April 17, 2007 | Wolfie's Piggy Bank | by Patrick J. Buchanan
Barracks language edited out, Tommy Franks once referred to the Pentagon's No. 3, Doug Feith, as "the dumbest guy on the planet."
It now appears Gen. Franks' honorific better applies to Feith's boss, the Pentagon No. 2, Paul Wolfowitz. For a man once hailed as the brightest of the neocons, Wolfie has behaved with a stupidity born of the arrogance of power.
Hailed in 2003 as architect of the Iraq victory, Wolfowitz, by late 2004, was being singled out as the bumbler of postwar planning and the man most responsible for what Gen. William Odom was already calling the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history.
With the roster of U.S. dead and wounded rising, Wolfie was looking for a place to hide. George Bush, who had heeded his cawing for war on Iraq from the first hours after 9/11, took pity. And more than pity. Bush made him president of the World Bank, the post to which Robert McNamara retreated after seven years at the Pentagon plunging us into a another war, a war we later learned McNamara had come to believe we could not win. ...
...
A few weeks in Eden, and Wolfie went straight for the apple tree. From memos unearthed by the Financial Times, he gave bank officials specific instructions on the care and feeding of his romantic interest, a mid-level Libyan bank bureaucrat by the name of Shaha Riza.
Warned by the bank ethics committee he was to have no role in deciding Shaha's salary, Wolfie brushed the ethics rules aside.
He ordered Xavier Coll, bank vice president for human resources, to assign Riza to the State Department and raise her salary by some 50 percent, to $193,000 today, tax-free. She would take home more than Condi Rice. Coll was then directed to assure that Riza receive annual pay hikes of 8 percent and be put on a glide path to the highest position of any civil servant at the bank. By 2010, she would be making $245,000, tax-free.
And what has been Wolfowitz's big cause at the bank? Fighting corruption. ...
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
secret plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel
The rape of Iraq's oil | March 22, 2007 1:30 PM | Printable version
The Baghdad government has caved in to a damaging plan that will enrich western companies.
The recent cabinet agreement in Baghdad on the new draft oil law was hailed as a landmark deal bringing together the warring factions in the allocation of the country's oil wealth. What was concealed was that this is being forced through by relentless pressure from the US and will sow the seeds of intense future conflict, with serious knock-on impacts on the world economy.
The draft law, now before the Iraqi parliament, sets up "production sharing partnerships" to allow the US and British oil majors to extract Iraqi oil for up to 30 years. While Iraq would retain legal ownership of its oil, companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP that invest in the infrastructure and refineries would get a large share of the profits.
No other Middle Eastern oil producer has ever offered such a hugely lucrative concession to the big oil companies, since Opec has always run its oil business through tightly-controlled state companies. Only Iraq in its present dire condition, dependent on US troops for the survival of the government, lacks the bargaining capacity to resist.
This is not a new plan. According to documents obtained from the US State Department by BBC Newsnight under the US Freedom of Information Act, the US oil industry plan drafted early in 2001 for takeover of the Iraqi oilfields (after the removal of Saddam) was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, calling for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oilfields.
This secret plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas. However, Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme. As Ariel Cohen of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation later told Newsnight, an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oilfields. ...
The Baghdad government has caved in to a damaging plan that will enrich western companies.
The recent cabinet agreement in Baghdad on the new draft oil law was hailed as a landmark deal bringing together the warring factions in the allocation of the country's oil wealth. What was concealed was that this is being forced through by relentless pressure from the US and will sow the seeds of intense future conflict, with serious knock-on impacts on the world economy.
The draft law, now before the Iraqi parliament, sets up "production sharing partnerships" to allow the US and British oil majors to extract Iraqi oil for up to 30 years. While Iraq would retain legal ownership of its oil, companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP that invest in the infrastructure and refineries would get a large share of the profits.
No other Middle Eastern oil producer has ever offered such a hugely lucrative concession to the big oil companies, since Opec has always run its oil business through tightly-controlled state companies. Only Iraq in its present dire condition, dependent on US troops for the survival of the government, lacks the bargaining capacity to resist.
This is not a new plan. According to documents obtained from the US State Department by BBC Newsnight under the US Freedom of Information Act, the US oil industry plan drafted early in 2001 for takeover of the Iraqi oilfields (after the removal of Saddam) was pushed aside by a secret plan, drafted just before the invasion in 2003, calling for the sell-off of all of Iraq's oilfields.
This secret plan was crafted by neo-conservatives intent on using Iraq's oil to destroy the Opec cartel through massive increases in production above Opec quotas. However, Philip Carroll, the former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who took control of Iraq's oil production for the US government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off scheme. As Ariel Cohen of the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation later told Newsnight, an opportunity had been missed to privatise Iraq's oilfields. ...
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Neoconservative radicalism: it touts a radical and authoritarian nanny-statism that seeks, at its core, to provide feelings of protection, safety, an
Thursday March 29, 2007 08:59 EST | Neoconservative radicalism has reshaped our political spectrum
David Brooks' column in The New York Times this morning contains several important observations. It would maximize clarity in our political discussions if journalists could just ingest Brooks' central point: the dominant right-wing political movement in this country that has spawned and driven the Bush presidency has nothing to do with -- it is in fact overtly hostile to -- the ostensible principles of Goldwater/Reagan small-government conservatism. Though today's so-called "conservatives" exploit the Goldwater/Reagan mythology as a political prop, they don't believe in those principles in any way. That movement is the very antithesis of those principles.
Brooks comes out and explicitly declares the twin icons of "conservatism" to be every bit as quaint and obsolete as the Geneva Conventions: "Goldwater and Reagan were important leaders, but they're not models for the future."
Brooks admits what has been crystal clear for some time -- namely, that so-called "conservatives" (meaning the contemporary political "Right") no longer believe (if they ever did) that government power should be restrained in order to maximize freedom. That belief system, says Brooks, is an obsolete relic which arose out of the the 1970s, and has been replaced by the opposite desire -- for expanded government power on every front. ...
...
But neoconservatism -- which is really what the right-wing pro-Bush movement has become -- doesn't believe in any of that, and Brooks' column demonstrates that they are admitting that more and more explicitly. Instead, it touts a radical and authoritarian nanny-statism that seeks, at its core, to provide feelings of protection, safety, and moralistic clarity -- "security leads to freedom" -- all delivered by political leaders using ever-increasing federal government power and limitless militarism. Whether one believes in that radical and warped vision of the American federal government is, more than any other factor, what now determines one's political orientation.
I have argued several times before that the radicalism of the Bush presidency and the neoconservatism on which it is based has resulted in a fundamental political re-alignment. As Brooks points out, the issues that shape our political spectrum and determine one's political orientation have changed fundamentally -- Brooks contrasts today's predominant issues with those of the 1970s in order to demonstrate this shift, but the shift is just as drastic even when one compares today's predominant political issues to those that drove the key political dispustes as recently as the 1990s. ...
David Brooks' column in The New York Times this morning contains several important observations. It would maximize clarity in our political discussions if journalists could just ingest Brooks' central point: the dominant right-wing political movement in this country that has spawned and driven the Bush presidency has nothing to do with -- it is in fact overtly hostile to -- the ostensible principles of Goldwater/Reagan small-government conservatism. Though today's so-called "conservatives" exploit the Goldwater/Reagan mythology as a political prop, they don't believe in those principles in any way. That movement is the very antithesis of those principles.
Brooks comes out and explicitly declares the twin icons of "conservatism" to be every bit as quaint and obsolete as the Geneva Conventions: "Goldwater and Reagan were important leaders, but they're not models for the future."
Brooks admits what has been crystal clear for some time -- namely, that so-called "conservatives" (meaning the contemporary political "Right") no longer believe (if they ever did) that government power should be restrained in order to maximize freedom. That belief system, says Brooks, is an obsolete relic which arose out of the the 1970s, and has been replaced by the opposite desire -- for expanded government power on every front. ...
...
But neoconservatism -- which is really what the right-wing pro-Bush movement has become -- doesn't believe in any of that, and Brooks' column demonstrates that they are admitting that more and more explicitly. Instead, it touts a radical and authoritarian nanny-statism that seeks, at its core, to provide feelings of protection, safety, and moralistic clarity -- "security leads to freedom" -- all delivered by political leaders using ever-increasing federal government power and limitless militarism. Whether one believes in that radical and warped vision of the American federal government is, more than any other factor, what now determines one's political orientation.
I have argued several times before that the radicalism of the Bush presidency and the neoconservatism on which it is based has resulted in a fundamental political re-alignment. As Brooks points out, the issues that shape our political spectrum and determine one's political orientation have changed fundamentally -- Brooks contrasts today's predominant issues with those of the 1970s in order to demonstrate this shift, but the shift is just as drastic even when one compares today's predominant political issues to those that drove the key political dispustes as recently as the 1990s. ...
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Many backed Bush thinking we were supporting a moderate small-c conservative with a humble approach to the rest of the world ...
Sunday, April 1, 2007 | The Conscience of a Bushie | 01 Apr 2007 06:20 am
The NYT's debriefing - degriefing? - of Matthew Dowd strikes a chord with me, as you might imagine. Many of us backed Bush in 2000 with the thought that we were supporting a moderate, inclusive Republican with a pragmatic small-c conservative domestic policy, and a humble approach to the rest of the world. We were wrong, but we bonded with the president we'd picked through the trauma of 9/11, and it took many of us time to come to terms with what it was we had ultimately enabled. It was in front of our noses, of course. But what Dowd calls a "love-affair" is sometimes hard to walk away from cleanly or even recognize as a nightmare before it is too late. I worried about spending rather quickly, but the war soon took precedence over everything else. For me, the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, the complete lack of planning, and the refusal to budge was the clincher. But Abu Ghraib - and the non-response to Abu Ghraib - made me realize that Bush was a danger to America, not an asset. The Federal Marriage Amendment obviously hit me in the solar plexus as well. It felt like a gratuitously vicious attack on a minority and a violation of conservatism. I knew my relationship with this president was over by the beginning of 2004. Some of us were mocked for backing John Kerry that year, and I can understand the mockery. Kerry? But yes, Bush really was that bad, that incompetent and that dangerous.
Dowd, it seems, took longer to recognize this. So have others. But what strikes me about the more thoughtful Bush alums - Matthew Dowd and David Kuo spring to mind - is their yearning for spiritual atonement. I think that for many the reckoning with these past few years may take longer to arrive. But there will be a wider reckoning. And it won't be pretty. ...
The NYT's debriefing - degriefing? - of Matthew Dowd strikes a chord with me, as you might imagine. Many of us backed Bush in 2000 with the thought that we were supporting a moderate, inclusive Republican with a pragmatic small-c conservative domestic policy, and a humble approach to the rest of the world. We were wrong, but we bonded with the president we'd picked through the trauma of 9/11, and it took many of us time to come to terms with what it was we had ultimately enabled. It was in front of our noses, of course. But what Dowd calls a "love-affair" is sometimes hard to walk away from cleanly or even recognize as a nightmare before it is too late. I worried about spending rather quickly, but the war soon took precedence over everything else. For me, the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, the complete lack of planning, and the refusal to budge was the clincher. But Abu Ghraib - and the non-response to Abu Ghraib - made me realize that Bush was a danger to America, not an asset. The Federal Marriage Amendment obviously hit me in the solar plexus as well. It felt like a gratuitously vicious attack on a minority and a violation of conservatism. I knew my relationship with this president was over by the beginning of 2004. Some of us were mocked for backing John Kerry that year, and I can understand the mockery. Kerry? But yes, Bush really was that bad, that incompetent and that dangerous.
Dowd, it seems, took longer to recognize this. So have others. But what strikes me about the more thoughtful Bush alums - Matthew Dowd and David Kuo spring to mind - is their yearning for spiritual atonement. I think that for many the reckoning with these past few years may take longer to arrive. But there will be a wider reckoning. And it won't be pretty. ...
Monday, March 19, 2007
Neo-Conservative Architects of Military Escalation
"Surge" or "Involuntary" Military Conscription: The Neo-Conservative Architects of Military Escalation | by Michel Chossudovsky | Global Research, January 26, 2007
...
The decision to substantially increase US forces in Iraq is not a makeshift initiative, which emerged in response to the evolving crisis in Iraq. It is part of a carefully formulated NeoCon agenda to increase the size of US forces and reinstate "involuntary" forms of military conscription.
Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute is credited as being one of the main architects of Bush 's "Surge". Fred Kagan together with General (ret) Jack Keane, argue that "any troop increase must be large and lasting"... [involving] a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so". (Quoted in the the Financial Times, 2 January 2007).
"Kagan was arguing that while "the high end of estimates" suggested the need for another 80,000 US troops to stage an effective counter-insurgency operation in Iraq, "it is very likely that a surge of 50,000 troops would be sufficient to stabilise the capital". In the event, it seems unlikely that Mr Bush will commit even half that number".(Ibid)
Frederick Kagan is the brother of Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who coincidentally is also on the board of Directors of the Project of the New American Century (PNAC). The latter is a Washington based think tank headed by William Kristol, with direct ties to the Bush Cabinet.
William Kristol is the son of Irving Kristol, one of the main founding figures of Neoconservatism. Irving Kristol sits on the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). He is also a Senior Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
William Kristol is editor of the influential Washington based Weekly Standard. Robert Kagan is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard. All of these people are firmly committed to America's "long war", a war without borders, inspired by the teachings of the late Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago.
Surge and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)
An overall expansion of US forces worldwide is an integral part of the NeoConservatives mission, as formulated in the Project of the New American Century's key document entitled Rebuilding American Defenses.
Bush's "Surge" is essentially derived from this document, which constitutes the PNAC's manifesto. The authors of Rebuilding American Defenses are Donald Kagan, (Professor of History at Yale University and father of Frederick Kagan and Robert Kagan)., Gary Schmitt (PNAC Project Coordinator together with Donald Kagan) and Thomas Donnelly (main author), Both Schmitt and Donnelly are resident fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and colleagues of Frederick Kagan.
In Part IV of Rebuilding American Defenses, the PNAC recommends an overall expansion of "active-duty strength" from 475,000 (2000 figure) to 525,000. It also points to the reinforcement of the Army National Guard as:
"a hedge against the need for a larger-than-anticipated force in combat.... It should not be used primarily to provide combat service support to active Army units engaged in current operations"
The Army National Guard should according to the PNAC "play its essential role in fighting large scale wars", while minimizing its civilian functions. ...
...
The decision to substantially increase US forces in Iraq is not a makeshift initiative, which emerged in response to the evolving crisis in Iraq. It is part of a carefully formulated NeoCon agenda to increase the size of US forces and reinstate "involuntary" forms of military conscription.
Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute is credited as being one of the main architects of Bush 's "Surge". Fred Kagan together with General (ret) Jack Keane, argue that "any troop increase must be large and lasting"... [involving] a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so". (Quoted in the the Financial Times, 2 January 2007).
"Kagan was arguing that while "the high end of estimates" suggested the need for another 80,000 US troops to stage an effective counter-insurgency operation in Iraq, "it is very likely that a surge of 50,000 troops would be sufficient to stabilise the capital". In the event, it seems unlikely that Mr Bush will commit even half that number".(Ibid)
Frederick Kagan is the brother of Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who coincidentally is also on the board of Directors of the Project of the New American Century (PNAC). The latter is a Washington based think tank headed by William Kristol, with direct ties to the Bush Cabinet.
William Kristol is the son of Irving Kristol, one of the main founding figures of Neoconservatism. Irving Kristol sits on the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). He is also a Senior Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
William Kristol is editor of the influential Washington based Weekly Standard. Robert Kagan is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard. All of these people are firmly committed to America's "long war", a war without borders, inspired by the teachings of the late Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago.
Surge and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)
An overall expansion of US forces worldwide is an integral part of the NeoConservatives mission, as formulated in the Project of the New American Century's key document entitled Rebuilding American Defenses.
Bush's "Surge" is essentially derived from this document, which constitutes the PNAC's manifesto. The authors of Rebuilding American Defenses are Donald Kagan, (Professor of History at Yale University and father of Frederick Kagan and Robert Kagan)., Gary Schmitt (PNAC Project Coordinator together with Donald Kagan) and Thomas Donnelly (main author), Both Schmitt and Donnelly are resident fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and colleagues of Frederick Kagan.
In Part IV of Rebuilding American Defenses, the PNAC recommends an overall expansion of "active-duty strength" from 475,000 (2000 figure) to 525,000. It also points to the reinforcement of the Army National Guard as:
"a hedge against the need for a larger-than-anticipated force in combat.... It should not be used primarily to provide combat service support to active Army units engaged in current operations"
The Army National Guard should according to the PNAC "play its essential role in fighting large scale wars", while minimizing its civilian functions. ...
White House case for invading Iraq included "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" that supported the political views of administration
Official's Key Report On Iraq Is Faulted | 'Dubious' Intelligence Fueled Push for War | By Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith | Washington Post Staff Writers | Friday, February 9, 2007; Page A01
Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community, according to a report by the Pentagon's inspector general.
Feith's office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," according to portions of the report, released yesterday by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). The inspector general described Feith's activities as "an alternative intelligence assessment process."
...
"The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq," Levin said yesterday. "The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war."
The summary document confirmed a range of accusations that Levin had leveled against Feith's office, alleging inaccurate work.
Feith's office, it said, drew on "both reliable and unreliable" intelligence reports in 2002 to produce a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq "that was much stronger than that assessed by the IC [Intelligence Community] and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the Administration."
It stated that the office produced intelligence assessments "inconsistent" with the U.S. intelligence community consensus, calling those actions "inappropriate" because the assessments purported to be "intelligence products" but were far more conclusive than the consensus view. ...
Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included "reporting of dubious quality or reliability" that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community, according to a report by the Pentagon's inspector general.
Feith's office "was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda," according to portions of the report, released yesterday by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). The inspector general described Feith's activities as "an alternative intelligence assessment process."
...
"The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration's decision to invade Iraq," Levin said yesterday. "The inspector general's report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war."
The summary document confirmed a range of accusations that Levin had leveled against Feith's office, alleging inaccurate work.
Feith's office, it said, drew on "both reliable and unreliable" intelligence reports in 2002 to produce a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq "that was much stronger than that assessed by the IC [Intelligence Community] and more in accord with the policy views of senior officials in the Administration."
It stated that the office produced intelligence assessments "inconsistent" with the U.S. intelligence community consensus, calling those actions "inappropriate" because the assessments purported to be "intelligence products" but were far more conclusive than the consensus view. ...
called the report “a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities” carried out by Douglas J. Feith, who was under secretary of defense for pol
Senate Panel Debates Iraq Intelligence | By DAVID STOUT | Published: February 9, 2007
WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 -- Senate Democrats and Republicans differed sharply today on whether Pentagon officials deliberately used faulty intelligence to justify the Bush administration’s war against Iraq.
The debate before the Senate Armed Services Committee was touched off by a report by the Pentagon inspector general’s office, which investigated the Pentagon’s intelligence-gathering and found it seriously flawed, especially in its search for links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the committee, called the report “a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities” carried out by Douglas J. Feith, who was under secretary of defense for policy just before the invasion of Iraq early in 2003.
“Well, unfortunately, the damage has already been done,” Mr. Levin said. “Senior administration officials used the twisted intelligence produced by the Feith office in making the case for the Iraq war.”
But Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican on the committee, immediately disagreed, setting the stage for a series of partisan exchanges. “First of all, you can read the same report and come up with different conclusions, which is quite obvious and will be obvious,” Mr. Inhofe said, adding that the report cannot easily be interpreted as “a devastating condemnation,” as Mr. Levin asserted.
The long-awaited report by Thomas F. Gimble, the Pentagon’s acting inspector general, concluded that, while the Feith team did not violate any laws or knowingly mislead Congress, it developed dubious intelligence that was inconsistent with the findings of the wider intelligence community. ...
WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 -- Senate Democrats and Republicans differed sharply today on whether Pentagon officials deliberately used faulty intelligence to justify the Bush administration’s war against Iraq.
The debate before the Senate Armed Services Committee was touched off by a report by the Pentagon inspector general’s office, which investigated the Pentagon’s intelligence-gathering and found it seriously flawed, especially in its search for links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who heads the committee, called the report “a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities” carried out by Douglas J. Feith, who was under secretary of defense for policy just before the invasion of Iraq early in 2003.
“Well, unfortunately, the damage has already been done,” Mr. Levin said. “Senior administration officials used the twisted intelligence produced by the Feith office in making the case for the Iraq war.”
But Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican on the committee, immediately disagreed, setting the stage for a series of partisan exchanges. “First of all, you can read the same report and come up with different conclusions, which is quite obvious and will be obvious,” Mr. Inhofe said, adding that the report cannot easily be interpreted as “a devastating condemnation,” as Mr. Levin asserted.
The long-awaited report by Thomas F. Gimble, the Pentagon’s acting inspector general, concluded that, while the Feith team did not violate any laws or knowingly mislead Congress, it developed dubious intelligence that was inconsistent with the findings of the wider intelligence community. ...
Since the first Bush administration, Feith had been advising the Israeli government to pressure Washington to remove Saddam Hussein
March 12, 2007 Issue | Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative | Saving Feith |
A new report gives the Pentagon intelligence peddler a pass. | by Philip Giraldi
Pentagon Inspector General Thomas Gimble’s narrow report on the activities of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans was not quite a whitewash, but neither was it an indictment. The report, presented to Congress on Feb. 9, rightly condemned Feith’s attempt to create what it charitably called “an alternative intelligence assessment process,” lacking the checks and balances observed by the CIA, DIA, and INR. But no punishment was recommended for anyone involved in the relentless advocacy that enabled the slide to war. Nor did the investigation seek to determine possible involvement of the Office of Special Plans in the Niger uranium forgeries and cover-up, or in the generation and dissemination of false intelligence derived from foreign sources.
Per Gimble’s careful parsing, Feith’s activities were deemed “inappropriate” but “not illegal or unauthorized.” And his investigation’s scope was curiously limited: the year-long inquiry only examined one of the many questionable activities carried out by the Office of Special Plans, the purported link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The role of Feith’s office in hatching the imaginary meeting between Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague was significant, but it was only a single element in the much broader pattern of deception that provided the “evidence” President Bush used to persuade the American people that Saddam’s Iraq was an existential threat akin to Hitler’s Germany.
At best, any investigation conducted in-house, as this one was, will be more collegial than adversarial, and Gimble took pains not to speculate about motive. But Feith didn’t come to the Pentagon without an agenda. The IG report found that his OSP “was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda,” and those who know Feith’s history understand why.
Since the first Bush administration, Feith had been advising the Israeli government to pressure Washington to remove Saddam Hussein. So it was unsurprising when he joined Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and others in July 1996 to develop a position paper that had Iraqi regime change as its centerpiece. Intended for incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the document, entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” pushed the new government to launch pre-emptive war against Israel’s Arab neighbors. “Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break,” the paper said, “to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism.” Baghdad was first on the hit list—“Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically,” they wrote—followed by attacks on Syria and Lebanon. To secure American support for “rolling back” Arab regimes, the group recommended phony motives for the invasions—in Syria’s case counterfeiting, drug running, and WMD development. ...
A new report gives the Pentagon intelligence peddler a pass. | by Philip Giraldi
Pentagon Inspector General Thomas Gimble’s narrow report on the activities of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans was not quite a whitewash, but neither was it an indictment. The report, presented to Congress on Feb. 9, rightly condemned Feith’s attempt to create what it charitably called “an alternative intelligence assessment process,” lacking the checks and balances observed by the CIA, DIA, and INR. But no punishment was recommended for anyone involved in the relentless advocacy that enabled the slide to war. Nor did the investigation seek to determine possible involvement of the Office of Special Plans in the Niger uranium forgeries and cover-up, or in the generation and dissemination of false intelligence derived from foreign sources.
Per Gimble’s careful parsing, Feith’s activities were deemed “inappropriate” but “not illegal or unauthorized.” And his investigation’s scope was curiously limited: the year-long inquiry only examined one of the many questionable activities carried out by the Office of Special Plans, the purported link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The role of Feith’s office in hatching the imaginary meeting between Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague was significant, but it was only a single element in the much broader pattern of deception that provided the “evidence” President Bush used to persuade the American people that Saddam’s Iraq was an existential threat akin to Hitler’s Germany.
At best, any investigation conducted in-house, as this one was, will be more collegial than adversarial, and Gimble took pains not to speculate about motive. But Feith didn’t come to the Pentagon without an agenda. The IG report found that his OSP “was predisposed to finding a significant relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda,” and those who know Feith’s history understand why.
Since the first Bush administration, Feith had been advising the Israeli government to pressure Washington to remove Saddam Hussein. So it was unsurprising when he joined Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and others in July 1996 to develop a position paper that had Iraqi regime change as its centerpiece. Intended for incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the document, entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” pushed the new government to launch pre-emptive war against Israel’s Arab neighbors. “Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break,” the paper said, “to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism.” Baghdad was first on the hit list—“Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant strategically,” they wrote—followed by attacks on Syria and Lebanon. To secure American support for “rolling back” Arab regimes, the group recommended phony motives for the invasions—in Syria’s case counterfeiting, drug running, and WMD development. ...
Saturday, February 17, 2007
The Anti-Neocon
The Anti-Neocon | David Corn | July 20, 2005
David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).
"I'm the anti-neocon." That's how Robert Merry recently described himself to me. After reading his new book—Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition —I have to say: He got that right.
His book is the most scorching mainstream critique of the neocons and their misadventure in Iraq that I have encountered. Merry, the publisher of Congressional Quarterly and a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, rips apart that small band of ideologically driven chickenhawks and leaves their bones scattered on the floor of a Council of Foreign Relations conference room. Merry is a hard-ass practitioner of global realpolitik. There is not a smidgeon of sentiment in a single sentence of this book. He's certainly not keeping company with one-worlders and those who would identify (or misidentify, in his view) American national security interests with feel-good global humanitarianism. But in a classic example of that old Middle East cliché—the enemy of my enemy is my friend—he has produced a book that liberal-minded foreign policy folks ought to gobble up. And I would dare the neocons to enter Merry's knife-throwing gallery. ...
David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).
"I'm the anti-neocon." That's how Robert Merry recently described himself to me. After reading his new book—Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition —I have to say: He got that right.
His book is the most scorching mainstream critique of the neocons and their misadventure in Iraq that I have encountered. Merry, the publisher of Congressional Quarterly and a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, rips apart that small band of ideologically driven chickenhawks and leaves their bones scattered on the floor of a Council of Foreign Relations conference room. Merry is a hard-ass practitioner of global realpolitik. There is not a smidgeon of sentiment in a single sentence of this book. He's certainly not keeping company with one-worlders and those who would identify (or misidentify, in his view) American national security interests with feel-good global humanitarianism. But in a classic example of that old Middle East cliché—the enemy of my enemy is my friend—he has produced a book that liberal-minded foreign policy folks ought to gobble up. And I would dare the neocons to enter Merry's knife-throwing gallery. ...
Anti-Neocons
Anti-Neocons No More Wars for Israel
Basics for new people. There are a lot of people who would like to know more about Zionism, the Neocons, MIC, NWO, CFR, BIS, CIA, MI6, Mossad, DSM, OSP, AIPAC, DOD, WHIG, MSM, ISCB, PNAC, and so forth. It is hard to swallow for regualr people with regular jobs who do not have the time to do the reasearch and who were not told a thing in School. This section is for breaking people into the movement.
Basics for new people. There are a lot of people who would like to know more about Zionism, the Neocons, MIC, NWO, CFR, BIS, CIA, MI6, Mossad, DSM, OSP, AIPAC, DOD, WHIG, MSM, ISCB, PNAC, and so forth. It is hard to swallow for regualr people with regular jobs who do not have the time to do the reasearch and who were not told a thing in School. This section is for breaking people into the movement.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
choice of Abrams as a top expert on the Middle East ... speaks volumes
Abrams in Jerusalem | Tom Barry, IRC | August 23, 2006 | IRC Right Web | rightweb.irc-online.org
During the 35-day conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was accompanied on her shuttle diplomacy to the region by Elliott Abrams. Abrams, who serves as President George W. Bush's adviser for “Global Democracy Strategy,” is a former Reagan administration figure who was convicted (and later pardoned) for his role in the Iran-Contra affair. Now ensconced in the National Security Council (NSC), Abrams' portfolio also includes advising on policies related to the Middle East.
It was in this capacity that Abrams was put to use during—and before—the recent conflict. According to an unnamed U.S. government consultant “with close ties to Israel” who was interviewed by journalist Seymour Hersh, Israel had put together bombing plans long before Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, which ostensibly set off the conflict. As they developed their plans early this summer, said the consultant, Israeli officials went to Washington “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear … Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.” In other words, the Israelis wanted the imprimatur of Elliott Abrams.
The choice of Abrams as a top expert on the Middle East and as the administration's point man in the recent conflict in southern Lebanon speaks volumes about the president's views on “global democracy” and Mideast affairs. It also points to the White House's high comfort level with the foreign policy agenda being promoted by the neoconservative camp.
As a deputy to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Abrams' main focus has been the Israeli-Palestinian friction—which Abrams insists is an “Israel-Arab” conflict disguised as a self-determination conflict. After a couple of weeks of watching Israel clash against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Abrams traveled to Jerusalem as part of a three-person, high-level delegation led by Rice and also including C. David Welch, a career diplomat who is assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs. Abrams travels regularly between Jerusalem and Washington and plays a key role in holding together the neoconservative-militarist Washington consensus on policy related to Israel and Iran and Arab states.
Abrams, a self-declared “neoconservative and neo-Reaganite,” is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, an activist couple who played a leading role in establishing neoconservatism as an influential political tendency in the 1970s. There's no doubting Abrams' neoconservative and neo-Reaganite credentials. Like many other second-generation neocons, Abrams got his political start as member of the right-wing Social Democrats USA and as legal counsel to the hawkish and avidly pro-Israel Democratic Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson. In the late 1970s Abrams worked with other right-wing Democrats in the Coalition for a Democratic Majority as part of an unsuccessful attempt to turn the post-Vietnam War Democratic Party back toward hardline anti-communism; then, along with other Cold Warrior Democrats, Abrams became a Ronald Reagan supporter and a Republican.
When not in government service, Abrams has been affiliated with key neoconservative institutes and pressure groups, including the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Project for the New American Century (PNAC), Center for Security Policy, Committee for U.S. Interests in the Middle East, Committee for the Free World, and the Nicaraguan Resistance Foundation.
As a Reaganite, Abrams served in President Reagan's State Department, in the first term as assistant secretary of state for human rights and then as assistant secretary for inter-American affairs. As a State Department diplomat, Abrams helped coordinate illegal government support for the Nicaraguan Contras (known by Reaganites as “freedom fighters”). He worked with Lt. Col. Oliver North to triangulate arms sales through Israel to Iran with the proceeds channeled to the Contras—an illegal operation about which he falsely denied knowledge in congressional testimony, resulting in his criminal conviction.
As befitting his neo-Reaganite identity, Abrams argued in the 1990s for a renewal of Reagan's “peace through strength” foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. In 1992 he helped form the Committee for U.S. Interests in the Middle East, which was actually a committee to ensure that U.S. policy was aligned with the Likud party in Israel. Other members of the committee included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney, and John Lehman, among dozens of other neoconservatives and pro-Israel hawks. The committee spoke out against what it perceived as a dangerous distancing between the George H.W. Bush administration and Israel that was supposedly evident in U.S. pressure for Israel to pull out of some occupied territories and halt its campaign to expand settlements in these zones. ...
Saturday, November 04, 2006
[Bush / ] war's neoconservative boosters turned sharply on Bush administration, grand designs undermined by White House incompetence
Vanity Fair Exclusive: Now They Tell Us | Neo Culpa | by David Rose VF.COM November 3, 2006
As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.
...
According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."
Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
...
To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush....
As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.
...
According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."
Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
...
To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush....
Sunday, July 23, 2006
the neocons as "so untethered from reality as to defy caricature."
Neonuts: "Neonuts"
For them, Afghanistan and Iraq will not suffice. They want to take out Syria and Iran, and speed full steam ahead towards World Wars III and IV. The Weekly Standard asks simply, "Why wait?"
According to Newt Gingrich, there is no need to wait at all. On Meet the Press this past Sunday he offered that the Israel-Hezbollah conflict "… is, in fact, World War III" and "the U.S. ought to be helping...."
And how might the US help fight Newt's World War? The Weekly Standard provides the answer: "It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions – and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."
George Will – not exactly your run-of-the-mill, card-carrying liberal – describes the neocons as "so untethered from reality as to defy caricature." ...
For them, Afghanistan and Iraq will not suffice. They want to take out Syria and Iran, and speed full steam ahead towards World Wars III and IV. The Weekly Standard asks simply, "Why wait?"
According to Newt Gingrich, there is no need to wait at all. On Meet the Press this past Sunday he offered that the Israel-Hezbollah conflict "… is, in fact, World War III" and "the U.S. ought to be helping...."
And how might the US help fight Newt's World War? The Weekly Standard provides the answer: "It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions – and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement."
George Will – not exactly your run-of-the-mill, card-carrying liberal – describes the neocons as "so untethered from reality as to defy caricature." ...
Saturday, April 22, 2006
THE ARCHITECTS OF WAR: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
Think Progress � THE ARCHITECTS OF WAR: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: "...
President Bush has not fired any of the architects of the Iraq war. In fact, a review of the key planners of the conflict reveals that they have been rewarded – not blamed – for their incompetence."
...
Bush promoted Wolfowitz to head the World Bank in March 2005. [Washington Post, 3/17/05]
President Bush has not fired any of the architects of the Iraq war. In fact, a review of the key planners of the conflict reveals that they have been rewarded – not blamed – for their incompetence."
...
Bush promoted Wolfowitz to head the World Bank in March 2005. [Washington Post, 3/17/05]
Key Quote: “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.” [Wolfowitz, 3/27/03]
...
Feith voluntarily resigned from the Defense Department shortly after Bush’s reelection. He is co-chairman of a project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to write an academic book on how to fight terrorism. Feith’s secretive groups at the Pentagon are under investigation by the Pentagon and the Senate Intelligence Committee for intelligence failures. [Washington Post, 1/27/05, 11/18/05; Washington Times, 3/3/06]
Key Quote: “I am not asserting to you that I know that the answer is — we did it right. What I am saying is it’s an extremely complex judgment to know whether the course that we chose with its pros and cons was more sensible.” [Washington Post, 7/13/05]
...
On January 26, 2005, Stephen Hadley was promoted to National Security Advisor. [White House bio]
Key Quote: “I should have recalled at the time of the State of the Union speech that there was controversy associated with the uranium issue. … And it is now clear to me that I failed in that responsibility in connection with the inclusion of these 16 words in the speech that he gave on the 28th of January.” [Hadley, 7/22/03]
...
Perle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he specializes in national security and defense issues. He has been investigated for ethical violations concerning war profiteering and other conflicts of interest. [Washington Post, 9/1/04]
Key Quote: “And a year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they’ve been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.” [Perle, 9/22/03]
...
Abrams was promoted to deputy national security adviser in February of 2005. [Slate, 2/17/05]
Key Quote: “We recognize that military action in Iraq, if necessary, will have adverse humanitarian consequences. We have been planning over the last several months, across all relevant agencies, to limit any such consequences and provide relief quickly.” [CNN, 2/25/03]
...
Wurmser was promoted to Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs; he is in charge of coordinating Middle East strategy. His name has been associated with the Plame Affair and with an FBI investigation into the passing of classified information to Chalabi and AIPAC. [Raw Story, 10/19/05; Washington Post, 9/4/04]
Key Quote: “Syria, Iran, Iraq, the PLO and Sudan are playing a skillful game, but have consistently worked to undermine US interests and influence in the region for years, and certainly will continue to do so now, even if they momentarily, out of fear, seem more forthcoming.” [Washington Post, 9/24/01]
...
Natsios stepped down as the head of USAID in January and is currently teaching at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh’s School of Foreign Service as a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy and Advisor on International Development. [AP, 2/20/06; Georgetown, 12/2/05]
Key Quote: “[T]he American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for any further-on funding for this.” [Nightline, 4/23/03]
...
Bartlett was promoted to Counselor to the President on January 5, 2005, and is responsible for the formulation of policy and implementation of the President’s agenda. [White House]
Key Quote: “President Bush understands that the need to disarm Saddam Hussein is necessary. He has made that case to the United Nations Security Council. He’s made that case to the United States Congress. The entire world rallied behind this resolution that gives him one last chance. He has that chance, but time is running out.” [CNN, 1/26/03]
...
In 2004, Daniels was elected Governor of Indiana. [USA Today, 11/3/04]
Key Quote: Mitch Daniels had said the war would be an “affordable endeavor” and rejected an estimate by the chief White House economic adviser that the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion as “very, very high.” [Christian Science Monitor, 1/10/06]
...
Tenet voluntarily resigned from the administration on June 3, 2004. He was later awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom. [Washington Post, 6/3/04]
Key Quote: “It’s a slam dunk case.” [CNN, 4/19/04 ...
Thursday, March 09, 2006
These are the right-wing intellectuals who demanded George Bush invade Iraq. Now they admit they got it wrong. Are you listening, Mr President?
Independent Online Edition > Americas: "9 March 2006 07:06 | NeoCon allies desert Bush over Iraq
These are the right-wing intellectuals who demanded George Bush invade Iraq. Now they admit they got it wrong. Are you listening, Mr President?
Published: 09 March 2006
William Buckley Jnr
INFLUENTIAL CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST AND TV PUNDIT
'One can't doubt the objective in Iraq has failed ... Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an army of 130,000 Americans. Different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.'
Francis Fukuyama
AUTHOR AND LONG-TERM ADVOCATE OF TOPPLING SADDAM
'By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.'
Richard Perle
ARCH-WARMONGER AND PIVOTAL REPUBLICAN HAWK
'The military campaign and its political aftermath were both passionately debated within the Bush administration. It got the war right and the aftermath wrong We should have understood that we needed Iraqi partners.'
Andrew Sullivan
PROMINENT COMMENTATOR AND INFLUENTIAL BLOGGER
'The world has learnt a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis ... than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response is not more spin but a sense of shame and sorrow.'
George Will
RIGHT-WING COLUMNIST ON 'THE WASHINGTON POST' AND TV PUNDIT
'Almost three years after the invasion, it is still not certain whether, or in what sense, Iraq is a nation. And after two elections and a referendum on the constitution, Iraq barely has a government.'
William Buckley Jnr
INFLUENTIAL CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST AND TV PUNDIT
'One can't doubt the objective in Iraq has failed ... Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an army of 130,000 Americans. Different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.'
Francis Fukuyama
AUTHOR AND LONG-TERM ADVOCATE OF TOPPLING SADDAM
'By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.'
Richard Perle
ARCH-WARMONGER AND PIVOTAL REPUBLICAN HAWK
'The military campaign and its political aftermath were both passionately debated within the Bush administration. It got the war right and the aftermath wrong We should have understood that we needed Iraqi partners.'
Andrew Sullivan
PROMINENT COMMENTATOR AND INFLUENTIAL BLOGGER
'The world has learnt a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis ... than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response is not more spin but a sense of shame and sorrow.'
George Will
RIGHT-WING COLUMNIST ON 'THE WASHINGTON POST' AND TV PUNDIT
'Almost three years after the invasion, it is still not certain whether, or in what sense, Iraq is a nation. And after two elections and a referendum on the constitution, Iraq barely has a government.'" ...
These are the right-wing intellectuals who demanded George Bush invade Iraq. Now they admit they got it wrong. Are you listening, Mr President?
Published: 09 March 2006
William Buckley Jnr
INFLUENTIAL CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST AND TV PUNDIT
'One can't doubt the objective in Iraq has failed ... Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an army of 130,000 Americans. Different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.'
Francis Fukuyama
AUTHOR AND LONG-TERM ADVOCATE OF TOPPLING SADDAM
'By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.'
Richard Perle
ARCH-WARMONGER AND PIVOTAL REPUBLICAN HAWK
'The military campaign and its political aftermath were both passionately debated within the Bush administration. It got the war right and the aftermath wrong We should have understood that we needed Iraqi partners.'
Andrew Sullivan
PROMINENT COMMENTATOR AND INFLUENTIAL BLOGGER
'The world has learnt a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis ... than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response is not more spin but a sense of shame and sorrow.'
George Will
RIGHT-WING COLUMNIST ON 'THE WASHINGTON POST' AND TV PUNDIT
'Almost three years after the invasion, it is still not certain whether, or in what sense, Iraq is a nation. And after two elections and a referendum on the constitution, Iraq barely has a government.'
William Buckley Jnr
INFLUENTIAL CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST AND TV PUNDIT
'One can't doubt the objective in Iraq has failed ... Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an army of 130,000 Americans. Different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat.'
Francis Fukuyama
AUTHOR AND LONG-TERM ADVOCATE OF TOPPLING SADDAM
'By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.'
Richard Perle
ARCH-WARMONGER AND PIVOTAL REPUBLICAN HAWK
'The military campaign and its political aftermath were both passionately debated within the Bush administration. It got the war right and the aftermath wrong We should have understood that we needed Iraqi partners.'
Andrew Sullivan
PROMINENT COMMENTATOR AND INFLUENTIAL BLOGGER
'The world has learnt a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis ... than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response is not more spin but a sense of shame and sorrow.'
George Will
RIGHT-WING COLUMNIST ON 'THE WASHINGTON POST' AND TV PUNDIT
'Almost three years after the invasion, it is still not certain whether, or in what sense, Iraq is a nation. And after two elections and a referendum on the constitution, Iraq barely has a government.'" ...
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
The Cartoons and the Neocon
The Cartoons and the Neocon: "The Cartoons and the Neocon | Daniel Pipes and the Danish Editor | By JOHN SUGG
02/14/06 'Counterpunch' -- -- Let me tell you a few things about blasphemy. Been there, done it. Got expelled from high school for it. "
...
I have to admit a severe conflict of principles here. On the one hand, I want to shout: “I am Danish! Cartoons don’t kill, bombs do!” I don’t countenance any prior restraint on freedom of expression, and when I first read of the Muslim outrage over cartoons -- such as one depicting Mohammed’s turban as a bomb -- I sighed a deep sigh of regret. There’s no dialogue in burning embassies.
...
There are other caveats that need to be stated: The Muslim world has been under assault from western, Christian crusaders for a thousand years. We’ve colonized and despoiled their lands. Many in America regard their oil as rightfully ours -- an underlying if not complete explanation for George Bush’s war of conquest. We’ve carved up the Middle East, overthrown democracies (pre-Shah Iran, for example), and fostered despots to suit the West’s imperial whims. And we wonder why THEY don’t like us, and why THEY take insults from us so seriously.
So, let’s look at the guy who started this whole cartoon escapade. He’s Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish newspaper. In all of the Lexis-Nexis database of stories from the American media on the Mohammed cartoons, there is absolutely no mention of the fact that Rose is a close confederate of arch-Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Indeed, there is almost no context at all about Rose’s newspaper. On a brief mention in the Washington Post gave a hint at a fact desperately needed to understand the situation. The Post described the affair as “a calculated insult … by a right-wing newspaper in a country where bigotry toward the minority Muslim population is a major, if frequently unacknowledged, problem.”
How bad is Pipes? He wants the utter military obliteration of the Palestinians; indeed, from the Muslim world, his racism is about as blatant as that of the Holocaust denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Pipes’ frequent outbursts of racism -- designed to toss gasoline on the neo-cons’ lust for a wholesale conflict of cultures -- earned him a Bush nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank. Rose came to America to commune with Pipes in 2004, and it was after that meeting the cartoon gambit materialized.
It’s also worth noting that Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen wrapped himself in protestations about freedom of speech, and that’s commendable. But he is one of Bush’s few fans in Europe, steeped in the we-versus-them rhetoric, and having sent troops to the Iraqi Crusade.
Is Rose an equal opportunity offender? No way. As the British press reported last week, his newspaper refused in 2003 to run cartoons that ridiculed Jesus. And, of course, free expression in Europe is very relative. Many of the democracies have laws banning certain speech.
Rose gave a rather misanthropic rejoinder to AP when asked about whether he would have published the cartoons in light of the subsequent protests. Rose said: "I do not regret having commissioned those cartoons and I think asking me that question is like asking a rape victim if she regrets wearing a short skirt Friday night at the discotheque."
That, of course, makes the assumption that women are responsible for being raped. It’s just as fallacious as assuming the Muslim world should passively accept an intentional provocation, one that gratuitously attacked one of the religion’s strictest prohibitions. ...
02/14/06 'Counterpunch' -- -- Let me tell you a few things about blasphemy. Been there, done it. Got expelled from high school for it. "
...
I have to admit a severe conflict of principles here. On the one hand, I want to shout: “I am Danish! Cartoons don’t kill, bombs do!” I don’t countenance any prior restraint on freedom of expression, and when I first read of the Muslim outrage over cartoons -- such as one depicting Mohammed’s turban as a bomb -- I sighed a deep sigh of regret. There’s no dialogue in burning embassies.
...
There are other caveats that need to be stated: The Muslim world has been under assault from western, Christian crusaders for a thousand years. We’ve colonized and despoiled their lands. Many in America regard their oil as rightfully ours -- an underlying if not complete explanation for George Bush’s war of conquest. We’ve carved up the Middle East, overthrown democracies (pre-Shah Iran, for example), and fostered despots to suit the West’s imperial whims. And we wonder why THEY don’t like us, and why THEY take insults from us so seriously.
So, let’s look at the guy who started this whole cartoon escapade. He’s Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of the Danish newspaper. In all of the Lexis-Nexis database of stories from the American media on the Mohammed cartoons, there is absolutely no mention of the fact that Rose is a close confederate of arch-Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Indeed, there is almost no context at all about Rose’s newspaper. On a brief mention in the Washington Post gave a hint at a fact desperately needed to understand the situation. The Post described the affair as “a calculated insult … by a right-wing newspaper in a country where bigotry toward the minority Muslim population is a major, if frequently unacknowledged, problem.”
How bad is Pipes? He wants the utter military obliteration of the Palestinians; indeed, from the Muslim world, his racism is about as blatant as that of the Holocaust denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Pipes’ frequent outbursts of racism -- designed to toss gasoline on the neo-cons’ lust for a wholesale conflict of cultures -- earned him a Bush nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded think tank. Rose came to America to commune with Pipes in 2004, and it was after that meeting the cartoon gambit materialized.
It’s also worth noting that Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen wrapped himself in protestations about freedom of speech, and that’s commendable. But he is one of Bush’s few fans in Europe, steeped in the we-versus-them rhetoric, and having sent troops to the Iraqi Crusade.
Is Rose an equal opportunity offender? No way. As the British press reported last week, his newspaper refused in 2003 to run cartoons that ridiculed Jesus. And, of course, free expression in Europe is very relative. Many of the democracies have laws banning certain speech.
Rose gave a rather misanthropic rejoinder to AP when asked about whether he would have published the cartoons in light of the subsequent protests. Rose said: "I do not regret having commissioned those cartoons and I think asking me that question is like asking a rape victim if she regrets wearing a short skirt Friday night at the discotheque."
That, of course, makes the assumption that women are responsible for being raped. It’s just as fallacious as assuming the Muslim world should passively accept an intentional provocation, one that gratuitously attacked one of the religion’s strictest prohibitions. ...
The Truth About George W. Bush
The Truth About George W. Bush: "The George W. Bush Administration: | A Lesson for Bush Supporters | Editor, TvNewsLIES.org – February 2006
The facts and allegations contained in this article are not disputed, are easily verified and are documented by the subjects in their own words. ...
The facts and allegations contained in this article are not disputed, are easily verified and are documented by the subjects in their own words. ...
Group 1: The Neocons – The Policy Makers of the Administration
We have heard the term “Neocon” for the past five years. We have been told time and time again that the bulk of key policy makers in the Bush administration are Neo-Conservatives yet we never hear much about what Neocons believe in nor do we hear anything about their principles.
...
The godfather of the Neocon movement was an intellectual disciple of Machiavelli named Leo Strauss. Straus was a German Zionist who immigrated to the US in the 1930s and mentored people like William Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz while advocating his philosophy of a dog-eat-dog world.
In essence, the Straussian philosophy and teachings are now known as Neo-Conservatism. Below are some of the more interesting and perhaps surprising or even disturbing aspects of Neo-Conservatism as taught by Strauss:
- Nations cannot consider collective action and multilateralism unless it is 100 percent in line with their own selfish interests
- Strong leadership is required
- Military power is essential
- Leadership ought not be encumbered by human rights discourse or a moral conscience but nonetheless must "appear" to advocate such ideas.
- Rulers need not observe the laws they impose on the ruled.
- A ruler can cheat and lie and do all sorts of things but should at all time maintain the outside appearance of adherence to human rights and caring for people.
- Leaders can use religion as one of many tools to ensure the nation keeps on course as formulated.
- Outside threats help ensure social cohesion under domestic leadership
- Altruism, environmental protection, justice etc, are not the concern of governments and ruling elites. They have no part to play in the equation of power
- Strauss questioned how, and to what extent, freedom and excellence can coexist.
- Strauss was very pre-occupied with secrecy because he was convinced that the truth is too harsh for any society to bear; and that the truth-bearers are likely to be persecuted by society, especially a liberal society because liberal democracy is about as far as one can get from the truth as Strauss understood it.
- Secular society is the worst possible thing, because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats
- Nazism was a nihilistic reaction to the ungodly and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic.
- Religion should impose moral law on the masses who would otherwise be out of control.
Machiavelli’s political doctrine serves as the foundation of Neo-Conservatism and it denies the relevance of morality in political affairs. It states that that craft and deceit are justified in pursuing and maintaining political power. It implies that when it comes to achieving or maintaining power the end justifies the means. This is essentially the core of Machiavellianism and serves as the foundation for Neo-Conservatism: The priority for the power holder is to keep the security of the state regardless of the morality of the means. Machiavelli discusses frankly, the necessity of cruel actions to keep power. He was in the business of power preservation not piety. According to the originator of Neo-Conservative ideology the leader of the state must stick to the good so long as he can, but, being compelled by necessity, he must be ready to take the way of the evil.
Let me repeat this last principle of Neo-Conservatism because it plays into the “believability factor” when considering claims made by people who accuse the Bush administration of unconscionable actions: “The leader of the state must stick to the good so long as he can, but, being compelled by necessity, he must be ready to take the way of the evil.” These people believe that evil is acceptable and necessary at times!Saturday, February 11, 2006
Shortly before the publication of the Muhammad cartoons, Jyllands-Posten ran a headline reading, “Islam is the Most Belligerent.”
AxisofLogic/ Critical Analysis: "Denmark and Jyllands-Posten: The background to a provocation | By Peter Schwarz
Feb 11, 2006, 10:02
Feb 11, 2006, 10:02
The basic lie in the controversy over the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published by Danish and European newspapers is the claim that the conflict is between free speech and religious censorship, or between Western enlightenment and Islamic bigotry.
...
In a country renowned for its tolerance and openness, the social crisis and the betrayals carried out by the old working class organizations have opened the way for the emergence of political forces which systematically encourage xenophobia and racism. The newspaper Jyllands-Posten has played a prominent role in this process.
Last autumn Jyllands-Posten assigned 40 prominent Danish caricaturists to draw the Prophet Muhammad. Twelve responded and the results were published on September 30. The project was deliberately designed to provoke.
According to the cultural editor of the newspaper, Flemming Rose, it was aimed at “testing the limits of self-censorship in Danish public opinion” when it comes to Islam and Muslims. He added: “In a secular society, Muslims have to live with the fact of being ridiculed, scoffed at and made to look ridiculous.”
When the anticipated reaction by the Muslim community failed to arise, the newspaper continued its campaign, determined to create a full-scale scandal. After a week had gone by without protest, journalists turned on Danish Islamic religious leaders who were well known for their fundamentalist views and demanded: “Why don’t you protest?” Eventually, the latter reacted and alerted their co-thinkers in the Middle East.
At this point the head of the Danish government, Andres Fogh Rasmussen, and the xenophobic Danish People’s Party, which is part of the ruling coalition, swung into action. Fogh Rasmussen demonstratively turned down appeals by concerned Arab ambassadors for talks to clarify the issue. Even after 22 former Danish ambassadors appealed to the prime minister to hold discussions with the representatives of Islamic states, Rasmussen maintained his stance, arguing that “freedom of the press” could not be a topic for diplomatic discussion.
...
Shortly before the publication of the Muhammad cartoons, Jyllands-Posten ran a headline reading, “Islam is the Most Belligerent.” The newspaper ran an exposé about an alleged Muslim death-list of Jewish names—until it emerged that the whole thing was a fabrication.
...
The FrankfurtRundshau writes: “Connoisseurs of Danish media will note with no little irony that it is precisely Jyllands-Posten which is now considered to be a beacon for free speech, i.e., the most right-wing of the Danish newspapers, which normally thrashes anyone who dares to advance a different point of view.”
Monday, January 30, 2006
Rumsfeld's Pentagon reissued clearances to Feith, Perle and Wolfowitz ... Feith was relieved of his clearances for allegedly passing sectets to AIPAC
The Raw Story | Pentagon investigation of Iraq war hawk stalling Senate inquiry into pre-war Iraq intelligence: "Larisa Alexandrovna | Published: January 30, 2006
The second part of the Senate investigation into bungled pre-war Iraq intelligence is still being held up by an internal Pentagon investigation of Douglas Feith, one of the war's leading architects, RAW STORY has learned.
The second part of the Senate investigation into bungled pre-war Iraq intelligence is still being held up by an internal Pentagon investigation of Douglas Feith, one of the war's leading architects, RAW STORY has learned.
As previously reported by Raw Story, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) inquiry -- titled Phase II -- is waiting on a report from the Pentagon inspector general as to Feith's alleged role in manipulating pre-war intelligence to support a case for war. Feith, who is also being probed by the FBI for his role in an Israeli spy case, resigned in January 2005.
More broadly, a RAW STORY investigation has found that Feith's access to classified information and his alleged wrongdoing can likely be laid at the feet of more senior officials in the Bush Administration -- namely Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- who would have had to have overruled Pentagon background checks to reissue Feith's clearances after he was booted from the National Security Council for allegations of espionage in the mid 1980s. ...
...
At the heart of the Senate Intelligence Committee's delay is the fact that Feith and the Defense Department refuse to provide documents and witnesses to the Committee. Senate sources say that Feith and the Pentagon have made the case that they will not share any information until the Senate provides them with full documentation of what the investigation is looking into, documentary evidence that Senate staff have acquired, and any other key findings that Feith's lawyers believe should be made available to them.
...
This lack of oversight has caused great concern among many former military and intelligence sources. One former intelligence source point to "a bigger can of worms" that a Feith investigation may unravel, pointing to the Israeli spy case -- in which Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin passed classified information to a pro-Israeli lobby -- and to the Defense Department's own inability to address security breaches.
In 1978, the current head of the World Bank and former Deputy Defense Secretary Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was investigated for passing classified information through AIPAC, the same organization that Franklin is charged with passing state secrets to.
Wolfowitz, who at the time was working for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), was himself brought in by yet another high level alleged leaker, Richard Perle. Perle, too, is being investigated in the current AIPAC case.
Perle, who most recently served as chairman of the Pentagon Defense Policy Board and quietly resigned after the AIPAC case broke, was alleged to have passed on highly classified information to the Israeli embassy when he was a foreign policy aide for Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson in 1970.
Perle was instrumental in bringing Feith into several positions, starting in the early 80s. By the mid-1980s Feith was relieved of his clearances for allegations of passing secrets to AIPAC, bringing the question of clearances full circle.
Rumsfeld seen to reinstate clearances
Despite their checkered past, Rumsfeld's Pentagon reissued clearances to Feith, Perle and Wolfowitz. Clearances were also issued to several of Feith's consultants, some of whom were major players in the Iran Contra scandal. ...
Sunday, January 22, 2006
"Fixed" Intelligence from Feith's "Gestapo Office,"
"Fixed" Intelligence from Feith's "Gestapo Office,": "'By Walter C. Uhler | 01/21/06 'ICH'
The CIA and the Bush Administration's Impeachable Lies about Iraq's Prewar Links to al Qaeda
Except in the cynical, zealous or spiritually clouded minds of his right wing devotees, it's become a well-established (if under reported) fact that President George W. Bush is a serial liar, if not a congenital liar.1 For example, after The New York Times very belatedly leaked Mr. Bush's unconstitutional order permitting the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without obtaining the required court-approved warrants, Bush defended his directive as a 'vital tool' in the war against terrorism.
But, as liars commonly do, Bush seems to have forgotten that in April 2004 he told an audience in Buffalo, New York: 'When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so.' He also told the audience that precisely because it was 'the United States government talking about wiretap,' Americans could rest assured that 'constitutional guarantees are in place.' 2"
...
The CIA and the Bush Administration's Impeachable Lies about Iraq's Prewar Links to al Qaeda
Except in the cynical, zealous or spiritually clouded minds of his right wing devotees, it's become a well-established (if under reported) fact that President George W. Bush is a serial liar, if not a congenital liar.1 For example, after The New York Times very belatedly leaked Mr. Bush's unconstitutional order permitting the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without obtaining the required court-approved warrants, Bush defended his directive as a 'vital tool' in the war against terrorism.
But, as liars commonly do, Bush seems to have forgotten that in April 2004 he told an audience in Buffalo, New York: 'When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so.' He also told the audience that precisely because it was 'the United States government talking about wiretap,' Americans could rest assured that 'constitutional guarantees are in place.' 2"
...
The brief answer is: Because Douglas Feith's PCEG (which would merge into the Office of Special Plans) was still feeding him the bogus intelligence that confirmed what he already "knew." The PCEG did not simply "study the policy implications of relationships among terrorist organizations and their sources of support," as Feith falsely testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), but also "reviewed both raw and finished intelligence and did undertake their own intelligence analysis after looking at the IC [Intelligence Community] products and discovering that what they needed had not been produced by the IC." 18
What's worse, without exception, Feith's PCEG produced intelligence products that consistently exaggerated the number, type, significance and danger of the ties it found between Iraq and al Qaeda. And although it was wrong on every one of its assessments, not one of its errors resulted in underestimating the threat. This pattern of errors in one direction suggests fraud and the 'fixing" of intelligence, not mere incompetence.
But, thanks to the intervention of Feith's boss, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the politicized intelligence gathered by this rogue "Iraqi intelligence cell in the OUSD(P)" 19 -- "rogue," because it was operating outside the established intelligence agencies funded by Congress and subject to congressional oversight -- was presented to (and impressed) Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, briefed to Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet (but minus the slide disparaging the CIA), and ultimately presented to Condoleezza Rice's deputy (Stephen Hadley) and Cheney's Chief of Staff, "Scooter" Libby. That last briefing took place without the knowledge of Tenet.
...
Feith staffed the PCEG with his co-author of the 1996 report (and fellow unregistered agent for Israel) David Wurmser, as well as Michael Maloof. Wurmser and Maloof would be "working deductively, not inductively: The premise was true; facts would be found to confirm it." 64 As the authors of Vanity Faire write in their exceptional expose, The Path to War, "the advocates of regime change in Iraq realized that, for any American invasion to enlist support, both domestically and internationally, links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda needed to be proved." 65 Thus, in light of the CIA's September 21, 2001 President's Daily Brief, somebody needed to fix the facts!
At this point, one might ask, as George Packer does in his highly acclaimed book, The Assassin's Gate: "Does this mean that a pro-Likud cabal insinuated its way into the high councils of the U.S. government and took hold of the apparatus of American foreign policy to serve Israeli interests?" In general, Packer's answer is no. But "For Feith and Wurmser," Packer answers yes: "the security of Israel was probably the prime mover." 66
...
Inspired by Mossad, Feith's rogue intelligence cell appears to have solicited, reexamined, digested and regurgitated evidence from the programmed liars put forward by Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress - evidence that the Intelligence Community already had considered, before dismissing as unreliable. Then, as Seymour Hersh has noted: "A routine settled in: the Pentagon's defector reports, classified 'secret,' would be funneled to newspapers, but subsequent analyses of the reports by intelligence agencies - scathing but also classified - would remain secret."129
Perhaps, that explains why even Secretary of State Colin Powell privately referred to Feith's intelligence cell as "Feith's Gestapo office." How ironic! Neocon Jews running a "Gestapo office." Finally, and most significantly, let's not forget that this "un-American intelligence" got it wrong!
Can the United States still be called a "democracy," if a majority of its citizens fails to recognize and redress such "un-American" behavior? ("Un-American," at least according to our ideals, if not our actual history.) ...
Saturday, January 14, 2006
Riskiest manifestation of the "neoconservative revolution": the push to unilaterally invade and democratize Iraq
The Forward Newspaper Online: The Neoconservative Persuasion: "By Gal Beckerman | January 6, 2006
Acknowledging the Jewishness of neoconservatism has always triggered the red, flashing lights of antisemitism, especially since the start of the Iraq War (with extra points if it's Pat Buchanan doing the acknowledging). But there is some truth to the suspicion. If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants' grandchildren. Understanding what might be Jewish about this movement (or "persuasion" as its godfather, Irving Kristol, prefers it be called) should be possible without being accused of conspiracy theorizing about secret cabals pulling strings for Israel.
...
Acknowledging the Jewishness of neoconservatism has always triggered the red, flashing lights of antisemitism, especially since the start of the Iraq War (with extra points if it's Pat Buchanan doing the acknowledging). But there is some truth to the suspicion. If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants' grandchildren. Understanding what might be Jewish about this movement (or "persuasion" as its godfather, Irving Kristol, prefers it be called) should be possible without being accused of conspiracy theorizing about secret cabals pulling strings for Israel.
...
Strangely absent from Friedman's books is any discussion of the latest and certainly riskiest manifestation of the "neoconservative revolution": the push to unilaterally invade and democratize Iraq. It's a strange oversight for a book published two years after the start of the war. Friedman wouldn't have needed even to introduce new characters. Among the war's most passionate supporters, after all, were Norman Podhoretz and William Kristol (son of Irving).
The omission is glaring. Not just because Iraq is the next chapter in the neoconservative story, but because it is in Iraq that neoconservatism will be either vindicated or buried forever. Maybe even more than Reagan's Cold War policies, the Iraq War was the most dramatic embodiment of two key Podhoretz tenets, the "aggressive" side that would keep America on the initiative, and the "idealistic" that dreams of making theworld safer by remaking it in our image. For neoconservatives, the 9/11 attacks signaled
the start of a new global war against an ideology as morally corrupt and potentially as apocalyptically destructive as Nazism and communism. Podhoretz famously dubbed it World War IV, the Cold War having been World World III. (It was 1939 again.) The threat had to be confronted head on. And this time the present danger had no one obvious home, other than where the peripatetic Osama bin Laden parked himself. Accordingly, a dramatic, history-altering gesture was necessary to reshape the entire Middle East. The intransigent Iraqi dictator appeared to be the perfect target and Iraq the perfect first domino that, once tipped, would remodel the region.
Afterward, however, with no weapons of mass destruction and no Iraqi connection to 9/11 in evidence, the more idealistic motives of the neoconservatives took center stage. Describing an "evil" that he named "Islamic Radicalism," "militant Jihadism" or, most expressively, "Islamo-fascism," President Bush spent almost the entirety of an October 2005 speech drawing connections between Nazism, communism and this new totalitarianism. Proclaiming that "our enemy is utterly committed," Bush said that "the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history. Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously — and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply." ...
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Security adviser [Stephen Hadley] named as source in CIA scandal
Security adviser named as source in CIA scandal - Sunday Times - Times Online: "November 20, 2005
THE mysterious source who gave America’s foremost journalist, Bob Woodward, a tip-off about the CIA agent at the centre of one of Washington’s biggest political storms was Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser, according to lawyers close to the investigation.
Woodward, the Washington Post reporter who broke the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon out of office, has refused publicly to divulge the name of his informant without permission, which has thus far been withheld.
...
Two years ago, when Plame’s identity was first revealed, Hadley was Condoleezza Rice’s deputy at the NSC. He is also thought to have been a key source for two books by Woodward on the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. ...
THE mysterious source who gave America’s foremost journalist, Bob Woodward, a tip-off about the CIA agent at the centre of one of Washington’s biggest political storms was Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser, according to lawyers close to the investigation.
Woodward, the Washington Post reporter who broke the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon out of office, has refused publicly to divulge the name of his informant without permission, which has thus far been withheld.
...
Two years ago, when Plame’s identity was first revealed, Hadley was Condoleezza Rice’s deputy at the NSC. He is also thought to have been a key source for two books by Woodward on the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. ...
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Dual Disloyalty: Feith and the Occupations of Gaza and Iraq .... He pushed hard for both. Others are paying the price in blood.
The Village Voice: The Bush Beat: "Morning Report 8/19/05
Dual Disloyalty: Feith and the Occupations of Gaza and Iraq
He pushed hard for both. Others are paying the price in blood.
However, in all the stories about places like Kfar Darom, as in the recounting of the current misery in Baghdead, one reactionary gets little notice. No one is mentioning Doug Feith, who has been mostly successful in hiding his true colors as a right-wing Zionist while carrying out his fanatical wing's aims in Iraq.
The erstwhile Pentagon official is a key player in not only the disastrous occupation of Iraq but in trying to make sure Israel clung to the disastrous occupation of Gaza.
Feith is such a radical that he won't even refer to the West Bank as the West Bank — he uses the biblical names Judea and Samaria. And he doesn't even like to say "occupied territories," even though they are. In fact, our own government officially refers to them as "occupied" and freely uses the term "West Bank." Just look at the CIA map of Israel above, and you'll see that Gaza and the West Bank are separate from Israel, and each carries an asterisk.
But there's no asterisk attached to Feith's version of Israel. The son of a founder of Likud, he has pursued a radical Zionist policy at the expense of Israel's own Jews, a majority of whom don't favor the settlers.
His behavior as a Pentagon official toward the Arabs in Iraq is one of the shameful legacies of our unjustified invasion. We know quite a lot — although not enough — about Feith's role in propelling the U.S. into war and beyond. As one of the most prominent neocons, he hammered away at the need for regime change. And of course, he was one of the key Pentagon officials who didn't plan for the aftermath. He was in charge, however, of figuring out how to handle our Arab prisoners.
Bad idea. He's almost as anti-Arab as the fanatical anti-Semites over in the Arab camp are anti-Jewish.
Does Feith have divided loyalties? That's a common allegation leveled against those neocons and others who seem to put Israel's interests before those of the United States. It's clear, though, that Feith doesn't. His loyalty belongs to Israel and to its extremist politicians like Bibi Netanyahu, for whom he was an adviser.
Maybe the details of Feith's loyalties will emerge in the unfolding of the AIPAC spy scandal. One of Feith's direct subordinates, Larry Franklin, has already been charged with leaking U.S. secrets to Israel, and two major AIPAC officials (fired only after the scandal broke) have also been indicted. ...
Dual Disloyalty: Feith and the Occupations of Gaza and Iraq
He pushed hard for both. Others are paying the price in blood.
However, in all the stories about places like Kfar Darom, as in the recounting of the current misery in Baghdead, one reactionary gets little notice. No one is mentioning Doug Feith, who has been mostly successful in hiding his true colors as a right-wing Zionist while carrying out his fanatical wing's aims in Iraq.
The erstwhile Pentagon official is a key player in not only the disastrous occupation of Iraq but in trying to make sure Israel clung to the disastrous occupation of Gaza.
Feith is such a radical that he won't even refer to the West Bank as the West Bank — he uses the biblical names Judea and Samaria. And he doesn't even like to say "occupied territories," even though they are. In fact, our own government officially refers to them as "occupied" and freely uses the term "West Bank." Just look at the CIA map of Israel above, and you'll see that Gaza and the West Bank are separate from Israel, and each carries an asterisk.
But there's no asterisk attached to Feith's version of Israel. The son of a founder of Likud, he has pursued a radical Zionist policy at the expense of Israel's own Jews, a majority of whom don't favor the settlers.
His behavior as a Pentagon official toward the Arabs in Iraq is one of the shameful legacies of our unjustified invasion. We know quite a lot — although not enough — about Feith's role in propelling the U.S. into war and beyond. As one of the most prominent neocons, he hammered away at the need for regime change. And of course, he was one of the key Pentagon officials who didn't plan for the aftermath. He was in charge, however, of figuring out how to handle our Arab prisoners.
Bad idea. He's almost as anti-Arab as the fanatical anti-Semites over in the Arab camp are anti-Jewish.
Does Feith have divided loyalties? That's a common allegation leveled against those neocons and others who seem to put Israel's interests before those of the United States. It's clear, though, that Feith doesn't. His loyalty belongs to Israel and to its extremist politicians like Bibi Netanyahu, for whom he was an adviser.
Maybe the details of Feith's loyalties will emerge in the unfolding of the AIPAC spy scandal. One of Feith's direct subordinates, Larry Franklin, has already been charged with leaking U.S. secrets to Israel, and two major AIPAC officials (fired only after the scandal broke) have also been indicted. ...
Saturday, October 29, 2005
The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War .... Cheney stacked asministration with hardline neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience
The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War: "By Michael Lind | 04/07/03 'New Statesman (UK)' -- --
America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon.
...
The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called 'neoconservatives' because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these 'experts' never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for 'democracy'. They call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism' (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.
The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical 'pentagon' of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think-tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con 'in-and-outers' when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo-cons are ideologues, not opportunists.
The major link between the conservative think-tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defence experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co-signed a Jinsa letter that began: 'We . . . believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defence Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.'
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a 'pro-Israel activist'. While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government. ...
...
Then they had a stroke of luck - Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hardline allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
The neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. ...
America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-Marxist explanations involving big oil or American capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did not push for this war any more than it supports the Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon.
...
The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called 'neoconservatives' because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these 'experts' never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for 'democracy'. They call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism' (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.
The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical 'pentagon' of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think-tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con 'in-and-outers' when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo-cons are ideologues, not opportunists.
The major link between the conservative think-tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defence experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co-signed a Jinsa letter that began: 'We . . . believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defence Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.'
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a 'pro-Israel activist'. While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government. ...
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Then they had a stroke of luck - Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hardline allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
The neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. ...
Monday, October 24, 2005
What Turned Brent Scowcroft Against the Bush Administration?'
The Washington Note Archives: "From 'Breaking Ranks: What Turned Brent Scowcroft Against the Bush Administration?', Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 31 October 2005
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Scowcroft on Iraq and Neocon Idealism
A principal reason that the Bush Administration gave no thought to unseating Saddam was that Brent Scowcroft gave no thought to it. An American occupation of Iraq would be politically and militarily untenable, Scowcroft told Bush. And though the President had employed the rhetoric of moral necessity to make the case for war, Scowcroft said, he would not let his feelings about good and evil dictate the advice he gave the President."
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Scowcroft on Iraq & Israel
"The obsession of the region . . . is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Scowcroft wrote in the Journal. "If we were seen to be turning our back on that bitter conflict -- which the region, rightly or wrongly, perceives to be clearly within our power to resolve -- in order to go after Iraq, there would be an explosion of outrage against us." Scowcroft went on to say that the United States was capable of defeating Saddam's military. "But it would not be a cakewalk. On the contrary, it undoubtedly would be very expensive -- with serious consequences for the U.S. and global economy -- and could as well be bloody. In fact, Saddam would be likely to conclude he had nothing left to lose, leading him to unleash whatever weapons of mass destruction he possesses."
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Scowcroft on Cheney: "The Real Anomaly"
"The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney," Scowcroft said. "I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." He went on, "I don't think Dick Cheney is a neocon, but allied to the core of neocons is that bunch who thought we made a mistake in the first Gulf War, that we should have finished the job. There was another bunch who were traumatized by 9/11, and who thought, 'The world's going to hell and we've got to show we're not going to take this, and we've got to respond, and Afghanistan is O.K., but it's not sufficient.'" Scowcroft supported the invasion of Afghanistan as a "direct response" to terrorism.
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The disintegrating relationship between Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice has not escaped the notice of their colleagues from the first Bush Administration. She was a political-science professor at Stanford when, in 1989, Scowcroft hired her to serve as a Soviet expert on the National Security Council.
Scowcroft found her bright -- "brighter than I was" -- and personable, and he brought her all the way inside, to the Bush family circle. When Scowcroft published his Wall Street Journal article, Rice telephoned him, according to several people with knowledge of the call. "She said, 'How could you do this to us?'" a Scowcroft friend recalled. "What bothered Brent more than Condi yelling at him was the fact that here she is, the national-security adviser, and she's not interested in hearing what a former national-security adviser had to say."
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Yet the two do not see each other much anymore. According to friends of Scowcroft, Rice has asked him to call her to set up a dinner, but he has not, apparently, pursued the invitation. The last time the two had dinner, nearly two years ago, it ended unhappily, Scowcroft acknowledged.
"We were having dinner just when Sharon said he was going to pull out of Gaza," at the end of 2003. "She said, 'At least there's some good news,' and I said, 'That's terrible news.' She said, 'What do you mean?' And I said that for Sharon this is not the first move, this is the last move. He's getting out of Gaza because he can't sustain eight thousand settlers with half his Army protecting them. Then, when he's out, he will have an Israel that he can control and a Palestinian state atomized enough that it can’t be a problem." Scowcroft added, "We had a terrible fight on that."
They also argued about Iraq. "She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. Then a barely perceptible note of satisfaction entered his voice, and he said, "But we've had fifty years of peace."
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Scowcroft said of Wolfowitz, "He's got a utopia out there. We're going to transform the Middle East, and then there won't be war anymore. He can make them democratic. He is a tough-minded idealist, but where he is truly an idealist is that he brushes away questions, says, 'It won't happen,' whereas I would say, 'It's likely to happen and therefore you can't take the chance.' Paul's idealism sweeps away doubts."
Wolfowitz, for his part, said to me, "It's absurdly unrealistic, demonstrably unrealistic, to ignore how strong the desire for freedom is." Scowcroft said that he is equally concerned about Wolfowitz's unwillingness to contemplate bad outcomes and Kagan's willingness to embrace them on principle. "What the realist fears is the consequences of idealism," he said. "The reason I part with the neocons is that I don't think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful. If you can do it, fine, but I don't think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse."
He added, "I'm a realist in the sense that I'm a cynic about human nature."
...
...
Scowcroft on Iraq and Neocon Idealism
A principal reason that the Bush Administration gave no thought to unseating Saddam was that Brent Scowcroft gave no thought to it. An American occupation of Iraq would be politically and militarily untenable, Scowcroft told Bush. And though the President had employed the rhetoric of moral necessity to make the case for war, Scowcroft said, he would not let his feelings about good and evil dictate the advice he gave the President."
...
Scowcroft on Iraq & Israel
"The obsession of the region . . . is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Scowcroft wrote in the Journal. "If we were seen to be turning our back on that bitter conflict -- which the region, rightly or wrongly, perceives to be clearly within our power to resolve -- in order to go after Iraq, there would be an explosion of outrage against us." Scowcroft went on to say that the United States was capable of defeating Saddam's military. "But it would not be a cakewalk. On the contrary, it undoubtedly would be very expensive -- with serious consequences for the U.S. and global economy -- and could as well be bloody. In fact, Saddam would be likely to conclude he had nothing left to lose, leading him to unleash whatever weapons of mass destruction he possesses."
...
Scowcroft on Cheney: "The Real Anomaly"
"The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney," Scowcroft said. "I consider Cheney a good friend -- I've known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." He went on, "I don't think Dick Cheney is a neocon, but allied to the core of neocons is that bunch who thought we made a mistake in the first Gulf War, that we should have finished the job. There was another bunch who were traumatized by 9/11, and who thought, 'The world's going to hell and we've got to show we're not going to take this, and we've got to respond, and Afghanistan is O.K., but it's not sufficient.'" Scowcroft supported the invasion of Afghanistan as a "direct response" to terrorism.
...
The disintegrating relationship between Scowcroft and Condoleezza Rice has not escaped the notice of their colleagues from the first Bush Administration. She was a political-science professor at Stanford when, in 1989, Scowcroft hired her to serve as a Soviet expert on the National Security Council.
Scowcroft found her bright -- "brighter than I was" -- and personable, and he brought her all the way inside, to the Bush family circle. When Scowcroft published his Wall Street Journal article, Rice telephoned him, according to several people with knowledge of the call. "She said, 'How could you do this to us?'" a Scowcroft friend recalled. "What bothered Brent more than Condi yelling at him was the fact that here she is, the national-security adviser, and she's not interested in hearing what a former national-security adviser had to say."
...
Yet the two do not see each other much anymore. According to friends of Scowcroft, Rice has asked him to call her to set up a dinner, but he has not, apparently, pursued the invitation. The last time the two had dinner, nearly two years ago, it ended unhappily, Scowcroft acknowledged.
"We were having dinner just when Sharon said he was going to pull out of Gaza," at the end of 2003. "She said, 'At least there's some good news,' and I said, 'That's terrible news.' She said, 'What do you mean?' And I said that for Sharon this is not the first move, this is the last move. He's getting out of Gaza because he can't sustain eight thousand settlers with half his Army protecting them. Then, when he's out, he will have an Israel that he can control and a Palestinian state atomized enough that it can’t be a problem." Scowcroft added, "We had a terrible fight on that."
They also argued about Iraq. "She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. Then a barely perceptible note of satisfaction entered his voice, and he said, "But we've had fifty years of peace."
...
Scowcroft said of Wolfowitz, "He's got a utopia out there. We're going to transform the Middle East, and then there won't be war anymore. He can make them democratic. He is a tough-minded idealist, but where he is truly an idealist is that he brushes away questions, says, 'It won't happen,' whereas I would say, 'It's likely to happen and therefore you can't take the chance.' Paul's idealism sweeps away doubts."
Wolfowitz, for his part, said to me, "It's absurdly unrealistic, demonstrably unrealistic, to ignore how strong the desire for freedom is." Scowcroft said that he is equally concerned about Wolfowitz's unwillingness to contemplate bad outcomes and Kagan's willingness to embrace them on principle. "What the realist fears is the consequences of idealism," he said. "The reason I part with the neocons is that I don't think in any reasonable time frame the objective of democratizing the Middle East can be successful. If you can do it, fine, but I don't think you can, and in the process of trying to do it you can make the Middle East a lot worse."
He added, "I'm a realist in the sense that I'm a cynic about human nature."
...