neoconservadroid

From the point of view of the Middle East restructurers, Iran represents an increasing threat to regional stability. Not only does it already have long-range missiles, and might be developing nuclear weapons, its close ties with the Shiite majority in Iraq do not bode well for the type of political and economic restructuring the Bush administration planned for Iraq. Moreover, neoconservatives and Israelis have long complained that Iran backs the Hezbollah militias in Lebanon and is fueling the Shiite rebels in Iraq. Effectively, Washington has already declared war on Iran. Being named by President Bush as part of the “Axis of Evil” triad targeted in the global war on terrorism and the new U.S. strategy of preemptive war has made Iran increasingly nervous.

// posted by Unknown @ 2:28 PM   permalink  0 comments

Just as Mr. Cheney, Rummy and the neocons turned W. into a host body for their old schemes to knock off Saddam, transform the military and set up a pre-emption doctrine to strike at allies and foes that threatened American hyperpower supremacy, so now W. has turned Mr. Allawi into a host body for the Panglossian palaver that he believes will get him re-elected.

// posted by Unknown @ 9:08 PM   permalink  0 comments

With the rise of so-called "neo-conservatism" (in fact, a radicalism), the investing class has transformed itself from an economic symbiont - prospering conjointly with its producer-partner - into an economic parasite - impoverishing its host, the workers, and thus, eventually, itself. Like a heart-worm devouring the source and sustenance of its very life, the oligarchs are squeezing the productivity and the disposable income from the workers, which is to say, the well-springs of the oligarch's wealth.

// posted by Unknown @ 7:53 PM   permalink  0 comments

As Seymour Hersh discloses in Chain of Command, the decision to invade Iraq, high on the agenda of the neo-cons in Cheney's office and the Pentagon since the election, had been given the greenlight almost immediately after the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. At 2.40 in the afternoon on September 11, Rumsfeld convened a meeting of his top staffers. According to notes taken by an aide, Rumsfeld declared that wanted to "hit" Iraq, even though he well knew that Iraq was not behind the attack. "Go massive," ordered Rumsfeld. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

For Rumsfeld and his gang, 9/11 was an opportunity more than a hardship. It augured a war without end, a war without rules, a war without fiscal constraints, a war where anything was permitted and few questions asked. Almost immediately the Secretary of Defense conjured up his own personal hit squad, Joint Task Force-121, which he endearingly refers to as his "manhunters." Though we wouldn't hear about it for months, this operation launched the kidnappings, wholesale round-ups, assassinations, and incidents of torture that are only now coming partially to light.

Of course, it can't all be pinned on Rumsfeld and his band of bureaucratic thugs. It goes right to the top. On February 7, 2002, Bush signed an executive order exempting captured members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban from the protections of the Geneva Conventions. With that stroke of the pen, Bush affixed his imprimatur to the prosecution of his wars unbound by the constraints of international law. That secret imperial decree set into motion the downward spiral of sadism-as-government-policy which led directly to the torture chambers of Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib and obliterated the last molecule of moral authority from Bush's global war. Of course, such concerns are mere trifles to these cruise missile crusaders.

// posted by Unknown @ 11:32 AM   permalink  0 comments

For the record, Annan would certainly not be the first person to make such "outrageous" comments. In fact, last year the prominent neoconservative hawk Richard Perle, who serves on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, indicated that he thought that the invasion violated international law (Guardian, 11/20/03), which Perle said "would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone." Perle argued that French intransigence left the U.S. with "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the U.N. for dealing with Saddam Hussein," and therefore, Perle said, "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

// posted by Unknown @ 3:32 PM   permalink  0 comments

Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There's no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They're like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe. They believe that they could go in with few forces. They believed that once they went in it would happen quick. Iran would get the message. What they call occupied Lebanon would get the lesson. Even the Saudis would change.

// posted by Unknown @ 7:28 AM   permalink  0 comments

Bush Rejects Bleak Iraq Intel Report

New US Inspector: Iraq Had No WMD

Growing Consensus That Iraq Is Hopeless

Insurgents in Iraq More Powerful Than Ever

General: Iraq Is 'Far Graver Than Vietnam'

Car Bomb Kills 13 at Baghdad Police Checkpoint

US Continues Air Strikes on Fallujah, More Killed

US Says New Photos Show Iran Plans Nuclear Bomb

GOP Senators Rebuke Bush for Plan to Divert Iraq Funds

GIs Threatened: Re-Enlist or Face Deployment to Iraq

// posted by Unknown @ 3:11 PM   permalink  0 comments

Richard Perle, a foreign policy guru who has oozed his way through Republican administrations for two decades making a fortune as he went, has met his match in Conrad Black, the former head of Hollinger International, the U.S.-based newspaper conglomerate. Black stepped down as Hollinger CEO after being accused by shareholders of being a crook. As Black goes down, Perle, who worked for the Bush administration and deserves as much credit for the Iraq war as anyone, is going with him. A special committee investigating Hollinger's financial losses accuses both men of corruption.

...Perle turned down an appointment in the Bush Defense Department in order to take the position as chairman of the policy board and continue his business interests, which center around Trireme Partners Ltd., a company that invests in defense and security companies and has Kissinger as one of its advisers. Perle was forced out of his Pentagon position when it became public this year that Global Crossing was paying him to lobby the Pentagon at the same time he was heading the Pentagon advisory group. His resignation came two weeks after allegations by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker that Perle used his position as Pentagon adviser to try to profit from the war in Iraq.

....How comforting to know U.S. foreign policy – especially the war power – is in the hands of such principled people. If Bush is re-elected, rest assured Richard Perle will be back.

// posted by Unknown @ 8:23 AM   permalink  0 comments

A vocal advocate of U.S. intervention in the Middle East and for the hardline policies of the Likud party in Israel, Feith has been involved in or overseen the activities of two controversial Pentagon operations – the Defense Policy Board, whose former head Richard Perle resigned after concerns arose about conflicts of interest between his board duties and business dealings, and the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which allegedly misrepresented intelligence on Iraq to support administration policies. Feith's office not only housed the Office of Special Plans and other special intelligence operations associated with the Near East and South Asia (NESA) office and the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs but also the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, who directed military policy on interrogations of the Guantanamo Bay detainees and then arranged for the transfer of the base's commanding officer, Maj. General Geoffrey Miller, to the Abu Ghraib prison in an effort to extract more information from Iraqi prisoners.

// posted by Unknown @ 2:58 AM   permalink  0 comments

Make no mistake - Bush's advisers believe that the US, guided by their policies, can change the world. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice argued that the geopolitical "tectonic plates" started shifting after September 11 as they had after World War II. Consider that comparison. That period witnessed America's determination to contain Soviet power, to reconstruct Europe and to establish a global economic system. It was the most audacious peacetime decision to use US power to reshape the planet....Americans have always been uncomfortable exercising power for naked national interest. Instead, as historian Walter McDougall argues, Americans picture their role in the world as an extension of their personal values - promoting liberty, spreading democracy, and fighting evil. Moreover, Bush's advisers believe that ordinary Americans cannot comprehend and should be shielded from complex foreign policy (or even energy policy). Knowing that the US will not go to war based on hazy geopolitical trend lines, Bush's advisers justified their grand strategy in tangible terms - chemical weapons, links to terrorists, and tyranny. September 11 provided an opportunity to cloak geopolitical transformation in righteous intervention.

// posted by Unknown @ 7:46 AM   permalink  0 comments

There is so much about this presidency that we don’t know, and may never learn. Some of the most important questions are not even being asked. How did they do it? How did eight or nine neoconservatives who believed that a war in Iraq was the answer to international terrorism get their way? How did they redirect the government and rearrange long-standing American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress, and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile? I have tried, in this book, to describe some of the mechanisms used by the White House—the stovepiping of intelligence, the reliance on Ahmad Chalabi, the refusal to hear dissenting opinions, the difficulty of getting straight talk about military operations gone bad, and the inability—or unwillingness—of the President and his senior aides to distinguish between Muslims who supported terrorism and those who abhorred it.

// posted by Unknown @ 8:56 AM   permalink  0 comments

...the lies that led to the Iraq War are only part of a bigger story, the most important story of the past three years: The Bush administration's manipulation of the tragedy of 9/11 to extend and intensify the longstanding U.S. project of empire building (and the complicity of most Democrats in that endeavor).

No publication or network in the mainstream of U.S. journalism has offered an independent, critical analysis of that project. Only a few journalists, mostly on the margins, have even dared to take a crack at it. The best consistent work has been in the foreign press or the alternative media in the United States.

....The film concentrates on two major topics: The neoconservative agenda for U.S. domination of the world, which was created long before 9/11, and the selling of that agenda to the U.S. public after 9/11.

The first story goes back to the early 1990s and the end of the Cold War, when policy planners such as Paul Wolfowitz (current deputy secretary of defense) were devising a more aggressive foreign policy and military posture to allow the United States to capitalize on the collapse of the Soviet Union and to dominate the globe in ways that had not previously been possible. At the time, the plans were considered so extreme that the first Bush administration reined in these ideological fanatics; the U.S. empire could go forward but not in such radical form.

During the remainder of the 1990s, these neoconservative planners chafed at what they saw as an insufficiently aggressive approach to expansion of the empire in the Clinton administration. The Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank, was created as a vehicle for promoting this ideology, which was able to take center stage with the George W. Bush administration.

Resistance to such an aggressive and dangerous project remained, however, and the project still had to be sold to the U.S. public. The attacks of 9/11 created the political climate which made that possible.

// posted by Unknown @ 8:03 AM   permalink  0 comments