“Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome”: U.S. Interventionism and the Victory of ‘Perception Management’

During the Reagan years, Kagan worked closely on propaganda schemes with Elliott Abrams, then the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America. After getting convicted and then pardoned in the Iran-Contra scandal, Abrams reemerged on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council handling Middle East issues, including the Iraq War, and later “global democracy strategy.” Abrams is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

These and other neocons were among the most diligent students learning the art of “perception management” from the likes of Raymond and Casey, but those propaganda skills have spread much more widely as “public diplomacy” and “information warfare” have now become an integral part of every U.S. foreign policy initiative.

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Neocons Link Cuba Opening to Iran Deal

Official Washington’s influential neoconservatives are complaining about President Barack Obama’s move to lift the half-century-old embargo against Cuba, in part, because of what it might mean for his completing negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

Although some key neocons, such as Elliott Abrams, cut their teeth as U.S. government officials dealing with Cuba and other hemispheric issues – Abrams as assistant secretary of state for Latin America in the 1980s – their more recent focus has concentrated on supporting Middle Eastern policies that seek to derail any rapprochement with Iran, even if such a policy shift would further American interests.

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How the Neocons Never Left | Think Tank

The Crazy US ‘Group Think’ on Russia

This reckless strategy appears to be another neocon-driven “regime change” scheme, this time focused on Moscow with the goal to take down Russian President Vladimir Putin and presumably replace him with some U.S. puppet, a Russian-speaking Ahmed Chalabi perhaps. Since the neocons have never faced accountability for the Iraq disaster – when the conniving Chalabi was their man – they are still free to dream about a replay in Russia.

However, as catastrophic as the Iraq War was especially for Iraqis, the new neocon goal of Russian “regime change” is far more dangerous. If one looks at the chaos that has followed neocon (and “liberal interventionist”) schemes to overthrow governments in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine and elsewhere, what might the risks be if such political disorder was created in Russia?

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Return Of The Jewish Neocons

The War Against the ‘Trolls’

Poor Anne Applebaum. Every time she writes one of her interchangeable neocon screeds on how Putin is responsible for all the world’s evils or why we need to invade this or that country, her mortal enemies – the commenters! – launch an attack. They wonder why we should listen to anyone who was such a big fan of going to war in Iraq, and – when she’s writing about US foreign policy in Eastern Europe – they make acerbic references to her routine refusal to disclose that she’s married to the former Polish Foreign Minister, and a citizen of Poland, relationships that just might possibly have an impact on her worldview. Her latest neocon screed is designed to put an end to her torment: now she wants curbs on online commentary and a ban on online anonymity. There’s all this "rude commentary" out there, you see, an alarming proportion of it directed not only at her precious inviolable self but also at her fellow neocons:

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Neocon Leftists, “American Exceptionalism,” and Immigration

Paul Greenberg’s last article proves what many of us have long known: neoconservatives are leftists by another name.

Greenberg waxes orgasmic over President Obama’s decision to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens.  However, like every other champion of amnesty, he unequivocally denies both that he favors amnesty and that Obama has granted any such thing.  In fact, he enthusiastically seconds Obama’s line that “the real amnesty” is our current system, a system “that hasn’t stopped illegal immigration but just abandoned those who managed to sneak across the border, sentencing them to a vague limbo somewhere beyond the reach of law, offering them neither justice nor mercy” (italics added).  Greenberg is adamant that such a system is radically incompatible with “the America we know and still want to believe in.”

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Neocons Claim to Fight Russian ‘Unreality’

In addition to a who’s who of neocon luminaries like Kagan and Kristol, the Henry Jackson Society’s international patrons include Ambassador Dore Gold, former permanent representative of Israel to the United Nations, and Natan Sharansky, chair of the executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel.

Weiss’s previous employment at the UK-based, pro-Israel advocacy organization, however, is conspicuously absent from the lengthy “About the Authors” section at the end of the IMR-published, anti-Russia report. His updated bio, however, reveals that Weiss’s concerns haven’t changed much since his HJS days.

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SOME NEOCONSERVATIVE SENATORS IN THE UNITED STATES REMAIN IN DIRECT CONTACT WITH THE ISIL TERRORIST GROUP, SAYS A JOURNALIST.

Yuram Abdullah Weiler, a columnist with the Tehran Times Daily from Denver, told Press TV that the neoconservatives and the Israeli spy agencies have maintained direct contacts with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the so-called leader of ISIL.

“We also have evidence that John McCain was in direct contact with al Baghdadi and possibly he is involved with [Israeli spy agency] Mossad. This appears it is very much US creation,” he said, referring to hawkish US Senator McCain.

The analyst said the United States has found a replacement for the red armies of the Communist era in the form of ISIL.

Commenting on the ongoing unrest in Syria, he said that the United States and its regional allies were pursuing a vicious agenda of “regime change” through fueling militancy.

The commentator went on to say that the Americans are preventing “a unified Iraq” by unleashing militant groups and spreading division.

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Paying for the Neocon Moment: Sacrificing Lives, Liberty, and Wealth for Nothing

With President Barack Obama further tarnishing his Nobel Peace Prize by starting yet another Middle Eastern war, exuberant Neoconservatives claim their moment has arrived. And that was before Chuck Hagel, long the Neocon bête noire, was tossed underfoot. In fact, their moment has arrived, though not in the way they believe. The spectacle of Washington using the military in Iraq to destroy equipment provided by Washington in its last Iraq war illustrates the absurdity of the Neocons' claim that war-mongering and nation-building serve America's interests.

In 2001 President George W. Bush initiated what was supposed to be The Neocon Moment, projecting a swaggering global presence in which the U.S. would bomb, invade, occupy, and otherwise intervene whenever and for whatever reason it chose. Autocrats would flee, candies would be tossed, enemies would be defeated, flowers would bloom, allies would comply, cakewalks would be held, democrats would flourish, and the lion would lie down with the lamb.

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Letting the Neocons Lead

In a rational political system, the American neocons would be the most discredited group in modern U.S. history. If not in the dock for complicity in war crimes – from Central America in the 1980s to Iraq last decade – they would surely not be well-regarded scholars at prominent think tanks and welcomed as op-ed columnists at major publications.

But the United States doesn’t currently have a rational political system. Instead of being prosecuted or ostracized, the neocons continue to dominate Official Washington’s foreign policy thinking. They and their “liberal interventionist” sidekicks continue to demonize disfavored “enemy” leaders – just as they did in Central America and Iraq – and bait doubters for “weakness” if they don’t climb onboard.

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China – Russia Eurasian Trade Bloc Undermines Obama’s “Neocon Agenda”: Prof. Michael Hudson

The APEC meetings. In most such meetings for the last few years, including the G20 meetings (coming up in Brisbane this weekend) nothing really has been done. The United States is attending as the odd man out.

At issue are two different views of how economies should evolve. China is moving for its own trading bloc instead of being in a privatized pro-corporate bloc, it’s a mixed economy. So what you have is the Chinese economy growing very rapidly, and the American economy that’s been going flat.

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The Neocon Plan for War and More War

Buoyed by the Republican electoral victories, America’s neocons hope to collect their share of the winnings by pushing President Barack Obama into escalating conflicts around the world, from a new Cold War with Russia to hot wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and maybe Iran.

The new menu of neocon delights was listed by influential neocon theorist Max Boot in a blog post for Commentary magazine, an important outlet for neocon thinking. Boot argued that the Republicans – and thus the neocons – have earned a mandate on national security policy from the electoral repudiation of Obama’s Democratic Party.

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Unvanquished Republican neocons surge back

For almost a decade, the neoconservatives who championed the 2003 invasion of Iraq have been widely regarded as a spent force. But with the Republicans’ sweeping victory in the American midterm elections, they may be about to stage a comeback. The result is that the Republican party is resurrecting the unilateral foreign policy doctrines that first took hold under President George W Bush and his vice-president Dick Cheney.

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Putin demonized for thwarting neocon plan for global domination

The continuing attacks on Vladimir Putin and Russia by members of the western political, military and journalistic elite tell us one thing – the Russian President is doing a good job both for the people of his country and in the international arena.

For it is a rule which invariably holds true – if the Western elites praise the leader of a foreign country it means he is doing something which is good for those elites and bad for his country. If he’s demonized, as Putin is, it’s the other way round.

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Republican Senate takeover gives neocons, war hawks bully pulpit

Republican insiders say legislation already is in the works to pressure the White House into expanding the war against the Islamic State and increasing pressure on Russia and Iran, as the GOP takeover of the Senate provides neocons and war hawks with their first bully pulpit since the end of George W. Bush’s presidency.

While there will be pushback from isolationist voices in the party’s libertarian wing, it won’t take center stage, according to senior Republican congressional advisers who say that after years of standing by while the Obama administration has pursued a “lead from behind” foreign policy, the GOP is now poised to push the White House toward a more decisive leadership posture on the world stage.

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Republican Hawks Already Have a War Plan for ISIS, Ukraine, and Obama

Call it the neoconservatives’ revenge. But even the dovish side of the GOP now acknowledges the election was a win for their party’s hawks.

The Republican victory in the 2014 midterms is less than 24 hours old. But already, the hawkish wing of the GOP is planning an ambitious battle plan to revamp American foreign policy: everything from arming Ukraine’s military to reviewing the ISIS war to investigating the U.S. intelligence community’s role in warming relations with Iran.

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The Statist Roots Of The Neocon Ideology: Why Murray Rothbard Hated Max Lerner

All my life, it seems, I have hated the guts of Max Lerner. Now, make no mistake: there is nothing personal in this rancor. I have never met, nor have I ever had any personal dealings with, Max. No, my absolute loathing for Max Lerner is disinterested, cosmic in its grandeur. It’s just that ever since I was a toddler, this ugly homunculus, this pretentious jackass, has been there, towering over the American ideological scene. In the fifty-five years that I have been aware of Max’s presence, in all of his many permutations and combinations and seeming twists and turns, he has taken the totally repellent position at every step of the way. Thus:

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Ron Paul Makes Dire Prediction About Consequences of a Republican-Controlled Senate

Former Texas Congressman Ron Paul predicted that Republican control of the U.S. Senate would result in “expanded neocon wars in Syria and Iraq.”

“Boots on the ground are coming,” he wrote on Twitter.

Ron Paul        ✔ @RonPaul

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Republican control of the Senate = expanded neocon wars in Syria and Iraq. Boots on the ground are coming!

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The Neocon Moment: Showing Why Foreign Intervention Fails

With President Barack Obama further tarnishing his Nobel Peace Prize by starting yet another Middle Eastern war, exuberant Neoconservatives claim their moment has arrived. And it has: Neocon claims that war-mongering and nation-building serve America’s interests have become obviously ever more absurd.

In 2001 President George W. Bush initiated what was supposed to be The Neocon Moment, projecting a swaggering global presence in which the U.S. would bomb, invade, occupy, and otherwise intervene whenever and for whatever reason it chose. As I wrote for Forbes online:  “Autocrats would flee, candies would be tossed, enemies would be defeated, flowers would bloom, allies would comply, cakewalks would be held, democrats would flourish, and the lion would lie down with the lamb.”

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The Gloating of the Neocons

A Gallup poll showed 75% of those surveyed supported the assault on Iraq in March 2003.

The world did not. Outside the U.S., only Israeli polls showed mass approval. (But Israel and its chief advocates in the U.S.—including war architects Wolfowitz, Feith, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, David Wurmser, Elliott Abrams, Adam Shulsky, John Bolton, etc.—did not foreground Israel’s Interests in the propaganda campaign. They did not want to draw attention to the fact that Israel was pressing for Saddam’s fall, or that the plan for “regime change” throughout the Middle East had been conceptualized by Perle, Feith and Wurmser—in their capacities as Israeli citizens— in a paper presented to Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1996. The concept, in a nutshell, was that rather than negotiating with Arab foes Israel should urge the U.S. to topple the regimes in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia replacing them with non-threatening governments.

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Suffering Through The Neocon Moment: Warmongering and Nation-Building Don't Work

With President Barack Obama further tarnishing his Nobel Peace Prize by starting yet another Middle Eastern war, exuberant Neoconservatives claim their moment has arrived. And it has, though not in the way they believe. The spectacle of Washington using the military in Iraq to destroy equipment provided by Washington in its last Iraq war illustrates the absurdity of the Neocons’ claim that war-mongering and nation-building serve America’s interests.

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George Soros – Neocon

The collapse of Ukraine would be a tremendous loss for NATO, the European Union, and the United States. A victorious Russia would become much more influential within the EU and pose a potent threat to the Baltic states with their large ethnic Russian populations. Instead of supporting Ukraine, NATO would have to defend itself on its own soil. This would expose both the EU and the US to the danger they have been so eager to avoid: a direct military confrontation with Russia.

This sounds a whole lot like Bush’s fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here rhetoric.

This is coming from a man who said, “the removal of George Bush from office is a matter of life and death.   By declaring a ‘war on terror’ after September 11, we set the wrong agenda for the world. … when you wage war, you inevitably create innocent victims.” These words are coming from the new book by George Soros entitled Wake Up Europe!

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Springtime for Neocons

IN MAY 1968, Richard Hofstadter published an essay about the Vietnam War in the New York Times Magazine. It was called “Uncle Sam Has Cried ‘Uncle!’ Before.” Hofstadter had earned fame for works such as The American Political Tradition and Anti-Intellectualism In American Life that upended traditional interpretations of American history. The two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian was also a colleague and close friend of Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun and Daniel Bell at Columbia University. It was a moment when the voice of the New York intellectuals carried, even as the paladins of the New Left assaulted everything that they cherished.

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Neocon Sabotage of Iran-Nuke Deal

David Sanger’s article in the New York Times about how the Obama administration is seeking a nuclear accord with Iran that would not require any early votes in Congress has garnered a lot of attention. Naturally, the administration in response has offered assurances that Congress has a role to play and no one is trying to shove it out of the picture. Just as naturally, opponents of the administration accuse it of such shoving.

We all know what’s going on and what’s at stake here. The more of a role Congress does play in the immediate aftermath of signing a deal, the greater the chance that elements opposed to anyone reaching any agreement with Iran on anything will be able to torpedo the deal.

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The Neocons — Masters of Chaos

This neocon destabilization of the world economy began with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 under President George W. Bush who squandered some $1 trillion on the bloody folly. But the neocons’ strategies have continued through their still-pervasive influence in Official Washington during President Barack Obama’s administration.

The neocons and their “liberal interventionist” junior partners have kept the “regime change” pot boiling with the Western-orchestrated overthrow and killing of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the proxy civil war in Syria to oust Bashar al-Assad, the costly economic embargoes against Iran, and the U.S.-backed coup that ousted Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February.

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The Neoconservative Hit List: Iraq, Libya and now Syria? A Plan for Global US Military Supremacy

1997 witnessed the birth of one of the most pivotal American think tanks in modern times, whose ideas and objectives would come to shape the foreign policy of the United States (U.S.) for decades to come. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) was founded by William Kristol, the chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle during the Bush senior administration, and Robert Kagan, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The PNAC group’s stated objectives included the desire to “ shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests ” along with challenging “regimes hostile to U.S. interest and values”. 

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The Neocons Return

The neocons are back. That is, at least in Marco Rubio’s world. The Florida senator and potential 2016 presidential candidate has, since his election in 2010, regularly consulted with and sought the advice of top neoconservative writers and policymakers, several of whom served in the administration of George W. Bush.

His loose circle of advisers includes former national-security adviser Stephen Hadley, former deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, Brookings Institution scholar and former Reagan-administration aide Robert Kagan, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, and former Missouri senator Jim Talent.

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Neocons Call It "America's Biggest Challenge"

The reports of the latest military action in Syria and Iraq has pushed most other foreign news out of the US media. This has been good for the neoconservatives, who have been urging an even more aggressive intervention, to include US boots on the ground. Since so much mainstream media coverage of the fighting has emphasized the threats from a bewildering array of new and old terrorist groups to strike here in the “homeland” many Americans have tended to rally ‘round the flag to support a forceful preemptive response.

And for once the neocons have a point as the performance by the administration is a bit of a fraud. The air campaign cannot in itself “destroy” ISIS as President Barack Obama has pledged to do, meaning that someone is going to have to do the hard fighting. The Iraqi army appears to be incapable of defeating anyone better equipped and led than a troop of Boy Scouts while Washington eschews any assistance to the Syrians who actually could have a major impact. The Turks, who have the capability to crush the group, are meanwhile standing on the sidelines. America’s European allies are in some cases providing assistance that has been described as “limited” while the Gulf States are straddling both sides in the conflict, wishing to see fellow Sunnis triumph over what they regard as heretics while also fearing that the revolutionary fervor will come back home.

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Syria bombing fulfills Wes Clark prediction, Bush Neocon plans

In 2007, Clark told an audience that the true intention of the so-called "Neoconservatives" in the Bush White House, the name given to the inner Bush foreign policy team, was not to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but to "take out" seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq. Clark revealed that the information came from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office, and had been given to him by a staff general in the Joint Chiefs of Staff's office in the Pentagon. The staff general told Clark that the true plan after 9/11 was to overthrow the governments of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.

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Alt media success panics neocons

As Western mainstream media fall into the hands of lying billionaires, Zionists, and intelligence agencies (three categories with significant overlap) – and as neoconservatives script big media’s ignoble lies – a surging internet-based alternative media has arisen to challenge the elite’s false narratives. Thanks to alt-media, fewer and fewer people are buying the simplistic feel-good myths peddled by the mainstream.

While most old people still cling to the corporate media worldview, the young are skewing ever-harder toward alternative perspectives. In Thursday’s Scottish independence referendum, for example, the London Daily Mirror reported that 71% of 16-17 year olds voted “yes” while those over 65 voted “no” by a 73%-27% margin. 

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More Neocon Hypocrisy in the Mideast

Shortly afterward Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy presented a piece titled “Islamists Are Not Our Friends,” which illustrates almost in caricatured form some of the misleading attributes of the single-bucket attitude that I was discussing.

Ross’s article probably is not grounded in Islamophobia, although it partly appeals to such sentiment. The piece ostensibly is about how “a fundamental division between Islamists and non-Islamists” is a “new fault line in the Middle East” that provides “a real opportunity for America” and ought to guide U.S. policy toward the region.

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Neocons Revive Syria ‘Regime Change’ Plan

Official Washington’s ever-influential neoconservatives and their “liberal interventionist” allies see President Barack Obama’s decision to extend U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State terrorists into Syria as a new chance to achieve the long-treasured neocon goal of “regime change” in Damascus.

On the surface, Obama’s extraordinary plan to ignore Syrian sovereignty and attack across the border has been viewed as a unilateral U.S. action to strike at the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but it could easily evolve into a renewed effort to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s government, ironically one of ISIS’s principal goals.

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Dick Cheney and the Neocons Would Like to Celebrate This 9/11 by Freaking Out Over Iraq Again

It is comical — in the second-time-as-farce way, not the ha-ha way — that the anniversary of 9/11 has coincided with a sudden revival of neoconservative thought. The neocons never really went away or even questioned their analysis. (The conflation of uncertainty with weakness is itself a defining tenant of neoconservatism.) The terrifying emergence of ISIS and genuine questions about the Obama administration’s lurching response has created a space for the Republican Party, after flirting with noninterventionism, to re-embrace its Bush-era ultrahawkery.

Signs of the neocon revival include the party shedding whatever lingering inhibitions it had about associating itself openly with Dick Cheney, who delivered a deliriously militant speech at the American Enterprise Institute, addressed the House Republican conference (and received a “rapturous reception”), and was celebrated in a Wall Street Journaleditorial (headline: “Dick Cheney Is Still Right”). They also include the spreading use of conservative responses to ISIS that eerily echo its impulsive response to the attacks of 13 years ago.

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Neocons confess: "We did 9/11-anthrax"

Every year at this time, the neocons orchestrate and hype a series of public relations stunts designed to magnify fears of "radical Islam" and reinforce their crumbling 9/11-Anthrax cover story. But this year's propaganda campaign is so extreme that it represents a tacit confession: The neocons know that the truth about the 9/11-Anthrax operation is slowly closing in on them; so they are over-reacting by desperately trying to stoke the dying embers of the so-called War on Terror, in order to maintain the myth that Muslims (rather than neoconservative Zionists) attacked America in the autumn of 2001.

When a hysterical person exhibits guilty demeanor by trying too hard to blame a crime on someone else, that person is almost certainly the real perpetrator. As the neocons try much too hard to blame Islam for 9/11 and "terrorism" in general, their hysteria inadvertently reveals their own culpability. Like Shakespeare's Lady MacBeth, the neoconservative movement has blood on its hands and "doth protest too much."

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Neoconservative war against Communism and the Traditional Right

Neoconservative leading light Ron Radosh, authored a hatchet piece attacking Patrick Buchanan and other traditionalist conservatives and Christians for their defense of Russia and their opposition to the globalist aspirations of the EU and the United States. What is interesting about Radosh’s attacks is not so much the tried-and-true shibboleths he trots out against the traditionalists, but the obvious debt, intellectually, he owes to the historic Left.

Radosh’s article illustrates extremely well that the inherited framework of Trotskyite ideology survives and continues fundamentally to motivate American (and European) Neoconservatives. For Radosh and his compatriots, the double-front war against old-fashioned “Communism” (which he calls “Stalinism,” to distinguish it from an earlier love affair that many older Neoconservatives had with Trotskyite Marxism) and “reactionary traditionalism” continues unabated, finding its newest cause celebre in the situation unfolding in Ukraine, where the Neocons are pushing for confrontation with nationalist Russia. Their deep-seated motivating belief combines the internationalism of Trotsky with a commitment to universal and, in the words of Allan Bloom, imposed global egalitarianism and liberal democracy.

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Can Rand Paul defeat neocon Hillary?

U.S. foreign policy is a bipartisan fiasco. President George W. Bush gave the American people Iraq, the gift that keeps on giving. President Barack Obama is a slightly more reluctant warrior, but he is taking the country back into Iraq.

Hillary Clinton, the unannounced Democratic front-runner for 2016, supported her husband’s misbegotten attempt at nation-building in Kosovo and led the drive for war in Libya, which is unraveling. Most of Clinton’s potential GOP opponents share Washington’s bomb, invade, and occupy consensus.

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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.

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Want to put a Neocon in Jail? Here is a way

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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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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.”

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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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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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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. 

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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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Neocons are going home to the left

Are the neocons going home? By “neocons,” I refer to followers of the hawkish foreign policy school that began to coalesce in the 1970s around New York writers and academics who had rejected their Communist or Socialist lodestar to become vocal anti-Communists. A generation or so later, from Kosovo to Georgia, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine and now back to Iraq, they consistently advocate the use of American power, often American troops, to establish and enforce a “liberal world order.”

By “going home,” I mean returning to the Democratic Party.

The question took shape while I was reading a profile in The New York Times about neocon light Robert Kagan — brother of Iraq “surge” architect Frederick Kagan, son of Yale professor Donald Kagan, and husband of State Department diplomat Victoria Nuland. The Times describes Robert Kagan as “the congenial and well-respected scion of one of America’s first families of interventionism.”

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The Chaos In Iraq Is By DESIGN

The Real History of the American Strategy for Iraq and the Middle East

Neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz planned regime change in Iraq more than 20 years ago … in 1991.

But the goal wasn’t just regime change (or oil).  The goal was to break up the country, and to do away with the sovereignty of Iraq as a separate nation.

The Guardian noted in 2003:

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