The Past, Present, and Future of Neoconservatism

[XFBO]

Had we gone in before allowing the UN making a mockery of things, Id be willing to bet we would of found more than we did.

The sooner you wake up and realize that ONLY guilty ppl stall for time, the sooner you'll have life figured out.

[247]

Isn't Bush stalling for time right now?

He's trying to run out the clock on the war, so that our inevitable withdrawal can be pinned on his successor.

[XFBO]

Uh no, havent you been listening to your own presidential hopeful?

Even she knows, complete withdrawl is not possible, it doesnt stop her from saying it but when asked she also tell you she wont be withdrawing ALL troops. Pay attention already.

[Gog]

Expanding the Cracks in and Crashing Down the Right Wing, Republican Wall

by Rob Kall

OpEdNews.Com

It has become clear that under George W. Bush's watch, the US has perpetrated some of the most shameful, despicable acts in its history. Torture, murder, corruption, lies, distortions, international outrages, the destruction of our nation's reputation as a freedom loving, open, fair democracy.

George W. Bush and his administration have presided over the dismantling, putrefaction, disembowelment and abomination of a 230 year historical endowment of honor, nobility, justice and an archetypal symbol that has led the world towards a better future.

The criminals who have advised him and carried out his combination of stupid and malevolent policies have been allowed total freedom, with none of them being fired, let alone accused of the treachery, treason, law breaking etc. that they deserve.

We are in the early stages of seeing cracks in the wall of unanimity among right-wingers. This is a wall that is a threat to America, a threat to America's future, a wall that must come down if the US as a free nation, respected by the world's other nations, is to survive.

The cracks are starting to show in this wall because, finally, there are Republican leaders who have been able to see that their loyalty to the Bush administration has been returned with perfidy, with incompetence and traitorous policies and actions that clearly are not consistent with loyalty to the US.

So far, there are four Republican US senators who have stood up to the other 47, holding them from passing even more egregious laws and policies and budgets-- Chafee, Voinovich, Snowe and McCain. In addition, Senator Warner has been taking a tough stance asking questions about the Abu Ghraib tortures. Lindsey Graham has also ruffled some Republican feathers with his questions.

Of course, when these independent legislators of character take steps outside the "allowed" range of operations that the right wing Republican leadership prescribe, there are repercussions. Dennis Hastert lashed out at John McCain recently. The Washington Post described the interaction:

On Tuesday, McCain gave a speech excoriating both political parties for refusing to sacrifice their tax-cutting and spending agendas in a time of war. At the Capitol yesterday, Hastert shot back: "If you want to see sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed (Army Medical Center) and Bethesda (Naval Hospital). There's the sacrifice in this country."

The obvious crack in the wall is McCain's criticism of the Republican party. But perhaps the more significant outcome is how badly Hastert comes off, not getting the whole idea of sacrifice by people other than the soldiers. It reminds me of the way patrician George Bush Sr. couldn't tell how much simple items in a grocery store cost. This disconnect from reality cost him dearly at the election booths. It is clear that the Republican leadership either doesn't get the idea of sacrifice or, worse, and probably more accurate, they believe they can get away without it.

The question is, are the supporters of the Republican party so selfish, so shallow and gutless that they are willing to allow the words of Hastert to stand for their own values. Is sacrifice only to be sustained by our young soldiers?

Are the wealthy exempt from sacrifice? Can the 25-35% of the Republican supporters who are fundamentalist Christians opposed to abortion willing to tolerate torture and murder, starvation of budgets for the poor, for military families, for veterans, students and even homeland security?

The far right has learned how to manipulate the spiritual faiths of a huge segment of the population, preying upon their hopes, their beliefs. But how much evil, how much malignant destruction will these purportedly spiritual, God-loving, good-intending souls tolerate. How many reports from former employees of the Bush administration, documenting failure, incompetence, dishonesty, dissembling, torture, homicide, total disrespect for laws, for humanity, for God's creations, will these Christian Republican sheep tolerate before they wake up and see that they have been led by the devil, by the antichrist they fear and that they have been manipulated into making the world a worse place with more suffering and unjust deaths?

I use the words; Devil, Antichrist, because these are the terms that these people relate to. These symbols are the ones they fear, yet they have been led along a primrose path that now puts the very planet and certainly the US as a nation at the brink of ruin.

So how do we take the small cracks in the wall and shake them and throttle them so the wall begins to crumble, begins to show further signs of crashing down?

First thing is to support the brave people who are showing the first signs of courage. Let them know that you appreciate their taking stands. Tell them you will seek ways to do extra business with their states. Write to them and tell them they are heroes.

Next, contact the republican leaders in your state-- at all levels, but certainly the federal legislators. Point out the leaders who are standing up against the Bush cabal and ask them to take independent stands. Tell them you want them to represent you and not an extreme right wing Republican party that, with the likes of Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert are out of control and no longer representative of your values.

Protest in front of churches. Make signs that say: HOW CAN YOU OPPOSE ABORTION AND SUPPORT TORTURE AND MURDER?

Call up the right wing talk radio shows. Ask them how they can support the most hated man in the history of the world. These radio talk shows all justify the use of torture by citing the behavior of terrorists. It is outrageous to cite criminals as justifications for the US to set a policy of torture in prisons. Where is the character and integrity in that? Ask them why the Bush administration is not developing alternative sources of fuel so we no longer depend upon dwindling oil supplies and middle east oil. Laugh at them when they stupidly and foolishly suggest that the solution lies in Prudhoe Bay. That is a short-sighted reply that does not deal at all with the need to develop an alternative to oil.

Contact the main media networks and demand coverage of issues that they are avoiding-- electronic voting and paper ballots, corporate takeover of government and the commons, failure of Bush to fire anyone... anyone at all, the massive incompetence of Bush appointees, the neocon cabal that Bush brought into government, the quashing of democracy.... One email is not enough. Print out and send snail mail. Do it often. These media respond when they see massive numbers of people roused to action.

Contribute, in the next five months, more than you have ever given before-- to candidates, to the Democratic party, to MoveOn.org, to Emily's list, to underfunded alternative media like OpEdNews.com, Buzzflash.com, alternet.org, commondreams.org, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive, TRUTHOUT, SmirkingChimp, Democratic Underground, whatreallyhappened.com...

Support the newly emerging progressive talk radio media-- radiopower.org, Airamericaradio, the Thom Hartmann Show, Pacifica, Bernie Ward, Counterpin... click here for a list of almost 40 progressive radio shows, most with access from the web, sattelite radio and or radio waves.

The Great Right Wing Republican Wall is beginning to crack. You can help expand the cracks and contribute to helping it crash and fall. It's not about destroying the Republican party. It's about remind the leaders that they are supposed to represent the interests of the voters, not of corporations and special interests. If millions of us all take small actions, we can bring the walls down.

[Gog]

YouTube Video

[Le Kiwi]

Originally Posted by XFBO

Had we gone in before allowing the UN making a mockery of things, Id be willing to bet we would of found more than we did.

The sooner you wake up and realize that ONLY guilty ppl stall for time, the sooner you'll have life figured out.

So YOU'RE the guy that bought the bridge !!

I'd keep it quiet, if I were you, otherwise you'll get people wanting to sell you the Sunset (NOT the strip...) or convincing you to invest in coal mines beating a path to your door....

You found nothing, because there was nothing. WTF is so hard to understand here ??? Saddam bluffed, because he was a sleezy dictator who ruled by fear, and if he had produced clear proof that he was as disarmed as a neocon in front of the facts, he would have gone under even faster than had you NOT invaded.

So, as an aside, only the "guilty stall for time", according to XFBO logic, eh ?

This was why the 9/11 report was so long out...thanks for that tip-off, XFBO....

[bigdog]

A more serious version of the “wrong place” argument came from within the neoconservative camp itself, and specifically from Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute. He argued in 2003 that we should focus not on Iraq but on Iran.

A key goal in the larger war against terrorism has been to put an end to state support for terrorists either by inducing state sponsors to mend their ways or by bringing about their downfall. Among these sponsors and/or perpetrators, the most active have been Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

All four are brutally repressive of their own citizens and opponents of regional peace. All have attempted to acquire weapons of mass destruction. All embrace radical anti-Western philosophies, secular or Islamist.

And all have been in place for decades. It seemed a sensible strategy to use force against one in the hope that this would precipitate the desired outcome in the others.

The administration did not spell out its rationale for choosing Iraq, but it is possible to imagine the reasons. In Iran, internal dissidents and reformers seemed far stronger at the time than they do today, and there were grounds for hoping they might change the government on their own.

Hitting Syria first, the choice of some neoconservatives, might have reinforced the canard that we were acting on Israel’s behalf and thus sparked an even stormier backlash in the Arab world than what we have suffered over Iraq. Libya had been quiescent since Reagan bombed the country in 1986 in response to a terrorist outrage.

The choice of Iraq as a target had another comparative advantage, a particularly ironic one in light of the subsequent charge by Kofi Annan (among others) that the war was “illegal.”

Actually, there was a clear justification in international law for using force against Iraq, and it did not rest primarily on the administration’s controversial interpretation of the traditional right of preemptive self-defense. It rested on Saddam’s own willful defiance of the terms and conditions ending the 1991 war he had launched by invading Kuwait.

In hindsight, was Ledeen right? After all, Iran is closer to having a nuclear bomb than Iraq seems to have been, and it has always been the greater supporter of terrorism. Moreover, our difficulties in Iraq have left an opening for Iran to bid for regional hegemony.

But if it was indeed a mistake to concentrate on Iraq first, the mistake had nothing to do with neoconservatism. Rather, it was the kind of strategic error that abounds in war. In World War I, our side may have concentrated too much on the central front; in World War II, too much on the periphery.

In the cold war, we met disaster in Vietnam, where we either should not have fought or should not have allowed ourselves to lose. In each case, however, we won the larger war.

In sum, the most persuasive criticisms of the Iraq war—that we sent too small a force, that we erred in dismantling the Iraqi state, that we would have been wiser to concentrate on Iran—do nothing to impeach neoconservatism.

And as for the criticisms that do aim at the distinctly neoconservative tenets of the war—that we should have deferred to the UN, that we should have avoided resorting to force, that we should not have tried to bring democracy to Iraq—none is persuasive.

[bigdog]

In the end, the validity of the neoconservative position, or for that matter of the indictment against it, rests on two issues that go beyond Iraq: whether and how the U.S. should try to spread democracy in the Middle East, and whether we should be engaged in a war against terrorism.

On the first count, Francis Fukuyama has explained his disaffection from neoconservatism on the grounds that, in contrast to his own, “Marxist” approach to democratization, his former friends and allies had behaved like “Leninists.” By this he means to separate his analysis in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) from the policies to which that analysis seminally contributed.

In writing about the “end of history,” Fukuyama now says, he was only attempting to discover the historical laws that, sooner or later, would lead all nations to democracy. But just as Lenin took matters into his own hands when he tired of waiting for Marx’s predicted revolution, so had the neoconservatives tried, fatally, to force the pace of democratization.

The analogy may be catchy, but it is flawed. The socialism envisioned by Marx was a fantasy, which came true neither by natural evolution nor by Lenin’s violence. Democracy, on the other hand, is the method by which governments are chosen today in about two-thirds of the countries of the world, and this is something that has come about via both the “Marxist” and the “Leninist” paths.

In the technologically advanced countries of Europe, democracy in the postwar era may arguably have developed organically, as the outgrowth of socio-economic development. But the majority of today’s democracies are not technologically advanced; democracy came to them because people wanted it and worked or fought for it. In other words, it has been a product of individual choice and will.

And though most of its proponents have been indigenous, outsiders have often played influential roles.

In fact, even in the advanced countries, postwar democracy did not just unfold naturally. There, too, it came with the help of various kinds of foreign intervention, whether it was the Allied occupations of Germany, Japan, and Austria, or the CIA’s interventions in the politics of Italy and France, or the role played by the Marshall Plan across Western Europe.

For that matter, America’s own democracy was born with outside assistance from the likes of Lafayette and the government of France. It turns out that we are all “Leninists.”

The strategy of promoting democracy in the Middle East flowed from Bush’s realization that the war against terror could not be won by military means alone. Bush eschewed the old cliché that the “root cause” of terror was poverty, a theory always contradicted by the available evidence and one that should have received its final blow this past summer from the appearance of a cell of terrorist physicians in the United Kingdom.

Instead, Bush hypothesized that the root cause was the political culture of the Muslim Middle East, which is steeped in violence. This political culture has incubated thousands of young men ready to die for the joy of killing and tens of millions of citizens ready to applaud their “martyrdom.” Bush’s thesis was, and is, that the Middle East can be brought to partake in the global tide of democratization that has touched every other region, and that such democratization will lead to new ways of thinking and make violence less acceptable.

Neither Bush nor anyone else can know if this strategy will work. There are two obvious areas of uncertainty. One has been expressed well by Kesler:

The conspicuous exception to democracy’s spread was the Arab Middle East. That could have meant, as the neoconservatives concluded, that its turn was next. But it could also have meant that there were cultural, religious, and political factors that had made it resistant to the democratic wave—and would continue to do so.

Kesler here makes the neoconservatives sound more assertive and uniform than I think is fair, but he is certainly right that we do not know whether Arabs will in fact embrace democracy any time soon or, for that matter, ever. And we also do not know—we can only suppose and hope—that if they do, democracy will work to pacify Arab political culture. That is the second uncertainty.

Was it irresponsible of Bush to rest such weighty national concerns on an unproved supposition? It would have been irresponsible had there been any better-tested or more plausible alternatives available.

But none has yet been suggested, unless one counts those who persist in believing that stronger U.S. efforts to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict will solve everything else. (If that were the case, attacks on America should have subsided during the 1990’s, the decade of our most vigorous efforts to broker just such a peace; instead, they crescendoed.)

Thus far, Bush’s strategy has scored some steps forward and some back. All in all, as Freedom House reported this year, “the Middle East continues to lag behind other regions in the development of free institutions.”

But, the Freedom House report immediately continues, “the fact that progress has been made since the September 11, 2001 attacks gives some cause for optimism.” Although no country in the region (apart from Israel) can be judged “free,” the number counted as “partly free” (as opposed to “not free”) has risen from 3 to 6 (or 7 if one counts the Palestinian Authority).

If appreciable progress is to come, it will require more years, which is why Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks of “a generational commitment.”

[Le Kiwi]

You blow Kristol, don't you, Bigdogma ? Because such love and fawning devotion to this grim, smirking proponent of neofascism could only come from some deep, perverse infatuation.
Nothing else could explain why someone who has been so wrong about everything he and his cronies have dabbled in and agitated for could be held up in such adoring light by you wasting bandwidth with his oily prose.

That you persist and sign, waving these pipe-dreams of delirious Straussian converts as dyed-in-the-wool truth, is both gobsmacking and disturbing.
Democracy does not come out of invading a country on trumped up reasons and stealing the oil. Are you receiving, Bigcliff ? Is anybody home ? Are your ears on, good buddy ?

[bigdog]

In the end, the validity of the neoconservative position, or for that matter of the indictment against it, rests on two issues that go beyond Iraq: whether and how the U.S. should try to spread democracy in the Middle East, and whether we should be engaged in a war against terrorism.

On the first count, Francis Fukuyama has explained his disaffection from neoconservatism on the grounds that, in contrast to his own, “Marxist” approach to democratization, his former friends and allies had behaved like “Leninists.”

By this he means to separate his analysis in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) from the policies to which that analysis seminally contributed. In writing about the “end of history,” Fukuyama now says, he was only attempting to discover the historical laws that, sooner or later, would lead all nations to democracy.

But just as Lenin took matters into his own hands when he tired of waiting for Marx’s predicted revolution, so had the neoconservatives tried, fatally, to force the pace of democratization.

The analogy may be catchy, but it is flawed. The socialism envisioned by Marx was a fantasy, which came true neither by natural evolution nor by Lenin’s violence. Democracy, on the other hand, is the method by which governments are chosen today in about two-thirds of the countries of the world, and this is something that has come about via both the “Marxist” and the “Leninist” paths.

In the technologically advanced countries of Europe, democracy in the postwar era may arguably have developed organically, as the outgrowth of socio-economic development. But the majority of today’s democracies are not technologically advanced; democracy came to them because people wanted it and worked or fought for it.

In other words, it has been a product of individual choice and will. And though most of its proponents have been indigenous, outsiders have often played influential roles.

In fact, even in the advanced countries, postwar democracy did not just unfold naturally. There, too, it came with the help of various kinds of foreign intervention, whether it was the Allied occupations of Germany, Japan, and Austria, or the CIA’s interventions in the politics of Italy and France, or the role played by the Marshall Plan across Western Europe.

For that matter, America’s own democracy was born with outside assistance from the likes of Lafayette and the government of France. It turns out that we are all “Leninists.”

The strategy of promoting democracy in the Middle East flowed from Bush’s realization that the war against terror could not be won by military means alone. Bush eschewed the old cliché that the “root cause” of terror was poverty, a theory always contradicted by the available evidence and one that should have received its final blow this past summer from the appearance of a cell of terrorist physicians in the United Kingdom.

Instead, Bush hypothesized that the root cause was the political culture of the Muslim Middle East, which is steeped in violence. This political culture has incubated thousands of young men ready to die for the joy of killing and tens of millions of citizens ready to applaud their “martyrdom.”

Bush’s thesis was, and is, that the Middle East can be brought to partake in the global tide of democratization that has touched every other region, and that such democratization will lead to new ways of thinking and make violence less acceptable.

Neither Bush nor anyone else can know if this strategy will work. There are two obvious areas of uncertainty. One has been expressed well by Kesler:

The conspicuous exception to democracy’s spread was the Arab Middle East. That could have meant, as the neoconservatives concluded, that its turn was next. But it could also have meant that there were cultural, religious, and political factors that had made it resistant to the democratic wave—and would continue to do so.

Kesler here makes the neoconservatives sound more assertive and uniform than I think is fair, but he is certainly right that we do not know whether Arabs will in fact embrace democracy any time soon or, for that matter, ever.

And we also do not know—we can only suppose and hope—that if they do, democracy will work to pacify Arab political culture. That is the second uncertainty.

Was it irresponsible of Bush to rest such weighty national concerns on an unproved supposition? It would have been irresponsible had there been any better-tested or more plausible alternatives available. But none has yet been suggested, unless one counts those who persist in believing that stronger U.S. efforts to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict will solve everything else.

(If that were the case, attacks on America should have subsided during the 1990’s, the decade of our most vigorous efforts to broker just such a peace; instead, they crescendoed.)

Thus far, Bush’s strategy has scored some steps forward and some back. All in all, as Freedom House reported this year, “the Middle East continues to lag behind other regions in the development of free institutions.”

But, the Freedom House report immediately continues, “the fact that progress has been made since the September 11, 2001 attacks gives some cause for optimism.” Although no country in the region (apart from Israel) can be judged “free,” the number counted as “partly free” (as opposed to “not free”) has risen from 3 to 6 (or 7 if one counts the Palestinian Authority).

If appreciable progress is to come, it will require more years, which is why Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks of “a generational commitment.”

[Le Kiwi]

Looks like Bigdogbot has broken down. It's repeating itself, spewing out the same mindless Kristolnacht garbage.
Breaking down just like the neocon empire of smoke and mirrors, collapsing under the weight of it's boorish stupidity and desperate arrogance, sinking back into the pit of ignorance and hatred that spawned it.
Methinks.

[bigdog]

If Bush’s strategy of spreading democracy bears a neoconservative imprimatur, it is not the largest issue on which neoconservatism stands or falls. That issue is the war against terrorism itself.

According to the financier George Soros, among many others, terrorism ought to be viewed simply as a form of criminal behavior, to be handled by means of law-enforcement and not by means of war.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national-security adviser, argues that, under Bush, the country’s fear of terrorism has amounted to a species of “paranoia,” resulting from “almost continuous national brainwashing” that has been perpetrated not only by our government but also by “security entrepreneurs, the mass media, and the entertainment industry.” This in itself sounds rather paranoid.

The simple fact is that the attacks of 9/11 were the most deadly on the United States proper in its history. What is more, they followed by eleven months the suicide bombing of the U.S.S. Cole that killed seventeen U.S. sailors and wounded 39 others.

Two years before that, two of our embassies in Africa were bombed, killing more than 300 people, and two years before that a truck bomb in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia struck U.S. military housing, killing nineteen and wounding 550.

One could go on. Perhaps more frightening is a fact I have already mentioned: tens of thousands of young men in the Islamic world have gone for formal training in terrorism.

Their highest objective, presumably, is to strike at “the Great Satan” even at the cost of their own lives, or especially at the cost of their own lives. These myriads are backed by a larger network disposing of considerable resources, making use of modern technology, enjoying the support or complicity of several governments, and striving to acquire or develop ever more lethal means.

The 3,000 lives that were obliterated on 9/11 represented a new benchmark in the success of terror operations, but no one then doubted that the killers would turn at once to the challenge of outdoing this toll.

So, indeed, they have repeatedly tried to do. Contrary to Brzezinski, to be frightened by this requires no brainwashing. Nor, contrary to Soros, are those young men likely to be deterred if we issue them restraining orders.

Fukuyama offers a somewhat more judicious argument. “‘War’ is the wrong metaphor,” he writes. “Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a ‘long, twilight struggle’ whose core is not a military campaign but a political struggle.”

The extent of that jihadist challenge, moreover, has been greatly overestimated, and its rootedness in Islam is itself exaggerated. “It is . . . a mistake,” Fukuyama asserts, “to identify Islamism as an authentic and somehow inevitable expression of Muslim religiosity.”

Interestingly, the very phrase “long, twilight struggle” is borrowed by Fukuyama from John F. Kennedy’s characterization of the cold war—which is exactly the model that neoconservatives have repeatedly offered for the war against terrorism.

And as for Islamism being an “authentic and inevitable expression of Muslim religiosity,” inevitable it surely is not; but who are non-Muslims to say that it is inauthentic? It certainly seems to be authentic to the individuals who espouse it.

Nor are they alone. Despite the insistence of U.S. officials that the supporters of terrorism are a tiny minority of Muslims, the available data tell a different story. Yes, they are a minority, but not an insignificant one.

This summer, the Pew Global Attitudes survey heralded a sharp decline in Muslim support for suicide bombings. After this drop, reportedly, “only” 16 percent of Turks support such attacks—as do 21 percent of Kuwaitis, 23 percent of Jordanians, 34 percent of Lebanese Muslims, 42 percent of Nigerian Muslims, and 70 percent of Palestinians. Confidence in Osama bin Laden “to do the right thing in world affairs” tracks these numbers at a slightly lower level.

There are, thank goodness, some countries where Pew’s figures are lower, the lowest being Egypt, where only 8 percent approve suicide bombings. But another Pew survey conducted just a couple of months earlier found 15 percent of Egyptians believing that “attacks on civilians . . . to achieve political goals” were justified.

Perhaps the discrepancy means that some Egyptians disapprove of suicide—which presents its own theological difficulties—but not the killing of innocents in a worthy cause. In the same poll, a mere 26 percent of Egyptians disapproved both of al Qaeda’s attitudes toward the U.S. and of its tactics.

When Egypt’s Ibn Khaldun Center, run by the political sociologist Saad Edin Ibrahim, asked Egyptians whom they most admired, the three frontrunners were the Hizballah chief Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Khaled Meshal of Hamas.

Troubling as they are, these data may understate the problem, at least to judge by election results in the region. In Egypt, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, Islamist parties, some of them non-violent but some very violent indeed, have scored a string of successes.

Although Fukuyama rightly assures us that “we are not currently engaged in anything that looks like a ‘clash of civilizations,’” if Islamists and jihadists take over additional countries, the consequences may well resemble exactly that.

[bigdog]

The terrorists are the shock troops of the jihadist or radical Islamist movement, a movement whose strength is limited but substantial—far greater than, for example, that of the Communists just after Lenin seized power in Russia.

Jihadism has many times more supporters, its reach is more global, it has far more resources, and it has a natural constituency that Communism only pretended to have.

Lenin and his band succeeded in fastening their grip on a backward country and used it as a springboard from which their heirs could contest seriously for world domination. Who is to say how powerful a threat radical Islam could become if allowed to metastasize further?

This movement has already been at war with us for some time, and has killed us by the thousands. Bush’s announcement of a “war against terror” was thus nothing more than a declaration that we had decided to fight back.

Soros, Brzezinski, and Fuku-yama notwithstanding, this war was not “optional.” If we had declined to fight it now, we would only have to fight more desperately later. If we do not fight back, can anyone imagine that the jihadists will stop? Conversely, defeat of their cause will assuredly demoralize that movement and thin its ranks.

As for the neoconservatives, they have taken their lumps over the war in Iraq. Nonetheless, the tenets of neoconservatism continue to offer the most cogent approach to the challenge that faces our country.

To recapitulate those tenets one last time: (1) Our struggle is moral, against an evil enemy who revels in the destruction of innocents. Knowing this can help us assess our adversaries correctly and make appropriate strategic choices.

Saying it convincingly will strengthen our side and weaken theirs. (2) The conflict is global, and outcomes in one theater will affect those in others. (3) While we should always prefer nonviolent methods, the use of force will continue to be part of the struggle. (4) The spread of democracy offers an important, peaceful way to weaken our foe and reduce the need for force.

This suggests a few priorities. First, for all our failures in Iraq, we cannot afford to accept defeat there; nor do we have to. True, our more fanciful images of what Iraq would become after Saddam’s removal have gone by the boards. But there is still a world of difference between a relatively stable if troubled country and a state of anarchy.

And then there is Iran. Even if we turn a corner in Iraq, our relative success will be negated if we allow Iran to obtain a nuclear bomb. Once it does, not only will we be haunted by the specter of nuclear terrorism, but we may be constrained by nuclear blackmail from actions we would want to take in future chapters of the war against terror.

Next, only by enlarging our military can we base strategic decisions on military need and not on the availability of forces. How is it that a nation of 300 million cannot indefinitely sustain a force level of 150,000 in a given theater, meaning one soldier for every 2,000 Americans?

Finally, our efforts to foster democracy in the Middle East must not be curtailed but prosecuted vigorously and more effectively. True, the “Arab spring” of 2005 did not turn out to be as successful as the famous “Prague spring” of 1968.

But then, it took two decades for that Prague spring to yield fruit. The modest liberalization in the Middle East and the democratic ferment that we have stirred there promise further advances if we persevere.

None of this offers a complete guide to waging the war against terror. But it does amount to a coherent approach, essentially similar to the one by means of which we won the cold war. By contrast, liberals and realists have no coherent approach to suggest—or at least they have not suggested one.

That, after all, is why George W. Bush, searching urgently for a response to the events of September 11, stumbled into the arms of neoconservatism, unlikely though the match seemed.

One can always wish that policies were executed better, but for a strategy in the war that has been imposed upon us, neoconservatism remains the only game in town.

[bigdog]

Anti-Americanism is on the wane at last. All over the world, Americans are being fêted once again as farsighted, liberating heroes.

Al Gore has won a Nobel Peace Prize, an Oscar and an Emmy, the triple crown of recognition from the self-adoring keepers of bien-pensant, elite liberal, global orthodoxy. Michael Moore is treated like a prophet in Cannes and Venice, as he peddles his tales of an America that poisons its poor, sends its blacks off to war and shoots itself.

Whenever a loquacious Dixie Chick or a contumacious Sean Penn utters some excoriating remark about the depravity of his or her own country, audiences around the world nod their heads in sympathetic agreement. Bill Clinton, of course, is a god. Though protocol dictates that he may not say things that are too unkind about the country he once led, a nod and a wink will suffice.

It has always amused me that the same people who denounce America as a seething cesspit of blind obscurantist bigotry can’t see the irony that America itself produces its own best critics. When there’s a scab to be picked on the American body politic, no one does it with more loving attention, more rigorous focus on the detail, than Americans themselves.

It has always been this way. The fiercest and most effective opponents of US foreign policy in the 1960s were not the students in Paris or the Politburo in North Vietnam. They were Jane Fonda, Bobby Kennedy and Marvin Gaye.

Today I can only laugh when I see the popular portrayal of George Bush’s America in much of the international media. Supposedly serious commentators will say, without evident irony, that free speech is under attack, that Bush’s wiretapping, Guantanamo-building, tourist-fingerprinting regime is terrifying Americans into quiet, desperate acquiescence in the country’s proliferating crimes.

The truth is that America not only harbours the most eloquent and noisy anti-Americans in its own breast, it provides a safe haven for people to come from all over the world to condemn it.

Take a stroll through almost any American university campus and you will hear a cacophony of voices in a hundred different languages, slamming everything America does, from fast food to hedge-fund capitalism.

For years one of America’s most celebrated academics was Edward Said, the Palestinian agitator-cum-professor, who lived high on the hog at Columbia University, near the pinnacle of the American intellectual establishment, dispensing his wisdom about US wrongs in the Middle East.

Hollywood is the global mecca for angry denouncers of everything American. From all over they come, forcing themselves to live in their green-lawned mansions carefully tended by cheap migrant labour from south of the Border.

This autumn, unsuspecting Americans (and everyone else, of course) will be treated to an especially unsettling stream of antiwar, anti-American propaganda, much of it produced in Hollywood by foreigners – such as this weekend’s likely box-office hit, Rendition.

And where would the world get its daily media diet of horror stories about what a ghastly country the place is if its reporters weren’t all comfortably pavilioned inside America, where they make a generous living happily devouring the hand that generously feeds them?

It’s true that self-criticism is always more effective than an outsider’s observations. Let’s be honest, how much real moral weight do Vladimir Putin or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad carry when they decry American motives and actions?

All but the most unhinged of America’s critics know, deep down, in a part of the brain they try not to consult, that whatever they may think of the Bushitler in Washington, they don’t feel comfortable agreeing with the ex-KGB hatchet man of the Kremlin or the Holocaust-denying Dr Strangelove sitting astride his Islamist bomb. It sounds so much better when Al Gore or Michael Moore says it.

But ask yourself why that is. Isn’t it because they know that only American criticism really carries legitimacy?

Only a country that enthusiastically and self-woundingly honours Voltaire’s old dictum about free speech can really be trusted to cast judgment on anything.

There’s another, more important aspect to the world’s affection for those in America who are most critical of it. The Americans who win global approbation in Oslo or at the UN are not simply critics of current American policy.

They want to construct an international system that will for ever prevent the US from pursuing its own objectives, a system designed to dilute, counterbalance and constrain America’s ability to govern itself.

They prefer a world in which American democracy is subordinated to a kind of global government, rule by a global elite, tasked to make decisions on everyone’s behalf in the name of multilateralism.

Al Gore wants the US to give up its economic autonomy and submit to rule by binding international obligations to curb its carbon emissions. Some of the Democratic candidates for the presidency want to tie down the American Gulliver under a web of global treaties. The British Government, if recent speeches by ministers are to be believed, is now apparently seriously committed to the idea that only the UN has the legitimacy to determine how nations should behave.

In other words, that a system that gives vetoes to China and Russia and honours the human rights contributions of countries such as Syria or North Korea should be accorded a full role in the promotion of the dignity of mankind.

There’s a larger irony in all this. Even as the US demonstrates the openness of its own society, its unrivalled capacity for self-examination and self-correction, a free system based on the absolute authority of the rule of law, it is told it must submit itself to the views of Moscow, Beijing, and Brussels.

Fortunately, while the American system may be forgivingly tolerant of people with wild and dangerous ideas, it doesn’t generally let them run the country.

[bigdog]

Tony Blair has warned us that Iran is a hotbed of Islamic extremism and the world would do well to remember it

Tony Blair may have disappeared from the British political stage but there are some who would have his name up in lights internationally. Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed him as the European Union’s first permanent president, a job the former prime minister would no doubt feel obliged to take (in Europe’s interests, of course). When Mr Blair addressed a charity dinner in New York last week, his hosts expressed the wish that he could stand for the American presidency. No doubt if Mr Blair could, he would.

However, it was what the former prime minister said that has attracted more attention than his future employment. He told us in that speech that Iran is a prime engine of Islamist extremism, exporting and financing terror on an ever-increasing scale. Mr Blair warned that to ignore Iran’s threat would be to repeat the errors of those who turned a blind eye to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in the inter-war years.

“Analogies with the past are never properly accurate . . . but, in pure chronology, I sometimes wonder if we’re not in the 1920s or 1930s again,” he said. “There is a tendency . . . to believe they are as they are because we have provoked them and if we left them alone they would leave us alone. I fear this is mistaken.

They have no intention of leaving us alone. They have made their choice and leave us with only one - to be forced into retreat or exhibit even greater determination and belief in standing up for our values than they do in standing up for theirs.”

Mr Blair’s text could have been George Santayana’s timeless observation that those who ignore the mistakes of history are condemned to repeat them. Although, as the historian Antony Beevor pointed out, politicians tend to push this kind of analogy too far and learn the wrong lessons.

Anthony Eden likened Egypt’s President Nasser to Hitler, while Paul Wolfowitz made the same comparison with Saddam Hussein, who was more of a low-rent Stalin. Mr Blair, in arguing for the Iraq invasion, used the appeasement argument and George Bush compared the 9/11 attacks on America to Pearl Harbor.

Even so, Mr Blair is right to warn us about Iran. The regime does sponsor terrorist groups across the Middle East and is actively conniving in the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its regime vows to wipe out Israel. Its nuclear programme - benign it says - can scarcely be taken at face value after it tried so hard to conceal it from the world.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Iran’s ambitions pose one of the greatest threats to peace in the Middle East. Mr Blair believes the most important lesson of the past is to confront aggression and to do it slowly, firmly and with an unbending will.

Opponents of western democracies must always believe that there is the resolve to use force behind the diplomacy and the sanctions. If they doubt that, the cause is lost and Iran will carry on unimpeded.

[bigdog]

The mullahologists are all atwitter over the "meaning" of the surprise resignation of one of Iran's most public officials, chief nuclear negotiator and national-security council chief Ali Larijani.

It must mean something, mustn't it? This is a major figure in the Islamic Republic, who has long harbored presidential ambitions, and has played a key role in some of the regime's most important policies.

He was minister of culture, then head of state broadcasting, then secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. If such a powerful figure steps down from his position, it must be viewed as a significant event. But what?

Most of the folks who read Iranian tea leaves describe him as an intimate of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and a critic of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. With their usual tendency to project Western political models on foreign lands, most commentators have interpreted Larijani's resignation as a defeat for him, a big win for Ahmadinejad, and an indication that Khamenei has swung around to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's approach to the nuclear question.

Thus, al-AP describes Larijani's departure as "a victory for the hardline president that could push the country into an even more defiant position in its standoff with the West," because, after all, "Ali Larijani was viewed as more moderate than Ahmadinejad and the two often clashed over how to negotiate with the world on the nuclear issue."

And al-Reuters quotes an unnamed source to the effect that Larijani had been put in a strait jacket by Ahmadinejad. "The president left no more room for Larijani to maneuver and negotiate."

If that is right, then it's passing odd that Larijani will remain as the Supreme Leader's representative on the Supreme National Security Council, and participate in the meetings of Khamenei's inner circle. One would not be inclined to call that a crushing defeat.

Moreover, EU sources reported that Larijani will be part of the Iranian negotiating team that will meet Tuesday with Europe's foreign minister, Javier Solana. So that straitjacket isn't all that tight, is it?

Whatever Larijani's job change may mean, it doesn't represent a change in policy. The differences between Larijani and Ahmadinejad were only tactical. On the basic question--should Iran suspend its enrichment program--you couldn't get the tip of a scimitar between the two.

Both said repeatedly--as they had to, since the Supreme Leader had laid down the law--that Iran would never abandon enrichment. Theirs was a debate over style. Ahmadinejad wanted to tell the West to go to hell, while Larijani charmed them.

Indeed, Larijani was the West's favorite interlocutor. From EU Solana to a parade of foreign ministers and secret back channels (including Secretary of State Rice's personal emissary, former Spanish President Felipe Gonzales), Larijani was universally liked. To be sure, he never gave a centimeter, but he was popular. I suppose President Bush would consider him "a good guy," in the mold of, say, Vladimir Putin.

No doubt Larijani and Ahmadinejad don't love one another, and their more or less public spat has been going on for quite a while. The ruling class of the Islamic Republic is in the throes of a succession struggle, as Khamenei continues to defy the prediction of his doctors that he would die several months ago, and Larijani and Ahmadinejad, along with other celebrities such as former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, are major players in that battle, as John Bolton observed on Sunday.

The personnel shift may also be related to the mysterious meeting between Khamenei and Putin a few days ago, about which very little has become public. I am told, in fact, that the Russian president memorized his key message in Farsi, and delivered it in a private meeting with the Supreme Leader, with not even an interpreter present.

If you think that is a foolish way to conduct diplomacy, I'm inclined to agree, but then I'm not a former high official of the KGB. Perhaps Putin made some interesting proposal that requires the talents of a Larijani.

In that case, Larijani would need more time to devote to the Putin project. It's not as if his successor at the Supreme National Security Council is a dominant figure in the Iranian political world. Indeed the new guy is generally considered a nobody, which further reinforces the view that we are not witnessing a fundamental political shift in Tehran.

Most likely, in fact, the explanation of Larijani's departure is fairly mundane: It's just another in a long series of Iranian maneuvers to buy still more time to pursue their nuclear project, and stave off a new round of sanctions.

If the beloved Larijani is moving on, it will take time for the new guy, Saeed Jalili, a diplomat in the foreign ministry, to master his job, and Western governments can be expected to extend him the courtesy of a warm-up. As the Iranians see it, a month saved is a month earned.

The main point is that we still have no Iran policy. Maybe we should offer Larijani a nice job in Foggy Bottom.

[bigdog]

At first glance, it would seem a straightforward thing to stop a relatively weak but volatile Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb. It would also seem to be something a concerned world community would be actively working to do.

After all, the Sunni Arab states surrounding Iran don't want a Shiite nuclear power on their borders.

Europe, which isn't all that far from Tehran and lacks a missile-defense shield, certainly doesn't want to be in range of Iran's missiles.

Israel can't tolerate an Iranian theocracy both promising to wipe it off the map and then brazenly obtaining the means to do so.

The Russians and the Chinese, both already concerned about India, Pakistan and North Korea, don't need another rival Asian nuclear power on their borders.

And the United States, already worried about Iranian threats to Israel and involved in daily military battles in Iraq with pro-Iranian agents and terrorists armed with Iranian-imported weapons, doesn't want a nuclear Iran expanding its Persian Gulf influence.

But in truth, most players don't care enough to stop Iran from getting the bomb, or apparently don't think it's worth the effort and cost. Some may even see some advantages to a nuclear Iran.

The Arab Gulf monarchies, for example, know that their enormous dollar reserves would likely buy them some reprieve from a nuclear Iran, or at least bring in the U.S. Navy to offer them deterrence from attack.

Meanwhile, the current tension and ongoing fear of disruption in the Persian Gulf sends billions in windfall oil profits the Gulf states' way.

Leaders of Arab states also have to fear their own populations' reactions to any action taken against Islamic Iran. Despite his religious Shiite background, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is far more popular among Sunni populations in the Gulf than George Bush -- and even perhaps more popular than the autocratic Arab thugs and dictators who run most of the Middle East.

The European Union, like the Arab states, believes as a last resort that its economic clout and deft diplomats can always work out some sort of arrangement with Tehran's clerics, who, after all, need customers to buy their high-priced oil.

So most in Europe bristle at French President Nicolas Sarkozy's warnings about an impending war to stop an Iranian bomb. Instead, they feel it's an American problem to organize global containment of Iran.

Israel also has reason to fear a war with Iran. If Israel were to attack Tehran, it could find itself in three instantaneous wars -- and be hit with thousands of missiles from the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. That shower would make last year's Hezbollah barrage seem like child's play.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin's foreign policy is nursed on grievances about a lost empire, America as the sole superpower and the independence of cocky former Soviet republics. In the thinking of oil-exporting Russia, anything that causes America to squirm and world oil prices to soar is a win/win situation. That's why Russia supplies Iran with its reactor technology and stirs the nuclear pot.

China, like Russia, is a large nuclear power and doesn't fear all that much Iranian missiles that it thinks are more likely to be pointed westward anyway. True, it would like calm in the Gulf to ensure safe oil supplies, but thinks it still could do business with a nuclear Iran.

And, as in the case of Russia, anything that bothers the United States can't be all that bad for Beijing. While Ahmadinejad ties the U.S. down in the Middle East, China thinks it will have more of a free hand to expand its influence in the Pacific.

Then there's the complacent situation here at home. After Afghanistan and Iraq, most Americans don't feel we're up to a third war. Some point to nuclear Pakistan and believe we could likewise live with Iran having the bomb.

A few on the left even feel that a nuclear Iran would remind us of our own limitations in imposing our will and influence abroad. They belittle the current warnings of George Bush and Dick Cheney about Iran's nuclear program, shrugging that the two used to say similar things about Saddam and his nonexistent arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world, represented in the U.N.'s General Assembly, feels that a nuclear Iran offers comeuppance to a haughty United States, Israel and Europe without threatening anyone else.

Ahmadinejad may be viewed across the globe as a dangerous religious nut. But to many, he, like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, also represents an anti-capitalist, anti-globalization popular front against America and therefore shouldn't be ostracized.

So who wants a nuclear Iran?

No one and everyone.



by Victor Davis Hanson

[bigdog]

this interview, which was conducted right after David published "Radical Son in 1998," which is a fascinating insight into why he switched from the left to the right...........includes interviews with a few other people who came of age in the 60's - Roger Rosenblatt, Barbara Erenreich, Rick Hertzberg and most amusingly, PJ O'Rourke

YouTube Video

[247]

This clip, which was filmed right after Cliffy published "I'm a Fricking Idiot" in 1986 is a fascinating insight into why he switched from the valium to codeine...........

YouTube Video

[bigdog]

"In case you missed it, a few days ago Senator Clinton tried to spend $1 million on the Woodstock concert museum. Now, my friends, I wasn't there. I'm sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event.

I was tied up at the time." This jab by John McCain at Hillary Clinton at the most recent Republican presidential debate received the evening's only standing ovation. Admittedly, those standing were partisan Florida Republicans.

Still, it was a moment--in its combination of high-spirited playfulness and polemical sharpness--that made me think happier days may lie ahead for the GOP.

The first two years of George W. Bush's second term were rough: the situation in Iraq worsened, and his key domestic proposals--Social Security and immigration reform--flopped. The big Republican losses last November followed.

Since then, it's been conventional wisdom (including among many Republicans) that 2008 is likely to be a replay of 2006--this time leading to the loss of the White House too. But this conventional wisdom could well be wrong. Here are three reasons.

1) The Democrats' takeover of both houses of Congress last November turns out to have been a mixed blessing for them. The approval numbers for the Democratic Congress have been trending downward. It hasn't been easy for Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to keep the party's liberal base and its new supporters happy at the same time. And the Bush White House has made some adjustments.

The election defeat coincided with a crisis about how to move forward in Iraq. Bush decided against Donald Rumsfeld but also against the Iraq Study Group, and for General David Petraeus and the surge. Democrats forecast an even deeper quagmire. Instead, we've seen progress--which could well continue and broaden.

Meanwhile, Michael Mukasey--not Alberto Gonzales--will be making the case for the Administration on the tools it needs to conduct the war on terrorism. A respected and independent former judge, Mukasey will have credibility that Gonzales could only dream of.

2) Polls still show a hangover from November 2006, with Democrats having an advantage. But history suggests that may not hold up. Winning control of Congress doesn't necessarily signify much about the next presidential contest.

The last time Congress flipped was 1994--and that GOP sweep was followed by a Bill Clinton victory in 1996. Democrats took back the Senate (and thus control of both bodies of Congress) in 1986, and George H.W. Bush won easily in 1988. Voters like checks and balances.

It's true that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama now run ahead of the GOP candidates in matchups. But as often as not in recent presidential elections, the candidate who eventually won had trailed at some point by margins as large as those now facing the likely Republican nominees. This was true of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bush in 1988 and Clinton in 1992.

And in the two most recent elections, Republicans haven't done badly. The GOP candidate made a far closer race of it than expected in a special election in the strongly Democratic 5th Congressional District in Massachusetts, losing by only 6 points despite being outspent about 4 to 1. And 36-year-old Republican Congressman Bobby Jindal won the governorship of Louisiana with a majority in the first round of balloting.

3) Watching the Republican candidates in the debate in Orlando, Fla., I wasn't filled with dread about the general election. The Democrats are going to nominate either a one-term Senator (Clinton) or a half-term Senator (Obama), neither with much in the way of legislative achievements.

Against that, the GOP will offer one of the following: a remarkably successful two-term mayor (Rudy Giuliani), a business leader as well as Governor (Mitt Romney), a four-term Senator and war hero (McCain), an effective two-term Governor (Mike Huckabee) or a Senator with as much experience as Clinton and who was a star prosecutor and has an appealing personal story (Fred Thompson).

And then there's the McCain moment. Why did it galvanize the crowd? Perhaps because it brought together three Republican themes: the Democrats are the party of big spending (the museum earmark) and cultural liberalism (the Woodstock concert), while the GOP is the party that understands war ("I was tied up at the time").

It's true that McCain is uniquely qualified to make that last point--but if he's not the presidential candidate, he can advance it as the vice-presidential nominee or as a prospective Secretary of Defense.

At a time of war, in a culturally conservative country with voters suspicious of Big Government liberalism, it would be foolish to underrate the chances of the presidential nominee of the more hawkish, socially conservative and anti-Big Government party.

By WILLIAM KRISTOL