David Lane

Am I the only one who believes the term “Neocon” has been grossly distorted by those who, for a host of reasons, opposed the strike against Iran? “Neocon” used to be code for “Jew” or Jew-friendly, I suppose. Even for those who intend no ethnic or religious slur, the implication is that everyone who supported the strike is an over-the-top, jingoistic, military-industrial-complex, nation-building fanatic who doesn’t give a da** about anything else—including domestic policy. The further implication is that we’re all Bush/Cheney establishment elitist squishes who have abandoned Trump’s defining campaign promise of no foreign wars. Well, the large majority of us reject that generalizing smear. We do not favor forever wars. We do believe in the pragmatic preservation of our national security through offensive military action when necessary—but always as quickly, effectively, lethally, and non-permanently as possible. This is who Trump is. He is not an isolationist. We don’t support military action for sport, for our own amusement, or for a gratuitous demonstration of power. We genuinely believed—and still believe—that Iran was on a fast track to nuclear capabilities and missile delivery systems. That is why we, along with almost all Republicans and other sane patriots, opposed Obama’s sham Iran nuclear deal. We are being consistent. We did not favor, and we did not get, a forever war with Iran. We did not put boots on the ground, and we still do not have boots on the ground. You can rightly criticize Trump’s fits and starts, the bizarre MOU, and the rest of the execution. But he did not violate America First principles by striking Iran, and it is simply false to claim he intended to embroil us in a permanent quagmire there. Because we think it is clear that the murderous jihadist Iranian regime cannot be allowed to possess nuclear weapons—mutually assured destruction does not reliably deter religious zealots who believe their eternal reward is assured by murdering infidels—and because we believed Iran was well on the way to acquiring them, we concluded it was imperative to take out their nuclear program. You can argue until you’re blue in the face that we were factually wrong about Iran’s intentions and capabilities. What you cannot do is extrapolate from our support for the strikes that we are “Neocons,” whatever that term is supposed to mean. To the Woke Right it has come to mean people who dance to Israel’s whims and subordinate America’s interests to Israel’s. I admittedly and unapologetically support Israel and the Jewish people. But I would never advocate acting against America’s national interests. I do not believe we were duped or coerced by Israel into attacking Iran. We acted because we believed—and continue to believe—it was in our national interest to eliminate their nuclear capability. Period. The fact that some of you are convinced there was no serious threat leads you to assume we had ulterior motives—chiefly obedience to Israel. It is hard for us to understand your indifference in light of the Iranian regime’s nature and its half-century of direct and proxy terrorism, along with the clear evidence of its nuclear program and the herculean efforts to conceal it. And while this does not apply to everyone who opposed the strikes, some of you recognize that Iran posed an existential threat to the United States and the wider West yet appear not to care. Do those malefactors hate Israel and Jews more than they love America? Are they in bed with foreign interests as some have alleged? I am speaking only to those for whom the shoe fits and I believe this is a minority of those who opposed the Iran action. But are some of the rest of you opponents really incapable of distinguishing between establishment, war-friendly elitists and those of us who simply want to protect the security, liberty, and prosperity of the United States? Some of those loosely throwing around the term “Neocon” are people I consider friends. I have to believe they are not using it in bad faith and are not anti-Israel, but are genuinely frustrated by what they see as an abandonment of America First – as much as I disagree with them. I implore them to reconsider. We are not warmongers. We simply disagree—radically—on what America’s national security interests require. We believe we are the true champions of America First because there will be no America as we know it if Iran or any other jihadist regime acquires deliverable nuclear weapons. Why is that so difficult to understand? Why insist on conflating our position with that of the war aggressors of yesterday? Some have framed this as a choice between fighting communism at home and striking Iran. That is a false choice. Had we gone in, not vacillated in the prosecution of the war, and finished the job decisively, the picture today would look very different. But failures in execution and messaging do not retroactively invalidate the decision to act. Moreover, if some of you had not begun undermining Trump the moment the operation started, we might not have been shellacked this week. Indeed, your relentless naysaying, personal attacks and opposition contributed to much of Trump’s vacillation. The relentless charges that Trump and the rest of us were warmongers and Israeli puppets damaged the coalition. As it turns out, the bad-faith podcasters and other cynics did more harm than I expected. This is not to say these grifters are solely responsible for our electoral defeat. We all bear responsibility. But it was a real factor in the magnitude of the loss. Worse, it fractured the conservative coalition, at least for a time. Maybe MAGA as a personality-driven movement was never going to outlast Trump. But MAGA largely represented mainstream conservatism, and the end of MAGA should not mean the end of the conservative coalition. Preserving that coalition will be far harder if people who claim to be conservative and America First continue attacking from inside in ways that aid Democrats and anti-American interests. Not everyone who opposed the Iran strikes is in league with Tucker and his circle. But too many are making their work easier rather than harder. We need to reunite, or one side will eventually purge the other. For that to happen constructively there must be intellectual honesty on both sides. From our side, that means acknowledging that not everyone who opposed the strikes is antisemitic or reckless though too many are. From the other side, it means acknowledging that those of us who favored the strikes did so in good faith, pursuing what we believed were America’s interests. Instead, we mostly get caustic insults. Absent some reconciliation among people of good faith who agree on most other things, the conservative movement is headed for continued trouble. As noted, there are bad-faith actors among those who opposed the Iran strikes, and they inflicted outsized damage. Their motives should be obvious from how quickly they turned on Trump on issues having nothing to do with Iran, abandoned conservatism itself, and aligned with the left. Those of you who opposed the strikes in good faith should wake up to the nature of the Tucker movement and separate from it—yesterday.