“Not in Our Name!” How Neoconservatives and Liberal Hawks Use Lies to Sell Wars

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/news/2016/04/22/not-name-neoconservatives-liberal-hawks-use-lies-sell-wars/

At the end of the Bush II administration, with a few notable exceptions, the neoconservatives were out of government. Rather than having to find new careers due to their lies, failed predictions and lapses of judgement they were welcomed into think tanks like the Brookings Institution and found perches on newspaper editorial pages and in magazines like the Weekly Standard where they have continued to call for war in the Middle East and confrontations with other world powers, including nuclear armed Russia and China. Most of them opine that Obama is simply not militaristic enough, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The neocons were replaced by their ideological cousins, the liberal interventionists, whose standard bearer, Hillary Clinton, became Secretary of State. When calling for a no-fly zone in Libya in 2011, the US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, claimed that Gaddafi was encouraging his army to engage in mass rapes, even giving them viagra for this purpose. There was also talk of “foreign” mercenaries being brought in from sub-Saharan Africa. Many people were targeted by various militias as a result of these stories, including Libyans with dark skin and perfectly innocent foreign born oil workers.

There were also loud cries about a potential genocide in Libya’s second largest city Benghazi, then held by rebels. This idea was circulated far and wide, despite all the evidence to the contrary. There were no mass killings, let alone “genocide” in other rebel held towns taken on the army’s march to the eastern city but western commentators, using their mind reading abilities, insisted that they knew the Libyan leaders intentions. They also laughed off Gaddafi’s assertion that at least some of the rebels were extremists linked to Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, a claim that was later shown to be all too true.

Before the dust had even cleared, Tom Perriello, a former Democratic congressman who is now the Special Envoy for the Great Lakes Region of Africa, wrote an article calling on American progressives to embrace humanitarian intervention after the success of the no-fly zone, “Today, we have the ability to conduct missions from the air that historically would have required ground troops. And we possess admittedly imperfect but highly improved ability to limit collateral damage, including civilian casualties… this means fewer bombs can accomplish the same objectives, with early estimates suggesting that the Libyan air campaign required one-third the number of sorties as earlier air wars.”