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Podhoretz defends Bush on Israel
Despite the Bush teams’s now explicit renunciation of their supposed former policy of demanding actual abandonment of terrorism by the Palestinians before the U.S. would help them achieve a state, despite Bush’s pushing the Israelis into an ever more untenable position, Norman Podhoretz is still standing with his man Bush and Bush’s twin brain and insisting that Bush has not reneged. I haven’t read the article, but I searched it for the word “Rice.” Podhoretz makes no reference to Secretary of State Rice’s stunning statement to reporters last fall that the administration had dropped its demand that the Palestinians give up terrorism, because as long as that demand was in place, the peace process could not move forward. Podhoretz’s failure to mention the single most important fact showing that the administration has indeed reneged on its prior commitments reminds me of a previous Podhoretz article. In 1996, in a piece called “Neoconservatism: a Eulogy,” he wrote that there was no longer any difference between neoconservatism and conservatism on any issue, and that the two had therefore merged into one, undifferentiated, conservative movement. In that article, he did not so much as mention immigration, the largest issue separating neocons from other conservatives. Once upon a time, Norman Podhoretz was famous for his intellectual honesty.
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