Monday, March 28, 2016

Neocon War Hawks Want Hillary Clinton Over Donald Trump. No Surprise – They’ve Always Backed Her

The neoconservative Right would have you believe this election affords them a uniquely tough choice. On the one hand, there’s Hillary Clinton, liberal bogeywoman and hated embodiment of the Democratic establishment. On the other, there’s Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called the Iraq war a mistake, accused the Bush administration of lying to drag the United States into said war, claimed he would be “neutral” in his dealings with Israel and just recently sketched out an “unabashedly noninterventionist approach to world affairs” for the Washington Post editorial board.

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Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Hillary goes full neocon at AIPAC

Clinton used her speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee meeting, the gathering of some of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington, to lambaste Donald Trump for saying he’d try to be neutral in heading up negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Donald Trump should be lambasted. He is wrong on everything most of every day. But, like a clock, he is right twice a day and this a point on which he is correct. The US cannot be an honest broker in the Mideast conflict if it is more Israeli than the Israelis, which it typically is. Palestinian negotiators over the years complained that they’d get an Israeli proposal, then go to the US to tweak it, and get back the same proposal fromDennis Ross or some other American partisan of Israel who had been put in a position to shape negotiations on the American side.

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Friday, March 18, 2016

Why do neoconservatives never have to distance themselves from Frank Gaffney?

Gaffney is, to put it charitably, a few longnecks short of a twelve-pack. To put it uncharitably, he’s stark raving mad. He believes that Sharia Law is an impending threat to the American republic. He’s warned that President Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.” He’s suggested that Obama was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii. He continues to peddle the utterly discredited notion that Saddam Hussein was tied to both 9/11 and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

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Friday, March 11, 2016

Neocons Red-Faced Over ‘Red Line’

This resistance from the U.S. intelligence community should have been easy to spot, except that the neocons were whipping Official Washington into another war stampede. They saw the sarin attack as the catalyst for another “regime change,” so the last thing they wanted was a sober analysis of the evidence. They wanted a “group think” to take hold and to bait a reluctant Obama into action by portraying him as a wimp if he didn’t start bombing right away.

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Sanders, Clinton, and the Neoconning of the Democratic Party

Has the Democratic party moved so far to the neoconnish right that red-baiting is now back in fashion in those circles? One would certainly think so if the latest Clinton-Sanders debate is any indication.
I’ve covered the Republican presidential debates in this space while mostly neglecting the Democratic debates for the simple reason that foreign policy is apparently not something Bernie Sanders wants to emphasize. And, for some reason, the debate moderators have proved supremely uninterested in asking questions about the one issue a US President has virtually total power over. This time, however, it did come up, and what happened on that stage in Florida underscores the limited but very real differences between the Clintonian and Sanderista wings of the party. It also illustrates the weaknesses of Clinton’s position, if, as expected, she wins the nomination and goes into the general – weaknesses that will only be manifested if she’s up against Donald Trump instead of some routinely interventionist Republican.

Monday, March 07, 2016

GOP hawks declare war on Trump

In interviews with POLITICO, leading GOP foreign-policy hands — many of whom promoted the Iraq War, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable — said Trump would be a disaster for U.S. foreign policy and vowed never to support him. So deep is their revulsion that several even say they could vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump in November.

“Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin,” said Eliot Cohen, a former top State Department official under George W. Bush and a strategic theorist who argues for a muscular U.S. role abroad. Trump's election would be “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy," Cohen said, adding that "he has already damaged it considerably.”

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Thursday, March 03, 2016

Neocons declare war on Trump

Donald Trump calls the Iraq War a lie-fueled fiasco, admires Vladimir Putin and says he would be a "neutral" arbiter between Israel and the Palestinians. When it comes to America’s global role he asks, “Why are we always at the forefront of everything?"

Even more than his economic positions, Trump's foreign policy views challenge GOP orthodoxy in fundamental ways. But while parts of the party establishment are resigning themselves or even backing Trump's runaway train, one group is bitterly digging in against him: the hawkish foreign policy elites known as neoconservatives.

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Neocon Armchair Warhawks Panic Over Trump Foreign Policy

The neocons are renowned for their courage on the battlefield. There is no keyboard they are afraid to finger. No pen they won’t commandeer. When the battle cry is sounded, they unhesitatingly push the “on” button at their computers and saddle up for battle. Off with the loafers and under the desk! “Caution to the wind! Bring in a wine spritzer, dammit, I’m off to waaar!”
While this Institute and this column most definitely do not take a position on any candidate and in fact your correspondent views voting itself with disdain in today’s corrupt US political system, it is impossible to avoid viewing with extreme amusement the collective neocon hysterical breakdown over the possibility that voters of the Republican Party – a party neocons crashed en masse starting in 1972 and especially 1976 – may be sending as their nominee for president a man who has committed the cardinal sins of:

Neoconservatives Declare War on Donald Trump

Neoconservative historian Robert Kagan — one of the prime intellectual backers of the Iraq War and an advocate for Syrian intervention — announced in the Washington Post last week that if Trump secures the nomination, “the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.”
Max Boot, an unrepentant supporter of the Iraq War, wrote in the Weekly Standard that a “Trump presidency would represent the death knell of America as a great power,” citing, among other things, Trump’s objection to a large American troop presence in South Korea.

Can the Neocons Trump Donald?

The excellent Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept’s co-founding editor and a journalist who always keeps his eye on the ball, has been chronicling how leading Neocons are coming out openly in support of Hillary Clinton. He’s also been highlighting the hypocrisy of Republican establishment figures who claimed to be shocked by Trump’s tactics and statements.

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Washington’s Neocon Occupation Upholds The Illusion Of Choice In The Two-Party Duopoly

Obama even out-Bushed Dubya by expanding the “War on Terror” to benefit the military-industrial complex. He allowed for the strengthening of extreme right-wing militias and governments, the emboldening of Gulf monarchies and apartheid Israel, and the development of a foreign policy agenda that’s become increasingly aligned with al-Qaida.

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