Thursday, July 31, 2014

Did Hillary Clinton Just Join the Neocons on Iran Policy?

Did Hillary Clinton just throw in with the neoconservatives and the Israel lobby on the key sticking point in the Iran-P5+1 talks—namely, whether and how much Iran may enrich uranium on its own soil? In her appearance yesterday on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program on CNN, it sure looks like it. Unless she misspoke, she said explicitly that she favors the idea of “so little enrichment or no enrichment,” a view that outright contradicts the position of the White House and the State Department, who’ve long ago agreed that Iran can maintain a civilian enrichment program to produce fuel for its current nuclear reactors and for a planned expansion of its nuclear program in the future.

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Saturday, July 26, 2014

RON PAUL: ‘I DON’T BLAME AMERICA, I BLAME NEOCONS’

Facing a tough but respectful grilling on Fox Business’s The Independents over his recent comments on Ukraine and the apparent downing of a Malaysia Air plane, Ron Paul argues that the US government wants to blame Russia for the shoot-down while providing no evidence for its conclusion. Paul points out that the US claim that Russia was to blame for the disaster because they supply weapons to the rebels in east Ukraine is hypocritical because the US has armed oppositionists in Syria who went on to attack the US-backed government in Iraq.
But the best moment was when one of the hosts trotted out the old “aren’t you’re blaming America?” question, which was previously used by the likes of Giuliani and the other neocons over the 9/11 attacks.
Responded Paul to the claim:
That is a misrepresentation of what I say. I don’t blame America. I am America, you are America. I don’t blame you. I blame bad policy. I blame the interventionists. I blame the neoconservatives who preach this stuff, who believe in it like a religion — that they have to promote American goodness even if you have to bomb and kill people.
They say ‘oh Ron Paul blames America therefore he’s a bad guy and we can’t listen to him.’ Well I’ll tell you what: the American people are listening more carefully now than ever before. …Non-intervention is the wave of the future.
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Friday, July 18, 2014

OBAMA & NEOCONS GET BALL ROLLING ON WORLD WAR III

Obama, Hillary Clinton, the State Department, John McCain and others in government have reached the conclusion Russia was behind the deadly attack on a Malaysian airliner in Ukraine. They have reached this conclusion despite the fact the attack occurred less than 24 hours ago and an investigation has yet to begin.
The neocon wing of the establishment is ready to begin the process of blaming Russia and start the process of punitive sanctions.
“I think we could bring this to the U.N. and start the ball rolling,” Stephen Black, a Russia fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, told USA Today. “Not just the Security Council, but the General Assembly, where Russia can’t veto it. There are more economic tools. We did not simply block them from doing dollar-denominated transactions.”

The Human Price of Neocon Havoc

Whether the tragedy is four boys getting blown apart while playing on a beach in Gaza or nearly 300 killed from a suspected missile strike on a Malaysian Airliner over Ukraine or the thousands upon thousands of other innocent victims slaughtered in Iraq, Syria, Libya and other recent war zones, the underlying lesson is that the havoc encouraged by America’s neocons results in horrendous loss of human life.

While clearly other players share in this blame, including the soldiers on the ground and the politicians lacking the courage to compromise, the principal culprits in the bloodshed of the past dozen years have been the neoconservatives and their “liberal interventionist” allies who can’t seem to stop stirring up trouble in the name of “democracy” and “human rights.”

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Friday, July 11, 2014

The War Party To Buzzfeed: Don’t Say Neocon

Buzzfeed’s editor in chief Ben Smith would like you to believe that these two approaches define the conservative movement’s divide over foreign policy. The fellow with the vodka bong is what Smith dubs a “freedom conservative,” and his opposite is a “liberty conservative.” This is supposed to be some kind of act of linguistic magnanimity from our good editor — hey, it’s better than ‘teabaggers’ versus ‘warmongers,’ right?

Smith is right that the terms with which the media talks about the right are muddy and often poorly applied. But when he tries to limn the intellectual roots of his new categories, he ends up basically describing the Old Right and the neoconservative movement; the former forged in opposition to the New Deal, and the latter from FDR supporters who were “mugged by reality” (he leaves out their Trotskyite dalliances). This is rather curious, isn’t it? There was once a time when journalists would look into the roots of ideas and attempt to explain how they carry on to today; in the Buzzfeed era, just make an arbitrary distinction we don’t really understand, name both sides something inoffensive, and pretend it’s a paradigm shift.

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Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Are Neocons in Iraq Thinking Like the Banks that Blew up the Global Economy?

For the normally anodyne OilPrice to run an article, Obama Fiddles While Iraq Burns, that is openly frustrated with US conduct suggests that there is considerable consternation in the oil industry about the lack of a coherent policy in Iraq. One school of thought has been that the US wanted a breakup, but history like the dissolution of Yugoslavia shows that they are ugly, bloody affairs that hurt the population and infrastructure. Both are bad for business, such as drilling for and refining oil, which was apparent reason we occupied Iraq in the first place.

I’ve discussed with Lambert the difficult of coming up with a coherent rationale for the US stance towards Iraq. The only one I can come up with is that the neocons have convinced themselves that chaos in Iraq creates more options for the US, and as the world’s only superpower, we’ll find a way to take advantage of the situation. Readers of this blog will recognize this is troublingly similar to the way banks generate risk, because it’s profitable for them, even if they break the system

Monday, July 07, 2014

The Next Act of the Neocons

Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.

To be sure, the careers and reputations of the older generation of neocons — Paul D. Wolfowitz, L. Paul Bremer III, Douglas J. Feith, Richard N. Perle — are permanently buried in the sands of Iraq. And not all of them are eager to switch parties: In April, William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, said that as president Mrs. Clinton would “be a dutiful chaperone of further American decline.” 

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