NeoCons

“Okay everyone, repeat after me.

Carter won the cold war, Carter was one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century.





Uhhh don't mention the fact that he left our hostages in Iran.”

“And don't mention the fact that Reagan traded with Iran in a deal to keep the hostages there until his inauguration date”

“what should Carter have done stickman?”

“And that black helicopters are being used by the UN to spy on Americans, and there are Russian troops being housed at US bases, and a secret society called the Skulls control the world's banks and governments.”

“Can I put forward silly theories and pretend they are yours? You bet I can!”

“Exactly.
My fav. conspiracy theory: Concentration camps are already built and ready to be used by the gov.”

“The north pole is not the top of the world, the south pole is. We are all living upside down.”

“Well if I were to nominate best pres it would be ford, he wasnt in office long enough to really screw up :}

stick there are in fact one or two concentration camps left over from ww2, we used them to inter japanese americans.....The goverment hasnt gotten around to tearing them down.”

“CONCENTRATION CAMPS ROCK!”

“Concentration was a fun game show.”

“Violin, you are BAD!”

“regiem change, huh? guess vIoLiN likes ole john F kerry.....”

“

Neoconservatives
They emerged from behind the scenes politically to change American foreign policy. But they've always been there, and Iraq is only one of their goals.
By Dick Polman
Inquirer Staff Writer


WASHINGTON - For seven long years, Bill Kristol agitated for a U.S. coup against Saddam Hussein, and argued that America should remake the world to serve its own interests. Few bothered to listen at the time. So how does he feel now?

In his office the other day, he grinned without smirking. That's how most of the hawkish defense intellectuals - better known as neoconservatives - are behaving these days. Although they're sitting pretty in wartime Washington, they're trying not to preen.

Kristol refuses to strut his stuff, because he knows how fast the high and mighty can be brought low in this town; after all, he was once Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff. Still, he can't resist contending that Sept. 11 made all the "neocons" look like prophets.

"We saw, earlier than most people, that the world was very dangerous, that America's drift during the '90s was very dangerous," he said Wednesday at the Weekly Standard, the Rupert Murdoch-financed magazine he edits that promotes the neocon credo. "We were alarmed; we tried to call attention to all that. So I don't want to say we feel vindicated, but we do feel our analysis was right."

The neocons - think-tank warriors and commentators, all of whom cite Ronald Reagan's moral clarity - are hot these days because they emerged from the political wilderness to alter the course of American foreign policy. And Iraq is just the beginning, as Kristol cheerily contended: "President Bush is committed, pretty far down the road. The logic of events says you can't go halfway. You can't liberate Iraq, then quit."

The neocons care little about domestic policy; they think globally. They don't believe in peaceful coexistence with hostile, undemocratic states; rather, they want an "unapologetic, idealistic, assertive" America (in Kristol's words) that will foment pro-democratic revolutions around the world, if necessary at the point of a gun.

The neocon assumption - that the American way is best for everybody, whether foreigners know it or not - is not shared by their numerous critics. Establishment Republicans, many of whom worked for Bush's father, worry that the fomenting of new "regime changes" will sow more global terrorism against Americans. Liberals simply say that the neocons have captured Bush's brain.

Historian Allan Lichtman said that regardless of whether one agrees with the neocons, "they are historically important, because, in the post-Cold War world, they are providing an intellectual justification for the continuation of the national security state."

Others talk darkly about a "neocon cabal" that includes a media empire (Murdoch also owns Fox News), policy shops (notably the American Enterprise Institute, home to many neocon scholars and Kristol's Project for a New American Century), and revenue sources (particularly the Bradley Foundation, which has helped finance the policy shops).

In a sense, it is tight-knit. The institute, Kristol's Project for a New American Century, and the Weekly Standard are all housed in the same Washington office building, a square slab of concrete 12 stories high. During Gulf War II, it was the place to be; every Tuesday morning, the institute hosted public "black-coffee briefings" led by Tom Donnelly, an institute scholar who once worked for the Project for a New American Century.

The neocons move between these groups and Bush's government. In 1998, the Project for a New American Century sent an open letter to President Bill Clinton, urging that he overthrow Hussein; 10 of the signatories now work for Bush. And when Bush spoke in February at the institute (Lynne Cheney, the vice president's wife, is a board member), he said that his team had borrowed 20 of its scholars.

Neocon Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser, was an institute scholar; so was John Bolton, who now has a key undersecretary post in the State Department. Today, the institute still has hawks who were hawks before the neocon label became hip; witness ex-Reagan Pentagon adviser Michael Ledeen, who, while puffing on a fat cigar the other day, said: "Americans believe that peace is normal, but that's not true. Life isn't like that. Peace is abnormal."

But is this a cabal? Networking is a way of life in Washington; Democrats do it, too. Max Boot, another prominent neocon (and a think-tank scholar who writes for Kristol's magazine), said: "The liberals have plenty of well-organized and well-funded groups. The problem is that they don't have any good ideas to sell, at least not on foreign policy. To judge from their recent antiwar invective, a large part of the party is still in cloud cuckoo land."

Marshall Wittmann, a close observer of the neocons and a friend of Kristol's, said: "The neocons are all about ideas. They understand how to promote those ideas. They get a lot of bang for the buck. It's the way they frame their arguments, and into whose hands they put those arguments. Also, while a fair number of conservatives shun the mainstream press, Bill participates in it."

In the '90s, the neocons were also relentless. Paul Wolfowitz, now the deputy defense secretary, was a Pentagon underling in 1992 under Dick Cheney when he drafted a document declaring that America should move against potential rivals, even if forced to act alone: "The United States should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated."

The document was deemed too radical; it was watered down. But four years later, in a foreign-policy journal, Kristol and colleague Robert Kagan tried again, writing that America, in pursuit of "benevolent global hegemony," should be willing to confront hostile countries and "bring about a change of regime."

But, as Kristol now recalls, "that article was pretty much ignored." So was his magazine's special issue of Dec. 1, 1997, titled Saddam Must Go. In fact, most Republicans didn't care; on Capitol Hill, they were talking about a lower U.S. profile in the world. And Bush, during his 2000 campaign, talked of showing "humility" abroad.

It was Sept. 11 that put the neocons in play; until that day, they had been castigating Bush for not being tough enough overseas. And now, looking back, they freely admit that Bush embraced their national-security strategy only because he had been jolted by events.

Gary Schmitt, a former Reagan administration intelligence expert who now runs Kristol's think tank, said: "Without 9/11, Bush might have been off wandering in the desert, in terms of foreign policy. He might have been looking for a minimal foreign-policy voice so that he could concentrate on domestic matters. So we [neocons] might not have been in a good position at all.

"Even now, do we feel triumphant? No. We've been around this town too long. Our job is to continue to push."

The neocon crusade for a democratic Middle East, abetted by American might, has just begun. Last week, Kristol's magazine rebuked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for refusing to commit himself to building a military base in Iraq, and tweaked Bush for being "too hasty" in praising Syria for its vow to expel Hussein's henchmen. The neocons, fearing that monetary constraints could hamper their vision, also want a defense budget much bigger than what the Bush team has proposed.

And if people overseas don't like the more imperious America, the neocon response is basically: So what? Boot said: "Being number one will always elicit a certain amount of resentment; lots of people outside New York hate the Yankees, just as lots of people outside Dallas have always hated the Cowboys. That doesn't mean the Yankees and Cowboys can't go on winning."

Kristol shrugged, "We're going to get criticized for being an imperial power anyway, so you might as well make sure that the good guys win.

"But there will be obstacles, and I'm worried about them. Iraq is going to be messy, there's no easy solution to North Korea, and there are risks in confronting Iran. Some things can go wrong. But it's always better to err on the side of strength. The pressures will be great, but this is what it means to live in a genuinely historic moment."”

“Nother great one decoupage.”

“Kristol was Quayle's chief of staff?

One good sissy deserves another.”

“One good sissy deserves another."

That's why libs stick together.”

“no SMW, i think it's cuz they're askeered of the dark......”

“I have argued that the contemporary left, which opposed the American war and opposes the America peace, which denounces American corporations and the global capitalist system, should be called "neo-communist," a term to denote anti-American leftists who demonize the American economic system and identify it as a "root cause" of global problems. An objection to the term is that some members of this left - perhaps many - no longer advocate a Communist future sensu strictu. Many in fact call themselves anarchists and would be eager to denounce (costless as that might be now) the late Soviet state.








I have already provided one answer to this objection. There is no group that identifies its politics as "neo-conservative," either. There are no "neo-conservative" organizations (official or unofficial) and there is no "neo-conservative" policy or plan. Yet there is little objection to the use of "neo-conservative" to describe what others consider a readily identifiable political position.

The resistance to the term "neo-communist," derives from a misunderstanding of the nature of a political left that is proud of its Communist heritage - gulags aside -- (as this left mainly is) and still clings to socialist "solutions" and the revolutionary idea (as this left mainly does). There are always (and inevitably) two sides to the revolutionary coin. The first is negative and destructive, since it is necessary first to undermine the beliefs, values and institutions of the old order which must be destroyed before a new one can be established. The second is positive and utopian, a vision of the future that condemns the present and encapsulates the idea of a redemptive fate.

For half a century now, ever since Khrushchev's revelations about the crimes of Stalin, the left has been exclusively driven by its negative agendas. (This has become even more the case since the pathetic implosion of the socialist system.) Leaders of the contemporary left have put forward no serious plans for the post-capitalist future. More importantly, none of the energies that drive them are inspired by such plans. The left's inspirations are mainly negative and nihilistic, and have been so for nearly fifty years.

For even in its innocent beginnings, the new left defined itself by negatives, as "anti-anti Communist." It was a "new" left because it did not want to identify with communism. But it also did not want to oppose Communism either, because then it would have had to support America's Cold War. "Anti-anti Communism" was the code for its anti-Americanism. What the left wanted was to oppose America and its "sham democracy."

There is a sense, of course, in which the left has always been defined by its destructive agendas. Its utopian vision was just that - utopian, a vision of nowhere. In practice, socialism didn't work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy. In the vast library of socialist theory (and in all of Marx's compendious works), there is hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth - to what will cause human beings to work and to innovate, and to what will make their efforts efficient. Socialism is a plan of morally sanctioned theft. It is about dividing up what others have created. Consequently, socialist economies don't work; they create poverty instead of wealth. This is unarguable historical fact now, but that has not prompted the left to have second thoughts.

Because its positive agendas are unworkable, to characterize the left by its negative critiques and destructive agendas is perfectly appropriate; everything else, everything it claims to intend, everything it does in fact intend is so much utopian air.

In a previous, article titled, "Neo-Communism: The Forty Years War," I identified several exemplars of the neo-communist left, one of whom has since responded. Maurice Zeitlin is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the co-author of a faculty resolution condemning the United States' liberation of Iraq -- after the fact. Because the resolution was drafted and passed after the liberation of Baghdad its agendas are clearly aimed at America and not the reality in Iraq.

I have known Maurice Zeitlin for more than forty years since we were both new left radicals in the Sixties. In my article, I pointed out that Zeitlin, speaking at an academic conference, had recently hailed the late Cuban Communist, Che Guevara, as "a leader of the first socialist revolution in this hemisphere." He had also said, "[Guevara's] legacy is embodied in the fact that Cuban revolution is alive today despite the collapse of the Soviet bloc," and also that, "No social justice is possible without a vision like Che's."[1] I concluded that it was Zeitlin's neo-communist agenda, and not any specifics of the war that had inspired the post-hoc UCLA faculty resolution against the U.S. action.

Zeitlin has responded to this article in a terse and angry email, which he sent to my assistant, Elizabeth Ruiz, referring to me in the third person. This email affords a further look into the mind of the neo-communist left.

In my article I had mentioned that Zeitlin and Robert Scheer, an L.A. Times columnist with similar politics, had written one of the first books celebrating the Communist revolution in Cuba. In his email Zeitlin is irritated because I didn't mention in the article that I had edited this book. ("You can tell Davey for me that he might have mentioned in this column that he edited the book by myself and Scheer on Cuba -- and we thanked him in the acknowledgments.")Zeitlin appared to think that this fact implicated me in his radical politics in a way I had not already written about in my autobiography Radical Son. He continues: "To think that I saved him from an enraged audience and protected his right to speak at the LA Times Festival of Books a few years ago."[2] I have also written about this incident. "Saved" is a little over the top for the remarks Zeitlin made in defense of my right to express myself. Book readers are not the most violent of audiences and in any case the event was being televised on C-Span. The point Zeitlin seems to want to make is that since he defended my free speech at UCLA, he cannot be called a "neo-communist."

Why not? Didn't Communists defend the principle of free speech in America when they stood up to Senator McCarthy? Communists are great defenders of freedom in the democracies they want to overthrow. It enhances their powers to subvert the system. Didn't Lenin himself defend the right to vote in democratic Russia before abolishing it as soon as he took power?

In the second brief paragraph of his email, Zeitlin makes his objection clearer, and makes explicit the defense of good intentions: "[David] knows damn well that I have long opposed execrable regimes like Hussein's, years before, indeed, Bush even knew who Hussein was. He also knows that I wrote severe criticisms of the restrictions on rights in revolutionary Cuba in Ramparts, when he was its very editor and still gung ho for Fidel;…"

This cri de coeur begs the most important question: What does it mean to oppose Saddam Hussein's "execrable regime" and at the same time oppose the effort to change it? Or to condemn the regime change after the fact when Iraqis are rejoicing in the streets? What are intentions worth when actions contradict them? Are Zeitlin's critiques of Castro harsher than Khrushchev's criticisms of Stalin? Did Khrushchev cease to be a Communist because he criticized Stalin? Zeitlin's attempt at self-exculpation does not provide answers.



Zeitlin was indeed critical of the Cuban revolutionary regime, and was critical even earlier than he indicates. He is correct as well that as a fellow leftist I did not want to see such criticisms aired. (However I would not describe myself at the time as exactly "gung ho for Fidel). The fact is that I published his critique. But Zeitlin could have cited a much more impressive instance of his new left independence from the Communist past.

In 1960, long before the creation of Ramparts, Zeitlin had visited Cuba and interviewed Che Guevara, who was then the second most powerful man in the dictatorship. We published the interview in the first issue of our Berkeley magazine, Root and Branch, which one of the political journals that launched the new left (Robert Scheer was also an editor). The rest of us were both shocked and impressed when we read the interview and realized what Maurice had done.

He had not just interviewed Guevara, already a radical legend. He had challenged Guevara's policies and in effect called into question his revolutionary credentials. Maurice had asked Guevara about the role he thought the trade unions should play in a socialist country, specifically Cuba. Should they be independent - as new left socialists like us wanted - or would they be appendages of the state, as Lenin and Stalin had made them? Maurice reminded Guevara that the elimination of independent unions, the organizations after all of the revolutionary class, had paved the way for the Soviet gulag. Guevara was angered by the question and by Maurice's temerity in raising the question, would not criticize the Soviets and abruptly changed the subject.

Zeitlin had put Guevara to the test and Guevara had failed. The interview revealed that Guevara was a Stalinist himself. We all recognized the significance of what he had said. Yet to our shame, we continued to support the Cuban regime anyway, knowing that it was destined to be a totalitarian gulag - because that was the intention of its creators. Maurice did write a subsequent critique for Ramparts. But like us, he continued to support the regime and to attack the United States and its efforts to restore freedom to Cuba. Later, when I had second thoughts about my political commitments and left the political left and comrades like Maurice Zeitlin, I wrote about my regrets for defending a regime that has become the most sadistic dictatorship in Latin American history. Except for Ronald Radosh and other "second thoughters" who have also turned their backs on the left, I don't know of any new radicals who have done the same.

The left's silence over these unforeseen consequences of its political commitments underscores the pitiful impotence and ultimate irrelevance of good intentions however good they may be. What does it matter that we wanted to create a "new" left or a "democratic socialism," if we did not put our actions behind these desires, if we did not apply the same standards of judgment (and action) for socialist tyrannies as we did for others? What were our "critiques" worth if we were prepared to continue our support for such regimes, or to remain part of a movement that actually defended them? What are Zeitlin's critiques worth if he preserves the myth of Che's leadership and the viability of the socialist idea?

Forty years later, the results of our defense of the Cuban revolution are indisputable. Cuba is an island prison, a land of regime-induced poverty, misery and human oppression (greater by far than the old regime it replaced). Yet despite his criticisms, Maurice Zeitlin is still defending the Cuban "revolution" - along with its patron saint, Che Guevara. As a UCLA professor he is now teaching a new generation of college students who have no memory of this past to idolize the Communist predator he criticized forty years before, calling him an inspiration for the future! ("No social justice is possible without a vision like Che's.") In view of this record, what do Zeitlin's parenthetical condemnations and critical asides matter?

Zeitlin's political career reminds me of a short story by Irwin Shaw titled, "The Ninety-Yard Run," about a college football star who makes a ninety-yard run in his senior college year, which turns out to be the high point of his life. It's down hill all the way for him from there.

In defining the term "neo-communist" as applied to leftists like Zeitlin, I was careful to be specific. I defined a neo-communist as "a political radical and a determined opponent of America and its capitalist democracy." What I had in mind in this description was not just a political outlook, but an outlook reflecting a profound feeling of alienation from America and a hostility towards it that only someone who was or had been a radical himself could really understand.

In attempting to describe this attitude, I have elsewhere employed as an example a line we once used in Ramparts magazine, the flagship publication of the new left. On the cover of our issue we had placed a photograph of a seven-year-old holding the flag of the Communist enemy in Vietnam. The cover line said, "Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win."[3] That was the way we felt, and we felt that way because our outlook had led us to look at the United States as the imperialist leader of world reaction, which meant that anything that caused America's defeat would be a benefit to mankind.

In the 1980s, I was provided a personal insight into Maurice Zeitlin's own profound alienation from his country - a country that had provided him intellectual freedom, a six-figure income, and opportunities to travel all over the world doing research and writing Marxist tracts at American taxpayers' expense. When the incident in question occurred, I had not seen Maurice nor heard from him in more than twenty years, since our days together in the radical Sixties. I had no idea whether he had had second thoughts like mine or whether he was still on the left. Our paths crossed, so to speak, because of a newspaper report about another Sixties radical named Margaret Randall who was applying for the reinstatement of her American citizenship. She was supported by a chorus of radicals, who claimed that in resisting her request the State Department was trampling on her civil rights.

This news item so outraged me that I promptly wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times urging the authorities to deny her request. The reason Randall no longer had her citizenship was that she had joined a movement of local terrorists in Mexico City who were attempting to obstruct the 1968 Olympic games. When the street battles were over and many lay dead, she publicly renounced her American citizenship and attacked her homeland as a "fascist" state. She then went to live in Communist Cuba and work as a teacher, indoctrinating Cuban schoolchildren in the Communist creed. In my letter to the Times, I urged officials to demand that Randall apologize to her country before returning to her the citizenship she had renounced. Being an American, in my view, meant accepting a social contract that included a commitment to democracy and individual freedom. I thought Randall should be treated like a new citizen-applicant, and required to make a formal commitment to her country and its principles before being receiving her citizenship back. What is America if it is not a nation of citizens committed to these common ends?

Maurice read my letter to the Los Angeles Times. His reaction, which I learned about through a mutual friend was, "I wonder how low Horowitz will sink next?" This came as a shock to me, because I remembered Maurice's bold defense of freedom to Che Guevara years before, and was unaware of his political evolution since. This remark told me more about Maurice's political commitments than I wanted to hear.

The purpose of the term "neo-communist" is to identify a segment of the left that regards the United States as the root cause of international evil because it is the guardian of the international property system. In the eyes of radicals, this makes America the bulwark of the prevailing system of "social injustice" in the world. These propositions have profound implications for one's political loyalties and commitments, and explain how individuals who claim to honor peace, justice, equality and freedom, can interpose themselves between America and a fascist like Saddam Hussein.

In my previous article on this subject, I referred to Nicholas DeGenova, the Columbia professor who recently made himself notorious at an "antiwar" teach-in by wishing for "a million Mogadishus" -- a million American military defeats. The outrage at his remarks was a response to the image of American troop casualties. But this was to miss the forest for the trees. As DeGenova himself explained in defending his remarks afterwards, what he meant was not that a lot of Americans should be killed (the left always imagines it can separate support for America's troops from support for America's wars) but that a defeat for America would be a victory for humanity. This is the way DeGenova put it:

What I was really emphasizing in the larger context of my comments was the question of Vietnam and that historical lesson….What I was intent to emphasize was that the importance of Vietnam is that it was a defeat for the U.S. war machine and a victory for the cause of human self-determination. [4]

DeGenova might have added "for social justice."

This is the essence of the neo-communist vision. It explains how leftists like Maurice Zeitlin can condemn America's liberation of Iraq, despite the fact that they recognize that Iraq's regime is "execrable" and that the Iraqi people have been freed from a tyranny. "The analogy between Mogadishu and Vietnam," DeGenova elaborates, "is that they were defeats for U.S. imperialism…. The analogy between Mogadishu and Iraq is simply that there was an invasion of Somalia and there was an invasion of Iraq."[5]

A key to the mentality of the left is that it judges itself by its best intentions, and judges its opponents -- America chief among them -- by their worst deeds. Or by the fantasies of what their worst deeds might be. By imagining a perfect world of social justice that leftists (unopposed) will surely create, even America's most positive achievements can be made to look bad. If a world can be made in which everyone will be fed and have shelter and medical attention, then the fact that they don't can attributed to America, because America is the guardian of the international "status quo."

Therefore, every good that America has achieved can be seen in its reality - from the point of view of social justice -- as a social obscenity. It may be the case, for example, that America has raised unprecedented millions out of the ranks of poverty into a comfortable middle-class existence. But a neo-communist sees this achievement as one that is realized at the expense of a million greater achievements. A historical good that America has accomplished is thus turned into a malevolent deprivation or an evil deed. By extension, when the left acts to weaken America or defend America's enemies, it is really advancing the cause of social progress. This is the neo-communist creed.

Therefore, let us call such radicals neo-communists, or neo-coms (or small "c" communists) for short. They are neo-communist because in the past the Communist left was driven by the illusion that the Soviet Union was actually a "workers paradise" and that true socialism had been achieved. Communists who defended Stalin's oppressive state believed that Russia was really a paradigm of human freedom. Consequently, they experienced none of the problems of cognitive dissonance such as their political heirs do today. Neo-communists know the execrable nature of regimes like Iraq's but defend them against American arms nonetheless. Yet, unlike Moscow, Baghdad is not their socialist mecca. In order to sustain their antagonism to America's intervention to liberate Iraq, they must disconnect their intentions from their actions and their actions from the results.

Neo-communists survive on bad faith. In the past, Communists believed in what they did; today, neo-communists justify their deeds by invoking the excuse of good intentions. But isn't this just what all utopians do? If you believe in a future that will redeem mankind, what lie will you not tell, what crime will you not commit to make the future happen? Which is why progressives have committed every crime in the last half century and lied to all, especially themselves. The Communist mantra that "the ends justify the means," is exactly the rationalization that neo-communists use to defend their alliances with reactionary Islamic radicals and fascist regimes. But after all, using good intentions to justify bad deeds is the first requirement of a utopian bad faith.”

“that was a whole slew of words!!!!”

“i know, sorry. it just seemed so perfect for this thread....he tells it liek it is and he defined the left iback in the 60's. he truely knows the way they think in their 'secret meetings'....”

“I like the term neocon...Give em credit for having some sort of vision..whether you agree with it or not.”

“Good parody site:

http://www.weaklystandard.com/”

“Beauty.”

“From How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle:
A PNAC Primer by Bernard Weiner


The Origins of the Crisis 

Most of us Americans saw the end of the Cold War as a harbinger of a more peaceful globe, and we relaxed knowing that the communist world was no longer a threat to the U.S. The Soviet Union, our partner in MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) and Cold War rivalry around the globe, was no more. This meant a partial vacuum in international affairs. Nature abhors a vacuum. 



The only major vacuum-filler still standing after the Cold War was the United States. One could continue traditional diplomacy on behalf of American ends -- the kind of polite, well-disguised defense of U.S. interests (largely corporate) and imperial ambition carried out under Bush#1, Reagan, Clinton, et al. -- knowing that we'd mostly get our way eventually given our status as the globe's only Superpower. Or one could try to speed up the process and accomplish those same ends overtly -- with an attitude of arrogance and in-your-face bullying -- within maybe one or two Republican administrations. 



Some of the ideological roots of today's Bush Administration power-wielders could be traced back to political philosophers Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter or to GOP rightist Barry Goldwater and his rabid anti-communist followers in the early-1960s. But, for simplicity's sake let's stick closer to our own time. 



In the early-1990s, there was a group of ideologues and power-politicians on the fringe of the Republican Party's far-right. The members of this group in 1997 would found
The Project for the New American Century
(PNAC);  their aim was to prepare for the day when the Republicans regained control of the White House -- and, it was hoped, the other two branches of government as well -- so that their vision of how the U.S. should move in the world would be in place and ready to go, straight off-the-shelf into official policy. 



This PNAC group was led by such heavy hitters as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, James Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, James Bolton, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, William Bennett, Dan Quayle, Jeb Bush, most of whom were movers-and-shakers in previous Administrations, then in power-exile, as it were, while Clinton was in the White House. But even given their reputations and clout, the views of this group were regarded as too extreme to be taken seriously by the mainstream conservatives that controlled the Republican Party. 

Setting Up PNAC 

To prepare the ground for the PNAC-like ideas that were circulating in the HardRight, various wealthy individuals and corporations helped set up far-right think-tanks, and bought up various media outlets -- newspapers, magazines, TV networks, radio talk shows, cable channels, etc. -- in support of that day when all the political tumblers would click into place and the PNAC cabal and their supporters could assume control. 



This happened with the Supreme Court's selection of George W. Bush in 2000. The "outsiders" from PNAC were now powerful "insiders," placed in important positions from which they could exert maximum pressure on U.S. policy: Cheney is Vice President, Rumsfeld is Defense Secretary, Wolfowitz is Deputy Defense Secretary, I. Lewis Libby is Cheney's Chief of Staff, Elliot Abrams is in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security Council, Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department, John Bolton is Undersecretary of State, Richard Perle is chair of the Defense Policy advisory board at the Pentagon, former CIA director James Woolsey is on that panel as well, etc. etc. (PNAC's chairman, Bill Kristol, is the editor of The Weekly Standard.) In short, PNAC had a lock on military policy-creation in the Bush Administration. 



But, in order to unleash their foreign/military campaigns without taking all sorts of flak from the traditional wing of the conservative GOP -- which was more isolationist, more opposed to expanding the role of the federal government, more opposed to military adventurism abroad -- they needed a context that would permit them free rein. The events of 9/11 rode to their rescue. (In
one of their major
reports, written in 2000, they noted that "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.") 



The Bush Administration used those acts of terrorism -- and the fear generated in the general populace -- as their cover for enacting all sorts of draconian measures domestically (the Patriot Act, drafted earlier, was rushed through Congress in the days following 9/11; few members even read it) and as their rationalization for launching military campaigns abroad. 

The Domestic Ramifications 

Even today, the Bush manipulators, led by Karl Rove, continue to utilize fear and hyped-up patriotism and a permanent war on terrorism as the basis for their policy agenda, the top item of which, at this juncture, consists of getting Bush elected in 2004. This, in order to continue to fulfill their primary objectives, not the least of which domestically is to roll back and, where possible, decimate and eliminate social programs that the far-right has hated since the New Deal/Great Society days. 



By and large, these long-established programs are popular with Americans, so Bush&Co. can't attack them frontally -- but if all the monies are tied up in wars, defense, tax cuts, etc., they can go to the public and, in effect, say: "We'd love to continue to fund Head Start and education and environmental protection and drugs for the elderly through Medicare, but you see there's simply no extra money left over after we go after the bad guys. It's not our fault." 



So far, that stealth strategy has worked. The Bush&Co. hope is that the public won't catch on to their real agenda -- to seek wealth and power at the expense of average citizens -- until after a 2004 victory, and maybe not even then. Just keep blaming the terrorists, the French, the Dixie Chicks, peaceniks, fried potatoes, whatever. (Don't get me wrong. The Islamic fanatics that use terror as their political weapon are real and deadly and need to be stopped. The question is: How to do that in ways that enhance rather than detract from America's long-term national interests?) 



One doesn't have to speculate what the PNAC guys might think, since they're quite open and proud of their theories and strategies. Indeed, they've left a long, public record that lays out quite openly what they're up to. As I say, it was all set down on the record years ago, but nobody took such extreme talk seriously; now that they're in power, actually making the policy they only dreamed about a decade or so ago -- with all sorts of scarifying consequences for America and the rest of the world -- we need to educate ourselves quickly as to how the PNACers work and what their future plans might be. 

The PNAC Paper Trail 

Here is a shorthand summary of PNAC documents and strategies that have become U.S. policy. Some of these you may have heard about before, but I've expanded and updated as much as possible. 





1. In 1992, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had a strategy report drafted for the Department of Defense, written by Paul Wolfowitz, then Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy. In it, the U.S. government was urged, as the world's sole remaining Superpower, to move aggressively and militarily around the globe. The report called for pre-emptive attacks and ad hoc coalitions, but said that the U.S. should be ready to act alone when "collective action cannot be orchestrated." The central strategy was to "establish and protect a new order" that accounts "sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership," while at the same time maintaining a military dominance capable of "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Wolfowitz outlined plans for military intervention in Iraq as an action necessary to assure "access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil" and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and threats from terrorism. 



Somehow, this report leaked to the press; the negative response was immediate. Senator Robert Byrd led the Democratic charge, calling the recommended Pentagon strategy "myopic, shallow and disappointing....The basic thrust of the document seems to be this: We love being the sole remaining superpower in the world and we want so much to remain that way that we are willing to put at risk the basic health of our economy and well-being of our people to do so." Clearly, the objective political forces hadn't yet coalesced in the U.S. that could support this policy free of major resistance, and so President Bush the Elder publicly repudiated the paper and sent it back to the drawing boards. (For the essence of the draft text, see Barton Gellman's
"Keeping the U.S. First; Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower" in the Washington Post.





2. Various HardRight intellectuals outside the government were spelling out the new PNAC policy in books and influential journals. Zalmay M. Khalilzad (formerly associated with big oil companies, currently U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan & Iraq ) wrote an important volume in 1995, "From Containment to Global Leadership: America & the World After the Cold War," the import of which was identifying a way for the U.S. to move aggressively in the world and thus to exercise effective control over the planet's natural resources. A year later, in 1996, neo-conservative leaders Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, in their Foreign Affairs article "Towards a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," came right out and said the goal for the U.S. had to be nothing less than "benevolent global hegemony," a euphemism for total U.S. domination, but "benevolently" exercised, of course. 



3. In 1998, PNAC unsuccessfully lobbied President Clinton to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. The
January letter from PNAC 
urged America to initiate that war even if the U.S. could not muster full support from the Security Council at the United Nations. Sound familiar? (President Clinton replied that he was focusing on dealing with al-Qaida terrorist cells.) 





4. In September of 2000, PNAC, sensing a GOP victory in the upcoming presidential election, issued its white paper on
"Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for the New Century." 
The PNAC report was quite frank about why the U.S. would want to move toward imperialist militarism, a Pax Americana, because with the Soviet Union out of the picture, now is the time most "conducive to American interests and ideals...The challenge of this coming century is to preserve and enhance this 'American peace'." And how to preserve and enhance the Pax Americana? The answer is to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major-theater wars." 



In serving as world "constable," the PNAC report went on, no other countervailing forces will be permitted to get in the way. Such actions "demand American political leadership rather than that of the United Nations," for example. No country will be permitted to get close to parity with the U.S. when it comes to weaponry or influence; therefore, more U.S. military bases will be established in the various regions of the globe. (A post-Saddam Iraq may well serve as one of those advance military bases.) Currently, it is estimated that the U.S. now has nearly 150 military bases and deployments in different countries around the world, with the most recent major increase being in the Caspian Sea/Afghanistan/Middle East areas. 





5. George W. Bush moved into the White House in January of 2001. Shortly thereafter, a report by the Administration-friendly Council on Foreign Relations was prepared,
"Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century," 
that advocated a more aggressive U.S. posture in the world and called for a "reassessment of the role of energy in American foreign policy," with access to oil repeatedly cited as a "security imperative." (It's possible that inside Cheney's energy-policy papers -- which he refuses to release to Congress or the American people -- are references to foreign-policy plans for how to gain military control of oilfields abroad.) 

6. Mere hours after the 9/11 terrorist mass-murders, PNACer Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his aides to begin planning for an attack on Iraq, even though his intelligence officials told him it was an al-Qaida operation and there was no connection between Iraq and the attacks.
"Go massive," the aides' notes
quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not." Rumsfeld leaned heavily on the FBI and CIA to find any shred of evidence linking the Iraq government to 9/11, but they weren't able to. So he set up his own fact-finding group in the Pentagon that would provide him with whatever shaky connections it could find or surmise. 





7. Feeling confident that all plans were on track for moving aggressively in the world, the Bush Administration in September of 2002 published the
"National Security Strategy of the United States of America."  
The official policy of the U.S. government, as proudly proclaimed in this major document, is virtually identical to the policy proposals in the various white papers of the Project for the New American Century and others like it over the past decade. 



Chief among them are: 1) the policy of "pre-emptive" war -- i.e., whenever the U.S. thinks a country may be amassing too much power and/or could provide some sort of competition in the "benevolent hegemony" region, it can be attacked, without provocation. (A later corollary would rethink the country's atomic policy: nuclear weapons would no longer be considered defensive, but could be used offensively in support of political/economic ends; so-called "mini-nukes" could be employed in these regional wars.) 2) international treaties and opinion will be ignored whenever they are not seen to serve U.S. imperial goals. 3) The new policies "will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia." 



In short, the Bush Administration seems to see the U.S., admiringly, as a New Rome, an empire with its foreign legions (and threat of "shock&awe" attacks, including with nuclear weapons) keeping the outlying colonies, and potential competitors, in line. Those who aren't fully in accord with these goals better get out of the way; "you're either with us or against us." 

Summary & The PNAC Future 

Everyone loves a winner, and American citizens are no different. It makes a lot of people feel good that we "won" the battle for Iraq, but in doing so we paid too high a price at that, and may well have risked losing the larger war in the Arab/Muslim region: the U.S. now lacks moral stature and standing in much of the world, revealed as a liar for all to see (no WMDs in Iraq, no connection to 9/11, no quick handing-over the interim reins of government to the Iraqis as initially promised), destruction of a good share of the United Nation's effectiveness and prestige, needlessly alienating our traditional allies, infuriating key elements of the Muslim world, providing political and emotional ammunition for anti-U.S. terrorists, etc. 



Already, we're talking about $80 to $100 billion from the U.S. treasury for post-war reconstruction in Iraq. And the PNACers are gearing up for their next war: let's see, should we move first on Iran or on Syria, or maybe do Syria-lite first in Lebanon? 

One can believe that maybe PNAC sincerely believes its rhetoric -- that instituting U.S.-style "free-markets" and "democratically-elected" governments in Iraq and the other authoritarian-run countries of the Islamic Middle East will be good both for the citizens of that region and for American interests as well -- but even if that is true, it's clear that these incompetents are not operating in the world of Middle Eastern realities. 



These are armchair theoreticians -- most of whom made sure not to serve in the military in Vietnam -- who truly believed, for example, that the Iraqis would welcome the invading U.S. forces with bouquets of flowers and kisses when they "liberated" their country from the horribleness of Saddam Hussein's reign. The Iraqis, by and large, were happy to be freed of Saddam's terror, but, as it stands now, the U.S. military forces are more likely to be engulfed in a political/religious quagmire for years there, as so many of the majority Shia population just want the occupying soldiers to leave. 



And yet PNAC theorists continue to believe that remaking the political structure of the Middle East -- by force if necessary, although they hope the example of what the U.S. did to Iraq will make war unnecessary -- will be fairly easy. 



These are men of big ideas, but who don't really think. They certainly don't think through what takes place in the real world, when the genies of war and religious righteousness are let out of the bottle. For example, as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently put it, the U.S. had no Plan B for Iraq. They did great with Plan A, the war, but when the Saddam government collapsed, and with it law and order, and much of the population remained sullen and resentful towards the U.S., they had no prepared way of dealing with it. An embarrassing three weeks went by, with no progress, finally leading the Bush Administration to force out its initial administrators and to put in another team to have a go at it. 



No, friends, the PNAC boys are dangerous ideologues playing with matches, and the U.S. is going to get burned even more in years to come, unless their hold on power is broken. The only way to accomplish this, given the present circumstances, is to defeat their boss at the polls in 2004, thus breaking the HardRight momentum that has done, and is doing, such great damage to our reputation abroad and to our country internally, especially to our Constitution and economy. 



We don't need an emperor, we don't need huge tax cuts for the wealthy when the economy is tanking, we don't need more "pre-emptive" wars, we don't need more shredding of constitutional due process. Instead, we need leaders with big ideas who are capable of creative thinking. We need peace and justice in the Middle East (to help alter the chemistry of the soil in which terrorism grows), we need jobs and economic growth at home, and we need authentic and effective "homeland security" consistent with our civil liberties. In short, we need a new Administration, which means that we need to get to serious work to make all this change happen.
Organize!, organize!, organize!

Copyright 2003 by Bernard Weiner

”

“Weiner


huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh”

“Worse than that he's Bernie Weiner.”

“The central strategy was to "establish and protect a new order" that accounts "sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership," while at the same time maintaining a military dominance capable of "deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."

They have failed utterly at this.”

“You actually read that Pheady? Gawd I got like two lines in and the next thing I know I'm waking up with my face in the keyboard and key prints on my face.

Violin is about as exciting as wet bread.”

“It's a good thing not everyone in the US has a reading disorder. What'd it take you to read it, Phaed? Under 5 minutes?”

“Seomthing like that, but it is obviously left-leaning. That can be a chore to get through, if you don't agree with the premises.

It took me damn near two weeks to finish Bias.

On the other hand, I finished Treason in a day and a half. Funny as hell, that.”

“it's official.....violin is terry mcaulif...”

“"Seomthing like that, but it is obviously left-leaning. That can be a chore to get through, if you don't agree with the premises."

Good point Phead. It's not so much that I don't agree with it. It's just that I don't give a rat's a$$.”

“I found this special report by the Christian Science Monitor on the neoconservative movement. I'm surprized I didn't see it earlier, but I figured it would be a good thing to post here, since the CSM is one of the few news venues that hasn't been beaten into the dirt with charges of media bias by folks from this board.

It even has an interactive quiz to determine if you're a neocon.”

“I took the quiz and apparently I am an Isolationist.”

“Realist

Realists…

Are guided more by practical considerations than ideological vision
Believe US power is crucial to successful diplomacy - and vice versa
Don't want US policy options unduly limited by world opinion or ethical considerations
Believe strong alliances are important to US interests
Weigh the political costs of foreign action
Believe foreign intervention must be dictated by compelling national interest
Historical realist: President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Modern realist: Secretary of State Colin Powell”

“BARF! :O~~~~~~”

“It's strange you brought that up. I came across it over the weekend. I thought I was a neocon, but apparently I'm a realist. It does warn that it's not scientifically accurate.”

“Apparently I am a realist as well.”

“Yeah, but what, in political leanings, is?”

“That's a pretty typical write-up of neoconservatism. That quiz was kind of bogus, though. I loved the question about Vietnam. While it was admirable for the U.S. to come to the aid of its ally (France), the domino theory was a fallacy, and there were morally bankrupt facets to the war. How are you supposed to answer that?!?”

“Face it Phaedy, You are a closet Republican.”

“Isolationisem all the way, baby :)”

“Realist.”

“The same way you answer the following question.
When did you stop beating your wife?”

“The Christian Science Monitor is obviously biased.

They called me a liberal.

Imagine that.”

“Hmmmm. I'm a realist, too - according to the quiz. It makes sense, I've long respected Dwight D. Eisenhower.”

“ped - did you see where the History Channel has a special on Ike this weekend. Magnum PI is playing Ike! It's hard to believe that next week will be the 60th anniversary of D-Day.”

“While it was admirable for the U.S. to come to the aid of its ally (France), the domino theory was a fallacy, and there were morally bankrupt facets to the war. How are you supposed to answer that?!?"
Mutt
02:27:51 PM
05/25/04

Yeah, I had a problem with that one as well. I picked the answer that I felt most strongly about.”

“This just in--after taking the quiz, Stratdewd registers somewhere left of Lenin.”