A Tragedy of Errors (Re: NEOCONS)

[drewb]

About a decade ago, I invented a game with a colleague of mine who, like me, had once worked for Irving Kristol. We called it neoconservative bingo. The idea was that the clichés of neoconservative discourse would be arranged in various combinations on bingo cards: "The World's Only Superpower"; "The New Class"; "The China Threat"; "Decadent Europe"; "Against the UN"; "The Adversary Culture"; "The Global Democratic Revolution"; "Down With the Appeasers!"; "Be Firm Like Churchill." The free space in the center of the bingo card would be "The Palestinian People Do Not Exist" (nowadays it would be "No Palestinian State" or "All Palestinians Are Terrorists"). As you read an essay or a book by a neoconservative, you would check off each slogan on the card in the order in which it appeared.

We never printed our neocon bingo cards. But the neoconservative manifesto by David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil, which is more a collection of talking points than a coherent argument, can serve just as well. The United Nations "has traduced and betrayed" the dream of world peace. The China Threat: "Eventual Korean unification will reinforce the power of the world's democracies against an aggressive and undemocratic China, should China so evolve." There are the Neville Chamberlain appeasers and the Decadent Europe theme: "To Americans, looked like appeasement. But it would be a great mistake to attribute European appeasement to cowardice--or to cowardice alone." There are the obligatory Churchill references--a chapter is titled "End of the Beginning"--and there is this: "We will never cease to hope for the civilized world's support. But if it is lacking, as it may be, then we have to say, like the gallant lonely British soldier in David Low's famous cartoon of 1940: 'Very well, alone.'"

Bingo.

Paradoxically, Perle and Frum happened to publish their manifesto of neoconservative grand strategy at the very moment many of their colleagues were insisting in print that neoconservatism does not exist, and that the neocons have no influence on US foreign policy. Up until the summer of 2003, neo-conservatives proudly championed their movement against adversaries on the left and against factions on the right (realist, paleoconservative and libertarian) that questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq. That summer, however, the invasion of Iraq--planned for a decade and carried out chiefly by leading neoconservative foreign policy experts like the Bush Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith--went terribly wrong. As of this writing, more US soldiers have died in the unnecessary second war in Iraq than have been killed in any other US military venture since Vietnam, and several thousand Iraqis have died, with many more maimed (the Bush Pentagon does not bother to count Iraqi casualties). As the enormity of the debacle became apparent, neoconservatives abruptly began avowing their own nonexistence. Not since Stalin ordered the US Communist Party to go underground has an American political faction pretended to dissolve itself in public like this.

~more...

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040223&c=1&s=lind

[ixion]

fantastic read

The article provides a great chronology of the neocon movement, and dispells the myth that 'they don't see one another much'. It also provides good insight as to their primary motivations.

here's a couple more choice paragraphs...

<snip>

The cynical way in which the Bush Administration lied to Congress and the American people to justify an invasion of Iraq planned years before September 11, 2001, by Wolfowitz and many of his PNAC allies came as no surprise to me, a former neocon. In an anthology titled The Fettered Presidency published by the American Enterprise Institute in 1989, Irving Kristol wrote that "if the president goes to the American people and wraps himself in the American flag and lets Congress wrap itself in the white flag of surrender, the president will win.... The American people had never heard of Grenada. There was no reason why they should have. The reason we gave for the intervention--the risk to American medical students there--was phony but the reaction of the American people was absolutely and overwhelmingly favorable. They had no idea what was going on, but they backed the president. They always will."



<snip>


David Brooks and his colleagues in the neocon press are half right. There is no neocon network of scheming masterminds--only a network of scheming blunderers. As a result of their own amateurism and incompetence, the neoconservatives have humiliated themselves. If they now claim that they never existed--well, you can hardly blame them, can you?




really, if you've got the time, read this. It's long, but well worth it.


thanks for posting.

[ixion]

please delete

multi post. sorry.

[ixion]

1. please delete

multi post... sorry