Thursday, July 28, 2005

The War Is Over, and We . . . by Paul Craig Roberts

June 30, 2005, was the peak of neocon delusion. On that day American Enterprise Institute neocon Karl Zinsmeister posted his article on the AEI online site titled: "The War Is Over, and We Won."

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Activists on right fear waning influence by Ralph Z. Hallow

Yet "government keeps growing," says Mr. Devine, now vice chairman of the American Conservative Union. "Journalistic conservatism is silent about this growth of government, which is especially fueled by neoconservative dreams of empire and which threatens the whole project of American liberty."

Defending The Neocon War by John Brown

The neocons’ response to these observations is to repeat that terrorists are ogres with nothing on their minds other than death and destruction (even though, in Commentary , Podhoretz claimed jihadist fundamentalists had long-term geopolitical plans against the United States). This crude caveman analysis—to be fair—could be an honest effort to expose the nature of terrorism to ordinary citizens without over intellectualizing the issue. But it is naïve to assume that the neocons are only interested in enlightening the public. They have a political agenda, and their current decoupling of terror from international politics is at heart an attempt to maintain declining popular support for their number-one priority: a forceful, aggressive U.S. military presence in the Middle East that will assure permanent American-led control of the area (for reasons the neocons have never made entirely clear). Their catchword for this bloody, expensive, universally despised attempted U.S. domination? “Democracy in Iraq.”

Blowback in Iraq by Justin Raimondo

The creation of a Shi'ite mega-state in the heart of the Middle East has the entire region boiling over with religious and nationalistic antagonism, making it not only the seedbed of a worldwide Islamic insurgency directed against the U.S. but also the launching pad of a new global war, what the neocons call "World War IV." The triumph of revolutionary Shi'ism in Iraq was entirely predictable, so much so that one can only ask if the creation of a new "Islamic Republic" by U.S. force of arms wasn't deliberate, rather than the outcome of sheer incompetence and ignorance. Could the aim be to provoke a worldwide Shi'ite-Sunni civil war within Islam, so as to take the pressure off the West and Israel?

Multipolar's the Way To Go for US by Leon Hadar

Hence, some of the neoconservative policy wonks who have been the driving force behind the American imperial policy in the Middle East and the tough approach towards China have been toying with the idea that a strategic alliance between Washington and Delhi could help the Americans establish stability and implant democracy in the Broader Middle East and that India should join the US in containing Chinese power in Asia.

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Loving Big Brother by William Norman Grigg

Gibson, like many other neo-"conservative" media figures, is a nebbishy pencil-neck whose pipe-cleaner arms would snap like dry twigs if he were forced to perform a push-up. It’s tempting to say Gibson’s essay, riddled with unconvincing tough-guy slang, represents what Dr. Thomas Fleming calls "vicarious masculinity." More serious than Gibson’s man-crush on British counter-terrorism cops is his unbuttoned embrace of totalitarian police state tactics – a type of behavior becoming very common among Bush’s conservative followers.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

WHAT BUSH FORGOT TO TELL HIS SOLDIERS by Peter Fredson

The neocon literature reveals that Bush and his buddies want to dominate the world, believe that aggression is the best policy, and that preemptive strikes are not reminiscent of Japanese treachery at Pearl Harbor?

Friday, July 22, 2005

Iraq: What Are We Fighting For? by Justin Raimondo

They're guarding the very building where the Founding Fathers of Iraq are gathered in solemn conclave, putting the finishing touches on a document that is the perfect offspring of neoconservative delusion and Straussian deception. Without the Americans to guard the fort, the Iraqi government, we are told, would collapse tomorrow, and Iraq, they wail, would descend into "chaos."

Thursday, July 21, 2005

The Anti-Neocon by David Corn

"I'm the anti-neocon." That's how Robert Merry recent y described himself to me. After reading his new book—Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition —I have to say: He got that right.

His book is the most scorching mainstream critique of the neocons and their misadventure in Iraq that I have encountered. Merry, the publisher of Congressional Quarterly and a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, rips apart that small band of ideologically driven chickenhawks and leaves their bones scattered on the floor of a Council of Foreign Relations conference room. Merry is a hard-ass practitioner of global realpolitik.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

The Neocons Have Played U.S. for a Chump!

It’s bad enough that the slippery Neocons got the U.S. involved in the Iraqi War, now those scoundrels want us to attack Iran! Just the other day, the unindicted war criminal, Henry Kissinger, suggested that we take Iran down, if certain conditions were fulfilled. Thanks to the compelling “Downing St. Memos,” and the splendid work of Think Tanks, like the IRmep, it has become clearer that the conniving Neocons have used the U.S. as a chump!

Patrick J. 'Bulldog' Fitzgerald, American Insurgent by Justin Raimondo

Not only that, but the whole operation has been unmasked as part of a coordinated campaign carried out by a cabal of war hawks centered in the civilian upper echelons of the Pentagon and the office of the vice president. This group of neoconservative ideologues did not have many scruples about how they accomplished their grand deception. The suspicion that they may have compromised – and deliberately corrupted – the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the U.S. government in order to pull it off has solidified into a series of investigations, the most visible sign of which is Fitzgerald's probe into the outing of Plame.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

The "Bloody Footprints" at 10 Downing Street by Mike Whitney

In the case of the London bombings the same rule applies; Blair’s career is miraculously revitalized, personal liberties are compromised, and the global neocon war-agenda moves forward. It’s a “win-win” scenario for the party in power.

Monday, July 18, 2005

Behind the Presidency by Thomas R. Eddlem

Unlike genuine conservatives, whose chief preoccupation is the preservation of individual liberty and national independence, neo-conservatives were primarily preoccupied with power. Supporters of a welfare state at home and an interventionist foreign policy abroad, the neo-cons attached themselves to the Republican Party and made an alliance of convenience with social conservatives — despite having little interest in the social conservative agenda.

Podhoretz, Junior vs. Steve Sailer by Steve Sailer

While Podhoretz Minor might be an extreme example, he reflects the intellectual decline of neoconservatism from the first generation to the second. While the formidable father has often provoked fury, the son has mostly elicited laughter. Hanna Rosin reported in 1998:

The World According to the Neo-Con Sympathisers by Yamin Zakaria

The media has always played a role in justifying genocide, Hitler’s propaganda film made the case against the Jews, the early American settlers made the case against Native Americans, for the slave trade, and the subsequent massacres, recently they did it for Iraq. The US is now on the move towards engineering another holocaust, justified and supported by those who “project” their own guilt onto others, claiming Muslim’s have blood on their hands, ignoring the fact that they are neck deep in the blood they have shed.

Friday, July 08, 2005

Presidential War Powers by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

The neoconservative argument, therefore, is based on ignorance or dishonesty. There is no third possibility. To support their position – although for obvious reasons they don’t put it quite this way – they are counting chases of cattle rustlers as examples of presidential warmaking, and as precedents for sending millions of Americans into war with foreign governments on the other side of the globe. No comment really seems necessary.

From Iraq to the G8: The Polite Crushing of Dissent and Truth by John Pilger

On the front page of the Guardian, the Age of Irony was celebrated as real life became more satirical than satire could ever be. There was Bob Geldoff resting his smiling face on smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and his jester. Elsewhere, there was an heroically silhouetted Bono, who celebrates men like Jeffrey Sachs as saviours of the world's poor while lauding "compassionate" George Bush's "war on terror" as one of his generation's greatest achievements; and there again was Brown, the enforcer of unfair rules of trade, saying incredibly that "unfair rules of trade shackle poor people"; and Paul Wolfowitz, beaming next to the Archbishop of Canterbury: this is the man who, before he was handed control of the World Bank, devised much of Bush's so-called neo-conservative putsch, the mendacious justification for the bloodfest in Iraq and the notion of "endless war."

Thursday, July 07, 2005

Empire of Debt and Delusion by Bill Bonner

But the neoconservatives said we were fools. America was an empire whether we liked it or not. No one chose to turn America into an empire; the role was thrust upon us. We had the last imperial ideology still standing, they said. It was time to stop whining and shoulder our imperial obligations.

Anatomy Of A Neocon Smear by William O. Beeman

Neocon (and Karl Rove confidant) Michael Ledeen couldn't even wait to find out who won. In a statement in the National Review Online on June 24, he wrote, "Iran today reminds me very much of the death struggle between Hitler and the SA, the brown-shirted thugs who led the Nazi 'revolution'. At a certain point, Hitler knew they were a potential threat to his rule, and they were violently purged." It is unclear whether Ledeen's reference to the SA applies to Hashemi-Rafsanjani or to Ahmadinejad. Presumably, either would have served his rhetorical purpose.

America's neo-conservative world supremacists will fail by Eric Hobsbawm

The third thread of continuity links the neo-conservatives of George Bush with the Puritan colonists' certainty of being God's instrument on earth and with the American Revolution - which, like all major revolutions, developed world-missionary convictions, limited only by the wish to shield the the new society of potentially universal freedom from the corruptions of the unreconstructed old world.

Neocon quotes - In their own words

A collection of quotes by neoconservatives.

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Iraq: A Right-Wing Alternate Reality Show by Justin Raimondo

Translated from Bizarro-talk, this means Iraq is the central conduit through which we are actively aiding Osama bin Laden and his followers – who, together with such neoconservative exemplars as Michael Ledeen, have a vested interested in embroiling the region in an orgy of "creative destruction."

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Will Ben Stein Come Clean about the Iraqi War? by William Hughes

I found Neocon Ben Stein's last column for Morton's very moving. [1] In fact, I was so moved by his piece, entitled, “How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury be a ‘Star’ in Today World?” that I wanted to throw up! I particularly found his statement that U.S. soldiers, who are fighting and dying in Iraq are "the real stars” of our society, as being grossly insincere. If Stein considered the troops to be “real stars,” then why did he and others, put them in harm’s way and support the Iraqi War, which was based on a pack of lies concocted by the Bush-Cheney Gang?

New Wind Blows in Washington's Korea Policy

Six months into U.S. President George W. Bush’s second term, a new wind is blowing in Washington’s Korea policy. The neocons and Asia hands that had an iron grip on Korea policy during his first term are being replaced by pragmatists, with priority on specialization and Europe experts.

Monday, July 04, 2005

Cyrus Kadivar: The Final 37 Days of the Pahlavi Regime in Iran

Cyrus Kadivar's chronicle on the final 37 days of the Pahlavi regime in Iran is must reading. His account depicts Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda and General Ali Neshat of the Shah's Imperial Guard as honorable men and fallen heroes---in a story otherwise laced with betrayal, cynicism, and treason.