As so often with the neo-cons,
however, there is less there than meets the eye, especially in finding
any serious intellectual content in the rise of men like the former
Deputy Defense Secretary and now World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz or
UN Ambassador-designate John Bolton.

Whatever their other derivation, the
genus also traces to more banal, seedier origins, curling back through
closed-door politics where so much of U.S. history happens. The neo-con
coup d'etat after 9/11, the war on Iraq, the fear and loathing as
foreign policy-all that and more started as well nearly seventy years
ago in the wooded curving inlets and gentle fog of the far Northwest.

Nineteen thirty-eight was the year
Henry Martin Jackson, an ambitious 26-year-old Democrat fresh out of
the University of Washington Law School, was elected prosecuting
attorney for Snohomish County along the shore of Puget Sound north of
Seattle. As usual, few outside Washington state noticed the obscure
local vote. But it launched a fateful political career, and ultimately
led to the U.S. invasion and bloody occupation of Iraq.

Jackson rose rapidly from the
courthouse in his hometown Everett. Making a name for himself chasing
San Juan Island-skirting bootleggers and lumberjack camp gamblers, he
shot on to Congress in 1940. He served five terms in the House, broken
by a stint as a World War II GI, and by 1952, had gained the Senate,
where "Scoop," as he was called from his days as a paperboy and cub
reporter, became a national force.

A middle-of-the-road, pro-labor
Democrat on domestic issues and an early champion of environmental
causes, Jackson was chairman for nearly two decades of the Interior
Committee (later Energy and Natural Resources) and sat on the
Government Operations Committee and Joint Committee on Atomic Energy --
all major fiefdoms in dispensing federal money and wielding influence
in politics and policy. One of Capitol Hill's more vigorous
legislators, he was a main author and driving force of the legislation
creating the Environmental Protection Agency, major wilderness
preservation and other landmark acts. With another local prosecutor
raised to Senate power, Seattle's Warren Magnuson, Jackson also saw to
it that generous appropriations and contracts were sluiced to his home
state. "Scoop" especially would be known scathingly in congressional
corridors as the "Senator from Boeing" for being on-call to the
increasingly powerful, increasingly corrupt corporate giant.

But it was in national security that
Jackson's impact was deepest. The hawks' hawk, he was to the right of
many in both parties. Not even the massive retaliation strategy and
roving CIA interventions of the Eisenhower '50s were tough enough for
him. Perched on the mighty Armed Services Committee as well as his
other bases of power, he went on over the next decade to goad the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations, urging the Vietnam War, fatter
military budgets, stronger support of Israel in the Middle East and a
more aggressive foreign policy in general.

It was then, 40 years ago, that
Jackson began to be linked directly, if furtively, to some of the
uglier and little-known origins of the war on Iraq. Overseeing the
CIA's "black budget" for covert operations and interventions from a
subcommittee of Armed Services, he was one of a handful of senators who
gave a nod to two U.S.-backed coups in Iraq, one in 1963 and again in
1968. Those plots brought Saddam Hussein to power amid bloodbaths in
which the CIA, exacting the price for its support, handed Saddam and
his Baath Party cohorts lists of supposed anti-U.S. Iraqis to be killed.

The result was the systematic murder
of several hundred and as many as several thousand people, in which
Saddam himself participated. Whatever the toll, accounts agree that CIA
killing lists comprised much of Iraq's young educated elite -- doctors,
teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as
military officers and political figures -- Iraqis who would not be
there to oppose Saddam's growing tyranny over ensuing years or to help
rebuild or govern Iraq, as the United States now hopes to do, after the
current war.

By 1969, Jackson was so prominent in
military and national security affairs, and so at odds on those issues
with many in his own party, that newly elected Republican Richard Nixon
thought to name the Washington Democrat his secretary of defense,
though the senator declined the job.

But Snohomish County's favorite son
coveted the White House himself and was soon a sharp critic of Nixon's
arms control and détente. Added to his cold warring was even greater
zeal for Israel, a certainty that the United States should endorse the
Israelis' own hard line- absorbing the West Bank after its conquest in
the 1967 Middle East War, the long-term subjugation of Palestine and an
abiding hostility to Iraq and other Arab states.

As Jackson grew nationally prominent,
he attracted the inevitable ambitious staffers and partisans boarding
his coattails to advance both their own hawkish views and themselves.
Among them was a recent graduate of the University of Southern
California who was fanatic about amassing and projecting U.S. power,
especially on behalf of Israel, and not least about his own strategic
genius. The young New Yorker named Richard Perle became Jackson's chief
assistant from 1969 to 1980. 

I saw these origins firsthand working
in the Senate in the early '70s after resigning from Henry Kissinger's
National Security Council staff over the invasion of Cambodia. Seen
from the inside, Jackson's Senate heft was considerable. Though a
relatively small, unprepossessing figure as politicians go, he usually
did his homework, could be incisive about important details his
colleagues let slip and struck a shrewd balance between conviction and
expedience. Much of his Capitol Hill power derived from his unique
role, which he played well, as a northern Democrat with solid labor
backing and other party credentials yet whose hard-line international
view drew the support of many Republicans and the most conservative
Southerners on either side of the aisle.

His belligerence also exerted-as it
still does, of course-an extortionist pull on Democrats deathly afraid
of appearing "weak" on national defense or in standing up to the
Russians or anyone else. There was no question that "Scoop," albeit
very much a half-educated provincial from the mountains and straits of
the far northwest corner of the continental United States, shrewdly
caught the unease and reflexive combativeness of much of America in
dealing with a planet we knew, and know, so little despite our power.
Still, in the '70s, a more worldly post-Vietnam moderation and
sensibility in the leadership of both parties appeared to have passed
Jackson by, leaving his chauvinism and foreign policy animus marginal,
sometimes looking a bit crazed. 

As for Perle, he was a pear-shaped,
slightly fish-eyed man of self-consciously affected locution, the
too-hungry, too-sly and too-toadying aide familiar in bureaucracies
public and private. His views were patently uninformed, and he wore his
conference-room warrior's zealotry no more gracefully than his
expensive blue pinstriped suits. It seemed obvious that the bellicose
policies he and Jackson embodied were not only wrong for America, but
would also usher Israel into the ruinous isolation I and other admirers
of its brave people most feared. "Scoop" & Co. would remain, I
assumed, an extremist fringe. 

How wrong I was.

Jackson, of course, never got the
White House. With big pro-Israeli money though stolid style, he lost
the presidential nomination in 1976 to Jimmy Carter, who offered a
fresh face in the national weariness in the wake of the Watergate
scandal. But when Jackson died seven years later back in Everett,
ending more than four decades on the national scene, he had spawned a
cult following. With the lavishly financed and much-propagandized
neo-conservatives first taking power under President Reagan, and then
at the senior levels under a new and ignorant George W. Bush, their
throwback foreign policy was, and is, "Scoop" Jackson warmed over --
the red, white and blue, bombs-away dawn of an old era. 

For his part, Perle missed a
long-coveted chance to make presidential policy when Jackson stumbled
in 1976. But the aide promptly moved on to the next coattails in
classic, if banal, Washington, D.C., style. Relentlessly levering the
system he learned under Jackson, he cultivated the media, courted
politicians in both parties and used old allies in the ever more
politically potent pro-Israeli and military-industrial lobbies. By the
Reagan '80s, he was an assistant secretary of defense, veteran of the
now-venerated Jackson tradition of military expansion and a
self-promoted strategist for a Republican president as comfortably as
for a Democratic senator. 

Whatever "Scoop" Jackson's mix of
political principle and opportunism, Perle's politics were largely
himself. And in time-honored Washington tradition, on the way up Perle
gathered his own disciples among similarly grasping men-Wolfowitz,
Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and others who
would go on themselves in the same fashion to become key officials in
the current administration, and who gathered their own coterie from
assorted Reagan regime and Capitol Hill right-wing hacks such as
Bolton. Like Perle, who was appointed in 2001 to chair the Bush
Administration's influential Defense Policy Board, they were all
longtime advocates, years before the Sept. 11 attacks, of pre-emptive
American military invasions in Iraq and elsewhere and of implicit, if
not open, support for the expansionist and repressive policies of their
right-wing counterparts in Israel. Their concerted influence was
decisive in going to war in Iraq.

Grown wealthy in the revolving door
between government and corporate plunder, Perle drew notoriety briefly
in 2003 not only for his intimate ties to Israel but also for his
connections to companies standing to profit obscenely from the war he'd
mongered. When Michigan Congressman John Conyers Jr. and Senator Carl
Levin began to prod Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the
disreputable dealings, Perle angrily resigned from the chairmanship of
the board, though he continued to sit as a full-fledged member of the
pivotal body.  It was a fleeting glimpse of the cronyism,
conflict-of-interest, loyalty-for-sale and general
political-intellectual corruption of the neo-cons in Perle's lineage. 

It was also-history's nice irony-just
the kind of disgrace young "Scoop" Jackson might once have prosecuted
up in Snohomish County.