Self-hating neocon

Hawkish AEI fellow Joshua Muravchik is getting far too much press. I first picked up his radical militant agenda when Democracy Now! had him on as token wing-nut to debate Kucinich and McGovern last week. He had a temper tantrum during the interview, berating his opponents and Amy Goodman (or as he called her, "Miss Moderator").

Today he resurrected the "smoking gun mushroom cloud" in an LA Times opinion column featuring the screeching lede "WE MUST bomb Iran."

Wouldn't such a U.S. air attack on Iran inflame global anti-Americanism? Wouldn't Iran retaliate in Iraq or by terrorism? Yes, probably. That is the price we would pay. But the alternative is worse.

With Foreign Ministry in Tehran signaling its openness to negotiations, it seems the alternative is not nuclear holocaust, but diplomacy. Not if hard-liners like Muravchik have their way though--they'll dismiss diplomatic overtures because they'd rather exacerbate global instability and security, squandering any semblance of good-will the U.S. has left from the international community all in the name of regime change and regional dominance.

All this under the noble guise of "spreading democracy," the topic of a CSPAN Hudson Institute discussion aired tonight. Democracy is something Muravchik assumes is "good for everyone," though only if you vote for his guy, of course, so the Palestinian vote for "war and terror" (not a vote of no confidence for leadership hobbled by Israel's stranglehold) was illegit. Ariel Cohen of Heritage criticized Muravchik's "one-size-fits-all democratization policies." You know someone's out in right field when a Heritage fellow seems moderate in comparison. However Lee Smith, another panelist from the Hudson Institute also had his moments, remarking condescendingly, "Arabs need to fight it out themselves," and dismissing ramifications of anti-American sentiment in the region.

Muravchik's a pretty artless revisionist, using the end of Pinochet's regime in Chile as an example of democratic victory (of course he was "our bastard") and touting the U.S. as the infallible beacon of democracy. He says "power is gained or held by the use or threat of force" in the Middle East. And how does this differ from U.S. foreign policy under neoconservative rule?

I wondered how he got to be such an ideologue. Turns out he's a radical turn-coat like David Horowitz (swung from New Left to NewsMax)--he's the former leader of the Young People's Socialist League. I think it's telling that he characterizes socialism as the "faith" he was raised by. Fundamentalists are fundamentalists. The difference is that these two demagogues are legitimated by mainstream attention.