Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | M | Middle East Policy

The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel.

Article Excerpt
The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, by Stephen J. Sniegoski. Light in the Darkness Publications, 2008. 440 pages, including notes and index. $24.95, hardcover.

In this well-written, well-organized book, Stephen J. Sniegoski makes some compelling arguments about neoconservatives: (1) they were the driving force behind the Bush administration's war in Iraq, (2) their motivation was based on their belief that American interests in the Middle East are virtually identical with the Israeli Likud party's beliefs about Israeli interests in the region, and (3) these mutual interests lie in destabilizing Israel's adversaries and reconfiguring the environment rather than in the traditional American policy of stabilizing the Middle East. Others have plowed this same ground, but Sniegoski has marshaled a prodigious amount of evidence and added some new elements. He notes that these arguments have often elicited charges of anti-Semitism, particularly from neoconservatives themselves.

He points out, however, that they sometimes acknowledge being a largely Jewish group, and he dismisses the charge of anti-Semitism by noting that many Jewish Americans have made his basic arguments.

The author provides a good definition of neoconservatives: primarily Jewish individuals who began as liberals and leftists but migrated to the right in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They began to see McGovern and Carter Democrats and the Nixon and Ford Republicans as insufficiently devoted to anti-communism, military strength, interventionism and Israel and gravitated first to Senator Henry Jackson (D-WA) and then to the Reagan Republicans. Again, Sniegoski is...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!