Thursday, August 28, 2014

ISIS, the Neocons, and Obama’s Choices

Though Congress and the president are out of town, the final weeks of August have seen the arrival of an unexpectedly critical moment. The brutal beheading of James Foley by ISIS (the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq) confirmed that there remains a Sunni jihadist terrorism problem in the Mideast: decimating al-Qaeda and killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end it. It shouldn’t be forgotten that America’s destruction of the Iraqi state in 2003 created the opportunity for ISIS to grow and thrive, as America’s Sunni allies, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, gave ISIS financial backing.

How to respond? The usually wise Andy Bacevich suggests that ISIS constitutes a negligible threat to America, a superpower an ocean away, that bombing it has become—like bombing elsewhere, America’s substitute for a genuine national security strategy. Bacevich suggests we ought to butt out, except perhaps to give aid to countries genuinely threatened by ISIS. There is much to this argument, as there is little inclination from the American people to send ground troops once again into Iraq. And even if we were willing to reconstitute and send an occupation force, what good would it do? In a similar vein, Paul Pillar argues that overestimating ISIS as a potential threat is perhaps more likely, and dangerous, than underestimating it.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Behind Obama’s ‘Chaotic’ Foreign Policy

So, we have Obama covertly arming Syrian rebels, many of whom were interchangeable with Islamic jihadists, but then sending the U.S. military back into Iraq to fight some of these same extremists who spilled back into Iraq, the country where they got their start after President George W. Bush’s neocon-inspired invasion.

We also have Obama spending years ratcheting up sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program – despite Iran’s repeated offers to accept limits that would guarantee no military applications – and now finding that he needs Iran’s help to broker political changes in Iraq.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Bill Clinton’s “Neocon-inspired Decisions” Triggered Three Major Crises in our Times

An eye-popping new book has alleged that U.S. President Bill Clinton had his White House phones tapped in real time, for the benefit of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The book also reveals how the Israeli Prime Minister could have used taped conversations of the American president regarding Mr. Clinton’s 1990s sexual scandal in the White House, to exert pressure on him to release from prison a convicted Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard, who had been arrested in 1985, for espionage against the United States. In fact, the Israeli surveillance activities in the United States may be very widespread.
I suspect that such illegal activities and the fact that an American president (and other members of the U.S. administration) could have been placed under electronic surveillance and could have been potentially blackmailed by a foreign country will not go down well with ordinary patriotic Americans, if this becomes widely known. This comes after it has been discovered that theCIA, which works closely in tandem with the Israeli Mossad, has been illegally and unconstitutionally spying on U.S. senators.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Hillary Clinton’s neocon moment

Is it not a thing of wonderment that the two leading families of the Party of the Poor and Down-and-Out are ending the summer in Martha’s Vineyard? Both the Obamas and the Clintons are renting spacious mansions, probably from Wall Streeters, on that enchanted isle and playing golf and tennis, and — who knows — croquet, just like the Rockefellers or Vanderbilts. Yet do not expect them to be dining together in the moonlight. In fact, relations between them have turned downright hostile.
Hillary Clinton this week has made it all but final. She is a neoconservative, a genuine, 24-carat, neoconservative. She has all the credentials. Back in the 1970s, Irving Kristol, the official godfather of neoconservatism, defined a neoconservative as a liberal who has been mugged by reality. By that definition, a mere believer in muscular foreign policy pronouncements is no neoconservative. Perhaps he or she is a hawk, but not a neoconservative. To be a true neocon, one has to have once been a liberal — preferably a Trotskyite — and to have come to one’s conversion in fits and starts. Well, Mrs. Clinton certainly fills the bill, complete with fits and starts.
Read the entire article

HILLARY CLINTON THE NEOCON, ANTI-OBAMA

With U.S. president Barack Obama‘s approval rating at record lows, presumed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is doing her best to put some distance between herself and an increasingly unpopular administration.
The only problem? She’s running from the arms of Obama – whose foreign policy she (mis)managed from 2009-2013 – and into the arms of the warmongering neoconservatives like U.S. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham.
Read the entire article

Saturday, August 09, 2014

Neocons to Obama: No half-measures

The neocons have a message for President Barack Obama: Don’t screw this up.

Former Bush administration officials and other hawkish voices of the Bush era say the Democratic president deserves credit for signing off on airstrikes against an Islamist extremist group on the march in Iraq. But they fear Obama will let his reluctance toward military engagement in the region keep him from striking a death blow against a group of militants with strong anti-Western views.

They also worry his actions now may be too little, too late.


Read the entire article

Thursday, August 07, 2014

The Naked Catholic Neocon

Artur Rosman interviews Patrick Deneen, a Catholic and professor at the University of Notre Dame, about the neoconservative Catholic imagination. It’s a meaty, if far too brief, interview, one that allows Deneen to launch a terrific line about what he considers to be the inconsistency of Catholic neocons stressing the Church’s line on faith and morals, but exempting economics from its authority:
What is more striking to me is the way that many Catholics of the stripe we are discussing are strenuous in their insistence that, on the one hand, the public square should not be stripped of religion and morality, but that the Market should have a wardrobe like that of Lady Godiva.
Source