Obama’s Wild Neocon Dream

What explains the US strategy shift? Evidently, Washington has concluded that a direct intervention has become necessary to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime and the objective of regime change cannot be realized by merely arming the rebels. It seems a matter of time before some sort of no-fly zone is imposed. The concerted attempt to demonize the Syrian regime by pointing finger at it for allegedly using the chemical weapons is reminiscent of the build-up leading to the US intervention in Iraq in 2003. Now, in the case of Syria, as was then in the case of Iraq in 2003, evidence is being fragmented to justify the military invasion.

Doesn’t the US know that it could open a Pandora’s Box since the fate of Syria and the Middle East are inextricably linked? Of course, it does. But then, that is precisely the point why a US intervention in Syria could be on the cards. In a candid interview with the National Interest magazine last week, former US national security advisor and well-known strategic thinker Zbigniew Brzezinski probed the reasons why Obama allowed himself to be drawn into the Syrian problem. Brzezinski spoke darkly of a «mysterious aspect» to all of this.

 

He obliquely hinted at the Obama administration due to the domestic political pressure picking up the threads of the US’ Middle Eastern policy from where they were left by President George W. Bush, namely, the old neocon agenda to «create a larger Fortress Israel» that would be pivoted on a regime change in Iraq, followed by the overthrow of the Syrian and Iranian regimes.

 

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379. Against Neocon Domination

Ron Paul talks to LewRockwell about these enemies of freedom.

• Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
• Ron Paul News
• Ron Paul’s Homeschool Curriculum
• Ron Paul’s facebook page
• Ron Paul Archives
• Ron Paul Podcasts
• The Ron Paul File

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Neocon fears of Rand Paul’s ‘foreign policy views’ may bring John Bolton into the 2016 mix

In a article by Robert Costa in National Review Online yesterday, the author says Republican hawks are concerned about the ascent of Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and his limited government and less intervention foreign policy he’s espousing.

Unnamed sources of Costa are worried, he says “Behind the scenes, they’re worried that he [Paul] has a shot at the nomination.”

Enter the uberhawk of all uberhawks—former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and Fox News mainstay, John Bolton.

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Why Neocons Are Freaking Out Over Lincoln

It is this "rhetoric of continuing revolution" that the American state has invoked for more than a century now to "legitimize" all of its powers, especially its endless aggressive wars. It is the opponents of endless military interventionism, men like Ron Paul, who alternatively invoke the Constitution as defining the legitimate role of government in society. The myths, legends, and superstitions surrounding the story of Abraham Lincoln ("Father Abraham," as the neocons are fond of calling him) are what are used to legitimize the power of the American warfare/welfare state, not the Constitution.

This fact explains the odd but perfectly predictable occurrence of recent hysteria among the neocons, especially one Rich Lowry of National Review magazine, over criticisms of the Lincoln dictatorship by yours truly and many others. They have become strangely unglued and freaked out over the fact that many young Americans, especially, no longer buy into the standard propaganda line that is always invoked to "justify" more war, more killing, more debt, taxes, inflation, spying, and other attacks on civil liberties. The neocons are still punch drunk, in other words, from how the Ron Paul phenomenon, during the congressman’s two attempts at securing the Republican Party presidential nomination, captured the imaginations of millions of young people and continues to do so.

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Iran's election spoils neocons' plans for a new war

The election of Hassan Rowhani as president of Iran is good news for Americans, except for the neoconservative hawks who brought us the war in Iraq and have been especially eager for another military adventure in Iran.

In Iranian terms, Rowhani is a moderate. In the Iranian media, he is called the “diplomat sheikh” and the “sheikh of hope.” In his initial news conference after the election, Rowhani said he would work to build trust between Iran and the United States, Britain and other Western powers with the goal of lifting the international sanctions that have crippled Iran’s economy.

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Beck: 'A NeoCon Is a Liberal!'

Glenn Beck opened his television program last night with a long monologue warning against US involvement in Syria, saying that it will lead to World War III and destroy America.

Beck wondered why a Democratic president like Barack Obama was contemplating intervention when such involvement was wildly unpopular with the American population, saying that during the run up to the war in Iraq, the Left insisted that it was only "neocons" who supported US military action in Middle Eastern countries.

Citing support for military action from Republicans like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Beck declared that "a neocon is a liberal; it's a liberal that says I'm for big, oppressive government that wants to change the whole world through military action":

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Ron Paul destroys neo-con argument on Syria poison gas

NSA Neocon Spying Agency - American's are Living in East Germany

The US security state keeps growing. Any communications of possible interest are read under the impossibly vague anti-terrorism laws. If I am a subject of interest because I read Muslim religious sites on the internet, then anyone who emails me also becomes a suspect, and anyone who contacts them, and so ad infinitum.

The endless faux "war on terror" sanctions all violations of personal rights. Its is the magic lantern of the far right, a carte blanche pushing the US and its allies ever further to the right. Once bad laws like the Patriot Act are established, they rarely go away.

Americans will just have to get used to acting as if they live in old Communist East Germany or the Soviet Union. Anything sent electronically becomes government property. Privacy has been repealed by the 342-page Patriot Act. The big internet providers are becoming government accomplices.

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The Neocon Pathology

Daniel Larison dismantles Max Boot’s unhinged argument that we should get involved in the Syrian civil war to “settle the score” with Hezbollah:

To seek to “settle” a score from 1983 by increasing U.S. involvement in a potentially even more dangerous civil war in Syria is nothing more than the foolish pursuit of revenge. It also demonstrates a complete failure to understand the original error of the Lebanon intervention, which [Max] Boot and [Lee] Smith think Reagan ended too quickly.
If intervention in Lebanon should have taught us anything, it is that the U.S. has no business meddling in another country’s civil war. To cite the costs of the disastrous Lebanon intervention as a “compelling” reason to intervene in Syria is perverse. If the U.S. made policy decisions today based on carrying out vendettas from thirty years before, there would be no end to the wars that we would feel “compelled” to join or start. The truth is that there are no compelling reasons for the U.S. to become more involved in Syria’s conflict. Many Syria hawks have been desperately trying to find some for two years, but to no avail.

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A Perfect Distillation of Neocon Boosterism and Its Dangers

Taking to the pages of Commentary to criticize Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, Max Boot offers a paragraph that may be the quintessential example of neoconservative boosterism and its dangers. Writes Boot of Snowden:

He claims he is willing to sacrifice a comfortable lifestyle in Hawaii "because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building." In reality, of course, the United States is the greatest champion of liberty the world has ever seen -- this is, after all, the nation that defeated Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and has championed democracy from Libya to the Philippines, freeing untold millions from oppression.

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Hey, let’s say “imperialist” instead of “neocon”

One might argue that because they’re less enthralled with democratization, Krauthammer and Bolton aren’t real neocons. But it’s a mistake to put democratization at neoconservatism’s core. Kristol, Kagan, and Abrams are more optimistic than Krauthammer and Bolton that democracy can promote American hegemony, but even for them, democracy is valuable primarily as a means to that end. Kristol and Abrams, for instance, are sympathetic to bombing Iran even though it would be a disaster for the democracy movement there. And neither show much concern about the fundamentally undemocratic nature of Israeli control of the West Bank.

Besides, even if democratic expansionism were neoconservatism’s essence, journalists don’t define it that way. In February 2012, citing Abrams and Kristol’s support for the Egyptian uprising that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power, an article in the Newark Star-Ledger asked, “How’s that Arab Spring working out for you, neocons?” Later that year, an article in The New Statesman, citing Krauthammer’s pessimism about Egypt’s revolution, declared, “Ignore the neocons—I refuse to give up on Egypt, or the Arab Spring.” Each article, in other words, identified “neocon” with a polar opposite view of the Arab Spring…

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Desperate Neocons Dig Up the Rotted, Smelly Corpse of Lincoln . . .

. . . yet again in an amateurish rehash of nineteenth-century Republican Party propaganda (a.k.a., "Straussianism") in the form of a National Neocon Review cover story titled "Defending Lincoln."  The way to become politically relevant and win over America's youth, says Rich Lowry (who apparently will always look like he just started shaving last week) is to continue to libel and smear Ron Paul and "the fever swamp of LewRockwell.com" while composing boring, poorly-written, long-winded apologies for the abolition of civil liberties, crackdowns on free speech, the imprisoning of dissenters, pervasive spying by the state, the deportation of political opponents, massive taxation and debt to pay for it all, centralized, monopolistic government, crony capitalism,  and above all, never-ending aggressive wars all around the world in the name of "making all men free."

This of course is all in keeping with founding the ideology and main purpose of National Neocon Review's founder, "former" CIA employee William F. Buckley, Jr., who wrote in the January 25, 1952 issue of The Commonweal magazine that what America needed was "the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-communist foreign policy . . . . we have got to accept Big Government for the duration -- for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged . . . except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores . . . . [including] large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington."  (See Murray Rothbard, "Buckley Revealed" at:  http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard6.html).  Just a few years after Americans fought a war against fascism, the "founder of modern conservatism" demanded that conservatives adopt fascism as their ideology.  Buckley, in other words, was the original neoconman.

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Peter Beinart's Misguided Attack on Me, David Corn et al. Over 'Neocon'

Peter Beinart wants everyone to stop talking about the neoconservatives. Perhaps, if we stop talking about them, they’ll go away? No, it’s not that. Beinart, of course, was once a fellow traveler of sorts with the neocons, as editor of The New Republic from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s, when its publisher at the time, Marty Peretz, would reasonably qualify as a neocon or “quasi-neocon.” In that post, Beinart famously supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and then, even more famously—as that war degenerated into a catastrophic series of horrors—apologized for his support.

In a recent piece in The Daily Beast, Beinart takes several writers to task, including me, David Corn of Mother Jones, and Ann McFeatters of the Chicago Sun-Times for, well, talking about neoconservatives and their penchant for war—in particular because many of their tribe are among the loudest backers of war against Syria.

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Too Many Imperialisms

Peter Beinart thinks “neoconservatism” has lost any distinctive meaning. It no longer has anything to do with the kind of right-leaning empirical social science that characterized the original neoconservatives, nor does it imply someone who used to be on the left but moved right. Nor does it distinctively mean a hawk or an advocate of spreading democracy, since there are liberals who favor democratization and neocons (like Krauthammer) who oppose it, while “hawk” is simply too broad.

So, Beinart suggests a change in terminology:

There’s a better way. Retire “neocon,” which is rarely used coherently, if it even can be anymore, and often leads commentators (sometimes unwittingly) into dangerous territory. Call the people who want America to dominate the world militarily without the constraints of international institutions and international law “imperialists.” Yes, the term has negative connotations, but what distinguishes people like Kristol and Abrams from those liberals who also support military force in places like Bosnia and Syria is precisely the former’s open scorn for the idea that America should be bound by rules that other nations help craft. Liberal interventionists trace their intellectual ancestry to Woodrow Wilson, who tried to turn international affairs into a sphere regulated by law. Neocons scorn Wilson and revere Theodore Roosevelt, who believed, at least for part of his career, in unfettered American power.

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Neocon rage over Syria

The corporate media were infested today with neocons like Danielle Pletka, Jennifer Rubin and Chris Wallace who insisted that only US intervention in Syria would make the world safe.

Pletka and Rubin descended in their arguments to the truth of their position.  This position is that Iran will be emboldened by what they  call US "weakness" in Syria.  Yes, that's right, its's all about Israel for them.  Evidently they have never seen a war in which they would not sacrifice the interests of the US and the lives of her soldiers to make Israel safe and the undisputed hegemon of the Middle East.  Iran is not a serious threat to the US. (Sorry, Larry)

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Al Qaeda, the Private Army of America’s Neocon Right

There was never an organization known as Al Qaeda, not until now.  “Phony Al Qaeda” was an imaginary boogeyman enemy constructed out of false flag terrorists employed by a variety of intelligence agencies to bring the world to economic collapse.  History makes this hypothesis a “slam dunk.”

There was no “Al Qaeda,” a extremist, jihadist movement intent on warring against Christianity on behalf of, well, we aren’t really sure, until if was formed in Syria.  There, up to 80,000 fighters from 27 nations are at war with the government.  The majority are there to create a terrorist empire as a base of operations to attack the United States, Europe and Russia.  None are there to war on Israel or support Palestinian rights.  This is extremely curious.

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