty
“of poorly explaining neoconservatism;” of being “glib
about how Iraqis would greet liberation;” of
supporting “the revolution in military strategy that
our neocon hero, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
has championed” and which “has left our armed forces
short on troops and resources;” of failing to foresee
the difficulties in democratizing the Middle East,
where recent elections have seen the emergence of
radical Islamists; and of insufficiently influencing
Bush's disastrous public diplomacy efforts, since
after all “no group other than neocons is likely to
figure out how to do that.” 

Muravchik's suggestions for the future were
unsurprising: Neoconservatives “need to pave the way
intellectually now and be prepared to defend the
action” when Bush bombs Iran's nuclear facilities,
which “make no mistake” he will have to do “before
leaving office.” Also topping the list: “Recruit Joe
Lieberman for 2006.” Arguing that “twice in the last
quarter-century we had the good fortune to see
presidents [Reagan and Bush the younger] elected who
were sympathetic to our understanding of the world,”
Muravchik implored his comrades to begin preparing for
the 2008 presidential campaign, promoting “Sen. John
McCain [or] former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani,”
both of whom “look like the kind of leaders who could
prosecute the war on terror vigorously.” He added: “As
for vice presidential candidates, how about
Condoleezza Rice or even Joe Lieberman? Lieberman says
he's still a Democrat. But there is no place for him
in that party. Like every one of us, he is a refugee.
He's already endured the rigors of running for the
White House. In 2008, he deserves another chance—this
time with a worthier running mate than Al Gore.” 

This was not the first time Muravchik devoted his
rhetorical skills to trying to revive the
neoconservative movement. He also played a leading
role in championing a new interventionist crusade for
the United States as the Cold War began to wind down
and the Soviet Union crumbled, an event that wreaked
havoc on the neoconservative anti-communist consensus
that had been in place since before the election of
Ronald Reagan. As scholar John Ehrman writes: “The
neoconservatives' view of the world assumed a stable,
malevolent Soviet Union that was immune from drastic
change” (The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals
and Foreign Affairs 1945-1994, p. 173). With the rise
to power of Mikhail Gorbachev and the ensuing warming
relations between the two superpowers,
neoconservatives experienced a sharp decline in their
influence in the Reagan administration and a rupture
within their own ranks. The neoconservatives entered
“a period of increasing confusion,” writes Ehrman,
which was characterized by “an intellectual failure”
(p. 173). Lacking an anointed enemy, some
neoconservatives, like Irving Kristol, began
reconsidering whether the United States needed to
undertake an aggressive role in global affairs, while
others sought to find renewed justification for
continued military mobilization—some by attempting to
rehabilitate the Soviet threat, others by envisioning
new threats and missions for the United States. 

Among the second group were people like Washington
Post columnist Charles Krauthammer and Muravchik, who
championed a new crusade, one aimed at capitalizing on
the country's position as the lone superpower to
aggressively promote democracy and American values as
a replacement for militant anti-communism. In his
seminal 1990 Foreign Affairs article, “The Unipolar
Moment,” Krauthammer wrote that if “America wants
stability, it will have to create it.” The alternative
to “such a robust and difficult interventionism,” he
argued, “is chaos.” For his part, Muravchik argued
that if “communism soon completes its demise, U.S.
foreign policy still should make the promotion of
democracy its main objective” (cited in Stefan Halper
and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The
Neoconservatives and the Global Order, p. 79). 

For many first-generation neoconservatives like Irving
Kristol, these ideas represented “a dangerous
manifestation of Wilsonianism,” as the conservative
scholars Halper and Clarke characterize the dissent in
their 2004 book America Alone. Instead, Kristol
advocated a new realism based on the prevailing
circumstances in the international system. Arguing
that there was no longer any “balance of power for us
to worry about,” efforts at “monitoring and
maintaining a balance of power among other nations,
large and small, in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and
elsewhere 
 would make the United States the world's
policeman.” “We are simply not going to be that kind
of imperial power,” he concluded (cited in Halper and
Clarke, America Alone, p. 77). Likewise, Robert
Tucker, a longtime contributor to neoconservative
journals, warned against undertaking a new mission to
impose freedom, promoting instead “a framework of
stability and moderation within which democratic
institutions may take root and grow” (cited in Ehrman,
p. 181). Presciently, however, although he opposed
these new trends in neoconservative discourse, Kristol
recognized that they would appeal “not only to
liberals but to many conservatives who are
ideologically adrift in the post-Cold War era” (cited
in Halper and Clarke, America Alone, p. 76). In the
late 1990s, neoconservative-led groups like PNAC
successfully began to exploit the appeal of their
democracy rhetoric to enlist various factions,
including many liberal internationalists and Christian
Right leaders, behind their appeals for a more
interventionist U.S. foreign policy, creating
formidable coalitions of elites that proved invaluable
as neoconservatives began to push for war in Iraq
after 9/11. 

For Muravchik and other neoconservative hardliners,
people like Kristol and Tucker had ceased being
neoconservatives by the end of the 1980s. Instead,
they were, according to Muravchik, conservative
neo-realists or “right isolationists.” Around the
ideas promoted by Muravchik and Krauthammer a new era
of neoconservatism began to emerge, one spearheaded by
what Halper and Clarke call a “Young Turk faction,”
which grew to include the offspring of many of the
earliest neoconservatives, including William Kristol
(son of Irving), Robert Kagan (son of Donald), John
Podhoretz (son of Norman), and Daniel Pipes (son of
Richard). Among this faction's early agenda items
were: 1) aggressively advance democracy across the
globe as the “touchtone of a new ideological American
foreign policy,” as Krauthammer phrased it in his 1989
article “Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World,”
which appeared in the Irving Kristol-founded National
Interest; and 2) in the aftermath of the Gulf War,
promote the idea that rogue states equipped with
nuclear weapons were America's new anointed
enemies—or, as Krauthammer defined them in “The
Unipolar Moment:” “small aggressive states armed with
weapons of mass destruction and possessing the means
to deliver them.” Such states, argued Krauthammer,
“will constitute the greatest single threat to world
security for the rest of our lives.” 

Muravchik is a prolific writer, having published a
number of books, including Heaven on Earth, a 2002
book about the rise and fall of socialism that served
as the basis for a PBS documentary by the same title,
and The Future of the United Nations (2005), which
argues for a dramatically reformed and less
influential United Nations. He is also author of
hundreds of articles for a variety of publications,
including Foreign Policy, Commentary, the National
Review, and all the major U.S. newspapers. 

Affiliations

Henry Jackson Society: International Sponsor 
Committee on the Present Danger: Member 
American Enterprise Institute: Resident Scholar
(1987-current) 
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs:
Member, Board of Advisers 
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq: Member, Advisory
Board 
Project for the New American Century Statement:
Signatory to Multiple Open Letters 
Institute of World Politics: Adjunct Professor
(1992-current) 
Washington Institute on Near East Policy: Adjunct
Scholar (1986-current) 
Coalition for a Democratic Majority: Executive
Director (1977-1979) 
World Affairs Journal: Member, Editorial Board 
Journal of Democracy: Member, Editorial Board 
Orbis: Member, Editorial Board 
American Committee for Peace in Chechnya: Member 
Government Service

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights: Member, Maryland
State Advisory Committee (1985-1997) 
Commission on Broadcasting to the People’s Republic of
China: Member (1992) 
Education

City College of New York: B.A. 
Georgetown University: Ph.D. in International
Relations 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sources 

Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,
Advisory Board Profile: Joshua Muravchik,
http://www.jinsa.org/about/adboard/adboard.html?documentid=752.

American Enterprise Institute: Joshua Muravchik,
http://www.aei.org/scholars/scholarID.42,filter.all/scholar.asp.

Joshua Muravchik, “The FP Memo: Urgent: Operation
Comeback,” Foreign Policy, November/December 2006. 

Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The
Neoconservatives and the Global Order, Cambridge
University Press, 2004. 

John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism:
Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs 1945-1994, Yale
University Press, 1995. 

Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign
Affairs, Winter 1990/91. 

Charles Krauthammer, “Universal Dominion: Toward a
Unipolar World,” National Interest, Winter 1989/90.

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