A Left hook to the leviathan

Three writers hunt down the mentors, manipulators and warmongers of the American Right. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones keeps score

If America admitted to having a Left, the books under review would be indications of its creed. Their authors challenge the current US Administration, its imperialism and the neoconservatism judged to be the driving force behind both.

Anne Norton is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and her contribution to the demolition of conservatism is a book about the Straussians. Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was a Jew who fled Germany to settle in the US. He was a political theorist of some renown, and through the Bodleian Library catalogue one can track down his books in several Oxford colleges and other libraries. Indicatively, however, they are not concentrated in the Vere Harmsworth, the Oxford library devoted specifically to the study of America. For only in recent years have the Straussians been recognised as a force in American politics. Norton looks at the how and why of Strauss's transformational resurrection and its consequences.

She spends some time on the genealogy of the Straussians, distinguishing between those who were Strauss's students at the University of Chicago and those - including the author herself and policymakers Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky - who were taught by his students. She argues that a cohesive Straussian neoconservative network exerts an appreciable influence on current US policy.

Norton depicts the posthumous Strauss as a kind of Karl Marx of the Right, spreading his ideological tentacles through the American polity. His "truth squads" roam US campuses, attacking and belittling any who disagree with their views. In one unkind reference to the followers of this refugee from the Holocaust, she says they have had the reputation of being "intellectual brownshirts".

She suggests that Straussian neoconservatives may be distinguished from earlier neoconservatives because they believe in Big Government, or at least in its security and police dimensions. They are also "neo-neo" in that Wolfowitz and his like no longer deem it necessary to defend America's role in the Vietnam War. They furthermore embrace the idea of an American empire. Rejecting Woodrow Wilson's vision, they see Theodore Roosevelt as the model exponent of "big stick" foreign policy.

Norton's Straussians are intolerant of Palestinians and passionate devotees of the cause of a greater Israel. But, she points out, Strauss himself took inspiration from Arab scholarship and distinguished between "Israel" and the "Jewish state".

Norton's attack on the Straussians is vigorous and wide ranging. She ridicules their faith in the doctrine of "nature", with its assertion of the authority of men over women; she accuses them of infiltrating and subverting the bioethical establishment; she has little sympathy with their attack on Prozac. She is scathing on Wolfowitz's post-9/11 strategy, which included plans to invade several Middle Eastern countries. She doesn't spare Strauss himself either, noting that he was an early supporter of Hitler and dismissive of non-Aryan aspects of American culture.

No less critical of the American Right is Anatol Lieven, a former correspondent for The Times who is now attached to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC. He has written books on the decline of the Soviet empire, and, in the book under review, turns to the weaknesses of the American leviathan.

Lieven conceives of US foreign policy as being in part the product of what he terms the "American thesis", which has to do with democracy, liberty and the rule of law. The American thesis has no place for imperialism, the supporters of which "are relatively few in number".

But Lieven is more concerned with what he calls the American antithesis.

The antithesis does embrace imperialism. Lieven believes that an overlapping cohort of policymakers and neoconservatives promotes that antithetical doctrine, and that the preferences and actions of this ruling clique have shaped our perceptions of US foreign policy.

Lieven's American antithesis stems from cultural conservatism and paranoia rooted in the defeat of the Confederacy. It has produced an American nationalism that is anachronistic in the post-nationalist modern world and has made the US of 2004 a throwback to the Europe of 1904. Its religiosity invites comparison not with the rest of the industrialised world, but rather with "developing" nations such as Mexico and Turkey. The antithesis breeds negativity and a contempt for foreigners.

Lieven's Southern-based American antithesis rests on a sense of "righteous victimhood" reminiscent of the moods in 1930s Germany, in Serbia on the brink of a later genocide and in present-day Israel. For Lieven, it is hardly a coincidence that the neoconservatives side with Israel. At the dawn of the current century, the overwhelming majority of American Jews were still liberals and Democrats. But, usurping the ground this majority had never claimed and insisting that only Jews had rights in Palestine, in stepped the leading Bush Administration adviser Richard Perle and fellow members of the private neoconservative foreign-policy ginger group Project for the New American Century (PNAC). According to Lieven, the super-chauvinistic dogma associated with neoconservative intellectuals amounts to a new trahison des clercs.

For Lieven, capitalism in the interest of a few is the driving force behind current American policy. He thinks it ironic that the nation's middle-class majority, hooked on the culture of the antithesis, lines up behind policies that are undermining its own welfare. He points to a stagnation in median family income and to a widening income gap between the middle classes and the very rich. His book is a wake-up call for the oppressed bourgeois masses.

Similarly challenging, but from a more focused perspective, is the book by David Ray Griffin, an emeritus professor at the Claremont School of Theology in California, about the 9/11 Commission Report. Published at the end of 2004, the report had been expected to yield an objective perspective on the infamous terrorist attack, but Griffin calls it a cover-up.

Griffin identifies two conspiracy theories about 9/11. The first posits the idea that there has been an exclusively al-Qaeda plot to destroy America.

Huge attention has been paid to this speculation, and Griffin does not comment on it beyond labelling it the "official conspiracy theory". He concentrates, instead, on the second theory - that there has been a conspiracy by the Bush Administration to cover up its motives and reactions in connection with 9/11.

Griffin issues a disclaimer - "I do not try to explain 'what really happened'" - that allows him to stop short of promoting a third conspiracy theory, that the Bush Administration plotted the 9/11 attack by manipulating the terrorists. But he has written an earlier book comparing 9/11 with Pearl Harbor, and his interpretation is not far from that of those who dwell on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's concern that the question was how to "manoeuvre" the Japanese into "firing the first shot".

Griffin concentrates on discrediting the commission. He claims that the White House starved it of funds to impair its mission. He questions the integrity of its executive director, Philip Zelikow, whom he sees as too closely aligned to the Bush Administration. An associate of President George W. Bush retainers such as Condoleezza Rice, Richard Cheney and Wolfowitz, the executive director is to Griffin little more than the cheerleader of a loyal retinue.

According to Griffin, the commission failed to pursue leads and to ask questions. He complains that in spite of intelligence reports to the contrary, the commission accepted the White House's contention that the 9/11 outrage was a surprise. He maintains that Air Force strike planes specifically assigned to intercept hijacked aircraft were given stand-down orders on the eve of 9/11 and that Zelikow's team did not ask why.

Griffin observes that commission staff included six former Federal Bureau of Investigation employees. He thinks this was one reason why they did not properly investigate the bureau's lapses. When the FBI whistleblower Sibel Edwards tried to point to deficiencies, attempts were made to bully her into silence. Zelikow's commission ignored both her evidence and the bullying.

Griffin advances possible reasons why steps were not taken to pre-empt 9/11 and why a general cover-up ensued, culminating in the Zelikow-dominated commission. In support of his contention that Bushite defence policy is a cover for aggression, he refers to an autumn 2000 PNAC document drawn up with the assistance of some of his favourite villains, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and James Woolsey. It called for a "missile defence shield", the "purpose" of which, in Griffin's paraphrase, "is to prevent other countries from being able to deter the US from launching a first strike against them". The same document urged an increase in the military budget to enhance America's pre-eminence and noted that this could be more quickly achieved if there occurred "some catastrophic event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The events of 9/11, according to Griffin, were a gift to those who wanted to militarise space. It helped the advocates of perpetual war for perpetual oil profits. All too conveniently, in the words of Rumsfeld, "an emergency exists in this country to increase defence spending, to dip into Social Security, if necessary". Little wonder, in this light, that a cover-up took place.

As one might expect, different authors display different weaknesses. One of Norton's is her fondness for short sentences unsuited to nuance. Lieven deploys the absolute adjective: those with whom he disagrees suffer from "total ignorance". Griffin is an exemplar of the paranoid style in American political writing.

Collectively, too, the three authors might be faulted. For example, they fail to address the American tradition of anti-imperialism. The admonishing finger of Thomas Jefferson instructs even neoconservatives. Speaking in Latvia on the eve of this year's VE Day commemorations, Bush condemned the Yalta agreement and urged vigilance against "the iron rule of another empire". Lieven at least acknowledges the popular appeal of the anti-imperialist tradition. But none of the authors asks what exactly happened to it in policy terms. Did it just disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union? Or do we see today a kind of anti-imperialism manque, an oil tanker that cannot turn?

But the three books under review also exhibit a collective strength. They unpick the mysteries and contradictions of modern American neoconservatism.

They show how our leaders are using the martyrs of Islam to enrich the rich and arm the mighty.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is professor of American history, Edinburgh University.