Thursday, February 26, 2015

The Neoconservative Threat To World Order

What I propose to you is that the current difficulties in the international order are unrelated to Yalta and its consequences, but have their origin in the rise of the neoconservative ideology in the post-Soviet era and its influence on Washington’s foreign policy.

The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the only constraint on Washington’s power to act unilaterally abroad. At that time China’s rise was estimated to require a half century. Suddenly the United States found itself to be the Uni-power, the “world’s only superpower.” Neoconservatives proclaimed “the end of history.”

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

ISIS and the neocons: fearful symmetry?

A further irony is that these neocon re-mapping schemes closely mirror the internal boundaries on the maps that ISIS has released of its pretended "caliphate"—which is to cover every inch of territory ever ruled over by Muslms, including Spain and the Balkans. Of course the neocons seek to weaken the Muslim world by reducing it to fragments, while ISIS would see a totalitarian Islamic empire. But they both share the fetish for "natural states," a dangerous fallacy if ever there was one. (See the ISIS map at Daily Mail of last June 30, which frighteningly tells us the jihadis hope to acheive their vast "caliphate" within five years.)

Read the entire article

Sunday, February 22, 2015

The Neocons Have To Go

You will be a much wiser American if you read this article and my past two articles about getting rid of the Neocons. For peace and prosperity to reign they must be purged from the US political process and discussion.
You should also take the time to read the two article links I provide below as additional background.
It is utterly disgusting to watch Washington DC posturing and lies, and their Mynah Birds and ‘Talking Head Non-Experts” over in MSM just look the other way on one of the most important stories of this year. Actually two important stories, a speech given in the National Press Club by a former ambassador to the USSR, and one in Moscow given by President Vladimir Putin.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Neoconservativism Is Down But Not Out of the 2016 Race

Ahead of his foreign policy speech in Chicago on Wednesday, Jeb Bush released a list of 21 familiar foreign policy advisers joining his staff. Nineteen of the names would have been familiar to foreign policy wonks (they’d served under one of more of the last Republican presidents) but only one brought back memories of the neoconservative movement that led the U.S. into Iraq: Paul Wolfowitz.

As several people, especially liberals, have pointed out, by including Wolfowitz—whose brief, scandal-plagued tenure as president of the World Bank is overshadowed by his key role in America’s unpopular invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush—the former Florida governor did little to distinguish himself from his brother’s foreign policy.

Read the entire article

Barack Obama, Neocon?

Yesterday Barack Obama had an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times titled, “Our fight against violent extremism.” It was intended, I think, as a prelude to the White House summit on Countering Violent Extremism–no particular extremism, just the violent kind–that is now under way. Obama articulated his vision for how we can defeat “violent extremism”:
In Syria and Iraq, the terrorist group we call ISIL has slaughtered innocent civilians and murdered hostages, including Americans, and has spread its barbarism to Libya with the murder of Egyptian Christians. In recent months, we’ve seen deadly attacks in Ottawa, Sydney, Paris and Copenhagen.
Read the entire article 

Why President Obama is a Neocon

In a Tuesday op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, the president wrote, "Efforts to counter violent extremism will only succeed if citizens can address legitimate grievances through the democratic process and express themselves through strong civil societies." At a speech at the summit on Wednesday, Obama said that "the essential ingredient to real and lasting stability and progress is not less democracy. It's more democracy. It's institutions that uphold the rule of law and apply justice equally." Finally, his Thursday speech at a Summit session hosted at the State Department reiterated the points made in his Wednesday speech, covering the importance of democratic institutions in CVE.
To be fair, the idea that the US should actively promote democracy and rule of law because it's in America's national interest is not unique to neoconservatism. It's also a core premise of the Wilsonian perspective on foreign policy (a.k.a. liberal internationalism or liberal interventionism). The difference is that neocons tend to have far less faith in the ability of squishy, fuzzy international drum circles like the United Nations — née League of Nations — to do anything useful on this front.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

NEOCON THINK TANKS FLOATS ISIS INVASION OF EUROPE BY SEA

ISIS plans to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa and attack Europe, according to Quilliam, an anti-terrorism British think tank.
The invasion force will land on Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa and invade other ports in southern Europe, the group claims, citing letters allegedly written by Abu Arhim al-Libim, an Islamic State propagandist.
The propagandist supposedly said Libya has “immense potential” for ISIS.

Monday, February 16, 2015

It Wasn’t About Oil, and It Wasn’t About the Free Market: Why We Invaded Iraq

I was reluctant to review Muhammad Idrees Ahmad's The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War. With all the dramatic developments in the Middle East today—the ISIS crisis, the siege of Kobanê, the deepening nightmare in Syria, the escalating repression in Egypt, the fate of Tunisia’s democratic transition, the sectarianization of regional conflicts driven by the Saudi-Iranian rivalry—delving back into the 2003 invasion of Iraq seemed rather less than urgent. It’s hard enough just to keep up with the events unfolding day-to-day in the region. Reading—let alone reviewing—a detailed study of the internal processes that led to the United States toppling Saddam Hussein over a decade ago seemed remote, if not indeed a distraction.
But I’m glad I set these reservations aside and took the assignment. This forcefully argued and meticulously researched (with no fewer than 1,152 footnotes, many of which are full-blown paragraphs) book turns out to be enormously relevant to the present moment, on at least three fronts:

Sunday, February 15, 2015

US neoconservatives continue to control foreign policy: Analyst

Neoconservatives in the United States continue to control the country’s foreign policy and have a “grand scheme” to keep US forces in Afghanistan “permanently,” an American investigative journalist says.
The US-led coalition fighting the ISIL terrorist group was designed by neoconservatives, which “looks like an excuse to keep US troops engaged in conflicts in Afghanistan and elsewhere for an indefinite period of time,” said Wayne Madsen — an author in Florida who specializes in international affairs.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Chapel Hill Shooting and the ‘New Atheist’ Neocons

All of this clarifies the reality that the ‘New Atheists’ are lackluster intellectuals motivated purely by greed and opportunism. As ‘guardians of Zion,’ we can assuredly expect these dedicated ‘free thinkers’ to continue to deny the very real threat of Jewish extremism and continue to inflate the counterfeit menace posed by Islamic theocrats.

 Beware the neocon ‘New Atheists.’

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

14+ Years Into Neocon’s 100-Year ‘War On Terror': Obama Asks Congress For Troop Deployment In Iraq, War Authorization On Islamic State

Several years ago, Obama impressed a handful of crusty, old people in Norway who believed the recent Illinois senator’s vision of a world without war, validated by his eagerness to end the war in Iraq and withdraw US troops to their native country. He got an award for it. Today, Obama will finally complete the circle started in August when, under the premise of “humanitarian intervention”, allegedly meant to save a group refugees stranded on a mountain, Obama launched an airborne coalition effort to destroy the same group of radical jihadist extremists that the US was assisting when they were merely fighting the Assad regime in Syria. Because today is when Obama will officially request that those same troops that he so liberally pulled out in compliance with his Nobel Peace Prize, be put back in Iraq in order to declare war on, drumroll, a nation that doesn’t technically even exist: the Islamic State.

Read the entire article

Sunday, February 08, 2015

WPost Is Lost in Neocon Fantasyland

James Carden and Jacob Heilbrunn provided in the current issue of The National Interest an extensively documented review of how the ever-more-neocon editorial page of the Washington Post “responds to dangerous and complex problems with simplistic prescriptions.”

The Post‘s most recent editorial about the nuclear negotiations with Iran is firmly in that same simplistic, destructive tradition. It is hard to know where to begin in pointing out the deficiencies in this effort by the Post‘s editorialists, but noting some of them can illustrate how the tendencies that Carden and Heilbrunn cataloged constitute, as the abstract for their article puts it, a crusade for doctrines “that have brought Washington to grief in the past.”