neoconservadroid

2005-02-08T09:26:00.000-08:00

I got sick of focusing on this evil elite and am letting it go for awhile.

another happy neocon new year?

2005-01-02T10:03:00.000-08:00

When Mr. Rumsfeld told Specialist Thomas Wilson in Kuwait that the only reason the troops lacked armor was "a matter of production and capability," he was lying. [New York Times]

strange neocon bedfellows

2004-12-17T08:18:00.000-08:00

Hell-bent on regime change in Iran, some neoconservative hawks are lobbying the Bush administration to support an organization designated as a terrorist group by the State Department.

...read it all: In Bed with Terrorists by Laura Rozen

they eat their young, too

2004-12-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

Rumsfeld hit by a Right hook, by Alec Russell, Telegraph:

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, faced a blistering attack from the Right yesterday as an influential neo-conservative figure accused him of "breathtaking arrogance" and called for him to resign. William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, the house journal of the neo-conservative movement, said no wartime defence secretary had ever "so breezily dodged responsibility and so glibly passed the buck."

neoconservadroids' liberal legacy?

2004-11-29T08:20:00.000-08:00

One might, therefore, begin a consideration of neoconservatism with its rich history — or, in the alternative, with its contemporary influence. I propose to do neither (though I will indeed touch upon the past and the present). Instead, I want to explore its future — specifically, the ways in which neoconservatism has evolved according to its own premises in the direction of a current and future politics dedicated to the preservation and extension of liberal order, properly understood. To get to neoconservatism’s liberal legacy, however, it is necessary to begin with liberalism’s origins in the nature of politics itself.

...read it all: Neoconservatism’s Liberal Legacy by Tod Lindberg, Policy Review

pride goeth before the fall

2004-11-28T09:22:00.000-08:00

In a seemingly innocuous Thanksgiving message to readers last week, William Kristol, the neoconservative editor of The Weekly Standard magazine, slipped in a surprise demand for Rumsfeld’s dismissal.

“What remains to be done is to announce new leadership for the department of defence,” wrote Kristol. “This, surely, would be an important opportunity for a strong, Bush-doctrine-supporting outsider, someone who of course would be a team player, but someone who could also work with the military and broaden support for the president’s policy.”

Boiled down, this meant: almost anybody but Rumsfeld, whose performance has not always matched his swagger. His failure to install enough troops on the ground after last year’s invasion of Iraq has upset American generals and alienated supporters of the war.

“I am allergic to Rumsfeld,” said Ralph Peters, a former lieutenant-colonel and robust media champion of the war on terror. “We did a great thing in Iraq, but we did it very badly.

“He is an extremely talented man but he has the tragic flaw of hubris. His arrogance is unbearable. My friends in uniform just hate him.”

The calls for Rumsfeld to be dismissed have intensified since the departure was announced of his cabinet rival, Colin Powell, the secretary of state. With the liberal-leaning Powell being the first to go, conservatives no longer see the need to hold back their opinions.

...read it all: Neocons join the lynch mob for ‘arrogant’ Rumsfeld by Sarah Baxter, Times, 28 November 2004

multiple conservative frustrations

2004-11-26T21:44:00.000-08:00

From An Era of End-Timers and Neo-Cons: Whatever Happened to Conservatives? by Paul Craig Roberts, Counterpunch:

In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush.

The Iraqi War is serving as a great catharsis for multiple conservative frustrations: job loss, drugs, crime, homosexuals, pornography, female promiscuity, abortion, restrictions on prayer in public places, Darwinism and attacks on religion. Liberals are the cause. Liberals are against America. Anyone against the war is against America and is a liberal. "You are with us or against us."

This is the mindset of delusion, and delusion permits of no facts or analysis. Blind emotion rules. Americans are right and everyone else is wrong. End of the debate.

That, gentle reader, is the full extent of talk radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal Editorial page, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and, indeed, of the entire concentrated corporate media where noncontroversy in the interest of advertising revenue rules.

Once upon a time there was a liberal media. It developed out of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Liberals believed that the private sector is the source of greed that must be restrained by government acting in the public interest. The liberals' mistake was to identify morality with government. Liberals had great suspicion of private power and insufficient suspicion of the power and inclination of government to do good.

Liberals became Benthamites (after Jeremy Bentham). They believed that as the people controlled government through democracy, there was no reason to fear government power, which should be increased in order to accomplish more good.

The conservative movement that I grew up in did not share the liberals' abiding faith in government. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Today it is liberals, not conservatives, who endeavor to defend civil liberties from the state. Conservatives have been won around to the old liberal view that as long as government power is in their hands, there is no reason to fear it or to limit it.

up next: North Korea

2004-11-23T13:30:00.000-08:00

Bush claimed Sunday that his interlocutors, who included the leaders of the four other parties – Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea – agreed with him, but Hu and South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun have not backed down publicly from their strong opposition to a harder line toward Pyongyang.

Indeed, just before the weekend summit, Roh told an audience in Los Angeles that a hardline policy over North Korea's nuclear weapons would have "grave repercussions," adding, "There is no alternative left in dealing with this issue except dialogue."

The South Korean leader also denounced the idea of an economic embargo against Pyongyang.

That the hawks back in Washington are indeed mobilizing became clear Monday when William Kristol, an influential neoconservative who also chairs the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), faxed a statement entitled "Toward Regime Change in North Korea" to reporters and various "opinion leaders" in the capital.

....The article, "Tear Down This Tyranny," called for the implementation of a six-point strategy aimed at ousting North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-Il, in part by "working around the pro-appeasement crowd in the South Korean government," which apparently includes Roh himself.

...read it all: Hawks Push Regime Change in North Korea by Jim Lobe

the rise of stephen hadley

2004-11-21T09:03:00.000-08:00

Stephen Hadley is a fire-tested Vulcan--a hardliner close to Vice President Dick Cheney and to the neoconservative camp. Named by the president in mid-November 2004 to replace Condoleezza Rice as his National Security Adviser, Hadley formed part of a loosely constituted group of foreign policy advisers known as the Vulcans who advised presidential candidate Bush in 2000 and were at the core of the presidential transition team following Bush's election victory. Among the other Vulcans who later moved into the first Bush administration were Rice, Colin Powell, Cheney, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

...read it all: The Vulcans Consolidate Power by Tom Barry, Counterpunch, 20-21 November 2004

a neocon night of the long knives

2004-11-18T19:23:00.000-08:00

Powell's sacking and Rice's promotion are more than examples of behaviour punished and rewarded. His fall and her rise signal the purge of the CIA and the state department, a neocon night of the long knives.

...read it all: Colin and the crazies by Sidney Blumenthal, Guardian, 18 November 2004

how they spent Vietnam

2004-11-17T14:33:00.000-08:00

James Wolcott:

I can exclusively report what finally drove Powell over the brink. Yes, he was bummed by years of being backstabbed by the neocon hawks, most of whom spent Vietnam masturbating in their dorm rooms.

goosesteppin'

2004-11-17T13:36:00.000-08:00

They're on the march

Big Dick

2004-11-17T10:53:00.000-08:00

What counts in Washington today.

neocon wishlist for new Bush cabinet

2004-11-09T20:52:00.000-08:00

Michael Ledeen, in a National Review column today, The War Cabinet
President Bush needs to reshape his top structure, wants Zell Miller for Secretary of State, Jim Woolsey for Defense, John Bolton or Paul Wolfowitz for National Security Advisor, for the "War Cabinet" he says Bush needs. Thanks to Laura Rozen at The Gadflyer for the link.

four more years

2004-11-08T20:06:00.000-08:00

From Four More Years by James Mann, in Foreign Policy:

The Doomsayers suggest that Bush’s second term is likely to produce further military interventions overseas, along the lines of Iraq in 2003. Perhaps Syria may be the next target of U.S. military power, they suggest, or Iran. They believe that the neoconservatives (that is, officials such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz), who were the driving force behind the Bush administration’s preventive war against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, will have even greater power and influence, now that the president has won reelection. “Secretary of State Colin Powell is not staying for a second term,” warned one Foreign Service officer, writing under the byline “Anonymous” on Salon.com last month. “When he goes the last bulwark against complete neoconservative control of U.S. foreign policy goes with him.”

The Skeptics contend that Bush’s foreign policy in his second term will turn out to be more cautious and less belligerent than his first, if not by choice, then by compulsion. Whatever some hawks might like to do, the reality is that the Bush administration will face a series of constraints—military, diplomatic, political, and economic—that will curb its ability to launch new preventive wars. Moreover, say adherents of the Skeptic school, the power of the neoconservatives inside the administration will probably be diminished, not augmented, during Bush’s second term.

Bush is likely to appoint a new secretary of state (whether National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice or someone else) who is more subject to the political control of the Bush-Cheney-Karl Rove White House.

But it’s a mistake to leap from there to the judgment that the neoconservatives will have complete control of the second Bush administration. During the last four years, the neocons were the dominant influence on U.S. foreign policy when it came to Iraq (which was no small thing). The neocons did not control the Bush administration’s first-term policy toward China or Russia, which conformed to the classic realist principles of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft.

And the impact of the Iraq war has served to reduce further the neocons’ clout. The war they so strongly favored has lasted vastly longer than they predicted. It took more U.S. troops and cost much more money than they led the nation to believe. By early this year, even leading conservative Republicans, such as columnist George Will, were vehemently opposing the Iraq war and the larger goal of spreading democracy in the Middle East. That internal Republican opposition has been muted this fall during Bush’s reelection campaign, but it is sure to resurface.

Iran, China, Russia, Latin America ...

2004-11-06T09:41:00.000-08:00

From Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America ... by Jim Lobe:

An influential foreign-policy neo-conservative with longstanding ties to top hawks in the administration of President George W Bush has laid out what he calls ''a checklist of the work the world will demand of this president and his subordinates in a second term.''

The list, which begins with the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq and ends with the development of ''appropriate strategies'' for dealing with threats posed by China, Russia and ''the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America,'' also calls for ''regime change'' in Iran and North Korea.

The list's author, Frank Gaffney, the founder and president of the Centre for Security Policy (CSP), also warns that Bush should resist any pressure arising from the anticipated demise of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to resume peace talks that could result in Israel's giving up ''defensible boundaries.''

While all seven steps listed by Gaffney in an article published Friday morning in the 'National Review Online' have long been favoured by prominent neo-cons, the article itself, 'Worldwide Value', is the first comprehensive compilation to emerge since Bush's re-election Tuesday.

It is also sure to be contested, not just by Democrats who, with the election behind them, are poised to take a more anti-war position on Iraq, but by many conservative Republicans in Congress. They blame the neo-cons for failing to anticipate the quagmire in Iraq and worry their grander ambitions, like those expounded by Gaffney, will bankrupt the Treasury and break an already-overextended military.

Yet its importance as a road map of where neo-conservatives -- who, with the critical help of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dominated Bush's foreign policy after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon -- want U.S. policy to go, was underlined by Gaffney's listing of the names of his friends in the administration who he said, ''helped the president imprint moral values on American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term.''

In addition to Cheney and Rumsfeld, he cited the most clearly identified -- and controversial -- neo-conservatives serving in the administration: Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby; his top Middle East advisors, John Hannah and David Wurmser; weapons proliferation specialist Robert Joseph and top Mideast aide Elliott Abrams, on the National Security Council (NSC).

Also on the roster are: Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith; Feith's top Mideast aide William Luti, in the Pentagon; Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, and for global issues, Paula Dobriansky at the State Department.

Virtually all of the same individuals have been cited by critics of the Iraq War, including Democratic lawmakers and retired senior foreign service and military officials, as responsible for hijacking the policy and intelligence process that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

world recoils from neocon America

2004-11-06T08:56:00.000-08:00

On Nov. 2, Americans blew their only chance to redeem themselves in the eyes of the world.

The entire world is stunned by the Bush administration's abandonment of a half century of U.S. diplomacy in favor of misguided, unilateralist, "preemptive" naked aggression on totally false pretenses against Iraq. America's allies are amazed at the ignorance manifested by the Bush administration. They are resentful of Bush's "in-your-eye" attitude toward friends who warned Bush against leading America into a quagmire and giving Osama bin Laden the war he wanted.

The world was waiting hopefully for the sensible American people to rectify the ill-advised actions of a rogue neoconservative administration. Instead, Americans placed the stamp of approval on the least justifiable military action since Hitler invaded Poland.

In the eyes of the world, Bush's reelection is proof that Ariel Sharon's neoconservative allies in the Bush administration speak for America after all.

The world's sympathy for America that followed the Sept. 11 attacks has been squandered. If the U.S. suffers terrorist attacks in the future, the world will say that America invited the attacks and got what it asked for.

Europeans and Asians will never be able to comprehend that Bush was reelected because Americans were voting against homosexual marriage and abortion.

The world is simply unable to believe that Americans, so enamored of family values, would vote to send their sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers to unprovoked war unless Americans valued empire and control over oil as more important than their family members.

...from: The American Century Is Over by Paul Craig Roberts, 6 November 2004

becoming the imperial party

2004-11-04T09:07:00.000-08:00

From a The Australian op-ed essay worth reading:

The Republican Party has become the party not just of big government, but of global government. If, as seems likely, the President follows the neo-conservative agenda and takes his war of "liberation" beyond Iraq -- Syria and Iran seem to be the next targets -- the transformation of the Republican Party will be complete: it will become the imperial party, albeit not without dissent from traditional small government conservatives.

they've got China fever, too

2004-11-01T20:58:00.000-08:00

Beyond Iraq, beyond Iran, beyond Syria. . .

The most frightening thing of all is that the Project for a New American Century group, which has made an internal coup in the Bush administration, ultimately has its sights on China. They want to surround, besiege and break up Communist China, as they imagine the US did to the Soviet Union. In many ways, the Bush administration uses North Korea as a proxy for China, saying things about Pyongyang they really would like to say about Beijing. In fact, China is currently increasingly tied to the US-led world economic order and has every impetus to cooperate with the US on most issues. The Chinese take in $80 billion a year more from the US than we make from them. Picking a fight with Beijing, which is a very attractive option for the American Right, would be disastrous.

The Bush administration is full of revolutionaries. They are shaking up the world by military force. They are playing a role familiar in modern history, pioneered by Napoleon Bonaparte, of using overwhelming military superiority to establish new forms of hegemony by appealing to desires for change among neighboring publics. Bonaparte promised the Italians liberty on the French model, but in fact reduced the Italians to a series of French puppet regimes and then he looted the country. So far Bush's Iraq looks increasingly like Bonaparte's Italy in these regards.

At a time of increased radicalization in the global South, at a time when mass terrorism has been made possible by new technologies, the last thing the US should be risking is destabilizing Asia by provoking a series of revolutions.

...says Juan Cole, What's at Stake: The Revolutionary vs. the Statesman

rumsfeld's war

2004-10-31T09:19:00.000-08:00

Rumsfeld's War, the PBS Frontline documentary, is online.

why the neocons let Zarqawi get away

2004-10-31T08:54:00.000-08:00

Why didn't the Bush administration kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi when it had the chance?

That it had opportunities to take out the Jordanian-born jihadist has been clear since Secretary of State Colin Powell devoted a long section of his February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council. In those remarks, which were given to underscore the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, Powell dwelt at length on the terrorist camp in Khurmal, in the pre-invasion Kurdish enclave. It was at that camp that Zarqawi, other jihadists who had fled Afghanistan, and Kurdish radicals were training and producing the poison ricin and cyanide.

....In recent months, the mystery of the administration's inaction has only grown. News reports—including, most recently, one in the Wall Street Journal this week—make it clear that military leaders and the CIA felt Zarqawi was a threat that could and should be removed. On at least three occasions between mid-2002 and the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon presented plans to the White House to destroy the Khurmal camp. Each time the White House declined to act or did not respond at all.

It is impossible to see that refusal as anything other than an enormous blunder.

....It seems never to have occurred to President Bush and his advisers that in a globalized world, where borders are porous and technologies of massive destructiveness are available, hidden networks can be far more dangerous than a state, which can be threatened and contained. Yet that surely has been the lesson of the last three years. It is an added irony that the administration's inability to fully assimilate the threat from "non-state actors" is leading, thanks in part to Zarqawi, to the failure of its effort to reinvent Iraq as a stable democracy in the Middle East.

...from: Holy Zarqawi: Why Bush let Iraq's top terrorist walk, by Daniel Benjamin, "a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff."

america's stalinist right

2004-10-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

It is a cliche of American conservatives that liberal and even centrist Democrats are sympathetic to Communism. Yet today it is the Republican Party leadership and rank-and-file right-wing activists who are using Stalinist techniques in an attempt to intimidate opposition, create an alternate, ideologically-based "reality," and enforce acceptance of that false "reality." Behind these techniques is an even more frightening reality - Stalinist-style rhetoric and ways of thought now dominate the political discourses of the American Right.

I should state right now that obviously the Bush administration and its supporters do not have Stalinist economic policies and do not engage in domestic mass murder of the Stalinist sort. I'm saying rather that there are important parallels in mentality, propaganda, and methods of intimidating dissent between the Republican Party leadership today and the Stalinist regime

As a student of the origins of Stalinist culture and propaganda, I have become more and more aware of the Stalinist tactics and mentality of much of the American Right since the virulent Clinton-hating publicity campaigns of the 1990s. The words "treason," "traitors," "unity," and "patriotism" are a good place to start in understanding this. Stalin was a great patriot and hunter of "traitors." Accusing political opponents of treason, lack of patriotism, or lack of resolution in the face of an external threat is quintessentially Stalinist. It has become a staple of Republican rhetoric since the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda massacre. On right-wing talk radio and conservative websites, and in publications of such commentators as Ann Coulter it is routine to accuse the entire Democratic party of treason. These accusations erode the assumption, essential for a functioning democracy, that there can be a patriotic "loyal opposition" to the party in power.

Relentless insistence on unity, on the existence of an unprecedented and overwhelming external threat, and on the total moral depravity of political opposition were all integral to Stalinist propaganda, and they are a growing part of conservative rhetoric in the United States today. Hate campaigns against "wealthy" peasants, "bourgeois" engineers and professors, and "enemies of the people" became central to Stalinism. A hate campaign against gays and lesbians is a keystone of President Bush's reelection campaign, and expressions of hatred against all Muslims on right-wing websites and by talk show commentators such as Jay Severin and Michael Savage are common. "Liberals" are constant targets of charges of treason and psychopathology. Calls for their elimination (means unspecified) by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk are not uncommon.

....continues: America's Stalinist Right by Matthew Lenoe Assistant Professor of History, Assumption College, author of CLOSER TO THE MASSES. STALINIST CULTURE, SOCIAL REVOLUTION, AND SOVIET NEWSPAPERS (Harvard University Press, 2004)

massaging Iraq data

2004-10-21T19:54:00.000-07:00

From Senator Says Pentagon Office Massaged Iraq Data:

A Democratic U.S. Senator on Thursday accused a senior Pentagon official of distorting intelligence information to back claims of links between Iraq and al Qaeda in the run-up to last year's U.S.-led invasion.

A report issued by Sen. Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, also questioned assertions of pre-war links between Baghdad and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who since the invasion has emerged as a leader in the anti-U.S. insurgency.

The report, compiled by the committee's Democratic staff, criticized the Office of Special Plans, which operated under the auspices of Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.

It was released less than two weeks before the U.S. presidential election, in which President Bush's handling of Iraq is a major issue.

The report said Feith's office looked at evidence "through a different lens, one that was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."

Democrats have frequently accused Feith and other hawks in the Bush administration of manipulating data supplied by the CIA and other sources to bolster the case for invading Iraq.

The 46-page report argued that Pentagon assertions of a link between al Qaeda and Iraq's President Saddam Hussein were not supported by intelligence reports on which they were purportedly based.

GOP long knives out for the neocons

2004-10-17T09:20:00.000-07:00

That's the thrust of a just-published US News and World Report article. Excerpt:

The Republicans' united front masks a growing struggle sparked by the president's hawkish and ambitious foreign policy--one that may burst into the open soon after the polls close, whoever wins. "Most conservatives are not comfortable with the neocons," Viguerie says. He decries the neocons as "overbearing" and "immensely influential. . . . They want to be the world's policeman. We don't feel our role is to be Don Quixote, righting all the wrongs in the world."

Viguerie's disquiet is widely shared by veteran conservative activists, who are increasingly blaming neoconservatives for placing Iraq at the center of the war on terrorism. "I'm hearing more discussion about foreign policy and the direction of the country than I have heard probably in the last 35 years," says Paul Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

more torture news from Guantanamo, too

2004-10-16T15:37:00.000-07:00

Broad Use Cited of Harsh Tactics at Base in Cuba by Neil Lewis, in the New York Times.

Many detainees at Guantánamo Bay were regularly subjected to harsh and coercive treatment, several people who worked in the prison said in recent interviews, despite longstanding assertions by military officials that such treatment had not occurred except in some isolated cases.

....In guided tours of Guantánamo provided to the news media and members of Congress, the military authorities contended that the system of rewards and punishments affected only issues like whether the inmates could be deprived of books, blankets and toilet articles. The interrogation sessions themselves, the officials consistently said, did not employ any harsh treatment but were devised only to build a trusting relationship between the interrogator and the detainee.