With Their Demand for War, Neocons and Establishment Conservatives Will Destroy Conservatism

During the presidency of George W. Bush, conservatism as a political ideology became equated with military adventurism. This was mostly due to the Iraq War – a largely unnecessary war, that was started by neoconservatives and establishment types who thought they could "export" democracy and human rights. The war in Iraq was so unpopular that the Republican nominee in 2008 (the admittedly weak Senator John McCain) had little to no chance of winning. Conservatism as a brand was tarnished, it seems, beyond recovery.

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Iran: To Neocon or Not to Neocon, Is That the Question?

Neoconservatism has had a bad reputation since the Iraq War, a conflagration that was supposed to turn that Middle Eastern country into Denmark.

We all know how that went. Those of us who were neocons in those days (I was, more or less, as well as tons of people who now pretend otherwise) didn't bank on the tribalism of the region as well as the fundamentalist nature of Islam that resists, to put it mildly, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's.

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Wilkerson says ‘Israel’s security’ was motive for Iraq war– though not in NYT op-ed

There was an excellent headline in the New York Times two days ago— “I Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It’s Happening Again”– on a piece by retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson.

Wilkerson served as Colin Powell’s chief of staff in the runup to the Iraq disaster, and he wrote that the Secretary of State’s “gravitas” was used by the Bush administration to sell a war that destabilized the Middle East. A similar runup of claims is today being plotted by advocates of war in Iran. In both cases, a Washington braintrust pushes “falsehoods.”

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I Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It’s Happening Again.

Fifteen years ago this week, Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, spoke at the United Nations to sell pre-emptive war with Iraq. As his chief of staff, I helped Secretary Powell paint a clear picture that war was the only choice, that when “we confront a regime that harbors ambitions for regional domination, hides weapons of mass destruction and provides haven and active support for terrorists, we are not confronting the past, we are confronting the present. And unless we act, we are confronting an even more frightening future.”

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‘We overstepped in that case’ — David Brooks offers another empty apology for supporting Iraq war

Brooks responded:

I was so-called neoconservative. That’s what we cared about. We wanted to defeat the Soviet Union to preserve the human rights of the Soviet Union. We went into Iraq because we thought it would help for democracy around the world, and we overstepped in that case. But it was a human rights-based, democracy- and freedom-based foreign policy that Ronald Reagan stood for.

Sadly, no one pressed the neoconservatives’ Iraq story. Though at other times in the debate Brooks struck conservative themes that, had he taken them seriously, should have stopped him from supporting the Iraq invasion.

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The U.S. is at last facing the neocon captivity

The best thing about this political moment in the U.S. (if not for the good people of Iraq) is that the rise of ISIS and the Republican candidates’ embrace of the Iraq war is posing that deep and permanent question to the American public, Why did we invade Iraq?

Last night Chris Matthews asked that question again and David Corn said it was about the neoconservative desire to protect Israel. Both men deserve kudos for courage. Here’s part of the exchange:

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Neocons Falsify Iraq War ‘Lessons’

It really rankles some people that Barack Obama was correct from the outset, before any unfolding of the history confirming he was right, that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a huge mistake. And one can understand how to some ears Mr. Obama’s subsequent references to the Iraq War may have a grating “I told you so” quality.

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Neo-conservatives promoted war with Iraq, now look toward Iran

Neo-conservatives who successfully pushed the nation to war with Iraq, a country that never attacked us and never possessed the Bush Administration’s “weapons of mass destruction,” are now promoting war with Iran, a country more than three times the size of Iraq.

The war in Iraq did not go well, defying the neo-conservatives’ prediction that U.S. troops would be welcomed with open arms. That war had a series of unintended consequences, as wars always do. It left a regional power vacuum that helped promote the growth of ISIS, helped increase the chaos in Syria and increased the regional importance of Iran.

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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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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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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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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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Iraq — Neocon/Liberal Treason

Invading Iraq was insane from the point of view of American interests. The best Iraq could hope for is a rational dictator like Hussein who is tough enough to keep everybody from murdering each other, and who is secular enough to keep the clergy in their place. And, as far as U.S. interests are concerned, that's the best situation we could hope for in Iraq. Nevertheless, American interests don't seem to have been prioritized by our neocon/liberal decision-makers. We destroyed that stability by invading and overthrowing Hussein. Who benefits from an unstable Iraq? Only one I can think of is Israel, which seems to promote unrest and chaos all over the Muslim world, in order to keep any country from getting organized enough to threaten Israel. If so, the mess in Iraq is a feature, not a bug.

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Neocons Want U.S. Back in Iraq: Here’s Why

“America must always lead,” President Barack Obama told West Point graduates during his May 28 commencement speech.

It would seem those four words should not prompt much criticism from the president’s conservative critics, who argue his stance on American foreign policy is weakening the country. Essentially, Republican lawmakers have made the same argument: the United States must take a leadership role on the world stage. But congressional Republicans and the Obama administration disagree over the form that leadership should take. “Our allies are looking to America for leadership, but rather than acting boldly and speaking with moral clarity this president’s tenure has been marked more by obfuscation and weakness,” stated Speaker of the House John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, in a response to the defense of his approach to foreign policy Obama gave at West Point.

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The Neocon Legacy

David Atkins, The Brutal Neoconservative Legacy in Iraq, pretty much says the same stuff I wrote here. Very basically, Atkins points out that the neocons have continued to justify the invasion of Iraq by claiming that getting rid of Saddam Hussein would be good for America in the long run.

But over a decade after the invasion and with Iraq seemingly entering a disastrous sectarian civil war, it seems abundantly clear that whatever the long-term effects of the invasion may be, the near to mid-term result has been to empower Shi’ite theocrats in Iran, and to radicalize Sunni factions in Iraq. As of this writing, Sunni extremist groups expressly intent on establishing a global caliphate are threatening to overrun Baghdad. The corrupt Shi’ite government of Nouri Al-Maliki is counting on and receiving support from the Ayatollahs in Iran.

Neither of these developments have even a silver lining behind them.

It wasn’t just the invasion, but the gross mismanagement of the occupation/nation building phase that came after pretty much guaranteed that the invasion of Iraq will always be counted as one of the greatest foreign policy bleep-ups of all time. I’d say it’s got Napoleon’s invasion of Russia beat by a mile.

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Neocon lunatics are back: Right-wing Wall Street Journal calls for reinvading Iraq

The eight-years-long bloody disaster that was the Iraq War did nothing – absolutely nothing – to persuade its architects, promoters and defenders that military intervention in the region is perhaps not the best idea. With Iraq now falling to pieces as it struggles to contain the advance of the Islamic extremist group ISIS, the same public officials who made the spurious case for war in 2003 and the media outlets that aggressively backed it are once again agitating for armed conflict.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board was one of the Iraq War’s most fervent supporters. (“It will be the nasty weapons and the cheering Iraqis the coalition finds when it liberates the country,” they predicted in February 2003, wrongly.) Now they want the U.S. to go back to war, and they’ve even done the courtesy of drawing up their own battle plans.

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The Neocons’ Iraq War Mess

The neocons are rewriting more Iraq War history, arguing that if only President Obama had stayed the course on an open-ended US military occupation, the regional situation would be a lot better. But the truth is that it was their invasion of Iraq that set loose the chaos.

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Iraq 10 Years Later (3): Why the Neocon Theory behind the War Failed

In short, it was the ‘fiasco’ execution of the Iraq war that turned so many against it, not the original premise. That is why neocons still get air-time on the right and aren’t repentant; they don’t feel that they have been intellectually disproven. That is also why Drezner is correct to note how many people thought the war was at least not a bad idea before it actually occurred.

That said though, the primary geopolitical lesson is probably just the banal, Waltian observation that some ideas are simply too ambitious to see through even if they’re intellectually defensible. Iraq is a perfect example of why realism counsels prudence. Even if the neocon analysis was right – which is disputable, especially in the wake of Arab Spring – to follow through on it would have required, 1) a wholesale COIN/nation-building re-making of the military, especially the army, in the face of painful lessons to the contrary from the Vietnam War and disinterest in that re-making almost everywhere in DoD; and 2) enduring US public support for long-term nation-building, which the US electorate has never before supported like that. In fact, the US public is known for the opposite – casualty-shyness that regularly puts a political limit on the US use of force. Yet even were both of those in place, trying to remake a foreign society is still extraordinarily difficult. Nonetheless, with mixed tools and tepid public public support, we tried something super-difficult. It’s not surprising, then, that it ended so poorly. Hence, today’s ‘leading from behind’ is not a bad choice after all.

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Iraq 10 Years Later (2): What was the Neocon Theory behind the War?

My first thoughts on the war’s ten year anniversary are here. There I asked if there was any defensible theory behind the war, anything that might explain why we launched it, because weapons of mass destruction were not really the reason. Paul Wolfowitz notoriously admitted they were just a pretext to rally the country behind the invasion. And it’s hard to argue it was about pre-emption either; Iraq was hardly a looming military threat in 2003. So here’s my guess about the real neoconservative logic. I should say up front, I do not endorse this rationale. I’m just trying to lay it out what I bet neocons were saying to each other in 2002:

The Iraq invasion was to serve two neocon purposes: 1) It was to be a demonstration strike against the Arab states. Islamist anti-western pathologies from the Middle East lead to 9/11, so the Iraq invasion was a warning to Arabs, and Muslims generally, to never to attack the US like that again. As Cheney put it in the film W, ‘don’t ever f— with us again.’ 2) It was to be a hammer strike to break the frozen, dysfunctional Arab political status quo which generated those pathologies; this would force the region toward democracy it would never attain on its own. This thinking was summarized in the widely used expression at the time, ‘drain the swamp.’

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How Iraq Maneuvered the US Exit

The neocons’ treasured Iraq War myth of their “successful surge” is belied by the actual history of how Iraqi Shiite leaders collaborated with Iran to tamp down internal violence and then destroy neocon plans for long-term U.S. military bases to project power in the Middle East, as Gareth Porter explains.

The real story behind the U.S. withdrawal is how a clever strategy of deception and diplomacy adopted by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in cooperation with Iran outmaneuvered Bush and the U.S. military leadership and got the United States to sign the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement.