Word: rightnesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Consider his analysis of the Middle East. "The Shah's Iran" is "the only stable right-wing country in the area." Israel, with its powerful army, has become a neutral nation. And Egypt has once again swung over into the Soviet camp. Perhaps it would be spiteful to point out to General Sir John that, despite his access to top-secret documents, he has missed the basic point of recent U.S. military policy in the Eastern Mediterranean--to keep Israel as a friendly naval and air base in light of the instability of both Greece and Turkey...
...WELL BE RIGHT. But his eagerness to prove a point blinds him to several important factors on which NATO political leaders (if not their military counterparts, Hackett inadvertently suggests) base their thinking. First, he assumes that generals on both sides will exercise self-restraint in the use of tactical nuclear weapons. No fighting force in history has ever believed it should not make full use of all available weapons, and battlefield nuclear equipment is abundantly available to both sides. Hackett avoids considering what effect the use of tactical nukes would have on the land war, on international public opinion...
...Right or wrong-and they have been both-left-wing intellectuals have never had much luck in America. The Depression seemed ready to trigger enduring class hatred. But radicals were mistaken about the benignity of Joseph Stalin and the possibilities of domestic Marxism. Their revolution was postponed. Then along came World War II, the postwar boom and millions of house-owning, boat-buying, TV-consuming workers, downtrodden all the way to the bank...
Even when things again went badly for capitalism, the left could not capitalize on its opportunities. The anti-Establishment was right about the Viet Nam War; it proved a conflict that could not be won, or lost, with honor. But radical rhetoric kept linking dislike of the war with condemnation of the whole American system. Perspectives were blurred; hard-liners compared the U.S. to Hitler's Germany and listeners turned away. Today, as Jimmy Carter acknowledges the country faces recession, popular distrust of big corporations and the existence of a sizable underclass. And still most Americans can imagine...
Perceived in that manner, the new pessimism seems only the old optimism turned upside down. Surely a better way to explain the neoconservatives' views is not to deal with their motives but to measure their reasons for turning right against the political and social reality that Americans have been confronting for the past 15 years. Steinfels' provocative volume might have been better served by getting down to more tough cases. He repeatedly reprimands his subjects for not blaming society's weaknesses (self-indulgence and galloping consumerism, for instance) on the free-enterprise system. He might have pursued...