Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The Neocon Purge of "Ron Paul Types" from the Republican Party

Pat Buchanan fills us in on a cocky Bill Kristol who seems to think that "Ron Paul types" have been purged from the Republican Party and that Kristol will be more than happy to see Ron Paul leave:

"The big story in the Republican Party over the last 30 years, and I'm very happy about this," said Kristol, is the "eclipsing" of the George H.W. Bush-James Baker-Brent Scowcroft realists, "an Arabist old-fashioned Republican Party ... very concerned about relations with Arab states that were not friendly with Israel ... ."

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Top neocon has portrait of Zionism founder in his house

Douglas Feith is a Jewish neoconservative who served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for United States President George W. Bush from July 2001 until August 2005.

In 1996 he co-authored the Zionist policy paper, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm – which said removing Saddam Hussein from power was an “important Israeli strategic objective” — for the incoming prime ministership of Benjamin Netanyahu. After the Mossad’s attack of 9/11, Feith, along with fellow Jew neocon Abram Shulsky, ran the “Office of Special Plans” in the Pentagon, which was, for all intents and purposes, an outlet of Zionist propaganda to justify the invasion and destruction of Iraq.

How Bill Kristol Purged the Arabists

“The big story in the Republican Party over the last 30 years, and I’m very happy about this,” said Kristol, is the “eclipsing” of the George H.W. Bush-James Baker-Brent Scowcroft realists, “an Arabist old-fashioned Republican Party … very concerned about relations with Arab states that were not friendly with Israel….”

That Bush crowd is yesterday, said Kristol. And not only had the “Arabists” like President Bush been shoved aside by the neocons, the “Pat Buchanan/Ron Paul type” of Republican has been purged.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Iranian talks fail after neocon ‘blitz’ — as Obama dispatches aide to reassure Tel Aviv

The Baghdad talks on Iranian nuclear enrichment have failed without an agreement-- though the Guardian says the continuance of the talks in Moscow next month means another month without an Israeli military attack.

How much does Israel drive the discussion here? Inter Press reports that the talks broke down because the U.S. took the Israeli hardline and said to Iran, you'll get no relief from sanctions even if you agree to the international demand not to enrich uranium to 20 percent. Writes Gareth Porter:

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Neocons cheer for war

According to an article in the Nation magazine by Ari Berman, over seventy percent of the neocons who ran the Iraq war have signed up as foreign policy advisors to Mitt Romney. Elliott Cohen served as counselor to Condoleeza Rice and in 2009 urged the Obama administration to “actively seek the overthrow of Iran’s government.” Robert Kagan the author of Romney’s American exceptionalism stance; Robert Joseph National Security Council who inserted the famous “16 words” in Bush’s 2003 SOTU address claiming Iraq tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger; Dan Senor, former spokesman for the CPA under Paul Bremmer, and Eric Edelman a top official at the Pentagon under President Bush.

Many of these advisors belonged to the PNAC, an influential neoconservative advocacy group founded in the ‘90’s. It has morphed into the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) launched by Kagan, Edelman and Senor. They advocate for regime change in Iran and a more confrontational stance with Russia. They are opposed to cuts in military spending.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Passive-aggressive George Bush namechecks neocons for getting us into that mess

In a post on Bill Kristol's appearance in New York, Scott McConnell reminds us that George W. Bush called Kristol and Charles Krauthammer "the bomber boys" because they pressured him to bomb Iran. McConnell says the neocons may have had George W. Bush wrapped up, but he had real misgivings about them.

I just got Bush's book, Decision Points (2010). And it shows some real passive-aggressive tendencies with respect to the neocons.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Chris Hughes to Neocons: “Don’t Worry”

I hope I’m wrong, but I fear the War Party got a lot stronger with Chris Hughes’s decision to bring back Franklin Foer to edit The New Republic. Hughes is a young, very rich Facebook founder who understands that owning an opinion magazine is a great way have a political impact. TNR was owned by Marty Peretz, and then by some hedge fund friends of Peretz, and was steadfastly neocon on all the foreign policy issues that mattered. In the end Peretz made himself a laughing stock with repeated anti-Arab racist outbursts, but along with apparently tenured-for- life literary editor Leon Wieseltier, nothing was so certain as the fact that on Mideast issues, the “liberal” TNR would march in lockstep with Commentary and The Weekly Standard. This unfortunate fact was important in Washington, for it gave a false impression of intellectual bipartisan unanimity in foreign policy — the sense that anyone who questioned the need for serial wars against Israel’s adversaries or spoke in favor of the Palestinian human rights was some sort of marginal outlier.

I had hoped the coming of Hughes would change that. He is young (which isn’t necessarily relevant) and gay (which isn’t either, there is after all uberhawk Jamie Kirchik.) And an Obama supporter. The combination gave the ever-hopeful reason to think that the magazine might be open to more realist perspectives. It wasn’t a stretch to think that — after all both Andrew Sullivan, who has in the last five or six years become very wise on foreign policy, and Peter Beinart, now a vocal and effective critic of Israeli expansionism and of the American globalist foreign policy he once advocated, are former TNR editors.

Old Neocon War Horse Cheney to Hold Fund-raiser for Mittens

Mitt Romney wants a warmonger and war criminal as his vice president – somebody just like Dick Cheney. But then professional teleprompter readers will say just about anything to get elected.

Cheney and his wife will host a July fund-raiser for Romney at their home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, according to an email from the Romney campaign, the Wall Street Journal reports today

Friday, May 18, 2012

Neocons and the TSA

The TSA has been shown to be one of those evil metastasizing bureaucracies that are as abusive as they are ineffective in carrying out their supposed duties. Stories of abuse of airline passengers, terrorizing little children, committing theft, and ogling people forced to go through porn scanners have demonstrated without a doubt that the "well-trained federal workers" (as they have been called by the New York Times) are the very people who should not be permitted to touch or give orders to anyone.

While the Democratic Party Left (and every other Democrat I know) has enthusiastically supported the TSA and all of its abuses (when confronted with obvious TSA atrocities, TSA director John Pistole has promised "more training," the Progressive mantra and solution to everything), Republicans have been just as bad. The neoconservative Wall Street Journal is no exception, and one of its editors, James Taranto (emphasis on "rant") assures readers that whatever treatment the TSA recently gave Henry Kissinger, it was OK because the TSA is good. Not surprisingly, "Rant-o" the neocon (emphasis on "con") goes off on TSA critics:

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Neocons vs. Islamophobes

The Muslim Brotherhood, a group that was once thought virtually extinct in Syria, has surprised everyone by staging a comeback. The Islamist group is, according to Reuters, a “dominant force” in the Syrian opposition. Similarly, in Egypt, the MB has become perhaps the most powerful group in the wake of the Revolution.

This doesn’t sit well with everyone in the American conservative movement, and two factions are vying to define the Republican response to the increased power of political Islam. Leading what might be called the ‘to-hell-with-democracy’ strain of thought is Andrew McCarthy, a national-security columnist for National Review and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. McCarthy has been relentless in arguing that the MB poses a major threat to America, and that it must be opposed at all costs. McCarthy called Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain “the useful-idiot brigade” for meeting with MB members in Egypt. He accused the senators of “helping install an Islamist government in Libya” that he says is composed of al-Qaida members.

What and who are the neocons, really?

So I got into a little contretemps online the other day about “neocons” when someone suggested that I was one, or at least a supporter of one in saying Rep. Allen West of Florida would make an interesting choice for GOP vice president. In response I went off on a bit of a historical rant, explaining who the neocons (more accurately “Neo-Conservatives,” as they were originally known) are, and where they came from (the moniker today is usually just used as an epithet, with no historical background; kind of a substitute for “war monger”). My rant apparently served some purpose, as some people have emailed me and said “thanks, I never was clear before on exactly who or what the neocons were.” Then Skip saw it and said “run it, run it!” So, okay, here’s a heavily edited version of what I said:

Actually, my interlocutors are both part right and part wrong about neocons (although both of them are nearly always totally right on the issues they address). There was no phenomenon known as “Neocons” in the way we speak of them today prior to the early 1970′s. The first Neocons—Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Sen. Daniel Moynihan, to name a few—were old-line, post-WW II American “liberals” who were supportive of and active in building both the welfare state and the civil rights movement. They “kind of” supported a “mixed economy” because they believed that it generated the most money that could be skimmed off by the government to help people (Irving Kristol wrote a book named “Two Cheers for Capitalism”; not three, only two). They were all big supporters of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier government expansion and spending, supported Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam and so-called Great Society programs (“guns and butter,” as the spending on both Vietnam and welfare expansion was called), and supported Hubert Humphrey who ran against Richard Nixon in 1968. (Humphrey was in some ways the last of the great “welfare-warfare state” American liberals; I asked him at a gathering in front of several thousand students in the early 1970′s how he could justify the overspending the federal government was engaged in even then; he said there’s nothing wrong with spending when it’s for “housing and urban redevelopment and helping poor people”; the crowd roared its approval…and here we are today.) The neocons were also likely supporters even earlier of Adlai Stevenson, the supposedly brainy, great post-WW II liberal who ran as a Democrat against Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, losing both times.

Shameless NeoCons Still Running the GOP

A friend informs me that John Boehner has appointed Elliott Abrams to something called “the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.” This tells us nothing — that is, that nothing has changed. That the Republican Establishment is still in the pocket of the Big Pentagon Money, and the serial liars, and the plunderers, and the self-dealers — and that the GOP Hot Tub Crowd is absolutely shameless.

Why? Listen to Boehner himself: “Elliott Abrams is an honorable public servant…”

Stop right there.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

An Inexperienced Romney and his Neocon Bush Foreign Policy Advisors

One of the things that ought to give anyone pause about Willard "Mittens" Romney is that he has surrounded himself with the Neoconservative war mongers from George W. Bush's presidency who gave us the bogus intelligence for an unnecessary war in Iraq that cost us so much in American lives and treasure. Not to mention set this country on a dark course to illegal torture and rendition as if we are the old Soviet Union.

These guys ought to be on trial for war crimes before a Nuremberg Tribunal-style court, not walking around free to peddle their "American Century" Pax Americana Empire wet dreams to Tea-Publican candidates for president.

The left lacks an analysis of the neocon rise

All The other night on CSpan, I watched Rachel Maddow give a lecture at Mount Holyoke College about her foreign policy book Drift. The speech was amusing, and her condemnation of Obama's use of drones was excellent, as was her sympathy for military families who have borne the brunt of these wars inside the U.S. But the speech was singularly lacking in analysis. Why are we mired in Middle Eastern wars? Maddow's analysis seems to be, That's just us. We've got a military establishment. They do this stuff. They can't be stopped. They build drones and like to fly 'em.

The same aphasia is at work in Ari Berman's piece on Romney's neoconservative braintrust in the Nation. It's a well-reported piece on the prevalence of neoconservatives in the Republican Party. And the Nation knows that neocon is now a curseword. It's on the cover of the magazine in huge letters.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

An Inexperienced Romney and his Neocon Bush Foreign Policy Advisors

One of the things that ought to give anyone pause about Willard "Mittens" Romney is that he has surrounded himself with the Neoconservative war mongers from George W. Bush's presidency who gave us the bogus intelligence for an unnecessary war in Iraq that cost us so much in American lives and treasure. Not to mention set this country on a dark course to illegal torture and rendition as if we are the old Soviet Union.

These guys ought to be on trial for war crimes before a Nuremberg Tribunal-style court, not walking around free to peddle their "American Century" Pax Americana Empire wet dreams to Tea-Publican candidates for president.

Twenty three of Romney's senior advisers served under Bush in some capacity, several serving in key roles in the administration. Here is the full list of Mitt Romney's national security team.

The neocon machine

Washington is setting up the same path all over again. As if nothing has been learned. The neocon propaganda organs are very much in place. The war talk is similar, especially the depiction of Iran’s leaders as irrational zealots, impervious to reason. Many of the key players are the same: Bill Kristol, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, “mainstream” Jeffrey Goldberg, Elliott Abrams. AIPAC drafting congressional resolutions designed to tie the administration’s hands, which Congress rubber stamps with all the careful debate one would expect from an assembly in Pyongyang. To an extent which seems even greater than 2002, the bulk of the Republican Party seems to have fallen in line.

Some important differences remain, however. The entire Israel lobby is not on board for an Iran war, and there are major national security figures in Israel itself saying it would be a bad error. The U.S. military seems more vocally opposed. The Obama administration, despite rhetorical hedging, seems to recognize that war is neither necessary nor wise.

Latest Neocon Terror Propaganda: Electromagnetic Pulse 'E-Bombs'

Yet another potential danger has been added to the ever-growing and increasingly absurd list of supposed terror threats - the "E-Bomb".

An "E-bomb" is a weapon designed to be detonated in the upper atmosphere, and which emits a strong electromagnetic pulse. British Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond, speaking today at a conference in London attended by the US Assistant Defence Secretary, warned that terrorists or "rogue states" could use such a device to devastate Britain's infrastructure.

Friday, May 11, 2012

Bin Laden Files Debunk Neocon Hysteria Over Iran

The U.S. Treasury Department's claim of a "secret deal" between Iran and Al-Qaeda, which had become a key argument by right-wing activists who support war against Iran, has been discredited by former intelligence officials in the wake of publication of documents from Osama bin Laden's files revealing a high level of antagonism between Al-Qaeda and Iran.

Three former intelligence officials with experience on Near East and South Asia told IPS they regard Treasury's claim of a secret agreement between Iran and Al-Qaeda as false and misleading.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

The Foiled Faux Underwear Bomber: An Ongoing Series

Expect the neocon-national-security-hawk-complex to start raising the hysteria level to purple following the foiling of the latest-and-greatest underwear-bomber attack. The plot, they’ll say, is a chilling reminder of the grave threat that the Islamist enemy still poses to the U.S. of A.

But if this episode proves anything, it is just how overblown this threat is. The best person that al Qaeda could find for the job wasn’t an authentic recruit but a double agent masquerading as a jihadist.

That al Qaeda and its affiliates wish to hurt America was never in doubt. However, intentions don’t alone deliver results. Successful transnational terrorist attacks need quality individuals who, as I wrote last year, would have to be:

Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Neocon Man Bites Foreign-Policy Dog—Atlantic Monthly’s Robert D. Kaplan says Mexico, Not Mid-East, is America’s Real Problem.

Robert D. Kaplan, the Atlantic Monthly’s National Correspondent, has written several books about remote regions and has not been shy about urging intervention in places where an over-riding American interest might not seem obvious—he was a vocal proponent of the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Kaplan is a New York City native with war correspondent experience and Israeli military service, so I was inclined to characterize him simply as an unusually muscular neocon/liberal. Some of his more recent books about the U.S. military reveal a fascination with things that go boom. But unlike most of the prominent neocons who continually call for American intervention in Middle Eastern morasses—Kagan, Kristol and Frum come to mind, among others—Kaplan has been willing to don fatigues and take his chances. Even if the fatigues weren’t American

Bin Laden docs show that alleged Iran-Al Qaeda alliance is neocon hype

As part of their quest for a military solution to Iran’s nuclear program, asserting a strong Iran-Al Qaeda connection became a staple of neoconservative thought. But new documents released yesterday by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), picked up by US special forces during the raid on bin Laden, show a much more complicated, and antagonistic, relationship.

As Ali Gharib notes at Think Progress, the Weekly Standard has printed Thomas Joscelyn of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies three times in the past two months, all of them articles on the Al Qaeda-Iran connection.

Mitt Romney's Neocon War Cabinet

The left does an excellent job exposing Republican neocons but it's totally silent on its own neocon warmongers. It's more than ironic that the same progressive liberal Dems that brought us WW I, WW II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Balkan Wars have the unmitigated gall to bash Republican neocons while giving themselves a pass for their own moral lapse in the slaughter of over 100 million folks. Earth to liberals: Obama is very much a neocon and so is his administration.

It’s safe to say that foreign policy was not the strong suit of this year’s contenders for the GOP presidential nomination. Rick Perry labeled the Turkish government “Islamic terrorists.” Newt Gingrich referred to Palestinians as “invented” people. Herman Cain called Uzbekistan “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan” and memorably blanked when asked what he thought of NATO’s incursion into Libya. Michele Bachmann pledged to close the US embassy in Iran, which hasn’t existed since 1980. Rick Santorum gave a major foreign policy speech at a Jelly Belly factory in California....Despite facing a war-weary public, the candidates—with the exception of Ron Paul, an antiwar libertarian, and Jon Huntsman, a moderate internationalist—positioned themselves as unapologetic war hawks. That included Mitt Romney...

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Marco Rubio Is a Dangerous Neocon: War Against Russia?

Conservative Patrick Buchanan has some wise words about why we should be very careful in propping up Marco Rubio as a star of conservatism. Buchanan reminds us of how Rubio pushed for war against Russia a few years back in an article worth reading proving Rubio is one dangerous neocon.

In August 2008, as the world's leaders gathered in Beijing for the Olympic games, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, hot-headed and erratic, made his gamble for greatness.

Sunday, May 06, 2012

Mitt Romney's Neocon War Cabinet

Judging by his advisers, expect Romney to strongly embrace Bush's unilateral interventionism (which arguably never ended) and massive military budgets (which definitely haven't ended).

If Romney is elected, we can expect for neocon foreign policy to go on steroids as the members of the Bush/Cheney crime family return with a vengeance.

Of Romney’s forty identified foreign policy advisers, more than 70 percent worked for Bush. Many hail from the neoconservative wing of the party, were enthusiastic backers of the Iraq War and are proponents of a US or Israeli attack on Iran. Christopher Preble, a foreign policy expert at the Cato Institute, says, “Romney’s likely to be in the mold of George W. Bush when it comes to foreign policy if he were elected.” On some key issues, like Iran, Romney and his team are to the right of Bush.

Saturday, May 05, 2012

Bin Laden docs show that alleged Iran-Al Qaeda alliance is neocon hype

As part of their quest for a military solution to Iran’s nuclear program, asserting a strong Iran-Al Qaeda connection became a staple of neoconservative thought. But new documents released yesterday by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), picked up by US special forces during the raid on bin Laden, show a much more complicated, and antagonistic, relationship.

As Ali Gharib notes at Think Progress, the Weekly Standard has printed Thomas Joscelyn of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies three times in the past two months, all of them articles on the Al Qaeda-Iran connection.

Declaring War on ‘Political Islamism’

If Mitt Romney wins in November, the neocons have made clear they will reclaim full control of U.S. foreign policy and reverse President Obama’s few halting steps toward peace. The neocons even want to move past George W. Bush’s “global war on terror” to a “war with political Islamism,” reports Robert Parry.

Like George W. Bush, Mitt Romney has responded to his lack of foreign policy experience by surrounding himself with clever neoconservatives who are now looking forward to expanding Bush’s “global war on terror” into what neocon ideologue William Kristol calls a U.S. “war with political Islamism.”

Friday, May 04, 2012

Mitt Romney's Neocon War Cabinet

Bolton is one of eight Romney advisers who signed letters drafted by the Project for a New American Century, an influential neoconservative advocacy group founded in the 1990s, urging the Clinton and Bush administrations to attack Iraq. PNAC founding member Paula Dobriansky, leading advocate of Bush’s ill-fated “freedom agenda” as an official in the State Department, recently joined the Romney campaign full time. Another PNAC founder, Eliot Cohen, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009, wrote the foreword to the Romney campaign’s foreign policy white paper, which was titled, perhaps not coincidentally, “An American Century.” Cohen was a tutor to Bush administration neocons. Following 9/11, he dubbed the war on terror “World War IV,” arguing that Iraq, being an “obvious candidate, having not only helped Al Qaeda, but…developed weapons of mass destruction,” should be its center. In 2009 Cohen urged the Obama administration to “actively seek the overthrow” of Iran’s government.

The Romney campaign released the white paper and its initial roster of foreign policy advisers in October, to coincide with a major address at The Citadel. The cornerstone of Romney’s speech was a gauzy defense of American exceptionalism, a theme the candidate adopted from another PNAC founder and Romney adviser, Robert Kagan. The speech and white paper were long on distortions—claiming that Obama believed “there is nothing unique about the United States” and “issued apologies for America” abroad—and short on policy proposals. The few substantive ideas were costly and bellicose: increasing the number of warships the Navy builds per year from nine to fifteen (five more than the service requested in its 2012 budget), boosting the size of the military by 100,000 troops, placing a missile defense system in Europe and stationing two aircraft carriers near Iran. “What he articulated in the Citadel speech was one of the most inchoate, disorganized, cliché-filled foreign policy speeches that any serious candidate has ever given,” says Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

Marco Rubio's Liberal Foreign Policy

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Neocon Think Tank Cites Cleveland Bust to Push Police State Surveillance

The Heritage Foundation has come out in favor of the FBI’s “counterterrorism” strategy of arranging fake terror attacks. On the day after the FBI convinced a gaggle of “anarchists” to blow up a Cleveland bridge with an inoperable bomb provided by one of its agents provocateurs, the “New Right” think tank funded by CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife and beer magnate Joe Coors posted an article supporting this dubious anti-terror effort.

“The best defense against all manners of terrorist threats, Islamist-inspired or otherwise, is to stop them before they occur by developing and maintaining effective counterterrorism, intelligence, and information-sharing programs. Thus, by employing an all-threats approach to counterterrorism, the Department of Homeland Security can protect against the many varied terrorist threats posed against the U.S.,” writes Jessica Zuckerman for the Heritage Foundation.

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Hard Measures: Torture Is Humane

CIA officers are overwhelmingly men and women of principle, who seek to shoulder the extraordinary burdens and honors of serving the United States in an amoral profession. They must have a strong understanding of the spirit of our laws, of right and wrong, when so often the choices they must make are hard and unclear.

But now we have the first, Neocon-generated apologia for some of the most controversial choices made by the Bush administration, and the CIA, during the "Global War on Terror" (GWOT): the use of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" (EITs) by the United States and the CIA, what in lay terms, and U.S. law, is called "torture. "

Romney gay advisor replaced by Senor the neocon

Grennel has been replaced by Dan Senor, the neocon "talking dog" who was the mouthpiece for the Coalition Privisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq.

"But Mr. Senor, we have no water, no electricity, no jobs and the country is in ruins..."

"Yes, well, but how is that freedom, uh? How's that freedom?"

Senor can be seem on MSNBC wagering meals at some Manhattan steak house with "Lightning Joe" Scarborough.

Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Neo-Con Hypocrites Leverage 'Human Rights' Against China

A man who has championed every war America has fought in recent history, as well as desperately pleading to start a wide array of wars yet fought, including against Syria and Iran, and who has played a part in devising and supporting military campaigns that have cost millions of lives, millions more maimed, displaced or otherwise affected, would be the last person one would expect to peddle "human rights." And especially, one would not suspect such a man to make the bold claim that the United States, whose enforced sanctions against Iraq alone killed over a million women and children through starvation, is the "the greatest champion of human rights in the world."

Yet that is exactly what Max Boot, a Council on Foreign Relations member, as well as a contributor to a myriad of Neo-Conservative, pro-war corporate-financier funded think-tanks, has done.