Category Archives: Neoconservatism

Neocons Resurrecting The Cold War

Bush, Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

My colleague Vox Day has a perspicacious post about Russia’s assistance to the South Ossetian and neighboring Abkhazian separatists:

“This battle for Georgia – not South Ossetia – is a long time in coming. Bill Clinton laid the groundwork for it by altering the rules of the game in Serbia, in which it was made clear that a major power had the right to intervene on behalf of a breakaway republic if it cried “help, help, I’m being repressed” by the sovereign territory owner. The Russians rightly feel that they’re playing by our rules and they have every reason to believe they’re going to get away with it since there is zero sympathy for the anti-Russian US position in Europe. The European position, quite reasonably, is to shrug and assume that it’s just like Kosovo, except that they also don’t want to upset their Russian fuel supplies.

At this point, the Georgian attack on South Ossetia appears to have been a terrible miscalculation by the Georgians and their US and Israeli advisors, who have been trying to solidify control over the oil pipeline in recent months.”

Myself, I warned against recognizing Kosovo some time back: Here and here.

The neocons are getting hot for war. These warmed-over Trotskyites yearn to resuscitate the Cold War. Andrew Sullivan, once a neocon, really seems to have repented—turned away from neoconery. He dishes it out:

“Krauthammer this morning goes into raptures about the possibility of reliving the 1970s and 1980s:
The most crucial and unconditional measure, however, is this: Reaffirm support for the Saakashvili government and declare that its removal by the Russians would lead to recognition of a government-in-exile. This would instantly be understood as providing us the legal basis for supplying and supporting a Georgian resistance to any Russian-installed regime.

This is a 1980s Afghanistan gambit, a de facto return to the Cold War, even though Russia is not a global expansionist power any more, and even though it is no longer communist. No thought given, apparently, to the chance that this could backfire on a power now occupying two countries rather closer to Russia than Georgia is to the US. Oh, well. They’ll figure that out later. There’s Russians to fight! One thing that baffles me: why does the US need a legal basis for anything in Krauthammer’s view?”

All that from a man who used to be a neocon of the deepest dye. Andrew may yet redeem himself.

Updated: Beam Scotty (McClellan) Up

Iraq, Media, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, War

You mean there still is no consensus about the unconstitutional, unjust war an American government waged? That’s right; the “nation” is still litigating the invasion of Iraq. What’s more, the stakeholders are circling the wagons.

Here is something of the smorgasbord of McClellan coverage; it’s some of what you should take away from the publication of a stale, tell-all by a former low-level Bush administration functionary. Admonitions are in order for most members of the media who were right by Scotty’s side, whooping it up for war crimes. For or against Scott, send in some of the reviews you like (but take your pro-war crimes comments elsewhere):

• “Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner?”—Richard A. Clarke

• “It would have been nice if he had told us some of this at the time, back when it was his job to keep the public informed.”—Karen Tumulty, Time magazine [Not so fast Ms. Tumulty; it was YOUR job too to apprise the public.]

• “The memoir strikes me as the standard stuff: ‘I was an insider to a corrupt group but the head of the group and I weren’t corrupt; we were misled.’”—liberal blog called American Street

• “Bush displayed a ‘lack of inquisitiveness’; the administration operated in a ‘permanent campaign mode’; the Iraq war ‘was not necessary’–other than that McClellan’s chosen to reveal them. But is that even really that surprising?” And: “the book displays a calculating mind that was never much in evidence in the White House press room.”—Jason Zengerle, The New Republic

Update (June 3): After watching Scott McClellan handle the raging bull, Bill O’Reilly, I’ve changed my opinion. This young man was strong, courageous and filled with a certain conviction. He did well against the man who acted as an accomplice to the administration, and who sold the war to those who’d have to go out and fight it. This was Bush’s war, Blair’s war, Podhoretz’s war, and Billo’s war. Billo showed his discomfort by flaring his nostrils and pursing his lips. McClellan, who was calm and comfortable, got to the man.

McClellan’s ability to admit over and over again that he had been completely wrong in his judgment and ethics served as a good contrast to Billo, who was prepared to concede nothing of the kind.

Granted, McClellan is not opposing the war on the most solid of grounds: Implicit in the case he makes is that if Iraq had WMD—irrespective of it not threatening the US or having any ties to al-Qaida—the US would have had a case for war. McClellan implies that we had a right to enforce UN resolutions, be a global governor. (Suddenly the US is an arm of the UN). We don’t.

Still, I will buy McClellan’s role as a bellwether of sorts—another insider sounding a warning—when the evidence against this corrupt administration results in impeachments, disgrace, and loss of face. There are no signs of that so far.

Update 4: Huffing Over Hagee

Christian Right, Islam, John McCain, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Neoconservatism

Desperate to create a Rev. Wright parallel in John McCain’s political universe, liberal madmen have been gleeful about uncovering Reverend Hagee’s many controversial statements. Hagee, an enormously powerful evangelical who’d endorsed McCain, has since withdrawn his endorsement.

Keith Olbermann, who barks orders AT his viewers as a Soviet commissar might do—but not as a TV talker ought to—offered up Hagee’s words:

“God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land”; the Roman Catholic Church is “the great whore”; “Hurricane Katrina was God’s retribution for homosexual sin.”

Olbermann had a giant “gotta moment” when it transpired too that Ohio megachurch pastor and author Rod Parsley, an “evangelical supporter of McCain,” had “sharply criticized Islam, calling the religion [an] inherently violent,” “anti-Christ religion,” and “the Muslim prophet Muhammad ‘the mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil.’”

So? Many respectable scholars concur. Many more Americans agree.

As to the first thing that had Olbermann elated: As I understand them, many Christians believe that, good or bad, God controls events and that there is a method in the madness around us, and in unfolding events in general.

Hagee, moreover, is an eschatological scholar. As such, his raison d’être is an overriding concern with “the end of the world or of humankind,” and all that stuff.

Update 1: Obama clearly wants a quid pro quo. He has implied that, just as he doesn’t hold Hagee against McCain, so too should the Arizonan not be encumbered by Hagee. Meanwhile, McCain is bending over backwards to denounce Hagee, which only helps legitimize the media-manufactured parallels between Hagee and Wright. McCain is stupid. (But then I’ve said so before.)

Update 2 (May 23): PARSING PARSLEY. First off, to be anti-Islam is not to be anti-Muslim. This distinction is conveniently collapsed by the left-liberals piling on Hagee. Islam is indeed a violent creed, conducive to violence. Come back to me on that, when you’ve perused our Islam Archive, where you’ll find references to many reliable sources. We’re not going to reinvent the wheel here for those who do not want to do the reading.

Pastor Rod Parsley also said that “America was founded with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed.” We live in the YouTube age, when every botched, unfortunate utterance by a public figure is dissected ponderously, after which denunciations are issued and apologies exacted.

Please calm down to a blind panic.

The estimable Robert Spencer has parsed Parsley’s statement. I take a different tack to the tack taken in the first part of Robert’s assessment: “Statements like that give the anti-jihad movement a wingnut patina that, of course, ABC is happy to perpetuate in this anti-McCain hit piece.”

Parsley, clumsily, was probably referring to the hard-core Christianity that early Americans espoused. They would surely never countenance Islam.

I see Parsley and Hagee, with all their faults, as “ours,” if you know what I mean. They’re warrior Christians. Granted, I’m not; besides being an irreligious Jew, I oppose aggressive wars. Still, Hagee is a crusader of sorts. He belongs squarely within the tradition of a vigorous, fighting Christendom. He’s an anachronism (but so am I in many ways) and he’s indubitably of the West.

Rev. Wright, on the other hand, is not “ours” in any way. His thinking is non-western, alien. He comes to destroy the West, as he hates with all his might the men who founded it.

The kind of rabbis who condemn Hagee as an anti-Semite—they’re engaged in grand-scale projection, for they, not Hagee, will help bring about the end of a West, after which Jews will be even less secure. Very many liberal rabbis are honorary Muslims, or dhimmis, as far as I’m concerned. Hagee is an honorary Jew.

Update 3 (May 24): Sigh. There are those who argue against Hagee and all else they dislike by declaring themselves and their opinions as the norm, the magical mean. Evangelicals are, apparently, outside the norm. Now there’s a rational argument. That’s profoundly annoying to this writer, especially when contributors do so in defiance of facts.

Revivalism, evangelicalism, the faith of happy-clappers, whatever—this branch of Protestantism, and its beliefs, is as American as apple pie. Ever heard of the First and Second Great Awakenings? “Historians have debated whether the Awakening had a political impact on the American Revolution [no less], which took place soon after.”

Afrocentrism, on the other hand—Wright’s creed—is as American as Idi Amin. African-Americans, I suggest, are morel likely to be evangelicals than Afrocentrists.

Update 4 (May 25): This is not a statement of support for either tradition, but merely a statement of historical truths vis-à-vis America’s creedal nature. (If I am not wrong, revivalists were active in the abolitionist movement.) Do I personally have more affinity for a Zionist Christian (Hagee) than an anti-Zionist, Afrocentrist of the left (Wright)?

You bloody bet.

But that’s because I’m a woman of the Right, not a neoconservative. Neoconservatives have very little patience or affinity for “their own.” As I’ve written, “Neo-con nirvana is a U.S.-supervised world where Afghani and Israeli alike are fashioned into global democrats, citizens of the world.” (A mold, incidentally, to which Wright would be infinitely more suitable than Hagee.) I’ve long maintained that neocons—they’re crypto-leftists—are as deracinated as any good left-liberal.

Neoconservatives, moreover, have always evinced contempt toward the Religious Right. You’d think the likes of Hagee would have learned. In fact, neocons consider the Religious Right a bunch of rube hicks. I’ll take the rubes any day over the wretched neocons, the two factions’ philosophical overlap notwithstanding.

Updated: Count McCain and Countess Condoleezza, His Vampire Bride

Elections 2008, John McCain, Neoconservatism, Race

“A new poll of New York State voters suggests a hypothetical John McCain-Condoleezza Rice ticket would beat the so-called ‘dream ticket’ of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, even though Rice has sought to douse rumors that she’s seeking the VP slot.”

If this is true, then Americans deserve to have their blood sucked dry by these two neoconservative vampires.

The presumptive Republican nominee is a neoconservative deluxe. Read my detailed analysis of “the pollution he has left along his political path” in “Mitt’s Gone, Bill’s Back.”

Condi’s his evil ideological twin—a neocon. At the very least, how can the genus Boobus Americanus forget this woman’s role, as the head of the National Security Council, in September 11?

As I wrote in “Hold Their Feet To The Fire”:

“According to Rice’s official bafflegab, a 1999 report by the Library of Congress stating that suicide bombers belonging to al-Qaida could crash an aircraft into U.S. targets belongs to the realm of analysis. It wasn’t ‘actionable intelligence.’”

“Incredible doesn’t quite describe what Condoleezza calls intelligence ‘specifics.’ The National Security Adviser [implied back then that she would have] moved to act if she [had gotten] word of time, place and method of attack. What next? A gilded, personalized invitation to attend the crime scene?”

She headed “an office created by the National Security Act of 1947 to advise the president on ‘integration of domestic, foreign and military policies relating to national security and to facilitate interagency cooperation.’ If suspicion existed – analytic, synthetic, prosaic or poetic – Rice should have put the squeeze on the system she [oversaw].” Or so I wrote in 2002.

Condoleezza was a colossal failure. If this new pole is accurate, Americans are emotional wrecks. I suspect they’re responding to the Ebony and Ivory seduction.

Update 1 (April 12): In 2005 I consigned Condi to the hate America crowd. Here’s why:

“Hating America is wildly in vogue among Bush and his devotees. Condi and acolytes, in particular, showcased their contempt for this country’s history by continually comparing the carnage in Iraq to the constitutional cramps of early America. As The Wall Street Journal put it, ‘There were a few glitches 200 years ago in Philadelphia too.’ For its part, Fox News kept coupling George Washington’s name with Saddam’s slimy successors: à la mode, man!”

“No matter that faction fighting in Iraq is as old as the sand dunes. As James L. Payne has reminded those struck with historical Alzheimer’s, there are cultural barriers to democracy, chief of which is a high-violence society. Iraq is—and has always been—a society in which assassinations, riots and terrorism are viewed by a large segment of the public and its leaders as legitimate tools in a political struggle. Iraq is a high-violence society now. And it was one in the days of Sumer, Saddam, and in the millennia in-between.”

“Yes, the uncivilized hoots, hollers, and deadly blasts instigated by members of Iraq’s tribal troika capture to a tee the tone of the debates in, what’s that document called? The Fedayeen Papers?”