Neocon War Hawks Want Hillary Clinton Over Donald Trump. No Surprise—They’ve Always Backed Her

[think]

Remember when Democrats were against Bush and Cheney's Neocon war loving foreign policy? Hillary obviously is an exception to the rule for some Democrats. Hillary is 100% neocon. Her failed foreign policy should be a testament to her unworthiness to be commander in chief.

Neocon War Hawks Want Hillary Clinton Over Donald Trump. No Surprise—They’ve Always Backed Her



BY Branko Marcetic - Web Only / Features » March 23, 2016

The neoconservative Right would have you believe this election affords them a uniquely tough choice. On the one hand, there’s Hillary Clinton, liberal bogeywoman and hated embodiment of the Democratic establishment. On the other, there’s Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called the Iraq war a mistake, accused the Bush administration of lying to drag the United States into said war, claimed he would be “neutral” in his dealings with Israel and just recently sketched out an “unabashedly noninterventionist approach to world affairs” for the Washington Post editorial board.

Whether or not Trump believes any of this is, as usual, up for debate. But some neocons are so disgusted with his rejection of foreign policy establishment thinking that they’ve declared the unthinkable: They’re going to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Concerned that Trump would “destroy American foreign policy and the international system,” author Max Boot told Vox that Clinton would be “vastly preferable.” Historian Robert Kagan has also come out in favor of Clinton, saying he feels “comfortable with her on foreign policy.” Eliot Cohen, a former Bush administration official who has been called “the most influential neocon in academe,” declared Clinton “the lesser evil, by a large margin.”

It would be convenient to accept that this support is just part of a Faustian bargain neocons have reluctantly entered into because of the looming specter of Trump. But the truth is, neocons and assorted war hawks have long had a soft spot for Clinton and her views on foreign policy.

When President Obama nominated Clinton for secretary of state in 2008, Richard Perle, one of the Iraq War’s primary cheerleaders and chairman of the Defense Policy Board in the lead-up to the war, said he was “relieved.” “There's not going to be as much change as we were led to believe.”

Perle, who was sometimes referred to as the “Prince of Darkness” and who once predicted there would be “some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush,” made clear his support for Clinton was not due to a lack of choices. “I heard about others on the list [for secretary of state] that I wouldn't be happy about,” he said. “Those were mostly Republicans.”

Read more:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/18998/neocon-war-hawks-want-hillary-clinton-over-donald-trump.-no-surprisetheyve

[Vinca]

1. If it's Trump, Hillary will be the de facto Republican candidate.

[PowerToThePeople]

3. I agree, he is her "Trump" card in the GE. n/t

[think]

8. It's sad. Hillary is turning the Dems into the party of neocons. Her supporters are letting it

happen without any push back.

And then they have the gall to claim Bernie supporters are republicans...

[bvf]

15. The Democratic party has been heading

in that direction since well before her husband (currently on time-out, apparently) shit all over the Oval Office and helped give us W.

She's sure damned happy to be riding the surge, though.

[think]

5. The mere thought of Richard Pearle & Robert Kagan endorsing Clinton should send shivers

down your spine....

[SamKnause]

6. McCain, Cheney, and Kissinger.

[think]

12. Do you support neocon ideology? Do think Clinton does or should embrace it?

[SamKnause]

4. Wall Street and war profiteers back Hillary.

Both have almost bankrupted and destroyed this country.

Hillary will continue down this path with a big smile on her

face as her bank account and the Clinton Foundation's bottom

lines continues to soar.

[think]

10. Excellent points. Between the corruption & economic destruction of Wall St; & the trillions

of dollars for war, on top of the human toll for our men and women in service it's been devastating.

And some people actually want more of this disastrous style of leadership...

[SamKnause]

14. I truly do not understand how people continue to vote

against their best interests.

If you are informed on the issues, I guess your vote says

you agree with these destructive, fraudulent, failed policies.

Have a safe and pleasant Sunday.

[Octafish]

7. 'We came. We saw. He died.'

Libya has oil. Lots of oil.

"Libya has some of the biggest and most proven oil reserves — 43.6 billion barrels — outside Saudi Arabia, and some of the best drilling prospects."

http://www.medialens.org/index.php/component/acymailing/archive/view/listid-3-alerts-precis/mailid-74-three-little-words-wikileaks-libya-oil.html

Mohammad Gaddafi shared the oil wealth with the Libyan people, not just the one-percent Wall Street types.

For over four decades, Gaddafi promoted economic democracy and used the nationalized oil wealth to sustain progressive social welfare programs for all Libyans. Under Gaddafi’s rule, Libyans enjoyed not only free health-care and free education, but also free electricity and interest-free loans. Now thanks to NATO’s intervention the health-care sector is on the verge of collapse as thousands of Filipino health workers flee the country, institutions of higher education across the East of the country are shut down, and black outs are a common occurrence in once thriving Tripoli.

-- http://www.globalresearch.ca/libya-from-africas-wealthiest-democracy-under-gaddafi-to-us-nato-sponsored-terrorist-haven/5482974

While little reported in the USA, Libya's former leader also used the wealth to better life throughout the poorest nations of Africa.

''War on Libya is War on Entire Africa.''

In 2010 Gaddafi offered to invest $97 billion in Africa to free it from Western influence, on condition that African states rid themselves of corruption and nepotism. Gaddafi always dreamed of a Developed, United Africa and was about to make that dream come true - and nothing is more terrifying to the West than a Developed, United Africa.
-- http://www.reunionblackfamily.com/apps/blog/show/7869956-war-on-libya-is-war-on-entire-africa-

Wall Street-on-the-Potomac prefers to do business with those it can relate to: greedy types.

[think]

9. You always manage to put it in perspective and provide valuable information to back it up.

Thank you.

[Octafish]

13. You are most welcome, think. Thank you for standing up to the PNAC warmongers!

Richard (PNAC/Another Pearl Harbor) Perle never is never mentioned on tee vee anymore. Just after September 11 and the Washington-Wall Street axis of war profiteering was heating up, Perle hit up Adnan (Iran-Contra/BCCI) Khashoggi for $100 million to make his new "Trireme Partnerships" take off.



Khashoggi's money would help launch the Carlyle Group-like investment group Perle founded. The petromoney was not for arms, directly. It was for investing in companies that were going to be making a killing off of homeland security related areas.

Interesting selling point: Perle already had secured financing from in from Boeing and some other bigwigs like Henry Kissinger.

One of the most important articles The New Yorker ever published:

Lunch with the Chairman

by Seymour M. Hersh
17 March 2003

At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.

Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

CONTINUED...

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/17/030317fa_fact

A bit on the new TRIREME business...

At Hollinger, Big Perks in A Small World

By Steven Pearlstein
Wednesday, November 19, 2003; Page E01

It's amazing the coincidences you find digging into Hollinger International, the publishing empire that includes Chicago's Sun-Times and London's Daily Telegraph and is quickly slipping from Conrad Black's control.

Let's start with the board of directors, which includes Barbara Amiel, Conrad's wife, whose right-wing rants have managed to find an outlet in Hollinger publications.

And there's Washington superhawk Richard Perle, who heads Hollinger Digital, the company's venture capital arm. Seems that Hollinger Digital put $2.5 million in a company called Trireme Partners, which aims to cash in on the big military and homeland security buildup. As luck would have it, Trireme's managing partner is none other than . . . Richard Perle.

Perle, of course, has been pushing hard for just such a military buildup from his other perch at the Pentagon's secretive and influential Defense Policy Board, where there are a number of other Friends of Hollinger.

CONTINUED (archived nowadays)...

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-309818.html

The to-bomb list was growing longer and the system stronger every damn day. It's why I keep bringing up Dallas. Those who remember the JFK Administration know it wasn't always this way.

[think]

16. Richard Perle. He is and will always be one of the slimiest of the slime. A true war profiteer

He did vanish from TV and the news. I'd pretty much forgotten about him.

Sorry to see he's resurfacing and being taken seriously again.

You really have to be full of shit for a major magazine to outright call you a liar. The fact that Richard Perle's area of "expertise" is foreign policy makes it all the more special that it is Foreign Policy magazine that called him out:

Richard Perle is a liar

BY STEPHEN M. WALTFEBRUARY 23, 2009

~Snip~

Now compare that frank and honest statement with the behavior of another former government employee: Richard Perle. In a recent article in The National Interest and a public appearance at the Nixon Center, Perle has tried to sell the story that neither he nor his fellow neoconservatives had any significant influence on the foreign policy of the Bush administration, and especially the decision to invade Iraq. Specifically, he denounces the supposedly “false claim that the decision to remove Saddam, and Bush policies generally, were made or significantly influenced by a few neoconservative ‘ideologues.'” He suggests that no one has ever documented this claim, either conveniently ignoring the many books and articles that did exactly that, or misrepresenting what these works actually say.

Given that Iraq turned into a debacle that the United States is having trouble escaping, it is hardly surprising that Perle is denying his role now. But that’s not what he said back when the war looked more promising. In an interview with journalist George Packer, recounted in the latter’s book The Assassins’ Gate, Perle described the key role that the neoconservatives played in making the Iraq War happen.

If Bush had staffed his administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker, which might well have happened, then it could have been different, because they would not have carried into the ideas that the people who wound up in important positions brought to it.”

The “people who wound up in important positions” were key neoconservatives like Douglas Feith, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and others, who had been openly calling for regime change in Iraq since the late 1990s and who used their positions in the Bush administration to make the case for war after 9/11, aided by a chorus of sympathetic pundits at places like the American Enterprise Institute, and the Weekly Standard. The neocons were hardly some secret cabal or conspiracy, as they were making their case loudly and in public, and no serious scholar claims that they “bamboozled” Bush and Cheney into a war. Rather, numerous accounts have documented that they had been openly pushing for war since 1998 and they continued to do so after 9/11. As neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan later admitted, he and his fellow neoconservatives were successful in part because they had a “ready-made approach to the world” that seemed to provide an answer to the challenges the U.S. faced after 9/11.

The bottom line is simple: Richard Perle is lying. What is disturbing about this case is is not that a former official is trying to falsify the record in such a brazen fashion; Perle is hardly the first policymaker to kick up dust about his record and he certainly won’t be the last. The real cause for concern is that there are hardly any consequences for the critical role that Perle and the neoconservatives played for their pivotal role in causing one of the great foreign policy disasters in American history. If somebody can help engineer a foolish war and remain a respected Washington insider — as is the case with Perle — what harm is likely to befall them if they lie about it later?

~Snip~

As Frank Rich and others have figured out, we are in trouble today because we have allowed a culture of corruption and dishonesty to permeate our institutions and pollute our public discourse. Until that changes — until our public institutions contain a lot more truth-tellers like Gene Kranz and fewer liars like Richard Perle — we are not going to know where we stand, where we are headed, or whom to trust.

Ful article:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/02/23/richard-perle-is-a-liar/