Thursday, April 28, 2011

Those Irrepressible Neocons

Two neoconservatives are out front urging President Obama to more energetically defend the human rights of Arabs. Jennifer Rubin, who writes for the Washington Post, and her mentor, Rachel Decter Abrams, the godmother of neoconservatism, believe that Obama should step up and defend the Syrian people against the repressive Assad regime.

Abrams, in particular, has stellar neocon credentials. She is married to Elliot Abrams (the Reagan assistant secretary of state who was indicted by a special prosecutor for intentionally deceiving Congress about the Iran-Contra arms deal). She is also the step-daughter of Norman Podhoretz, longtime editor of the neocon flagship Commentary, and the sister of John Podhoretz, its current editor.

Jennifer Rubin, on the other hand, was just one of those plugging along in Kingdom Neocon (she was a contributing editor to Commentary and its blog, Contentions) until recently, when the neocon editor of the Washington Post editorial page, Fred Hiatt, plucked her from obscurity and brought her to the Post.

Reshuffling the Neocon Chairs in the Obama Military and Intelligence Apparatus

On April 26, 2011 , it was reported that there would be a major reshuffling of the neocon deck chairs in the Obama Administration's military and intelligence apparatus. Leon Panetta will be nominated to replace Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. Panetta is currently CIA director. As DCI, Panetta did nothing to reform the CIA. Indeed he was a strong proponent of covering up Bush era illegalities there. As the current revolts in the Arab world show the CIA under Panetta's leadership continues to do an awful job predicting future events or being ready to react to them when they happen. In fact, the CIA has played a not insignficant role in poisoning relations with the people in that part of the world by its support for the dictatorships that oppressed them. It has been doing much the same with its drone programs in Pakistan. Somehow people don't like the idea of the CIA bombing their country at will. Go figure.

David Petraeus is slated to be named to Panetta's position at CIA. Petraeus originally made his reputation training the Iraqi army. He actually failed miserably at this, but Petraeus has always been an opportunist and known to move on to another position before the shit hits the fan. Bush chose him to lead the "surge" in Iraq. Petraeus had just written the book on counterinsurgency. It never seemed to matter to anyone, especially Bush, that the surge was never going to come close to meeting the conditions which Petraeus had himself laid down for a successful COIN strategy. Sectarian violence did decrease during Petraeus' stewardship in Iraq, but it had nothing to do with him. His big sweeps, in fact, tended to inflame the situation and increase US casualties. What saved him was a split between the traditional Sunni power structure and more radical jihadist elements. The traditionalists sought him out and he was able to buy them off for a couple hundred million a year, a nominal sum considering the $140 billion or so that it was costing us to keep an army in the country. Sectarian violence also decreased because, by that time, the Shiites had been largely successful in their ethnic cleansing campaigns in Baghdad and elsewhere and were quite content to sit on and consolidate their winnings. It should be remembered that the actual rationale for the surge was not to decrease sectarian violence but to achieve the conditions for a political settlement between the Iraq's Kurds, Shia, and Sunnis. The surge failed to even come close accomplishing this.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Neocon Chickenhawk Thinks HE Is ‘Liberating Millions’

Since Ron Paul gave FOX News the scoop on his presidential announcement they’ve all been at least civil toward him, as opposed to their sniveling bad manners in 2008. After Ron appeared on Hannity last night, he did an interview for the morning show with Brian Kilmead. It’s really amazing how little these people, with their large staffs, know about the classical liberal tradition of freedom, or even the rhetoric of freedom that was prevalent during the Reagan years. Kilmead read all his questions off of a clipboard, sounding like he was translating them from the original Chinese. He was civil, though, and managed to ask some good questions, but when it came to the wars he was very, very funny. After allowing Ron to say that we should bring all troops home and get the hell out of there, Kilmead said (paraphrasing): “But what if WE liberate millions” by staying there?

WE, Brian?

Monday, April 25, 2011

Gen. Grievous for President?

A friend and long-time political observer predicts that the Republican establishment, terrified of the pygmy candidates and of Ron Paul, plans to introduce the armed neocon Gen. Petraeus into the presidential race. He has the qualifications, after all. He’s a lifelong federal employee, he’s killed plenty of people, he has a smear of medals; he’s devoted to the empire; he’s believes in permanent, global war; and he pledges allegiance to the merchants of death. What’s not to like?

Friday, April 22, 2011

Libya: another neocon war

That agenda fit perfectly with the plans of Washington insiders, such as those who famously spelled out their intentions in the reports of the thinktank called the Project for the New American Century. The fierce Iraqi and Afghan resistance didn't fit at all. Neither did the nonviolent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. But taking over Libya still makes perfect sense in the neoconservative worldview. And it makes sense in explaining war games used by Britain and France to simulate the invasion of a similar country.

The Libyan government controls more of its oil than any other nation on earth, and it is the type of oil that Europe finds easiest to refine. Libya also controls its own finances, leading American author Ellen Brown to point out an interesting fact about those seven countries named by Clark:

Thursday, April 21, 2011

HAVE THE TEA PARTIES BEEN NEOCONNED?

If Tea Party activists really believe they are going to change the size and direction of government (at any level) by promoting and electing people such as Newt Gingrich, they are living in fantasyland. (Or, if they live in Montana, they are smoking too much of the weed that they seem hell-bent to deny everyone else!)

Furthermore, this whole Republican vs. Democrat, or “conservative” vs. liberal, paradigm is a joke, anyway! Voters have been replacing Democrats with Republicans, liberals with “conservatives” (and vice versa) for decades; and what has it gotten us? Nothing but bigger and bigger government; more and more government spending; more and more welfare programs; more and more taxes; more and more Police-State legislation; more and more political correctness; more and more environmental wackoism; more and more foreign wars; less and less freedom; and less and less State autonomy.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

What the Neo-Conservatives created in Iraq

I really hated to quote that all; but friends, I wanted you all to see it for yourselves; just what Bush and the Neo-Conservative warmongers in the G.O.P. created. My friends, if that does not sicken you to your core, you do not have a damned soul. In 2003, after the euphoria and outrage over 9/11, the United States of America went into a sovereign nation and invaded it; based on the lies of a man, who they call “Curveball.”

America then proceeded to take a Nation, who’s army had, at best, soviet-era tanks and equipment; and proceeded to give them our very best equipment; and now, they are using it on their own damned people. Anyone who believes that Iraq is a free nation; is either lying to themselves or worse. The United States of America basically ousted one dictator and installed a new one in Iraq. Even now the most pro-war Conservative admits that.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Bill Kristol On Obama, The "Neo-Con" President

Weekly Standard editor and Arch-Neocon William Kristol and libertarian Judge Andrew Napolitano discuss President Obama’s embrace of the Bush Doctrine and his abandonment of campaign promises.

Watch the video

Is George Soros the Weak Link in the Globalist/Neocon Alliance?

The advantage of a New World Order for Soros is that taxes could be collected and people couldn't run from paying and taking their responsibilities. However, based on the Matt Taibi article exposing the payment by the Fed to tax cheats in the Cayman Islands, I am not too confident that a one world government would go after the rich who construct it!

With Soros wanting to remake the entire world economy with the Bretton Woods meeting held on April 8, 2011, he wants the US to take the lead in this world order. And there will be some heavyweights there, like Gordon Brown, who never met a New World Order he didn't like.

These discussions need to be open and transparent, George, or I am sorry to say, we Americans just can't trust you. How can we trust secrecy? We reject a world order that doesn't represent us. How can you guarantee us that it ever really would do so as long as those who sold fraudulent bonds made up of crap mortgages aren't prosecuted under RICO laws?

Monday, April 11, 2011

Globalists Coming Full Circle – Obama executes final leg of Neo-Conservative imperialism

Wesley Clark would backtrack in his 2007 talk in California and recall a conversation he had in 1991 with then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz regarding Desert Storm. Clark was told that America’s intervention in Iraq proved that the US could use its military force and the Soviets wouldn’t stop them. Wolfowitz said the US had 5-10 years to clean up the old Soviet “client regimes” before the next super power rose up and challenged western hegemony. Clark claimed that this, along with the aftermath of 9/11 constituted a policy coup where Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other members of the of Project for a New American Century had hijacked US foreign policy to destabilize and turn the nations of the Middle East upside down – much the way they are now. The “Neo-Conservative” element of this current round of destabilization goes deeper than the promotion of war, as the “Neo-Cons” have uncharacteristically dedicated themselves to “human rights” and “democracy” side-by-side with the likes of George Soros and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Despite Wolfowitz’ agenda being meted out nearly 20 years ago, the ham-fisted nature of both the operation itself in Libya and the propaganda surrounding it suggests a rushed sense of desperation on the globalists’ behalf. Wesley Clark suggested that the operation to destabilize the Middle East and Northern Africa would take 5 years, starting in 2001. Wolfowitz believed that in 1991 the operation would have taken 5-10 years. The failed FBI attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 was most likely the staged impetus to trigger the first blitzkrieg. Not only did the attacks fail to cause the catastrophic effects needed to justify such an operation, the Egyptian informant assisting the FBI had recorded his conversations with agents indicating that they were indeed building a bomb for extremists and providing them with real explosives as well.

The Liberal Hawks' Neoconservative Allies

Both the Clinton-Rice-Power clique and their neocon counterparts share an ideology of nationalist socialism and internationalist imperialism. The former would stress the importance of “multilateralism,” of course, but only as a propagandistic tool of providing their decisions with a veneer of quasilegality. They are not opposed in principle to a gradual transfer of sovereign prerogatives to regional groupings exemplified by the European Union. By contrast the neoconservative urge for uninhibited physical control of other lands and peoples bears resemblance to the New European Order of seven decades ago, or to the “Socialist Community” that succeeded it in Eastern Europe. The Kristols and Kagans are merely more frank on who should call the shots. Both are statists par excellence who believe that society can be and should be managed by the state, i.e. themselves. They are not “patriotic” in any conventional sense of the term and do not identify themselves with the real and historic America.

Both neolibs and neocons believe that their relentless pursuit of an American Empire overseas should not be bound by constitutional restraints. Hillary Clinton’s mentor Madeleine Albright declared, back in the ‘90s, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” The neocon-dominated Bush administration then proclaimed, a decade ago, that such use of force is exempt from legislative control or oversight: “no statute can place any limits on the President’s determinations” because “these decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make.” The same spirit was triumphantly flaunted by Hillary Clinton when she told the House of Representatives that “the White House would forge ahead with military action in Libya even if Congress passed a resolution constraining the mission.”

Saturday, April 09, 2011

Neocon editors who increasingly dominate the New York Times want President Barack Obama to deploy A-10 and AC-130 aircraft for close-combat attacks

The neoconning of the New York Times may lag slightly behind the pace at the Post, but the phenomenon seems to gaining momentum under editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal and executive editor Bill Keller.

In typical neocon fashion, there was virtually no accountability for any of the pro-war editors when they fell for U.S. government war propaganda before the Iraq War, a gullibility that contributed to the deaths of untold thousands of innocent people and the expenditure of some $1 trillion.

Friday, April 08, 2011

Spain’s ‘Top Neocon Voice’ Misreads ‘Obama Doctrine’

In an effort to ‘retrospectively legitimize’ their own policies, are neoconservatives wrongly comparing the Libya campaign to the Iraq War? Columnist Liuis Bassets of Spain’s El Pais writes that Spain’s former president and Bush ally José María Aznar is wrong – as are the rest of the neocons – to see Obama’s policies as some form of approval.

For Spain’s El Pais, Liuis Bassets writes in part:

The neocons applaud him, the radical left criticizes him – and for strikingly similar reasons. This is a war to topple a tyrant, in which the leading power is using force against a sovereign state – and without paying too much attention to U.N. Security Council support. Not much different than what happened with Saddam Hussein. The neocons feel retrospectively legitimized in their war, and the anti-American sentiments of the radical left have been reinforced. They all believe that Bush would wholeheartedly endorse the speech Obama gave to his fellow citizens to explain the military intervention in Libya.

Unholy Alliance

Rubin’s smug dismissal of Republican “isolationists” is another case of wilful blindness: if the neocons have a major weakness, it’s a penchant for believing their own propaganda, a tendency that results in a debilitating tunnel vision. In the last Congress, there was no reliably “isolationist” group of Senators: this time around, there are as many as ten. At this rate, we’ll be a majority in no time.

Whatever their differences on domestic and other matters, the neocons and the Obama cult agree on one thing: their mutual disdain for the Constitution. The “progressives” sniff at “constitutional fundamentalism,” and the neocons regard Constitution-citing conservatives such as Paul and Lee as “dogmatists.” They hate the Constitution because it restrains their overweening (if often competing) ambitions, and holds them accountable – not merely every few years, at election time, but all the time. In a constitutional republic, such as we once had, there’s always someone looking over the governing elite’s shoulder – and would love nothing better than to dispense with this archaic custom.

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Buchanan penetrates to the essence of the neocon heresy

In this column, Pat Buchanan asks a question I've been asking ever since the so-called "neo" conservatives in the Bush administration announced their intention to bring democracy to the Mideast:

Why would we want to bring majority rule to a nation where the majority of people think it's okay to kill someone for blasphemy or for converting to Christianity?

That question surfaced again when our Afghan allies erupted in murderous rioting in response to the burning of that Koran by a Florida pastor:

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

WPost Seeks Longer Iraq Occupation

The neocon editors of the Washington Post, who have pushed the Iraq War since the beginning, are bummed out over the looming reality of America’s strategic defeat after eight years of fighting.

The early outlines of this aggressive concept for remaking the Middle East predated the 9/11 attacks by half a decade, when a group of American neocons, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, went to work for Israeli Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu during his 1996 campaign for prime minister.

The neocon strategy paper, called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” advanced the idea that only regime change in hostile Muslim countries could achieve the necessary “clean break” from inconclusive peace negotiations.

Under the “clean break,” Israel would no longer seek peace through mutual understanding and compromise, but rather through confrontation, including the violent removal of leaders such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Saturday, April 02, 2011

Neocons can’t have it 2 ways: cuts vs. war

For a neocon, fiscal restraint stops at the water’s edge.

There are several coherent ways to think about federal spending and foreign policy right now. You can address America’s fiscal crisis by calling for serious cuts both at home and abroad. That’s the libertarian path. You can deny that we’re facing a serious fiscal crisis at all. That’s what the pro-war, pro-bailout liberal hawks have been doing. And you can deny we face a serious fiscal crisis but join in the libertarians’ other arguments against the wars. That’s the liberal doves’ approach.

What you can’t coherently claim is that we need to both (a) bring our financial house in order or face fiscal ruin and (b) embark on one expensive open-ended military adventure after another.

Yet conservatives in the Kristol mold don’t seem to see a contradiction here at all.

Friday, April 01, 2011

Libya is a Continuation of Neocon War to Remake Middle East


This is not really a new war. It is in fact a continuation of the neoconservatives’ 22-year war to remake the Middle East. Unfortunately the president has ignored the US constitution and decided instead to continue this misguided policy. This is a deeply flawed foreign policy that will only lead to escalation, blowback, and unintended consequences. Ultimately it is leading us to financial catastrophe. We must abandon the fantasy that we can police the world before it’s too late. Congress must stand up and say “no” to this illegal war.

Neocons and Democrats Work in Congress to Support Obama’s Libyan War

Meanwhile, Senate neocons are drafting a resolution to slap the gloss of legality on Obama’s war. Sen. John McCain is working with Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass, GOP boss Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn, to come up with a symbolic “sense of the Senate” motion or something with more sticking power to legitimize the illegal war.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said debate on a resolution authorizing military force after the fact could open the door for opponents to rally against the resolution.

Kerry went so far as to say he doesn’t think Congress needs to sign off on the military action after the fact, but Congress may come up with a bill regardless.

In other words, the unitary presidency is alive and well, never mind how loudly Democrats howled when Bush did the same thing.

Foer on Kristol

In the wake of the Iraq war, a fascination with neoconservatism -- a fascination that had previously been shared by very few people, one of them being Frank -- exploded into the political and even the popular culture. But the concept became deeply vulgurized and misunderstood. One common and very crude assumption interpreted the neocons as simply a form of the Israel lobby, crafting doctrines for American power that were merely devised to justify Israel's interests.

The truth is that the original neocons were very far from deep, emotional supporters of Israel. They were pro-Israel, but their pro-Israel views stemmed from their general hawkishness rather than vice versa. In any case, the neoconservative ideology was wildly simplistic and intellectually corrupt, as Frank well shows, but this particular understanding of it has always been misplaced.

Ed Schultz Is a Neocon

EDITORIAL: Obama the Neocon

It’s nice to have a neocon back in the White House. With reports of CIA covert action in Libya, emissaries being sent to talk to the rebel government and ongoing air support for the anti-Gadhafi forces, regime change is definitely in the air. All we need to make it official at this point is for the White House to come up with a clunky new euphemism, like “nonpermissive humanitarian governmental transformation,” or some such thing.

Mr. Obama’s experiment in using covert action to take down Libya’s government may bring to mind similar CIA efforts against Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, or Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. But in spirit, the operation has much more in common with the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq. At this point, the most significant difference is that there are no - or at least much fewer - boots on the ground. For now anyway.

Mr. Obama’s motive - trying to dislodge an authoritarian regime in the name of the Libyan people - are solidly within the neoconservative framework. Aside from programs to develop weapons of mass destruction - and Mr. Gadhafi’s were substantial - the fundamental belief in universal human liberty is at the root of the classic neocon foreign policy approach. When the White House talks about supporting the “legitimate aspirations of the Libyan people,” the word “Libyan” could be replaced with “Iraqi” and we’d be right back in 2002.

Neo-Cons Target Assad Regime

Despite the clear opposition of the Barack Obama administration and apparent ambivalence on the part of the right-wing government in Israel, neo-conservative hawks here have set their sights on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who they hope will be the next domino to fall to the so-called "Arab Spring".

In a much-noted op-ed published Saturday by the Washington Post, Elliot Abrams, who served as George W. Bush's top Mideast adviser, called for the administration to take a series of diplomatic and economic measures similar to those taken against Libya before the U.S. and NATO's military intervention, to weaken Assad's hold on power and embolden the opposition.

He was joined the same day by the Wall Street Journal's hard-line editorial page which urged Washington to support the opposition "in as many ways as possible".