Neoconservative cabal exposed and excoriated...

[thingfish]

Former conservative Michael Lind has provided a devastating appraisal of the neocons and their thug tactics, both abroad and at home. Having myself watched incredulously as neocons have recently attempted to a) accuse anybody who even mentions neoconservatism as an influence on this administration as being "anti-Semites" and b) that neocons aren't an organized "movement" in every sense of the word, I especially appreciated Lind's case-closed exposure and devastation of those arguments.

here's an excerpt:

"David Brooks recently claimed in the New York Times that only "full-mooners" believe that neoconservative institutions like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) have any influence on Bush Administration policy because PNAC "has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy." But PNAC disseminates the views not of its paid staffers, receptionists and interns, but of powerful Administration insiders like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, in the same way that the Committee on the Present Danger used to broadcast the views of Paul Nitze and Gene Rostow, who as government officials were guarded in their own public comments.

Brooks continued: "In truth, the people labeled neocons... travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another." In truth--to use Brooks's phrase--among those who have signed PNAC letters are Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Robert Kagan. PNAC is run by William Kristol, who edits The Weekly Standard, for which Brooks writes, and is the son of Irving Kristol, founder of The Public Interest and former publisher of The National Interest, who wrote a book called Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, and is married to the neoconservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, William's mother. Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, is the father of John Podhoretz, a neoconservative editor and columnist who has worked for the Reverend Moon's Washington Times and the New York Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns The Weekly Standard and Fox Television. Norman is the father-in-law of Elliott Abrams, the former Iran/contra figure and former head of the neocon Ethics and Public Policy Center and the director of Near Eastern affairs at the National Security Council. Elliott's mother-in-law and Norman's wife, Midge Decter, like many older neocons a veteran of the old Committee on the Present Danger, was recently given a National Humanities Medal after publishing a fawning biography of Rumsfeld, whose number-two and number-three deputies at the Pentagon, respectively, are Wolfowitz and Feith, veterans of the Committee on the Present Danger and Team B, the intelligence advisory group that grossly exaggerated Soviet military power in the 1970s and '80s. Perle, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (and its former head), is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and sits on the board of Hollinger International, a right-wing media conglomerate (including the Jerusalem Post and the Daily Telegraph) controlled by Conrad Black, the chairman of the editorial board of The National Interest, which Black partly subsidizes through the Nixon Center. Perle and Feith--both PNAC allies--helped write a 1996 paper called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," on behalf of Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Perle, Feith and the other US and Israeli authors called on Israel to abandon the Oslo process and to restore martial law in the Palestinian territories long before the second intifada began. Co-authorship is common among the neocons: Brooks and Kristol, Kristol and Kagan, Frum and Perle.

These are people who, according to David Brooks, "don't actually have much contact with one another."

Awesome stuff. Lots more here...

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040223&s=lind

[Michael Harrington]

1. You should also pick up

Sidney Blumenthal's excellent The Rise of the Counterestablishment if you're interested in the history of these toads. It's an eye-opening book, to be sure. He needs to publish a revised edition.

[thingfish]

2. I just read that a couple months ago!

Unfortunately, it's out of print. I read a library copy.

[RainDog]

5. are you...

The Other America and The Accidental Century Michael Harrington?

edited to add the quote from the article-

"Neoconservatism--the term was Michael Harrington's--originated in the 1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, many of whom preferred to call themselves "paleoliberals." While there was a pro-Israel wing, the movement's focus was on confrontation with the Soviet bloc abroad and on the defense of New Deal liberalism and color-blind liberal integrationism against rivals on the left at home. With the end of the cold war and the ascendancy of the Democratic Leadership Council, many "paleoliberals" drifted back to the Democratic center. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once spoken of as a possible neoconservative presidential candidate, broke with the movement in the 1980s over its growing contempt for international law and its exaggeration of the Soviet threat. Today's neocons are a shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition."

Whether you are or aren't, welcome to DU.

[Michael Harrington]

14. Afraid not.

The real Michael Harrington died of Cancer in 1989. He was a huge influence on my thinking, and I was lucky enough to meet him after a lecture in 1987. He was a warm and thoughtful man, full of energy that I now realize must have been a real effort for him.

[yowzayowzayowza]

3. THIS IS A MUST READ.

Skip down to the last six paragraphs starting "The cynical way ..."

Quite an indictment.

:kick:

[thingfish]

8. Kick, because you're right.

sss

[yowzayowzayowza]

9. There is NO WAY...

enough DUers have read this yet!!!

:kick:

[thingfish]

12. Kick -- must read!

s

[RainDog]

4. so how many pinheads in America read the nation?

it's too bad that the so-called liberal media can't seem to find a way to make these facts available....in fact, why doesn't the NYTimes publish this very article alongside Brooks' in their newspaper, in the interests of fair and balanced access to information for their readers?

Of course, I don't expect the neocon propaganda mills like Fox, etc. to ever tell the truth, but it sure would be nice for the NYTimes to set the record straight when they hire a guy like Brooks to lie with impunity...or rather, to pay him to lie.

[formactv]

15. I do

[RainDog]

16. then I doubt you're a pinhead.

:)

what I meant was that too many Americans watch Fox to get information. Fox, remember, turned out to be the station whose viewers were the worst informed in America about the reality of the Iraq invasion.

I read The Nation, too. I wish more Americans read The Nation and fewer watched Fox and maybe we'd have a more sane govt.

[Stephanie]

6. Unfortunately they don't give up

They have now convinced the bonehead in the WH to "democratize" the ME. I've been saying this for a long time: they are not so smart as they think they are.

From the article:

They said Saddam had WMDs. He didn't. They said he was in league with Osama bin Laden. He wasn't. They predicted that no major postwar insurgency in Iraq would occur. It did. They said there would be a wave of pro-Americanism in the Middle East and the world if the United States acted boldly and unilaterally. Instead, there was a regional and global wave of anti-Americanism.

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?

[RainDog]

7. Whoa. Is Kristol channeling Goering?

"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.'"

Doesn't that sound like Goering's quote from The Nuremberg Diaries?

"...the people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism...it works the same in any country."

[mrgorth]

10. My favorite part

Not only America's cold war history but the British experience in the twentieth century has shaped neocon perceptions. This is not as strange as it seems. Britain was the leading world power until a few generations ago; many neoconservatives are adult immigrants from the British Commonwealth, like the former Canadian subjects of Her Majesty Charles Krauthammer and David Frum; and many neocon thinkers follow Lionel Trilling (whom Irving Kristol has cited, along with Leo Strauss, as one of the greatest influences on his thought) in looking to British culture to explicate American society. The first modern industrial society, Britain reached its peak, neocons believe, as a result of the combination of imperial ruthlessness, bourgeois (not managerial) capitalism and Victorian virtue. Tragically, however, British strength was sapped from within by the postbourgeois elitists of Bloomsbury, who mocked Victorian values even as the work ethic was eroded by the welfare state. As a result, Britain was morally and materially unprepared to fight fascist totalitarianism. The greatest man of the twentieth century, to judge from the number of times he is cited by neocons, was not Franklin Roosevelt but Winston Churchill, the upholder of Victorian values.

In neocon ideology, the United States is reliving the experience of Britain three-quarters of a century ago. Osama bin Laden (or Saddam or the Chinese leadership or Yasir Arafat) is the new Hitler. Bush is the new Churchill, as Reagan was earlier. Moderate Republicans and conservative realists, as well as liberal Democrats, are the new Neville Chamberlains. The working-class Protestant fundamentalists of the rural and suburban American South are equated with the bourgeois dissenting Protestants of Victorian England. The American university is the new Bloomsbury, full of decadent liberals and leftists sapping the morale of young Americans, who many neoconservatives think should be drafted and sent to fight a series of wars abroad to promote democracy. Four years ago, Donald Kagan and Frederick Kagan (Robert Kagan's father and brother, respectively) published a book called While America Sleeps, comparing the United States to Britain in the late 1930s. For the neocons, America is the Britain of Churchill and Chamberlain, and it is always 1939.

Something like what Vivian De Sola Pinto wrote of Kipling in Crisis in English Poetry (1968) could be said today of Kipling's admirer Max Boot and most of today's neoconservative imperialists: "There was no Irish or South African problem, only rebels and traitors; there was no aesthetic problem, only wasters and rotters like Sir Anthony Gloster's son who was educated at 'Harrer an' Trinity College' and 'muddled with books and pictures,' and Tomlinson whose sins were entirely literary; there was no problem of war and peace, only foolish liberals and sentimental or knavish pacifists. All the world needed was more discipline, obedience and loyalty, and above all a paternal British Empire with its unselfish and efficient administrators and admirable army licked into shape by perfect N.C.O.s."

[yowzayowzayowza]

11. Anyone wanna...

wager how may time this article is gunna be reposted in the next month?

[SanchoPanza]

13. Lind is Excellent

I suggest everyone run out and pick up "Up From Conservatism" and his more recent "Made In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics". Both are two pf my favorite books on modern party politics. The latter is especially revealing to those not familiar with the political culture of Tom DeLay's West Texas.

[thingfish]

17. That's a great one, too.

Great read.

[bobthedrummer]

18. The OSP and Selective Intelligence by Seymour Hersh

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact

The Pentagon Muzzles The CIA by Robert Dreyfuss
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/22/dreyfuss-r.html

[bpilgrim]

19. excellant article

though i wonder why in the end he leaves you with the impression that they are bumbling around looking for fights without any real purpose than being driven by some flawed romantic ideology of a virtuous empire of the past.

what these folks want is what simular folks throughout history who have faught for and gained a position of authority... POWER.

their only difference is their degree of ruthlessness and demand for TOTAL CONTROL, NOW, by any means necessary which is carries the seeds of their own destruction, HASTE. they are in such haste they become OVERLY DEPENDANT on the military and/or threats to solve most of our problems.

i agree that the neoCONs may feel they are only doing their duty - as representitives of the elite and powerful - to america by striving for TOTAL GLOBAL DOMINANCE but as others before them in history have found out the world is a mighty big and diverse place and it is impossible to rule by military or the threat of force alone.

no one can sit long on a throne constructed of swords - i forget who said that but they were right ;->

peace