Buy Making Sense Of The American Right!

By Paul Gottfried

Readers of VDARE.COM are urged to do what I recently asked of devotees of Lew Rockwell’s website: Go out and buy my book, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right!

Here’s what VDARE.COM editor Peter Brimelow said in his eloquent blurb:

"This study of the development and moral collapse of the postwar American Right is treated with vast historical knowledge that goes beyond Paul Gottfried's stated scope. Although its subject has been examined in a spate of books in recent years, including in two of Gottfried's earlier surveys, this new work brings an informed critical perspective to a major American political movement. A must read for students of American conservatism."

There is no way that the combined liberal-Neocon Establishment media will acknowledge my work. Put bluntly: since the members of the media have in many cases deliberately hidden the revelations about the evolution of the American conservative movement that my monograph offers, they would have absolutely no interest in publicizing the truth.

My work examines one by one the regnant fallacies about the group of self-described conservatives who founded National Review in the mid-1950s and about how their activities culminated in the present, largely neoconservative-dominated establishment Right. I set out to show that much of the story about how it got from A to Z has been twisted to fit particular agendas. I also note the magnitude of the misrepresentations in the recent tributes to W.F. Buckley served up by E.J. Dionne and Jonah Goldberg (and at an earlier date by Suzanne Garment , who said in the Wall Street Journal that Buckley had "pried conservatism loose from the fingers of its more demented followers"—There's Nothing Like a Libel Trial For an Education, October 11, 1985). I provide a long answer to the question of why certain factual distortions arose and why they have continued to be propagated. One factor that I would never exclude: these misrepresentations are deliberate and intended to strengthen an already existing configuration of journalistic power.

One key experience drove me into writing books about the changing American Right: witnessing the rapid and total way in which the neoconservatives came to dominate the Establishment Right in the 1980s. In the first edition of The American Conservative Movement, which I coauthored with Tom Fleming in 1986, we suggested that older “Movement Conservatives” had been simply naïve when they had allowed Kristol, Podhoretz and their minions to come in and take over the house that Buckley had built. I now think this was excessively charitable. One should never underestimate human greed and opportunism. Both were on display when the neoconservatives were actively encouraged to take over "conservative" foundations and journals from the 1980s on.

For me the most personally upsetting incident in this takeover, and it sticks in my mind far more than the dirt the neocons have done to me professionally, was watching the way in which the Conservative Movement hacks changed their minds about M.E. Bradford, the Southern literary scholar who had been earmarked for the position of NEH Director under Ronald Reagan.

As soon as their new neoconservative masters had begun to throw dirt on Bradford as a Southern racist and anti-Lincoln demagogue, using their connections to the liberal media to do so, the Movement Conservatives I encountered in DC hastened to express newly-discovered reservations about "our friend Mel." He no longer seemed to be quite the right person for the job. And in any case the neocon pick, Bill Bennett, even though he had previously been a liberal Democrat, looked more likely to obtain senatorial confirmation. Both Buckley and the head of the Heritage Foundation visited President Reagan in order to express their agreement with this judgment. In the process, they turned on a trusting friend of many years. (This episode is discussed with approval in Mark Gerson’s laudatory The Neoconservative Vision.

It reminds me of an act by the philosopher Martin Heidegger that I have always found profoundly contemptible. In 1933, Heidegger accepted a position as Rector of the University of Freiburg from the Third Reich. He thereupon suspended the library privileges of his own teacher and former colleague at Freiburg, the great phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, who was a Lutheran of Jewish ancestry. I personally despise those who seek to ingratiate themselves with a tyrant by turning on friends and masters.

The postwar conservative movement, especially in the 1980s, furnishes many such revolting examples. And those who have supplied them, unlike Heidegger, have been neither philosophical geniuses nor residents of a totalitarian state.

Anyone who knows me has heard me ask why the media never seems to notice the presence of perhaps millions of Americans on the right, who could be described as “Taft Republicans”. Why do the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and almost the entire MSM as if there were nothing noteworthy, except for a few isolated psychopaths, standing to the right of Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, and the post-purge NR editorial board?

And why, even at a time when the liberal news media has begun to pounce on W and his dying administration, does it continues to feature neoconservative columnists in the national press and on TV talk programs—honors that it would never conceivably extend to paleoconservatives or paleolibertarians, even though they fully share the Left’s distaste for the war in Iraq.

Yes, I do argue that this is all an attempt to create and perpetuate a controlled political conversation. Certain issues are never raised or, if they do intrude themselves, the way immigration recently has, can be shoved on to the backburner.

I also try to demonstrate why the post-World War Two Conservative Movement was suited to play this role, as soon as its preoccupation with Communist dangers became obsolete in the course of human events. In fact, the project of defining an "American conservatism" became, as my late friend Sam Francis liked to stress, a diversion from the pursuit of building an American Right. The “Conservative Movement” headquartered in New York and Washington became overly concerned with getting on well with the media establishment. And, consisting for the most part of journalists and fundraisers, it worked not to give offense to those who might contribute to its material and social success.

Yet an older Right already existed, in a peculiarly American form. It was the small-town, predominantly Protestant opposition to the expanding centralized administration that the Buckleyites replaced—and displaced from conventional historiography.

These transformations had the cumulative effect of driving the Conservative Movement steadily leftward, a point that I take pains to illustrate. So, quite naturally, the liberal media happily agreed. It joined in the efforts to recreate the relevant history. The more "moderate conservatives" were presented as brainier and as less xenophobic than their predecessors. At the same time, we learn from authorized accounts, Mr. Buckley had been working wisely and humanely toward the building of a more inclusive conservative tent since he cobbled together the new American conservatism of the post-World War Two era.

My book makes abundantly clear that none of this bears the slightest resemblance to ascertainable facts. I also suggest that the truth about my theme is so readily available that movement conservatives must be profoundly dumb or obsessively opportunistic not to notice changing party lines and periodic reconstructions about their movement’s past.

But there is reason for optimism. Americans who identify themselves with the Right do not always act according to the script prepared by the Weekly Standard or the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page.

Such a surprise happened most recently, and dramatically, with the derailing of the Bush-neocon Amnesty/Immigration Surge Bill. Senate Republicans, strongly pressured by their constituents, voted against the bill, although it enjoyed the support of MSM-favored presidential candidate John McCain, and President Bush, and the leading media outlets. Even Jonah (“Hopalong”) Goldberg, a symbol and a symptom of National Review’s decline, felt forced to publish a column in the Los Angeles Times [The wealth between our ears, July 3, 2007] suggesting that the U.S. might actually have the right (wow!) to determine its national culture.

Get my book! Unless you’re David Frum or Bill Kristol, you won’t be disappointed by the airing of dirty linen.

Paul Gottfried (email him) is Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, PA. He is the author of After Liberalism, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt and The Strange Death of Marxism.

http://vdare.com/gottfried/070823_book.htm

Gottfried explains the "What."

Here (http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showpost.php?p=3858934&postcount=1) is the "Why." From 1971!

THE MEDIA

NEWS CORP. (1). Rupert Murdoch (2), chairman and C.E.O. of News Corporation, funder of neocon stars and bosses, including Roger Ailes (3), chairman and C.E.O. of Fox News Corporation; Bob McManus (4), editorial-page editor of the New York Post; Post columnist and neocon scion John Podhoretz (5); see also: Commentary , (11). Mr. Murdoch's News Corp. owns The Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, son of neocon patriarch Irving Kristol. (For an explanation of the elder Mr. Kristol's movement from left-wing to conservative, try renting Arguing the World , the cogent 1998 documentary that charted the New York lefties' path rightward.) William Kristol is a board member at the right-wing think tank Manhattan Institute (21), former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and a commentator on ABC News' This Week (40).

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (6) . Home to top-tier neoconservative op-eds nearly every day of the week, including Richard Perle and other clients of agent Eleana Benador (26). Other WSJ neocon and neocon-friendly editors and columnists: Paul Gigot, Robert Bartley, Dorothy Rabinowitz, Dan Henninger and Tunku Varadarajan (7). (See also: Max Boot, 25)

THE NEW YORK SUN (8) . Seth Lipsky (9), president and editor, and Ira Stoll (10), vice president and managing editor. "A different point of view." Funded by ex-Canadian media mogul , Roger Hertog (17), Bruce Kovner (18) and Conrad Black (19).

COMMENTARY MAGAZINE (11). Home of neocon editor in chief Neal Kozodoy (12). Founded by neoconservative patriarch Norman Podhoretz (13), husband to neocon godmother Midge Decter, father to John Podhoretz (5). See also: News Corp, (1); Writers' Representatives, 29).

FIRST THINGS (14) . "Journal of Religion and Public Life," home to Catholic neocon Father Richard John Neuhaus (15), preeminent "theocon."

NATIONAL REVIEW (16). William F. Buckley Jr.'s paleo-conservative magazine, seen as a kind of a relic by the new neocons, but which achieved neocon street cred with editor Jay Nordlinger (17), who arrived last year from The Weekly Standard. Also publishes Gen-Y columnist Jonah Goldberg, son of Lucianne Goldberg (31), the Elaine Stritch of the neoconservative movement.

THE MONEY

ROGER HERTOG (17), vice chairman of Alliance Capital Management, described by Mark Gerson (24) as the "one man who has, far more than anyone else, financially enabled this movement to exist." A board member at the Manhattan Institute (21) and the American Enterprise Institute (38), Mr. Hertog is a primary financial backer behind the Shalem Center, a think tank known as the A.E.I. of Israel, as well as co-funder of The New York Sun (8) and The New Republic.

BRUCE KOVNER (18), chairman of the Caxton Corporation. Mr. Kovner, noted Wall Street figure, board member at the Manhattan Institute (21) and chairman of the American Enterprise Institute (38), the think tank that serves as the human-resources department for the Bush administration (40). Also invested in The New York Sun (8) and The New Republic .

CONRAD BLACK (19). Chairman and C.E.O. of Hollinger International Inc. Formerly a Canadian newspaper magnate, now a British subject, he also invested in The New York Sun (8). Richard Perle, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (38), is on Hollinger's board of directors.

JOHN M. OLIN FOUNDATION (20). The philanthropic organization, headed by James Piereson, has funded the American Enterprise Institute (38), along with neocon players Max Boot (25) and the Manhattan Institute (21).

CLUBS AND SCENE-MAKERS:

MANHATTAN INSTITUTE FOR POLICY RESEARCH (21). Right-wing bastion that houses the neoconservative stylings of Myron Magnet (22) and his City Journal , as well as the Fabiani Society (23)-founded to mock former Clinton aide Mark Fabiani, inventor of the phrase "vast right-wing conspiracy"-a social gathering of "young writers, journalists, professionals, activists, and others who share right-of-center politics and conversation." Board of trustees consists of the neoconservative elite: Roger Hertog (17) Bruce Kovner (18) William Kristol (38), Mark Gerson (24). Also: Fareed Zakaria (32), editor of Newsweek International .

MARK GERSON, C.E.O. (24), of the Gerson Lehrman Group, editor of The Essential Neoconservative Reader . See also: Manhattan Institute (21).

MAX BOOT (25), neoconservative Wunderkind . At 33, the former Wall Street Journal op-ed editor writes in The Wall Street Journal , The National Review (16) and The Weekly Standard (39). Recent column asked: "What the Heck Is a 'Neocon'?" Answer: "Neoconservatives believe in using American might to promote American ideals abroad." Also: Olin Senior Fellow at Council on Foreign Relations (See also: Olin Foundation, 20).

ELEANA BENADOR (26). Theatrical agent and publicist. Formerly publicist of columnist and Middle East Forum founder Daniel Pipes, her clients now include A.E.I. resident scholar Richard Perle (38), former C.I.A. director James Woolsey, Max Boot (25) and former New York Times executive editor A.M. Rosenthal, now a columnist for the Daily News .

PUBLISHING.

ADAM BELLOW (27). Editor at large at Doubleday, former editor in chief of now-defunct neocon publisher, the Free Press. The latest offering by right-wing son of Saul Bellow: Stephen Schwartz's The Two Faces of Islam , a critique of Saudia Arabia.

CROWN FORUM (28). New conservative imprint owned by Random House Inc. will publish 15 conservative books a year, starting with Ann Coulter's forthcoming Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism .

WRITERS' REPRESENTATIVES (29). Glenn Hartley and Lynn Chu, V.P. and Vice V.P. of conservative literary agency. Clients include David Brooks of the Weekly Standard (39); Max Boot (25); Robert Kagan (37), world-affairs columnist for The Washington Post and a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard ; and Midge Decter, author of An Old Wife's Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War . For more on Ms. Decter, see: Commentary (11) and News Corp. (1)

PENGUIN IMPRINT: Announced on Tuesday, April 22, the new unnamed imprint will be run by Adrian Zackheim (30), who edited Newt Gingrich's 1995 To Renew America . Says Penguin publisher David Shanks: "Fairly or not, there's a perception among many conservative thinkers, leaders, scholars and journalists that the mainstream book-publishing industry doesn't really respect their ideas or their audience."

DECORATIVE NEOCONS:

LUCIANNE GOLDBERG (31), founder of Lucianne.com, Linda Tripp confidante. Former literary agent turned Web mistress. On neoconservatives: "You mean people who like to kill people and break things. That's me!" Mother of Jonah Goldberg, National Review columnist (16).

FAREEDZAKARIA (32). Editor of Newsweek International, supporter of war with Iraq, democratization of the Middle East. He's on the board of trustees at the Manhattan Institute (21), although he does not classify himself as a neoconservative.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN (33). Foreign-affairs columnist at The New York Times . Neocons would laugh; so would Mr. Friedman. But in a recent column, Mr. Friedman wrote: "There are still two other walls holding back the explosion of freedom in the Arab East … the first is the wall in the Arab mind."

UTOPIA COFFEE SHOP (34). The Weekly Standard hatched here by young William Kristol (39), Norman Podhoretz (11) and Fred Barnes.

FRED SIEGEL (35), professor of history at Cooper Union and former editor of City Journal (21), considers himself a "New Democrat" on domestic issues, neocon on foreign policy. Contributes to Commentary (11). "The reason the neocons are so successful," he said, "is because they have a purchase on reality."

SISTER NEOCON CITIES:

PRINCETON, N.J. At Princeton University, Aaron Friedberg (36), professor of politics and international affairs, will soon announce that he has taken a national security advisory job with Vice President Dick Cheney (40).

NEW HAVEN, CONN. At Yale University, history professor Donald Kagan, father of Robert Kagan (37), whose wife, Victoria Nuland, is Vice President Cheney's national security advisor (40). Robert Kagan co-edited with William Kristol (39) Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in America's Foreign and Defense Policy (1996), which called for radical change in U.S. foreign policy because of "growing threats to the American peace."

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE (38), Washington, D.C. Neoconservative think tank. Richard Perle is resident scholar. Vice President Cheney's wife, Lynn Cheney, is on the board of directors. On Feb. 26, President George W. Bush gave his most comprehensive foreign-policy speech here, declaring the need to topple Saddam Hussein's regime, opening his remarks by calling the A.E.I. the home of "some of the finest minds in our nation," which had done "such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds." (See also: Bruce Kovner, (18); Roger Hertog, (17))

WILLIAM KRISTOL (39), Washington, D.C. Editor of the Weekly Standard , owned by News Corp. (1), 30 copies of which go to Vice President Dick Cheney's office each week, reported The New York Times . Mr. Kristol's father, Irving Kristol, coined "neoconservative." Colleague of Robert Kagan (37).

WHITE HOUSE (40), Washington, D.C. In various strategic alliances with neoconservative publications, theorists: President Bush, Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld.

Washington Post diagram:

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2008/02/01/GR2008020102389.gif

Scott Horton interviews Jim Lobe re neocons:

http://dissentradio.com/radio/08_02_01_lobe.mp3

Alex, I posted all of this over here (http://ronpaulforum.com/showthread.php?p=323590&posted=1#post323590)
if you want me to delete it I will. I just figured that from what I have been telling them this is another dot to the puzzle.


[Good - that's what it's for - to be used. Just keep commentary out of this and other archive subforums. - A.L.]

Allan David Bloom (14 September 1930 in Indianapolis, Indiana – 7 October 1992 in Chicago, Illinois) was an American philosopher, essayist and academic. Bloom championed the idea of 'Great Books' education, as did his mentor Leo Strauss. Bloom became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, with his views being expressed most forcibly in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. [1]

In 2000, years after Bloom's passing, Saul Bellow, Bloom's friend and teaching partner at the University of Chicago, wrote a novel based on his colleague titled Ravelstein. In it, among other personal details previously not disclosed publicly, it was revealed that Bloom was gay and likely died of complications from HIV-AIDS.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom#Sexuality

The Strategist And The Philosopher

By Alain Frachon et Daniel Vernet

Le Monde: Translated by Mark K. Jensen
April 15, 2003

http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3230--316921-,00.html

Who are these neoconservatives who are playing an essential role in the U.S.
president's choices, along with fundamentalist Christians? And who were the
thinkers who inspired them, Albert Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss?

It was said in a tone of sincere praise: "You are some of the best brains in
our country"; so good, George W. Bush added, that "my government employs about twenty of you." The president was speaking on February 26 to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. (Le Monde, March 20)

He was paying homage to a think tank that is one of the bastions of the
American neoconservative movement. He was saluting a school of thought that is marking his presidency, and he was stating how much he owes to an
intellectual current which is today a predominant influence. He was taking
note of the fact that he was surrounded by neoconservatives, and crediting
them with a central role in his political decisions.

At the beginning of the 1960s, John F. Kenney recruited some left-of-center
professors, notably at Harvard University, chosen from among "the best and the brightest," to use author David Halberstam's phrase. President George W.
Bush, for his part, has chosen to govern with those who have been in revolt
since the 1960s against the centrist, mostly Social Democratic consensus that was dominant then.

Who are they? What is their history? Who were their leading intellectual
influences? Where are the intellectual origins of Bushite neoconservatism to
be found?

The neoconservatives must not be confused with the fundamentalist Christians who are also to be found in George W. Bush's entourage. They have nothing to do with fundamentalist Protestantism's renaissance, which comes from the southern Bible Belt, and is one of the growing forces in the Republican Party of today. Neoconservatism comes from the East Coast, and also to some extent from California. Its instigators have an "intellectual," often New York, often Jewish, profile, and often began on the left. Some of them still call themselves Democrats. They carry around literary or political magazines, not the Bible; they wear tweed jackets, not the petrol blue suits of southern televangelists. Most of the time, they profess liberal ideas on social and moral questions. They are trying neither to ban abortion nor to impose school prayer. Their ambition lies somewhere else.

But, explains Pierre Hassner, what is singular about the Bush administration
is that it has achieved the fusion of these two currents. George W. Bush
causes neoconservatives and Christian fundamentalists to make common cause. The fundamentalists are represented in his government by a man like John Ashcroft, the Attorney General; the neoconservatives have one of their stars as assistant secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. George W. Bush, who campaigned just right of center, with no very precise political ties, has
concocted an astonishing - and explosive - ideological cocktail, marrying
Wolfowitz and Ashcroft, neoconservatives and Christian fundamentalists, two
opposite worlds.

Ashcroft taught at Bob Jones University in South Carolina, academically
unknown but a stronghold of Protestant fundamentalism. Positions bordering on anti-Semitism were common there. Jewish and from an academic family,
Wolfowitz is a brilliant product of Eastern universities; he studied with two
of the most eminent professors of the 1960s, Allan Bloom, who was the disciple of Leo Strauss, the Jewish philosopher of German origins, and Albert
Wohlstetter, professor of mathematics and a specialist in military strategy.
These are two names that will count. The neoconservatives have placed
themselves in the tutelary shadow of the strategist and the philosopher.

Inappropriately named, they also have nothing about them of people whose aim is to conserve the established order. They reject just about all the
attributes of political conservatism as this is understood in Europe. One of them, Francis Fukuyama, who made a name for himself with his essay "The End of History," says: "The neoconservatives have no interest whatever in defending the order of things as they are, founded on hierarchy, tradition, and a pessimistic view of human nature." (Wall Street Journal, Dec. 24, 2002)

Idealistic and optimistic, convinced of the universal value of the American
democratic model, they want to put an end to the status quo and its limp
consensus. They believe in politics for the sake of changing things. On the
domestic front, they sketch out a critique of the welfare state, the product
of Democratic presidents (Kennedy, Johnson) as well as a Republican president (Nixon), which is struggling to cope with social problems. In foreign
affairs, they denounced détente in the 1970s, which, according to them,
benefited the USSR more than the West. As critics of the accomplishments of
"the sixties" and opposed to the diplomatic realism of a Henry Kissinger, they
are anti-establishment. Irving Kristol and Norman Podheretz, the founder of
the magazine Commentary, are two of the New York godfathers of
neoconservatism, and come from the left. They once drew up a leftist bill of
indictment of Soviet communism.

In *Ni Marx ni Jésus* [Neither Marx nor Jesus] (1970, Robert Laffont),
Jean-François Revel offered a description of an America caught up in the
tumultuous social revolution of the 1960s. Today, he explains neoconservatism as a sort of backlash. Above all on the domestic front. In the wake of Leo Strauss, the neoconservatives criticize the moral and cultural relativism of the 1960s. For them, relativism leads to the "political correctness" of the 1980s.

There is another intellectual of the first rank who is directing the battle
here, Allan Bloom, of the University of Chicago, who was portrayed by his
friend Saul Bellow in his novel *Ravelstein* (Gallimard, 2002). In 1987, in
*The Closing of the American Mind* (translated into French under the title
*L'Ame désarmée* [The Helpless Soul]), Bloom skewers university milieux where everything is equated: "Everything has become culture," he writes; "drug culture, rock culture, street gang culture, and so on, without the slightest discrimination. The failure of culture has become a culture." [Reverse translation from French]

For Bloom, a great interpreter of classic texts like his master Strauss before
him, one part of the heritage of the 1960s "leads to a scorn for Western
civilization in itself," explains Jean-François Revel. "In the name of the
politically correct, every culture is as good as every other culture and Bloom
wonders about those students and professors who are perfectly willing to
accept non-European cultures that are often hostile to freedoms and that show at the same time an extreme harshness toward Western culture, refusing to admit that it is superior in any way."

While "politically correctness" was seeming to hold sway, the neoconservatives were scoring points. Bloom's book was an enormous success. In foreign affairs, a veritable neoconservative school took form. Networks grew up. In the 1970s, a Democratic senator from the state of Washington, Henry Jackson (who died in 1983), criticized the grand treaties of nuclear disarmament. He prepared at that time a generation of young strategists, among them Richard Perle and William Kristol, who took Allan Bloom's courses.

In and out of the administration, Richard Perle met up with Paul Wolfowitz,
since both of them worked for Kenneth Adelman, another critic of the politics
of détente, and Charles Fairbanks, under secretary of state. In strategic
matters, they looked to Albert Wohlstetter. A Rand Corporation researcher and Pentagon consultant, as well as a great specialist in gastronomy, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) was one of the fathers of American nuclear doctrine.

More precisely, he was at the origin of the rethinking of the traditional
doctrine known as "mutual assured destruction" (MAD, in its English acronym),
which was the basis for deterrence. According to this theory, two blocs
capable of inflicting upon each other irreparable damages would cause leaders
to hesitate to unleash the nuclear fire. For Wohlstetter and his pupils, MAD
was both immoral - because of the destruction inflicted on civilian
populations - and ineffective: it led to the mutual neutralization of nuclear
arsenals. No statesman endowed with reason, and in any case no American
president, would decide on "reciprocal suicide." Wohlstetter proposed on the
contrary a "graduated deterrence," i.e. the acceptance of limited wars,
possibly using tactical nuclear arms, together with "smart" precision-guided weapons capable of hitting the enemy's military apparatus.

He criticized the politics of nuclear arms limitations conducted together with
Moscow. It amounted, according to him, to constraining the technological
creativity of the United States in order to maintain an artificial equilibrium
with the USSR.

Ronald Reagan listened to him, and launched the Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI), dubbed "Star Wars," which is the ancestor of the anti-missile defense
taken up by Wohlstetter's pupils. These individuals are the most enthusiastic
partisans of a unilateral renunciation of the ABM treaty, which, in their
eyes, prevents the United States from developing its systems of defense. And they have also convinced George W. Bush.

Following the same path as Perle and Wolfowitz is Elliott Abrams, today
responsible for the Middle East on the White House's National Security
Council, and Douglas Feith, one of the under secretaries of defense. Both
agree on unconditional support for the policies of the state of Israel, no matter what government is in place in Jerusalem. This advocacy of constant support explains why they endorse Ariel Sharon with no hesitation. President Ronald Reagan's two terms (1981 and 1985) were the occasion for many of these figures to hold their first government positions.

In Washington, the neoconservative wove their web. Creativity was on their
side. Over the course of many years, they marginalized Democratic centrist or center-left intellectuals and took up predominant positions in the places
where the ideas that dominate the political scene are formulated. These are
reviews like "National Review," "Commentary," "The New Republic," which was
edited for a time by the young "Straussian" Andrew Sullivan; "The Weekly
Standard," owned by the Murdoch group, whose Fox television network ensures the diffusion of the mass-media version of neoconservative thought. There are also the editorial pages like that of the "Wall Street Journal," which, under the direction of Robert Bartley, conveys neoconservative militancy unabashedly. There are research institutes, the famous "think tanks," such as the Hudson Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute. There are families, too: the son of Irving Kristol is the very urbane William Kristol, the editor-in-chief of "The Weekly Standard"; one of Norman Podheretz's sons worked in the Reagan administration; the son of Richard Pipes - an émigré Polish Jew who emigrated to the United States in 1939, became a professor at Harvard, and was one of the most important critics of Soviet communism - is Daniel Pipes, who denounces Islamism as the new totalitarianism threatening the West.

These men are not isolationists. To the contrary. They are generally
extremely cultured and knowledgeable about foreign countries, whose languages they often speak. They are not at all like the reactionary populism of a Patrick Buchanan, who is in favor of America turning inward to address her domestic problems.

The neoconservatives are internationalists, partisans of a role of resolute
global activism for the United States. They are not, however, in the mold of
the old Republican Party (Nixon, George Bush senior), who trusted to the
merits of a Realpolitik that cared little about the nature of the regimes with
which the United States made alliances in the defense of its interests. For
them, Kissinger is a sort of anti-model. But they are also not
internationalists in the Democratic Wilsonian tradition (named after Woodrow
Wilson, the unfortunate father of the League of Nations), which was the
tradition of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, who are dismissed as angelic or
naïve figures who trust to international institutions to spread democracy.

Let us turn to the philosopher. There were no direct links between Albert
Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss (who died in 1973) before the official appearance
of neoconservatism. But in the network of neoconservatives, some have built
bridges between the teachings of the two men, even though their areas of
research were fundamentally different.

Whether as a source or as an incidental influence (Allan Bloom, Paul
Wolfowitz, William Kristol.), Strauss's philosophy has served as the
theoretical substrate of neoconservatism. He is read and recognized for his
immense erudition about classical Greek texts or Christian, Jewish, or Muslim
Scripture. He was hailed for the power of his interpretive method. "He
succeeded in grafting classical philosophy with German depth in a country that lacks a great philosophic tradition," says Jean-Claude Casanova, whose
intellectual mentor, Raymond Aron, sent him to study in the United States.
Aron greatly admired Strauss, whom he met in Berlin before World War II. He
advised several of his students, like Pierre Hassner or, several years later,
Pierre Manent, to take an interest in him. [Translator's note: Raymond Aron
(1905-1983) was one of the France's preeminent intellectuals in the twentieth
century, and was also important in the political realm, where he played a
considerable role as an advisor to French statesmen, including Charles de
Gaulle.]

Leo Strauss was born in Kirchhain, in Hesse, in 1899, and left Germany on the
eve of Hitler's accession to power. After brief stays in Paris and in
England, he arrived in New York, where he taught at the New School of Social
Research before founding the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, which would become the crucible where "Straussians" were formed.

It would be simplistic and reductionist to sum up Leo Strauss's teaching as
the few principles upon which the neoconservatives who surround George W. Bush draw. And neoconservatism has roots in traditions other than the Straussian school. But the reference to Strauss forms a relevant background for the neoconservatism that is presently at work in Washington. It permits one to understand to what extent neoconservatism is not simply a caprice of a few hawks; and also to what extent is relies on theoretic bases, which, while perhaps doubtful, are certainly not mediocre. Neoconservatism situates itself at the junction of two lines of thought in Strauss.

The first is linked to his personal experience. As a young man he lived
through the decrepitude of the Weimar Republic battered by both Communists and Nazis. He concluded that democracy had no chance of prevailing if it remained weak and refused to rise up against tyranny, expansionist by nature, even if this meant resorting to force: "The Weimar Republic was weak. It had only one moment of strength, if not greatness: its violent reaction to the assassination of the Jewish minister of foreign affairs Walther Rathenau in 1922," writes Strauss in a preface to *Spinoza's Critique of Religion*. "On the whole, it presented the spectacle of a justice without strength or of a justice incapable of resorting to force."

The second line of thought is the result of his readings of the ancients. For
us, as for them, the fundamental question is that of the political regime,
which shapes the character of human beings. Why did the 20th century engender two totalitarian regimes that, reverting to Aristotle's term, Strauss prefers to call "tyrannies"? Strauss's answer to this question, which obsesses
contemporary intellectuals, is: because modernity provoked a rejection of the
moral values and the virtue that must be at the base of democracies, and a
rejection of European values, which are "reason" and "civilization."

According to Strauss, this rejection finds its source in the Enlightenment,
which almost necessarily produced historicism and relativism, that is, the
refusal to admit the existence of a higher Good that is reflected in the
concrete, immediate, and contingent goods, but not reducing itself to them, an unattainable Good which must be the standard by which real goods are measured. Translated into the language of political philosophy, relativism's extreme consequence was the theory of the convergence of the United States and the Soviet Union, which was much in vogue in the 1960s and the 1970s. It led in some cases to an acknowledgement of the moral equivalence of American democracy and Soviet communism. Now, for Leo Strauss, there are good and bad regimes; political reflection should not refrain from making judgments of value, and good regimes have the right - and even the duty - to defend themselves against bad regimes. It would be simplistic to effect a direct transposition between this idea and the "axis of Evil" denounced by George W. Bush. But it is clear that it proceeds from the same origin.

This central notion of a regime as the matrix of political philosophy has been
developed by Straussians, who have taken an interest in the Constitutional
history of the United States. Strauss himself - an admirer of the British
Empire and of Winston Churchill as an example of a strong-willed statesman - thought that American democracy was the least bad political system. Nothing better had been found for the flourishing of humanity, even if interests tended to replace virtue as the foundation of the regime.

But it was above all his students, like Walter Berns, Hearvey Mansfield, or
Harry Jaffa, who enriched the American Constitutional school. This school
sees in American institutions the realization of higher principles, even, for
a man like Harry Jaffa, of Biblical teachings, more than it sees in these
institutions the application of the thought of the Founding Fathers. In any
case, religion, perhaps civil religion, must serve as the glue that holds
together institutions and society. This appeal to religion is not foreign to Strauss, but this Jewish atheist "liked to cover his tracks," to use Georges Balandier's expression; he thought that religion was useful to maintain the illusions of the masses, illusions without which order could not be
maintained. On the other hand, the philosopher was to maintain his critical
mind and address the initiated in a coded language, something that needs to be interpreted, but is intelligible to a meritocracy founded on virtue.

Advocating a return to the Ancients as a way of avoiding the pitfalls of
modernity and the illusions of progress, Strauss is nonetheless a defender of
liberal democracy, that child of the Enlightenment - and of American
democracy, which seems to be its quintessence. Is this a contradiction? No
doubt it is, but it is a contradiction that he is willing to live with, like
other liberal thinkers (Montesquieu, Tocqueville). For the critique of
liberalism is indispensable for its survival, since it runs the risk of
getting lost in relativism - if everything can be expressed, the search for
Truth loses its value. For Strauss, the relativism of the Good results in an
inability to react against tyranny.

This active defense of democracy and of liberalism reappears in political
doctrines as one of the favorite themes of the neoconservatives. The nature of political regimes is much more important than all institutions or
international arrangements for keeping peace in the world. The greatest
danger comes from states that do not share the (American) values of democracy. To change those regimes and encourage the spread of democratic values constitutes the best means of strengthening the security (of the United States) and peace.

The importance of the political regime, praise for militant democracy, the
quasi-religious exaltation of American values, a firm opposition to tyranny:
there are quite a few themes that are the mark of the neoconservatives
populating the Bush administration which can be derived from the teaching of
Strauss, sometimes revised and corrected by the "Straussians" of the second
generation. One thing separates them from their putative master: the optimism tinged with messianism that neoconservatives deploy to bring freedoms the world (to the Middle East tomorrow, yesterday to Germany and Japan), as if the belief in political will was capable of changing human nature. This is also an illusion, which it may be good to spread for the sake of the masses, but by which philosophers, for their part, ought not to allow themselves to be deceived.

There remains an enigma: how did "Straussianism," which was first founded upon an oral transmission that was mostly the result of the charisma of the master and was expressed in books of an austere character, texts about texts, establish its influence over a presidential administration? Pierre Manent, who directs the Centre de recherches Raymond-Aron in Paris, proposes the idea that the ostracism to which the students of Leo Strauss were subjected in American university milieux pushed them toward public service, think tanks, and the press. There they are relatively over-represented.

Another, complementary, explanation cites the intellectual vacuum that ensued upon the conclusion of the Cold War, which the "Straussians," and in their wake the neoconservatives, seemed to be the best prepared to fill. The fall of the Berlin Wall proved them right to the extent that Reagan's muscular policy vis-à-vis the USSR led to its downfall. The attacks of September 11, 2001, confirmed their thesis concerning the vulnerability of democracies confronted with different forms of tyranny. From the war on Iraq, they will be tempted to draw the conclusion that the overthrow of "bad" regimes is possible and desirable. As an alternative to this temptation, the appeal to international law can claim a certain moral legitimacy. But until further notice, it lacks the power of conviction and coercion.

--
Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Chair, Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
Webpage: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2978.htm

Serving Two Flags: Neocons, Israel and the Bush Administration

By Stephen Green

Since 9/11, a small group of “neoconservatives” in the administration have effectively gutted—they would say reformed—traditional American foreign and security policy. Features of the new Bush doctrine include the pre-emptive use of unilateral force, and the undermining of the United Nations and the principle instruments and institutions of international law...all in the cause of fighting terrorism and promoting homeland security.

Some skeptics, noting the neo-cons’ past academic and professional associations, writings and public utterances, have suggested that their underlying agenda is the alignment of U.S. foreign and security policies with those of Ariel Sharon and the Israeli right wing. The administration’s new hard line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict certainly suggests that, as perhaps does the destruction, with U.S. soldiers and funds, of the military capacity of Iraq, and the current belligerent neocon campaign against the other two countries which constitute a remaining counterforce to Israeli military hegemony in the region—Iran and Syria.

Have the neoconservatives—many of whom are senior officials in the Department of Defense (DOD), National Security Council (NSC) and Office of the Vice President—had dual agendas, while professing to work for the internal security of the United States against its terrorist enemies?

A review of the internal security backgrounds of some of the best known among them strongly suggests the answer.

Dr. Stephen Bryen and Colleagues

In April of 1979, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert Keuch recommended in writing that Bryen, then a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, undergo a grand jury hearing to establish the basis for a prosecution for espionage. John Davitt, then chief of the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, concurred.

The evidence was strong. Bryen had been overheard, in the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop, offering classified documents to an official of the Israeli Embassy in the presence of the director of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. It was later determined that the embassy official was Zvi Rafiah, the Mossad station chief in Washington. Bryen refused to be polygraphed by the FBI on the purpose and details of the meeting—whereas the person who’d witnessed it agreed to be polygraphed and passed the test.

The Bureau also had testimony from a second person, a staff member of the Foreign Relations Committee, that she had witnessed Bryen in his Senate office with Rafiah, discussing classified documents that were spread out on a table in front of an open safe in which the documents were supposed to be secured. Not long after this second witness came forward, Bryen’s fingerprints were found on classified documents he’d stated in writing to the FBI he’d never had in his possession...the ones he’d allegedly offered to Rafiah.

Nevertheless, following the refusal of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to grant access by Justice Department officials to files which were key to the investigation, Keuch’s recommendation for a grand jury hearing, and ultimately the investigation itself, were shut down. This decision, taken by Philip Heymann, chief of Justice’s Criminal Division, was a bitter disappointment to Davitt and to Joel Lisker, the lead investigator on the case, as expressed to this writer. A complicating factor in the outcome was that Heymann was a former schoolmate and fellow U.S. Supreme Court clerk of Bryen’s attorney, Nathan Lewin.

Bryen was asked to resign from his Foreign Relations Committee post shortly before the investigation was concluded in late 1979. For the following year and a half, he served as executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and provided consulting services to AIPAC.

In April 1981, the FBI received an application by the Defense Department for a Top Secret security clearance for Dr. Bryen. Richard Perle, who had just been nominated as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy (ISP), was proposing Bryen as his deputy assistant secretary! Within six months, with Perle pushing hard, Bryen received both Top Secret-SCI (sensitive compartmented information) and Top Secret-”NATO/COSMIC” clearances.

Loyalty, Patriotism and Character

The Bryen investigation became in fact the most contentious issue in Perle’s own confirmation hearings in July 1981. Under aggressive questioning from Sen. Jeremiah Denton, Perle held his ground: “I consider Dr. Bryen to be an individual of impeccable integrity...I have the highest confidence in [his] loyalty, patriotism and character.”

Several years later, in early 1988, Israel was in the final stages of development of a prototype of its ground-based “Arrow” anti-ballistic missile. One element the program lacked was “klystrons,” small microwave amplifiers which are critical components in the missile’s high-frequency, radar-based target acquisition system which locks on to incoming missiles. In 1988, klystrons were among the most advanced developments in American weapons research, and their export was, of course, strictly proscribed.

The DOD office involved in control of defense technology exports was the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) within Richard Perle’s ISP office. The director (and founder) of DTSA was Perle’s deputy, Dr. Stephen Bryen. In May of 1988, Bryen sent a standard form to Richard Levine, a Navy tech transfer official, informing him of intent to approve a license for Varian Associates, Inc. of Beverly, Massachusetts to export to Israel four klystrons. This was done without the usual consultations with the tech transfer officials of the Army and Air Force, or ISA (International Security Affairs) or DSAA (Defense Security Assistance Agency).

The answer from Levine was “no.” He opposed granting the license, and asked for a meeting on the matter of the appropriate (above listed) offices. At the meeting, all of the officials present opposed the license. Bryen responded by suggesting that he go back to the Israelis to ask why these particular items were needed for their defense. Later, after the Israeli government came back with what one DOD staffer described as “a little bullshit answer,” Bryen simply notified the meeting attendees that an acceptable answer had been received, the license granted, and the klystrons released.

By now, however, the dogs were awake. Then Assistant Secretary of Defense for ISA (and now Deputy Secretary of State) Richard Armitage sent Dr. Bryen a letter stating that the State Department (which issues the export licenses) should be informed of DOD’s “uniformly negative” reaction to the export of klystrons to Israel. Bryen did as instructed, and the license was withdrawn.

In July, Varian Associates became the first U.S. corporation formally precluded from contracting with the Defense Department. Two senior DOD colleagues who wish to remain anonymous have confirmed that this attempt by Bryen to obtain klystrons for his friends was not unusual, and was in fact “standard operating procedure” for him, recalling numerous instances when U.S. companies were denied licenses to export sensitive technology, only to learn later that Israeli companies subsequently exported similar (U.S.-derived) weapons and technology to the intended customers/governments.

In late 1988, Bryen resigned from his DOD post, and for a period worked in the private sector with a variety of defense technology consulting firms.

Bryen and the China Commission

In its May 27, 1997 issue, Defense Week reported that, “…the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence reaffirmed that U.S.- derived technology from the cancelled [Israeli] Lavi fighter project is being used on China’s new F-10 fighter.” The following year, the Nov. 1, 1998 Jane’s Intelligence Review reported the transfer by Israel to China of the Phalcon airborne early warning and control system, the Python air-combat missile, and the F-10 fighter aircraft, containing “state-of-the-art U.S. electronics.”

Concern about the continuing transfer of advanced U.S. arms technology to the burgeoning Chinese military program led, in the last months of the Clinton administration, to the creation of a congressional consultative body called the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The charter for the “The China Commission,” as it is commonly known, states that its purpose is to “…monitor, investigate, and report to the Congress on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the Peoples Republic of China.” The charter also reflects an awareness of the problem of “back door” technology leaks: “The Commission shall also take into account patterns of trade and transfers through third countries to the extent practicable.”

It was almost predictable that, in the new Bush administration, Dr. Stephen Bryen would find his way to the China Commission. In April 2001, with the support of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), Bryen was appointed a member of the commission by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Last August, his appointment was extended through December of 2005.

Informed that Bryen had been appointed to the Commission, the reaction of one former senior FBI counter-intelligence official was: “My God, that must mean he has a ‘Q‘ clearance!” (A “Q” clearance, which must be approved by the Department of Energy, is the designation for a Top Secret codeword clearance to access nuclear technology.)

Michael Ledeen, Consultant on Chaos

If Stephen Bryen is the military technology guru in the neocon pantheon, Michael Ledeen is currently its leading theorist, historian, scholar and writer. According to the Web site of his consulting firm, Benador Associates, he is “…one of the world’s leading authorities on intelligence, contemporary history and international affairs” and that “...As Ted Koppel puts it, ‘Michael Ledeen is a Renaissance man...in the tradition of Machiavelli.’” Perhaps the following will add some color and texture to this description.

In 1983, on the recommendation of Richard Perle, Ledeen was hired at the Department of Defense as a consultant on terrorism. His immediate supervisor was Principle Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs Noel Koch. Early in their work together, Koch noticed with concern Ledeen’s habit of stopping by in his (Koch’s) outer office to read classified materials. When the two of them took a trip to Italy, Koch learned from the CIA station there that when Ledeen had lived in Rome previously, as correspondent for The New Republic, he’d been carried in agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel.

Some time after their return from Italy, Ledeen approached his boss with a request for his assistance in obtaining two highly classified CIA reports which he said were held by the FBI. He’d hand-written on a piece of paper the identifying “alpha numeric designators.” These identifiers were as highly classified as the reports themselves—which raised in Koch’s mind the question of who had provided them to Ledeen, if he hadn’t the clearances to obtain them himself. Koch immediately told his executive assistant that Ledeen was to have no further access to classified materials in the office, and Ledeen just ceased coming to “work.”

In early 1986, however, Koch learned that Ledeen had joined NSC as a consultant, and, sufficiently concerned about the internal security implications of the behavior of his former aide, arranged to be interviewed by two FBI agents on the matter. After a two-hour debriefing, Koch was told that it was only Soviet military intelligence penetration that interested the Bureau. The follow-on interviews that were promised by the agents never occurred.

Koch thought this strange, coming as it did just months after the arrest of Naval intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard on charges of espionage for Israel. Frustrated, Koch wrote up in detail the entire saga of Ledeen’s DOD consultancy, and sent it to the Office of Sen. Charles Grassley, then a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which had oversight responsibility for, inter alia, the FBI.

A former senior FBI counter-intelligence official was surprised and somewhat skeptical, when told of Koch’s unsuccessful attempts to interest the Bureau in an investigation of Ledeen, noting that, in early 1986, the Justice Department was in fact already engaged in several ongoing, concurrent investigations of Israeli espionage and theft of American military technology.

Machiavelli in Tel Aviv
In any event, Koch’s belated attempts to draw official attention to his former assistant were too late, for within a very few weeks of leaving his DOD consultancy in late 1984, Ledeen had found his gainful (classified) employment at the NSC. In fact, according to a now declassified chronology prepared for the Senate/House Iran-Contra investigation, within calendar 1984 Ledeen was already suggesting to Oliver North, his new boss at NSC, “that Israeli contacts might be useful in obtaining release of the U.S. hostages in Lebanon.” Perhaps significantly, that is the first entry in the “Chronology of Events: U.S.-Iran Dialogue,” dated Nov. 18, 1986, prepared for the Joint House-Senate Hearings in the Iran-Contra Investigations.

What is so striking about the Ledeen-related documents, which are part of the National Security Archive’s Iran-Contra Collection, is how thoroughly the judgments of Ledeen’s colleagues at NSC mirrored, and validated, Noel Koch’s internal security concerns about his consultant.

On April 9, 1985, NSC Middle East analyst Donald Fortier wrote to National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane that NSC staffers were agreed that Ledeen’s role in the scheme should be limited to carrying messages to Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres regarding plans to cooperate with Israel on the crisis within Iran, and specifically that he should not be entrusted to ask Peres for detailed operational information;


On June 6, 1985, Secretary of State George Shultz wrote to McFarlane that “Israel’s record of dealings with Iran since the fall of the Shah and during the hostage crisis [show] that Israel’s agenda is not the same as ours. Consequently doubt whether an intelligence relationship such as what Ledeen has in mind would be one which we could fully rely upon and it could seriously skew our own perception and analysis of the Iranian scene.”


On Aug. 20, 1985, the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense informed Ledeen by memorandum that his security clearance had been downgraded from Top Secret-SCI to Secret.


On Jan. 16, 1986, Oliver North recommended to John Poindexter “for [the] security of the Iran initiative” that Ledeen be asked to take periodic polygraph examinations.


Later in January, on the 24th, North wrote to Poindexter of his suspicion that Ledeen, along with Adolph Schwimmer and Manucher Ghorbanifar, might be making money personally on the sale of arms to Iran, through Israel.
During the June 23-25, 1987 joint hearings of the House and Senate select committees’ investigation of Iran-Contra, Noel Koch testified that he became suspicious when he learned that the price which Ledeen had negotiated for the sale to the Israeli government of basic TOW missiles was $2,500 each.

Upon inquiring of his DOD colleagues, he learned the lowest price the U.S. had ever received for the sale of TOWs to a foreign government had been a previous sale to Israel for $6,800 per copy. Koch, professing in his testimony that he and his colleagues at DOD were not in favor of the sale to begin with, determined that he—Koch—should renegotiate the $2,500 price so that it could be defended by the “defense management system.” In a clandestine meeting on a Sunday in the first-class lounge of the TWA section of National Airport, Koch met over a cup of coffee with an official from the Israeli purchasing mission in New York, and agreed on a price of $4,500 per missile—nearly twice what Ledeen had “negotiated” in Israel.

There are two possibilities here—one would be a kickback, as suspected by his NSC colleagues, and the other would be that Michael Ledeen was effectively negotiating for Israel, not the U.S.

Like his friend Stephen Bryen (the two have long served together on the JINSA board of advisors) Ledeen had been out of government service since the late 1980s…until the present Bush administration. He, like Bryen, is presently a serving member on the China Commission and, with the support of DOD Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, has been employed since 2001 as a consultant for the Office of Special Plans (OSP). Both positions involve the handling of classified materials and require high-level security clearances.

The Principals: Perle, Wolfowitz and Feith
One might wonder how, with security histories like these, Messrs. Bryen and Ledeen have managed to get second and third chances to return to government in highly classified positions.

The explanation is that they, along with other like-minded neoconservatives, have in the current Bush administration friends in very high places. In particular, Bryen and Ledeen have repeatedly been boosted into defense/security posts by former Defense Policy Council member and chairman Richard Perle (who recently quietly resigned his position), Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

As previously mentioned, in 1981 Perle, as DOD assistant secretary for international security policy (ISP), hired Bryen as his deputy. That same year, Wolfowitz, then head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, hired Ledeen as a special adviser. In 2001 Douglas Feith, as DOD Under Secretary for Policy, hired or approved the hiring of Ledeen as a consultant for the Office of Special Plans.

The principals also have assisted each other—frequently—over the years. In 1973 Richard Perle used his (and Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s) influence as a senior staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to help Wolfowitz obtain a job with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In 1982, Perle hired Feith in ISP as his special counsel, then as deputy assistant secretary for negotiations policy. In 2001, DOD Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz helped Feith obtain his appointment as undersecretary for policy. Feith then pushed Perle for chairman of the Defense Policy Board. In some cases, this mutual assistance carries risks—as, for instance, when Perle’s hiring of Bryen as his deputy in ISP became an extremely contentious issue in Perle’s own Senate appointment hearings as assistant secretary of defense.

Every appointment/hiring listed above involved classified work for which high-level security clearances and associated background checks by the FBI were required. When the level of the clearance is not above generic Top Secret, however, the results of that background check are seen only by the hiring authority. And in the event, if the appointee were Bryen or Ledeen and the hiring authority were Perle, Wolfowitz or Feith, the appointee(s) need not have worried about the findings of the background check. In the case of Perle hiring Bryen as his deputy in 1981, for instance, documents released in 1983 under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that DOD provided extraordinarily high clearances for Bryen without having reviewed more than a small portion of his 1978-79 FBI investigation file.

Richard Perle: A Habit of Leaking

Perle came to Washington for the first time in early 1969, at the age of 28, to work for a neocon think tank called the “Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy.” Within months, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA) offered Perle a position on his staff, working with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

And within months after that—less than a year—Perle was embroiled in his first security inquiry. An FBI wiretap authorized for the Israeli Embassy in Washington picked up Perle discussing with an embassy official classified information which he said had been supplied by a staff member of the National Security Council. An NSC/FBI investigation to identify the staff member quickly focused upon Helmut Sonnenfeldt. The latter previously had been investigated in 1967, while he was a staff member of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, for suspected disclosure to an Israeli government official of a classified document concerning the commencement of the 1967 war in the Middle East.

Perle’s second brush with the law occurred in 1978, when he was the recipient of a classified CIA report on alleged past Soviet treaty violations. The leaker (and author) of the report was CIA analyst David Sullivan. CIA Director Stansfield Turner was incensed at the unauthorized disclosure, but before he could fire Sullivan, the latter quit. Turner urged Senator Jackson to fire his aide, but Perle was let off with a reprimand. Jackson then added insult to injury by immediately hiring Sullivan to his staff. Sullivan and Perle became close friends and co-conspirators, and together established an informal right-wing network which they called “the Madison Group,” after their usual meeting place in—you might have guessed—the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop.

In 1981, shortly before being appointed assistant secretary of defense for international security policy—with responsibility, inter alia, for monitoring of U.S. defense technology exports—Richard Perle was paid a substantial consulting fee by Israeli arms manufacturer Tamares, Ltd. Shortly after assuming the ISP post, Perle wrote a letter to the secretary of the army urging evaluation and purchase of 155 mm. shells manufactured by Soltam, Ltd. After leaving DOD in 1987, Perle worked for Soltam.

Paul Wolfowitz: A Well-Placed Friend
In 1973, in the dying days of the Nixon administration, Wolfowitz was recruited to work for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). There was a certain irony in the appointment, for in the late 1960s, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Wolfowitz had been a student and protégé of Albert Wohlstetter, an influential, vehement opponent of any form of arms control or disarmament, vis-à-vis the Soviets. Wolfowitz also brought to ACDA a strong attachment to Israel’s security, and a certain confusion about his obligation to U.S. national security.

In 1978, he was investigated for providing to an Israeli government official, through an AIPAC intermediary, a classified document on the proposed sale of U.S. weapons to an Arab government. An inquiry was launched and dropped, however, and Wolfowitz continued to work at ACDA until 1980.

In 1990, after a decade of work with the State Department in Washington and abroad, Wolfowitz was brought into DOD as undersecretary for policy by then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney. Two years later, in 1992, the first Bush administration launched a broad inter-departmental investigation into the export of classified technology to China. Of particular concern at the time was the transfer to China by Israel of U.S. Patriot missiles and/or technology. During that investigation, in a situation very reminiscent of the Bryen/Varian Associates/klystrons affair two years earlier, the Pentagon discovered that Wolfowitz’s office was promoting the export to Israel of advanced AIM-9M air-to-air missiles.

In this instance, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, aware that Israel already had been caught selling the earlier AIM 9-L version of the missile to China in violation of a written agreement with the U.S. on arms re-sales, intervened to cancel the proposed AIM 9-M deal. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time was Gen. Colin Powell, currently secretary of state.

Wolfowitz continued to serve as DOD undersecretary for policy until 1993—well into the Clinton administration. After that, however, like most of the other prominent neo-conservatives, he was relegated to trying to assist Israel from the sidelines for the remainder of Clinton’s two terms. In 1998, Wolfowitz was a co-signer of a public letter to the president organized by the “Project for the New American Century.” The letter, citing Saddam Hussain’s continued possession of “weapons of mass destruction,” argued for military action to achieve regime change and demilitarization of Iraq. Clinton wasn’t impressed, but a more gullible fellow would soon come along.

And indeed, when George W. Bush assumed the presidency in January 2001, Wolfowitz got his opportunity. Picked as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy secretary at DOD, he prevailed upon his boss to appoint Douglas Feith as undersecretary for policy. On Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz raised the possibility of an immediate attack on Iraq during an emergency NSC meeting. The following day, Wolfowitz conducted the Pentagon press briefing, and interpreted the president’s statement on “ending states who sponsor terrorism” as a call for regime change in Iraq. Israel wasn’t mentioned.

Douglas Feith: Hard-liner Security Risk

Bush’s appointment of Douglas Feith as DOD undersecretary for policy in early 2001 must have come as a surprise, and a harbinger, even to conservative veterans of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Like Michael Ledeen, Feith is a prolific writer and well-known radical conservative. Moreover, he was not being hired as a DOD consultant, like Ledeen, but as the third most senior United States Defense Department official. Feith was certainly the first, and probably the last, high Pentagon official to have publicly opposed the Biological Weapons Convention (in 1986), the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (in 1988), the Chemical Weapons Convention (in 1997), the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (in 2000), and all of the various Middle East Peace agreements, including Oslo (in 2000).

Even more revealing, perhaps—had the transition team known of it—was Feith’s view of “technology cooperation,” as expressed in a 1992 Commentary article: “It is in the interest of U.S. and Israel to remove needless impediments to technological cooperation between them. Technologies in the hands of responsible, friendly countries facing military threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance regional stability and promote peace thereby.”

What Douglas Feith had neglected to say, in this last article, was that he thought that individuals could decide on their own whether the sharing of classified information was “technical cooperation,” an unauthorized disclosure, or a violation of U.S. Code 794c, the “Espionage Act.”

Ten years prior to writing the Commentary piece, Feith had made such a decision on his own. At the time—March of 1982—Feith was a Middle East analyst in the Near East and South Asian Affairs section of the National Security Council. Two months before, in January, Judge William Clark had replaced Richard Allen as national security adviser, with the intention to clean house. A total of nine NSC staff members were fired, including Feith, who’d only been with the NSC for a year. But Feith was fired because he’d been the object of an inquiry into whether he’d provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. The FBI had opened the inquiry. And Clark, who had served in U.S. Army counterintelligence in the 1950s, took such matters very seriously…more seriously, apparently, than had Richard Allen.

Feith did not remain unemployed for long, however. As mentioned previously, in 1982 Richard Perle was serving in the Pentagon as assistant secretary for international security policy, and hired Feith on the spot as his “special counsel,” then as his deputy. Feith worked at ISP until 1986, when he left government service to form a small but influential law firm, then based in Israel.

In 2001, Douglas Feith, having returned to DOD as Donald Rumsfeld’s undersecretary for policy, created in his office the “OSP,” or Office of Special Plans. It was OSP that originated—some say from whole cloth—much of the intelligence that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld have used to justify the attack on Iraq, to mis-plan the post-war reconstruction there, and then to point an accusing finger at Iran and Syria…all to the absolute delight of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Reason for Concern

Many individuals with strong attachments to foreign countries have served the U.S. government with honor and distinction, and will certainly do so in the future. The highest officials in our executive and legislative branches should, however, take great care when appointments are made to posts involving sensitive national security matters. Appointees should be rejected who have demonstrated, in their previous government service, a willingness to sacrifice U.S. national security interests for those of another country, or an inability to distinguish one from the other.

Stephen Green is a Vermon-based free-lance journalist. This article first appeared in CounterPunch, Feb. 28-29, 2004.

http://www.wrmea.com/archives/May_2004/0405020.html

Turning the Tables on the Israel-Firsters

Now that the dust has settled in the spat between journalist Joe Klein and the ideologues at Commentary, it is time to regret the ink spilled over the non-issue of "dual loyalties." The idea that there are U.S. citizens who have equal loyalties to the United States and Israel is passé. American Israel-firsters have long since dropped any pretense of loyalty to the United States and its genuine national interests. They have moved brazenly into the Israel first, last, and always camp. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Norman Podhoretz, Victor Davis Hanson, the Rev. Franklin Graham, Alan Dershowitz, Rudy Giuliani, Douglas Feith, the Rev. Rod Parsley, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Bill Kristol, the Rev. John Hagee, and the thousands of wealthy supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) appear to care about the United States only so far as Washington is willing to provide immense, unending funding and the lives of young U.S. service personnel to protect Israel. These individuals and their all-for-Israel journals – Commentary, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal – amount to nothing less than a fifth column intent on involving 300 million Americans in other peoples' religious wars, making them pay and bleed to protect a nation in which the United States has no genuine national security interest at stake.

The Israel-firsters' success is, of course, the stuff of which legends are made. Most recently, for example, we heard President Bush echo Sen. Lieberman's insane and subversive contention that the United States has a "duty" to ensure the fulfilling of God's millennia-old promise to Abraham regarding the creation and survival of Israel. Bush told the Knesset all Americans are ready to endlessly bleed and pay to ensure Israel's security. And where does the president derive authority to make such a commitment in the name of his countrymen? From the Constitution? On the basis of America's dominant religion? From – heaven forbid – a thoughtful, hardheaded analysis of U.S. interests?

No, Bush's pledge was based on none of these. Bush's decision to more deeply involve America in the eternal Arab-Israeli war was based on nothing less than the corruption wrought on the American political system by the Israel-firsters, AIPAC's enormous treasury, and the lamentable but growing influence of America's leading evangelical Protestant preachers.

The Israel-firsters started the Iraq war and now have the United States locked into an occupation of that country that may not end in any of our lifetimes. Unless Americans ignore the likes of Hanson, Podhoretz, Lieberman, Woolsey, and Wolfowitz, the cost in blood and treasure will ultimately bankrupt America.

AIPAC is a perfectly legal organization, and the wealth of its members is channeled into reliable campaign contributions for any candidate from either party who will put Israel's interests above America's. From McCain to Obama, from Pelosi to Giuliani, from Hillary Clinton to Vice President Cheney, AIPAC pumps money to any and every American politician who is willing to adopt an Israel-first policy.

Leading American Protestant evangelical preachers – men like Hagee, Parsley, and Graham – are the newest and perhaps most anti-American members of this fifth column. They serve two purposes: (1) to reinforce in the minds of their flocks the Bush-Lieberman absurdity that the United States has a "duty" to ensure Israel's survival; and (2) to use religious rhetoric to steadily convince the Muslim world that U.S. leaders are interested only in taming – and if need be, destroying – Islam.

The reality and power of this anti-American, pro-Israel triangle – Israel-first politicians, civil servants, and pundits; AIPAC's corrupting influence; and the warmongering of major evangelical Protestant preachers – is so obvious and palpable that the only way its members can blur reality is to deny the triangle's existence and identify their critics as anti-Semites. Well, the time has come to simply ignore these folks' knee-jerk hurling of that epithet. Indeed, the slur ought to understood for what it is: a sure sign that the Israel-firsters know that their fifth column would be destroyed in a minute if their fellow Americans come to recognize that their sons and daughters are dying in Iraq and soon elsewhere to protect an Israeli state whose existence is just as important to U.S. interests as the creation of a Palestinian state – that is, of no importance whatsoever.

American voters must start using the democratic process to begin removing themselves from the religious war known as the Arab-Israeli conflict. Disengagement will take time, hard work, and a steadfast commitment to the rule of law. Three actions are well within the voters' capability, and their use would bring pressure on federal officials to stop killing America's children in wars between Arabs and Israelis.

Voters should press federal representatives to end taxpayer funding for the National Endowment for Democracy and other such organizations. These organizations' main function is to promote the fallacy that U.S. interests are served by making sure that Israel – "the embattled island of democracy in the Middle East" – is protected, and that the lives of American children should be joyfully spent to bring democracy to foreigners in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Voters should not vote for any candidate for federal office who accepts contributions from AIPAC or any other Israel-first organization. This decision would be an important step in beginning to sweep clean the Augean stable that is American politics.
Voters of all faiths must press their religious leaders to regularly, publicly, and specifically denounce the evangelical Protestant preachers whose fire-and-brimstone support for Israel involves Americans in religious wars in which U.S. interests are not threatened.
Neutralizing the Israel-first fifth column must be done, but it must be accomplished using legitimate democratic tools: voting, lobbying, free speech, and support for candidates pledged to keep America out of other peoples' religious wars. The invocation of the anti-Semite epithet by the Israel-firsters should be ignored. To be silenced by the slurs of the Israel-firsters is to ignominiously invite the end of American independence by subordinating U.S. interests to those of a foreign nation, as well as to forget the warning of the greatest American. "If men are precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind," George Washington said in March 1783, "reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent, we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter." As long as the Israel-firsters can define the limits of acceptable public discourse, Americans are on their way to the slaughter.

http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=13139

Americans are on their way to the slaughter.
http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=13139


Thanks for the Read.

The Neo-cons are within Slashing Range.
http://vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=71852

The Fraud of Neoconservative "Anti-Communism"

by Max Shpak

Neoconservatives and their apologists would have the public believe that the neocons were former Leftists who saw the light and came to reject liberal or Marxist ideology as a matter of conviction and principle. Regrettably, this official line has come to be conventional wisdom, no doubt reflecting neocon efforts to hide the fact that their transformation was neither sincerely motivated nor sincerely enacted. To understand the real agenda that drove and continues to drive much of neoconservatism, one needs to look back to the origins of the movement and the cultural backgrounds of those who lead it.

It is a well-established fact that many of the early luminaries of neoconservatism (most famously Irving Kristol in the 1940's, a more recent famous example being David Horowitz) came from Marxist backgrounds, and that neoconservatism (like Marxism itself) began and continues to be a largely a phenomenon of Jewish intellectualism. In the early part of the 20th century, Marxism attracted a disproportionate pool of Jewish recruits for a number of obvious reasons. There are a number of complex psychological and social reasons for the attraction, all of which largely stem from the fact that Marxist internationalism is an ideology which by its very nature finds disciples among a rootless, anti-religious urban intelligentsia.

More important for the purposes of this analysis, however, are the practical reasons for Jewish sympathy with Bolshevism. European and American Jews alike carried deep-seated hatreds for the traditional regimes and religions of the European continent, particularly Czarist Russia and various Eastern European nations due to (real and imagined) "persecution" and "pogroms" that occurred there. Thus, when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar, destroyed the hated Orthodox Church, rendered powerless the landed religious peasantry, and replaced traditional Russian authority with a largely Jewish Commissariate, world Jewry (including alleged "capitalists" like the Schiffs and Rothschilds) embraced the Revolution and Marxist ideology alike.

With Russia becoming an effective Jewish colony where "anti-Semitism" was an offense punishable by death and the native gentile culture was effectively stamped out (thanks to a leadership consisting mainly of Jews such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Severdlov, held together under the stewardship of the obsequious philosemite Lenin), Jews throughout the world put their hopes in the possibility of similar revolutions elsewhere. Indeed, their comrades in arms were hard at work affecting similar changes in Hungary (Kuhn), Austria (Adler) and Germany (Eisner). The rise of Fascist and Nazi movements only served to further polarize Jewish support in favor of international communism.

This near unanimity would change as a result of two developments: a shift in the character of Soviet Communism on the one hand and the foundation of the State of Israel on the other. Stalin's purges of many of his former Bolshevik colleagues (including Trotsky, who was assassinated while in exile), his 1939 pact with Hitler, and rumors of Stalin's own anti-Jewish prejudices gave many would-be supporters pause. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, it became clear the Russian masses would not fight for the sake of Bolshevism, an ideology that brought them so much misery, but rather for the sake of Russian blood and soil. From then on, the Soviet leadership had to court the very Russian nationalist elements that the early Bolsheviks had worked so hard to stamp out. This lead to an increasing tolerance towards the Russian Orthodox Church and a decreased Jewish presence in the Soviet politburo and KGB. Thus, the USSR was "betraying" the very elements that made it attractive to the Jewish establishment to begin with.

Perhaps even more significant a factor in the origins of neoconservatism was the emergence of an independent Israeli state. While many Jewish Marxists eagerly supported the Zionist state, the more intellectually consistent Left opposed Zionism on the grounds that all nationalisms, including Jewish ones, are enemies of global proletarian revolution. Thus, Jewish leftists who once advocated internationalism for gentile nations were forced to come to terms with the implications of this ideology for their own nationalist sentiments. Thus, they needed an ideology which would let them have their cake (opposing gentile nationalism) and eat it too (by supporting Israel), and they found just such a worldview with neoconservatism.

At the same time, although the Soviet Union initially courted Israel during the 1948 wars of independence, it became clear to the Israeli government that in world polarized between the United States and the Soviet Union the former would be wealthier and more pliant cash cow to milk. By the 1950's and the coming of the Suez Wars, regardless of residual Jewish loyalties to Communism, the battle lines were already drawn, with Israel in the US/Western camp and the Arab nations forced to make alliances of convenience with the Soviet Union.

It is hardly a coincidence that the changing character of Soviet Communism and the status of Israel as a US ally came at the same time that neoconservatism was becoming an influential political movement. For all of their talk about "capitalism," "democracy," "freedom," and "free markets," the fact that so many Jewish leftists turned on a dime to back the US in the Cold War because America could serve as a life support system for Israel and a bulwark against resurgent Russian "anti-Semitism" makes their real agenda entirely transparent. One can witness an identical phenomenon taking place today, as many Jewish liberal Democrats switch party ranks and join the GOP because of the latter's stronger support for Israel and harder line with the Arab nations. All of the window dressing about their newfound "patriotism" and "Americanism" is a sham designed to mask the fact that the question for the neocons has always been and will always be "is it good for the Jews?"

The different agendas driving neocon Cold Warriors as opposed to their erstwhile Old Right allies could be seen on any number of fronts. The most obvious one has been the different reactions in the two camps to Russia after the end of the Cold War. While paleoconservative leaning Cold Warriors such as Pat Buchanan have pushed for normalized relations with Russia, the neocons continue to fight on the Cold War, enthusiastically supporting Chechen separatists as "freedom fighters" and advocating NATO expansion. The reasons for this difference are entirely obvious: the Old Right's enemy was Communist ideology, while neoconservative Jews nurtured a hatred for Russian nationalism. Thus post-Communist Russia is still very much a threat to the latter, particularly with resurgent Russian "ultra-nationalism" and "anti-Semitism," while in the absence of Communist rule the above are of little concern to the Old Right.

For all their talk about "anti-Communism," the real engine driving neocon Cold Warrior instincts was punishing the hated Russian goyim for the sin of "anti-Semitism," not any opposition to residual or latent Marxism. As further evidence that this is the case, one need only consider the fact that while the Old Right championed Christian dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn, to the neocons the only legimate "dissidents" were Zionists like Natan Sharansky, just as the only "refugees" championed by the neos were invariably Jewish (including today's shady Odessa Mafiosi). Solzhenitsyn represented the Russian nationalism and Orthodox Church that made so many of the neocons' predecessors embrace Bolshevism, thus Solzhenitsyn and the plight of Christian dissidents were relegated to obscurity in neocon publications, while Zionist noise-makers in the USSR were given a hero's welcome.

In this regard, the neocons are the true heirs to Leon Trotsky, who condemned Stalin and his followers not so much for their brutality (as commander of the Red Army and overseer of Lenin's terrorist CHEKA, Trotsky was no stranger to brutality and sadism) but for their "anti-Semitism" and "betrayal of the Revolution." Trotsky's main critique of Stalinism seemed to be that Stalin was moving Russia in a nationalist direction rather than working towards the establishment of an international "proletarian" vanguard. The fact that the intellectual ancestors of neoconservatism had not an unkind word to say about Bolshevism while Leninist-Trotskyite goals were being fulfilled suggests that it was not so much ideological reconsideration as tribal self-interest that drove these most unlikely conversos.

Because their move from the Left to a pseudo-right was insincere, one would expect to find a whole range of issues where the neocons retain leftist instincts and remain true to their Trotskyite heritage. Indeed this is the case. In their portrayal of the Cold War as a struggle between "capitalism" on the one hand and "socialism" on the other, the neocons try to minimize the fact that in many ways the conflict between the Bolsheviks and the West was over much more than economic systems. To most on the Old Right, the economic issues were at best peripheral: Marxism was opposed because it was materialistic, atheistic, and because it rejected nationalism and patriotism in the name of global revolution.

Most neocons came from a culture that was every bit as materialistic and cosmopolitan as the early Bolshevik leaders, so it is rather unlikely that they would have any quarrel with these aspects of Communist doctrine. The fact that neoconservatism is an ideology which is materialistic in nature and internationalist in focus (with its talk of "global democracy" and "global markets") makes it obvious that the fundamental underpinnings of the Marxist Left are alive and well among the scribblers of Commentary and The Weekly Standard. Their "conservative" pretenses seem limited to the fact that they oppose "socialism" (of the nationalist variety) in the name of "capitalism" (of the internationalist variety), and for all too many naïve people that seems to be sufficient and believable.

Understanding the true nature of the neoconservatives illuminates the essence of the struggle between the Right and the Left. It was never a struggle between "capitalism" and "socialism" as neoconservative or Communist progaganda would have one believe. Rather, it was always a conflict between spiritualism and materialism, between nationalism and globalism, between tradition and subversion, between the defenders of Western Civilization and its enemies. With the battle lines drawn as such, it is abundantly clear where the neocons stand. Many "capitalists" understood that economic means are not significant, only the desired end. Jacob Schiff understood it when he financed the Bolsheviks, just as Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Marc Rich, Boris Berezovsky, and George Soros understand that their form of "capitalism" is fully compatible with the essence of the Left, and that they can find friends and allies among the ostensibly conservative neocons.

Unfortunately, many Rightists are not nearly as perceptive in their choice of allies.

May 15, 2002

http://www.originaldissent.com/shpak051502.html

Good article.

Kikes are kikes.

For all their talk about "anti-Communism," the real engine driving neocon Cold Warrior instincts was punishing the hated Russian goyim for the sin of "anti-Semitism," not any opposition to residual or latent Marxism.

Which is why during the 80s jewish movie producers kept pumping out movies like Rambo 2 and 3 and Red Scorpion which portrayed the Russians in exactly the same way Hollywood likes to portray the Nazis: as blond, cold-hearted, often sadistic, authoritarian robots.

Rambo 2, 3, and 4 sucked anyways.

Rambo 2, 3, and 4 sucked anyways.

2 and 3 sucked. I didn't mind the last one.

2 and 3 sucked. I didn't mind the last one.

AMC has been playing the first one lately. I used to love that movie. Now, SUPER JEW DESTROYS SMALL TOWN AND SHERIFF. Another Fuck You Whitey!

Do you agree?

Danielle Pletka

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/images/irc/33/452.jpg

American Enterprise Institute: Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
Committee on the Present Danger: Member


Danielle Pletka established herself as a foreign policy hawk while working as a reporter for Insight Magazine during the George H.W. Bush administration, and later as a member of the professional staff for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Clinton administration, serving as the committee's Middle East specialist. In 2002, when some 20 associates of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) joined the George W. Bush administration, Pletka moved from her government position to AEI, where she is vice president for foreign and defense policy studies.

Most recently, in late 2006 Pletka was involved with the creation of AEI's "Iraq Planning Group," a panel led by AEI scholar Frederick Kagan and Gen. Jack Keane. On January 5, 2007, the group released a report that recommended, among other suggestions, that at least 50,000 more U.S. troops be sent to Iraq.

Introducing Kagan at an AEI event marking the publication of the planning group's first report, Pletka repeated the new mantra of the hardline right-wing, that the United States must stay in Iraq until "victory" is achieved: "Like the war, hate the war, believe in it or not, America is now in Iraq, and we must win. It is as simple as that, because the price of failure is not ignominy for George W. Bush or egg on the face of Dick Cheney, it is the victory of terrorists and their sponsors and the creation of a national homeland for extremists bent on killing Americans" (AEI, January 5, 2007).

The goal of the AEI planning group was to determine how Washington might emerge from Iraq with a win: "The suggestion that victory was unachievable was dismissed from the outset. The idea that the world's greatest economic, political, and military force with more than a million men and women under arms can be trounced by the likes of al-Qaida in Iraq and Iranian-sponsored Shiite fire breathers is ridiculous. We can lose only if we choose to do so," Pletka said.

Kagan, who penned the AEI planning group's report, "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq," began his speech at the event by highlighting Pletka's role. "It was very fortunate for me to be at an organization where, when this idea [for the planning group] was developed-and it was actually Dani's idea, she does not take public credit for it, but she should-when an idea like this came up we could react rapidly, pull this group together and make this happen," Kagan said. He then elaborated on the AEI proposal to send tens of thousands more U.S. troops to Iraq. Later at the same event, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) also spoke in favor of staying in Iraq.

Pletka gained a reputation as an influential player in shaping U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East while working with Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) and the Senate Intelligence Committee. At AEI, Pletka has chaired numerous conferences on "rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq" and democratization in the Arab world.

One of the most prominent AEI voices on foreign policy, Pletka has associated herself with the neoconservative camp. (In May 2004, she told a Washington Post reporter: "I think the phrase 'neocon' is much more popular among people who think it shields their anti-Semitism. But it doesn't.") In 2002 and 2003 Pletka signed two letters to President George W. Bush (on Hong Kong and military budget) and two statements (on post-war Iraq) produced by the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC). She was one of a small group of prominent supporters of the now-defunct Coalition for Democracy in Iran, a group that operated out of the office of Morris Amitay. Pletka is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, which in its latest reincarnation commits itself on the side of the "free world" in a world war against Islamic terrorism.

Pletka also lists NGO Watch as one of her AEI research projects. A joint AEI-Federalist Society venture, NGO Watch claims to be a watchdog "highlighting issues of transparency and accountability in the operations of nongovernmental organizations and international organizations." Yet according to Public Eye, the magazine of the progressive think tank Public Research Associates: "NGO Watch is a clear example of a right-wing campaign designed to monitor and critique 'liberal' UN-designated NGOs . NGO Watch attacks those NGOs that organize and mobilize public opinion and advocate for 'liberal' causes" (Public Eye, Spring 2004).

Pletka's colleagues at AEI include some of the country's most prominent neoconservatives: Thomas Donnelly, David Frum, Reuel Gerecht, Irving Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, Michael Rubin, Gary Schmitt, and Ben Wattenberg. Also among AEI's ranks are Vice President Dick Cheney's wife Lynne Cheney, Newt Gingrich, and Roger Noriega.

While supportive of the Bush administration's war on terrorism rhetoric, Pletka believes that the U.S. government has not done all that it could to fight the "present danger." According to Pletka, "[T]he commitment of the enemy is hardly matched by the commitment of the United States to counter him. True, the United States is engaged in Iraq. Yes, an unprecedented effort has gone into public diplomacy. But how does the West combat Islamic extremism? U.S. officials confronted with the question hem and haw uncomfortably. They mention the 'freedom agenda' and the spread of democracy; and while democracy is indeed the long-term solution to the problem of radical Islam and the appeal of Islamic extremist groups, the problem faces us now. A short-term solution is needed to partner with the long term one" (AEI, December 22, 2005).

In October 2005, Pletka wrote that the Bush administration was not fully committing itself to the war on terrorism and the promotion of democracy in the Middle East. "The Bush revolution has indeed lost its energy," she wrote. "The evidence is widespread and disturbing. Whether on the question of Iranian nuclear proliferation, Iraqi constitution-building, or Libyan dictatorship, the rhetoric retains its ring, but it does not resonate through the Department of State, let alone through the region" (AEI, October 7, 2005).

The CIA, along with the State Department, has come under repeated attack by Pletka. "There are challenges ahead in Iran, North Korea, China, and in the war on terror," warned Pletka in February 2006. "No matter how those issues play out, the American people should be certain that their democratically elected leaders are making decisions based on unbiased intelligence. They won't get that from today's CIA" (Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2006).

An advocate of the Iraq War, Pletka has been a longtime supporter of Ahmed Chalabi, the chairman of Iraqi National Congress, a U.S.-financed organization that worked closely with the Bush foreign policy team in making the case for the U.S. invasion. When the U.S. government began distancing itself from Chalabi, Pletka rose to his defense. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Pletka called the U.S. government "a faithless friend" and concluded that Washington's agencies, namely the CIA and the State Department, were "more concerned with carrying out vendettas than with pursuing the real enemies of the United States." According to Pletka, Chalabi was one of the "all too few Iraqis who were willing to risk life and limb to topple Hussein; and there were even fewer who believed in Western democratic values" (Los Angeles Times, June 4, 2004).

With respect to Iran, Pletka (and other AEI scholars) regularly denounces those who propose diplomatic engagement. "Any opening from the United States will only lend credibility to that government and forever dash the hopes of a population that, according to reliable polls, despises its own leadership," she argued in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. "We have seen that engagement with the current leadership of Iran would not achieve policy change; all it would do is buy an evil regime the time it needs to perfect its nuclear weapons and to build a network of terrorists to deliver them" (Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2004). In September 2006, Pletka made it clear that she would support military action to prevent a nuclear-capable Iran: "We have talked about talking for long enough; there must be other options. If those options are unavailable to those most threatened by a nuclear-armed Iran (that is, the American people), then the likelihood of war becomes ever greater. It is not wise to force America into a choice between doing nothing and doing everything. But it may come to that" (AEI, September 7, 2006).

Pletka also echoes a hardline neocon position on Saudi Arabia. "The United States remains oddly reluctant to fight Islamic extremism at one of its most important sources: Saudi Arabia," she wrote in December 2005 (AEI, December 22, 2005).

Pletka advocates a more aggressive "regime change" foreign policy along the lines described by her AEI colleagues Perle and Frum in their book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. "The political prescriptions contained are terrific," Pletka told the Jewish magazine Forward. "This is a very thoughtful articulation of how to fight the battle ahead of us." Among the policy prescriptions offered by Perle and Frum are, according to the Forward, universal biometric fingerprinting, immediate steps to bring about regime change in Iran and Syria, a military blockade of North Korea, a diplomatic approach that treats Saudi Arabia and France as rivals if not "enemies," and decreased U.S. involvement in the United Nations (Forward, January 9, 2004).

Regime change in the Middle East doesn't necessarily require U.S. military action but rather U.S. support for revolution, according to Pletka and other AEI analysts. While at AEI, Pletka has worked closely with congressional representatives, notably Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), to pass resolutions supporting democracy in Iran. At an AEI forum on Iran, Brownback was introduced by Pletka as "an activist" and "a true believer" (American Conservative, March 27, 2006).

Pletka maintains that torture is a distasteful but acceptable practice in the war against terrorism. "I'm not a big fan of torture. Unfortunately, there are times in war when it is necessary to do things in a way that is absolutely and completely abhorrent to most good, decent people," she told the BBC. "If it is absolutely imperative to find something out at that moment, then it is imperative to find something out at that moment, and Club Med is not the place to do it" (BBC News, June 14, 2005).

Although the neoconservative camp has lost some of its most prominent players inside government-notably Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith-AEI, with its team of neoconservatives and fellow travelers like Danielle Pletka, has stepped up its pressure on the Bush administration to stay true to a foreign policy that has regime change, preventive war, and U.S. supremacy as core features of U.S. national security doctrine.


http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Pletka_Danielle

http://i56.tinypic.com/10eipvo.jpg

Spring Note
The American Interest
Spring (March/April) 2007

Not with My Thucydides, You Don’t

Richard K. Betts

“The devil can cite scripture for his purpose”, according to Shakespeare. This should not discredit scripture, but simply remind us that any text that is both hallowed and complex can be mined in different and sometimes disconcerting ways. Eliot Cohen is a bit devilish in the way he reminds us of this in his jaunty essay in the last issue of the AI (“Thucydides, Really!” January/February 2007). Like many before him, he sets out to rescue Thucydides from the clutches of the realist tradition in international relations theory. This mission is reasonable to a point, but he charges beyond that point. It is also rather odd that he chooses this time to fuel the ageless feud between idealists and realists, since recent events hardly help his case.

Thucydides was above all an historian, so the richness of his reflections on the 27-year long Peloponnesian War cannot be fully captive to any one theory, however powerful. The purpose of theory is to clarify and enable generalization, which requires focusing on patterns across a wide range of cases, putting aside particular exceptions; the historian usually emphasizes what is specific and unique rather than general. Theory is necessary if any lessons are to be drawn from history, and history is necessary to keep theory honest. Cohen’s celebration of Thucydides is a good reminder of this delicate relationship. But Cohen also cites scripture for his purpose, invoking Thucydides to discredit contemporary realists—and there the essay goes awry, lurching over the line from needling his targets to caricaturing them. It misstates what sensible realists argue. Pummeling a straw man, Cohen insinuates the moral superiority and wisdom of idealists who oppose them, in particular Wilsonians and neoconservatives he identifies as the objects of realists’ “loathing, contempt, disgust.”

I am not provoked by personal pique. My own views are eclectic, and strike hard-core realists as wishy-washy. At least one realist scholar has referred to me in print as a nonrealist. And I can hardly loathe Wilsonians, since my father was a staunch one. Nevertheless, I feel about realism as Winston Churchill did about democracy: It is the worst theory of international relations—except for all the others. It does not tell us that much, but what it does tell us is important: When interests conflict, power tends to determine whose claim prevails; just because something is necessary does not mean that it is possible; having good intentions does not excuse paving the road to hell; and a few other things ideologues of any stripe should bear in mind when deciding whether war will be worth its costs. Of course, it is fair to point out the many limitations of realism. The best of realists themselves are forthright about them: E.H. Carr himself wrote an entire chapter on just that subject in The Twenty Years’ Crisis. It is not sensible, however, to dismiss a body of theory because of arguments that fundamentalists make, but that sensible realists reject.

Cohen levies two principal indictments. First, realists deny that domestic politics, leadership or ideas affect the interactions of states, and they “think of states as homogeneous billiard balls bouncing predictably around the pool table of international politics.” Second, realists are morally cynical, as when they “take sophisticated pleasure in the clinking of cocktail glasses with the architects of the Tiananmen massacre.”

One can certainly find realists who are guilty of these indictments, since the school is—like Marxism, liberalism, conservatism or any rubric for an unwieldy body of strong ideas—a motley collection of sectarian variations on a theme. There are classical realists and neorealists, defensive and offensive realists, dovish and hawkish ones, realists who believe stable peace is most likely under multipolarity, and others who argue the benefits of bipolarity or unipolarity. Some realists are crude determinists, and some are indeed morally callous. But the particular leading ones Cohen mentions—Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz—are innocent of these charges. Applying the indictments to them is like blaming the Pope for the pronouncements of Jerry Falwell on the grounds that both can be called Christians.

Morgenthau, like Thucydides, is acutely aware of the human factor. He emphasizes the animus dominandi in human nature as an essential source of conflict. True, he could have been clearer about the difference between typical state behavior that makes the rules of the game and the deviations he criticizes as self destructive. Waltz is more explicit about how the two go together. Nor is Waltz obtusely unaware that domestic institutions and politics affect the actions of states. Indeed, although his first classic, Man, the State, and War (1959), emphasizes the anarchy of the international system because it is the permissive cause of all wars, the book clearly cites the internal politics of the state as the level of analysis to plumb for the “efficient” causes of any specific war. And his second book focuses on the subject of internal determinants: Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics (1967).

Like many other critics, Cohen misses Waltz’s crucial distinction between a theory of international politics and a theory of foreign policy. The former explains typical outcomes in the international system over time, while the latter explains specific choices of governments. This clarifies the relation between the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of theory that classical realists leave a bit confused. Because states usually take whatever they can get without great strain, those that do not guard what they have are likely to be exploited. (The same can be said of politics within states when regimes collapse or civil war reproduces the anarchy of the international system.) Waltz’s third book, Theory of International Politics (1979), argues not that states interact like billiard balls, but that the ones whose policy choices fail to take proper account of the constraints of the balance of power, as idealist statesmen sometimes do, will suffer—in Waltz’s words, “fall by the wayside.” How many good examples are there to refute this simple point?

Many liberals cite the collapse of the Soviet Union as just such an example confounding realism, but it actually illustrates the point perfectly. Mikhail Gorbachev bought into neoliberal globaloney and “cooperative security” so incautiously that he made one concession after another to Washington, with virtually no reciprocity, in hope of reaching a modus vivendi with the West that would allow communism to revive itself by focusing on internal development. Instead, happily for us, the Soviet Union fell by the wayside, big time. Other countries did not return Moscow’s concessions but pressed their advantage. The result was first the loss of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, and then the disintegration of the Union itself and the abasement of Russia. As one disgruntled communist said at the time, the result was no different than if Gorbachev had been a CIA agent.

The second indictment against realists—that they are amoral or immoral—is a hoary one, because so many think of morality in terms of absolute rather than utilitarian principles. It is no accident that “Machiavellian” is a dirty word to idealists. Yet Machiavelli has a transcendent moral purpose in arguing that a leader must sometimes do evil in order to do good. Recognizing that right does not make might and that consequences matter more than motives, realists stand with Max Weber’s “ethic of responsibility” against the “ethic of ultimate ends.” If they are guilty of a tragic cast of mind, it is because they notice how often the enthusiasm of righteousness yields destruction instead of salvation. As Robert Gilpin once put it:

This is not to say that power and security are the sole or even the most important objectives of mankind; as a species we prize beauty, truth, and goodness. . . . What the realist seeks to stress is that all these more noble goals will be lost unless one makes provision for one’s security in the power struggle among social groups. . . . A moral commitment lies at the heart of realism. . . . What Morgenthau and many other realists have in common is a belief that ethical and political behavior will fail unless it takes into account the actual practice of states and the teachings of sound theory.

Why should one choose this moment to reopen the old debate and to suggest that realists are more foolish than Wilsonians or neocons? Adventurism in Iraq has gravely damaged American security interests and moral standing, and instead of eliminating threats has spawned dangerous new ones. The current disaster begs for comment in a debate about guidance for foreign policy; yet it goes unmentioned by Cohen. The closest he comes is a peculiar quotation about the Sicilian expedition apparently meant to reproach envious free-riding European allies for not signing on to the war.

Of course, realists often make terrible mistakes, but all in all, who looks wiser lately—the idealist architects of the current calamity, or the realists who opposed an unnecessary war in the first place? Bush the Younger’s crew, or Daddy’s? Pundits in the Weekly Standard, or the 33 scholars of strategic studies, mostly realists, whose manifesto on the New York Times op-ed page of September 26, 2002, predicted that war in Iraq would be a grave self-inflicted wound?

Cohen begins his essay by reporting the agitation of one of his students, an Air Force officer, who does not like Pericles. Cohen then goes on to laud Pericles’ funeral oration for being “as noble a statement about what freedom means as one can find in any literature.” There is, however, a leaden lining to Pericles’ stirring speech. Cohen does not report the reason for his student’s distress, but if it was because of Pericles’ arrogant brief for liberal imperialism, or his later deflection of responsibility for a war gone bad, the officer was on to something.

In this vein, let me cite scripture for my purpose. In the context of his times, Athenian democracy gave Pericles much to brag about, and the funeral oration is one long boast. Pericles brags about his city’s openness, liberality, refinement, public spiritedness and generosity. His enthusiasm for empire shamelessly conflates Athens’ material and moral interests. He grandly declares, “Our city is an education to Greece” and “a model to others.” The Greeks had a word for this that begins with “h”, and it wasn’t humility.

Later, however, after a second invasion and a plague had laid waste to their land, the Athenians had the hubris knocked out of them, and they turned against Pericles for having convinced them to go to war. He is unapologetic and blames them for faint hearts. Then he frankly strips away the moral sheen of his earlier funeral oration: “Nor is it any longer possible for you to give up this empire. . . . In fact you now hold your empire down by force; it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.”

We hear the awful echo of this sentiment when supporters of persistence in Iraq attack critics by emphasizing the catastrophic consequences that would follow a U.S. withdrawal. Quite true; but whose arrogant optimism about remaking the politics of the Middle East got us into this bind in the first place? One can forgive those who promoted the war, later recognized their error and, with new humility, approach the challenge of fixing the disaster they caused. But those who remain unrepentant? Does Pericles vindicate them when Thucydides has him saying, “All who have taken it upon themselves to rule over others have incurred hatred and unpopularity for a time; but if one has a great aim to pursue, this burden of envy must be accepted”? Some neoconservative theorists may say yes, as they might brush off any analogy between the war in Iraq and the disastrous Sicilian expedition by arguing that neither had been doomed to failure, but could be blamed on others’ bad judgment about the particular strategies for implementing the projects. Thucydides the historian, however, might remind them of one very large discomfiting fact: Athens, however superior in virtue or motives it may have been, fought for 27 years, endured and inflicted more material devastation and moral degradation than the war’s architects could possibly have envisioned at the outset—and still ultimately lost the Peloponnesian War.

Cohen chides those “who take comfort in the world-weariness of realism”, but I would choose “sobriety” or “humility” rather than “world-weariness” as the bumper sticker for the best brands of realism—sobriety about how much can be accomplished by force at a reasonable price, or about how much right intentions can make up for uncertain capabilities, and humility about one country’s capacity to remake another in its own image. Of course, many realists are not humble, just as many Christians do not live by the Sermon on the Mount.

In the same way that Karl Marx said “Je ne suis pas marxiste” when he heard what some argued in his name, I would sometimes say that I am not a realist. For most practical purposes it is not sensible to demand consistent adherence to one vague school or another. And as Cohen rightly suggests, don’t expect Thucydides to settle any general theoretical question neatly. Nor should anyone be foolish enough to claim to know for sure which side of a particular policy debate Thucydides would take if he were alive today. But if one has to choose between world-weary, sober humility and fresh-faced, romantic hubris, the choice should be easy.

Richard K. Betts is director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.

http://arts.anu.edu.au/sss/pols3017/Recent%20Articles/Betts.pdf

Islamist Neocons?

The West's latest tactic in the war on terrorism

by Justin Raimondo, September 07, 2011

The effort to paint the Libyan rebels as freedom-loving democrats is visibly faltering, especially in view of the rise of Abdelhakim Belhaj, alias Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq, as the top military commander in Tripoli.

Belhaj’s biography is interesting, to say the least: the founder of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), he traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s, where he met Osama bin Laden and fought against the Soviet-backed regime. After the war, he eventually returned to Libya, where he founded the LIFG and took the nom-de-guerre Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq. An Islamist revolt in Eastern Libya, led by the LIFG, was defeated by Gadhafi in 1996, and Belhaj fled the country for his old stomping grounds in Afghanistan.

He was welcomed by the Taliban and al Qaeda, where he was especially close to Mullah Omar. LIFG set up two training camps in Afghanistan, one of which was headed up by Abu Yahya, now Al Qaeda’s top ideologue, also a Libyan national. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the LIFG was listed as an Official Terrorist Group and Belhaj was targeted by the US.

The CIA traced him to Malaysia, in 2004, and he was arrested at Kuala Lumpur airport. They shipped him to Bangkok, where he was held in a secret CIA prison, “renditioned” back to Libya, and jailed by the Gadhafi regime, where he says he was tortured. Freed after a seven-year stint in the hoosegow – due to the efforts of Gadhafi’s son, Saif – Belhaj underwent a “deradicalization” conversion – I’m sure the torture helped – and renounced “extremism.” As the Guardian reports:

“The British government encouraged and helped publicize the Libyan ‘deradicalisation’ effort, modelled on what was being done with former jihadis in Egypt. In a program overseen by Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, the LIFG produced a 400-page theological document entitled Corrective Studies explaining its renunciation of violence. Ironically, in an al-Jazeera film in March, Belhaj praised the mediation of Saif al-Islam for his release. Gaddafi’s son said that the men who had been freed ‘were no longer a danger to society.’”

The British investment in “deradicalization” paid off when Belhaj and his associates in the ex-LIFG formed their “Islamic Movement for Change” and called for NATO to intervene on the rebels’ behalf. Soon after the assassination by Islamists of the rebels’ top military commander, Abdul Fatah Younes – a former Interior Minister in Gadhafi’s government who defected to the rebel camp amidst much ballyhoo – Belhaj was made chief of the Tripoli Military Council, the Libyan rebels’ equivalent of the Pentagon, and given the official imprimatur of Western elites. As the Guardian notes, citing jihadi “expert” Noman Benotman:

“The experiences of the LIFG leaders in armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Libya and Algeria have forced them to mature politically, recalculate strategically, moderate behaviorally, modify their ideological beliefs.”

Modified them to allow for NATO intervention on behalf of an emerging Islamist emirate, lorded over by “Emir” Belhaj?

Benotman, himself a former LIFG fighter, now works for the Quilliam Foundation, which is described by the Guardian as “a UK government-funded counter-radicalization think tank in London.” The Quilliamites are the institutional expression of the West’s latest grand strategy in the endless “war on terrorism,” a campaign of ideological warfare aiming to split the Islamist movement into pro- and-anti Western factions. The Libyan intervention is the culmination of this co-optation strategy.

The Foundation is named after William “Abdullah” Quilliam, a British solicitor of radical political opinions who converted to Islam, in 1882, on a trip to North Africa, and returned to London to found a uniquely British variant of his adopted religion. With a small group of British converts around him, he founded a mosque, a Muslim college, and wrote several books, claiming Queen Victoria (who ordered five copies of The Faith of Islam) among his readers. The Victorian equivalent of the EDL, however, apparently made life difficult for Quilliam and his group, and “Abdullah,” as he was now known, made off for Turkey, where he was designated the “Sheikh of Britain.”

This is where the trail gets murky, but it seems Quilliam returned to Britain in 1914, under an assumed name, “Prof. Henri Marcel Leon,” where he continued his activities on behalf of Islam. An alternate story is that he stayed abroad until just before his death in 1932.

The same murky dodginess permeates the activities of the Foundation that bears his name. Funded by the British government, and now simply called “Quilliam,” the organization deploys its “experts” – ex-jihadis of one sort or another – whenever some event requires a pro-government “spin.” It is a replication of the CIA’s orientation during the cold war, when a cadre of ex-radicals was recruited to do Washington’s bidding in the fight against Communism. By aligning with anti-Communist socialists, particularly ex-Trotskyists whose “Stalinophobia” had become an obsession, the CIA funded and helped organize the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which included such luminaries as Irving Kristol, Stephen Spender, and James Burnham. By mobilizing socialists in their anti-Communist crusade, the geniuses over at the CIA hoped to split the left-wing movement internationally and undermine Soviet support. This tactic was deemed especially crucial in Europe, where pro-Moscow Communist parties controlled the labor movement and had gained new prestige as leaders of the anti-Nazi Resistance. There the CIA deployed followers of Jay Lovestone, the former American Communist party leader, who had formed his own ostensibly communist party in the US and later developed extensive ties with US government agencies on the trail of the Reds.

The Quilliamites are, in short, the Islamist equivalent of neoconservatives – those migrants into the conservative movement from the left who later went on to become the loudest and most bloodthirsty advocates of an all-out war against the Soviet Union.

That the Quilliamite strategy has its uses as an instrument of Western foreign policy is underscored by the “success” of the Libyan operation, which funneled money, arms, and most importantly militarily experienced Islamist cadre into Libya to commandeer the rebel movement. The assassination of the former rebel commander-in-chief, and, in effect, an Islamist coup d’etat inside the rebel camp, was the logical outcome of this policy.

If you’ve been baffled by the installation of an Islamist regime in Libya by force of NATO arms – well, now you know. We’re aiding one wing of the Islamist movement in order to fight the “extremist’ wing, on the theory that we can domesticate these tigers and turn them into tabby cats.

If ever a policy was destined to provoke blowback of the worst and deadliest sort, then this is certainly it. The unintended consequences of building up an Islamist movement, not only in Libya but throughout the Middle East, are too obvious to require much explanation. Suffice to say here that the citizens of the newly-minted Libyan “emirate” – forced to live and suffer under a regime of imposed Sharia law – will pay the price of our “strategic” cleverness. So much for the myth that the West is “exporting democracy” throughout the world. What is being exported here is a cadre of Western proxies, whose role as servitors of Washington, London, and Paris is clothed in the religious robes of Quilliamite Islam.

One fully expects a repetition of this ploy in Egypt, and throughout the Muslim world. As the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, one thing is clear: we in the West have learned nothing about how to avoid the unintended consequences of our interventionist policies.


http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/09/06/islamist-neocons/

ZOG's neocohens often make triumphs on imaginary victories and 'good news' to keep up the spirits of the deluded people.

America’s ‘World Revolution’: Neo-Trotskyist Foundations of U.S. Foreign Policy

by Dr. K R Bolton

May 3, 2010

The ideological foundations of U.S. foreign policy have neo-Trotskyite foundations. Hatred of the USSR since the time of Stalin was the primary motivation for Trotskyists to the point where a significant faction considered the USSR and Stalinism rather than America and capitalism as the major obstacles to world socialism. This faction was co-opted into the Cold War and has provided the ideological impetus for U.S. foreign policy ever since.

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/trotsky-300x168.jpg
Leon Trotsky

Abstract

America has been the center of ‘world revolution’ since the time of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to shape the post-war world in a single image of liberal-democracy. The policy has been one of internationalism, and the Bush description of it as a ‘new world order’ in launching the war on Iraq is the latest name. While conservatives bothered much about the USSR and Red China, the heart of ‘world revolution’ lay in Washington. Because the policies of the USA and the USSR often coincided on the world stage, in particular promoting decolonization in order to fill the void with their own versions of neo-colonialism, such policies have often been mistaken for ‘Soviet communism.’ While the ‘Soviet threat’ lies in ashes, U.S. hegemony proceeds apace, destroying reticent nations with bombs where debt and foreign aid does not work. The ideological origins of American globalist foreign policy received impetus and ideological direction from sources arising from the Trotsky-Stalin split. The Moscow Trials continue to reverberate as a major historical event throughout the world. Whatever might be said about the judicial processes of the trials, the charge at the time that Trotskyists were agents of foreign capital became reality within a few years of the trial, as Trotskyist hatred of the USSR became all-consuming. This essay examines the manner by which Trotskyism metamorphosed into a primary ingredient of US foreign policy doctrine.

“Global Democratic Revolution”

In 2003 President George W Bush embraced the world revolutionary mission of the USA, stating to the National Endowment for Democracy that the war in Iraq is the latest front in the “global democratic revolution” led by the United States. “The revolution under former president Ronald Reagan freed the people of Soviet-dominated Europe,” he declared, “and is destined now to liberate the Middle East as well.”[1]

The origins of this US “global democratic revolution” are to be found in an unlikely and far-away source: the Trotsky-Stalin split and the Moscow Trials of 1936-1938. Such was the hatred of the Trotskyists and certain allied socialists towards the USSR from Stalin onward, that this “Opposition”, came to regard the USSR as the primary bulwark against world socialism and saw in the USA the only means of resisting Soviet world power, to the extent that these Leftists were eventually found supporting America in Korea and Vietnam, and ultimately present American foreign policy throughout the world, including the war against Iraq.

At Trotsky’s Villa

The tendency for this historically significant shift of Trotskyists and sundry allied socialists towards a pro-U.S. position can be discerned among the personnel of the sub-commission of the Preliminary Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, or the Dewey Commission if one prefers less of a mouthful. The Dewey Commission emerged from the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, as a supposedly “impartial body,” that had been initiated by Prof. Sidney Hook, a leading Trotskyist and who was to play a major role in pro-US machinations during the Cold War. It was fronted by the venerable Dr John Dewey, who had been one of Hook’s professors. The “impartial enquiry” was itself the suggestion of Trotsky who had “publicly demanded the formation of an international commission of inquiry, since he had been deprived of any opportunity to reply to the accusations before a legally constituted court.”[2]

The sub-commission went the Mexico to question Trotsky at the villa he was given by Diego Rivera. Those on the sub-commission included socialists and Trotskyists of various types, who exercised a deferent attitude towards Trotsky, which caused the only independently minded commissioner, the author and journalist Carleton Beals, to quit in disgust.[3]

A look at some of those involved with the Mexico hearings and their subsequent political orientations is instructive. John Chamberlain, a “left-leaning liberal” journalist, by his own description,was in 1946 among the founding editors of the libertarian journal The Freeman.[4] Another founding editor of The Freeman was Suzanne La Follette, the Dewey Commission’s secretary whom Beals had described as having a ‘worshipful’ attitude towards Trotsky in Mexico.[5] Trotsky’s lawyer at the Mexico hearings, Albert Goldman, a Trotskyist who had joined the American Communist Party in 1920, was expelled for Trotskyism, and was one of a faction who broke with the official line that World War II would weaken Trotskyism, joined the Workers Party, and ended up as one of those who came to see the USA as the primary bulwark against the main enemy of socialism, the USSR. The sub-commission’s reporter was Albert M Glotzer, also a Trotskyist who had been expelled from the Communist Party USA in 1928 and with Max Shachtman founded the Communist League and subsequent factions, including the Workers Party, and the Social Democrats USA, of which Sidney Hook was an honorary president.[6]

Shachtmanism

The line pursued by leading Trotskyist Max Shachtman is of importance in considering the development of Trotskyism as a significant influence on US foreign policy. Shachtman was one of Trotsky’s primary representatives in the USA.[7] Expelled from the Communist Party USA in 1928 Shachtman co-founded the Communist League and the Socialist Workers Party, but split to form the Workers Party of the United States in 1940 with James P Cannon and James Burnham et al, which became the Independent Socialist League and merged with the Socialist Party in 1958; which in turn factionalised into the Democratic Socialists and the Social Democrats USA.[8]

Shachtman’s opposition to the USSR diverged from the official Trotskyist line and became known as the “Third Camp.” Trotsky and the Fourth International advocated during World War II a so-called “defence of the Soviet Union.” Trotsky and the Fourth International held that in the event of an attack on the USSR by capitalist or fascist states, the Soviet Union must be defended since, although it was a “degenerated workers state” controlled by a bureaucracy rather than the proletariat, the fact of its having a nationalised economy was the crucial point. Trotsky held that the armed proletariat and the crisis generated by war would lead to the post-war defeat of Stalin by another revolution.

By 1940 Shachtman was in dispute with the Workers Party and the Fourth International over the issue, and declared that Trotskyists should pursue a defeatist policy for the USSR in the war. It is of interest that Shachtman’s main ally was James Burnham who was to become a principal ideologue of American Cold War strategy. Shachtman wrote to Trotsky and the Fourth International spelling out his line of “true Trotskyism”:

The Fourth International established, years ago, the fact that the Stalinist regime (even though based upon nationalized property) had degenerated to the point where it was not only capable of conducting reactionary wars against the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, and even against colonial peoples, but did in fact conduct such wars. Now, in our opinion, on the basis of the actual course of Stalinist policy (again, even though based upon nationalized property), the Fourth International must establish the fact that the Soviet Union (i.e., the ruling bureaucracy and the armed forces serving it) has degenerated to the point where it is capable of conducting reactionary wars even against capitalist states (Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, now Finland, and tomorrow Rumania and elsewhere). This is the point which forms the nub of our difference with you and with the Cannon faction.

War is a continuation of politics, and if Stalinist policy, even in the occupied territory where property has been statified, preserves completely its reactionary character, then the war it is conducting is reactionary. In that case, the revolutionary proletariat must refuse to give the Kremlin and its army material and military aid. It must concentrate all efforts on overturning the Stalinist regime. That is not our war! Our war is against the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy at the present time!

In other words, I propose, in the present war, a policy of revolutionary defeatism in the Soviet Union, as explained in the statement of the Minority on the Russian question – and in making this proposal I do not feel myself one whit less a revolutionary class patriot than I have always been.[9]

There is a significant reference in Shachtman’s statement from which the shape of post-war Trotskyist ideology and the rationale for which it went over the American camp during the Cold War, and subsequently, can be discerned: The USSR had reached such a “degenerated” state, pursuing a thoroughly reactionary course, that it could now only act in interests inimical to socialism even in its actions against capitalist states. The USSR was therefore henceforth seen as the major obstacle to world socialism, as a dialectical regression.

After World War II Shachtman laid down a line in which specific Cold War policy can be seen:

The Stalinist parties are indeed agents of the Kremlin oligarchy, no matter what country they function in. The interests and the fate of these Stalinist parties are inseparably intertwined with the interests and fate of the Russian bureaucracy. The Stalinist parties are everywhere based upon the power of the Russian bureaucracy, they serve this power, they are dependent upon it, and they cannot live without it.[10]

By 1948 Shachtmanism as the Cold Warrior apologist for American foreign policy was taking shape. In seeing positive signs in the Titoist break with the USSR, Shachtman wrote:

In the first place, the division in the capitalist camp is, to all practical intents, at an end. In any case, there is nothing like the division that existed from 1939 onward and which gave Stalinist Russia such tremendous room for maneuvering. In spite of all the differences that still exist among them, the capitalist world under American imperialist leadership and drive is developing an increasingly solid front against Russian imperialism.[11]

Hence, “American imperialism” was in 1948 already seen by the Shachtmanists as a necessary bulwark to “‘Russian imperialism.” Shachtman saw the post-war world in terms of two contending power blocs, headed by America and Russia, and from a dialectical perspective regarded the American-led bloc as the side that required supporting. This led the Shachtmanists and certain other socialists to positions far removed from what would normally be considered “Left-wing.”

By 1950 Shachtman, now writing as head of the Independent Socialist League, stated that Stalinism is the primary problem faced by Marxism, which required an international response:

The principal new problem faced by Marxian theory, and therewith Marxian practice, is the problem of Stalinism. What once appeared to many to be either an academic or “foreign” problem is now, it should at last be obvious, a decisive problem for all classes in all countries. If it is understood as a purely Russian phenomenon or as a problem “in itself,” it is of course not understood at all.[12]

Hence this not insignificant faction of Trotskyism, through its detestation of the USSR, had placed itself firmly in the American camp in relation to the international situation, the “Cold War.”‘

Natalia Trotsky

While Shachtman was at loggerheads with Trotsky over the dialectical line to be pursued over the USSR, would Trotsky have continued to pursue the “defence of the USSR” vis-à-vis the Cold War scenario had a Stalnist assassin not liquidated him in 1940?

There are strong indications that Trotsky might have endorsed the Shachtman line had he lived into the Cold War period. Dialectical materialism is innately pragmatic according to the perceived historical mission of the “proletariat” and its “vanguard” party. The programme of the Fourth International itself, drafted by Trotsky, was described as a “transitional programme.” Trotsky’s position regarding the defence of the USSR against a fascist or capitalist attack on its territory was also subject to change depending on the historical circumstances. The fundamental difference between Shachtmanism and the Fourth International was that the so-called Third Camp of Shachtman, Burnham et al saw Stalinist Russia as more of a regressive step in the process of socialism than a Russia in which capitalism might be installed (keeping in mind that Russia had gone from feudalism to socialism without the intervening phase of capitalism as part of the Marxian dialectical process of history). Trotsky believed that a revolution could topple Stalin and revert Russia back to the Bolshevik path.[13] Shachtman did not, and saw the war rather as only increasing Stalin’s power in Russia and beyond. While Trotsky was confident in 1939 that a war between Hitler and Stalin would result in the arming and revolutionising of the proletariat not just in Russia but in Eastern Europe, increasing conditions under which Stalin would be overthrown while Hitler would be defeated simultaneously, he stated of the war in conclusion:

It may accelerate the process of the revolutionary regeneration of the USSR. But it may also accelerate the process of its final degeneration. For this reason it is indispensable that follow painstakingly and without prejudice these modifications which war introduces into the internal life of the USSR so that we may give ourselves a timely accounting of them.[14]

That Trotsky might have endorsed the Shachtman line, and henceforth the reorientation towards the USA in the Cold War, had he lived, is given a strong indication from this being precisely the line his widow and long time comrade, Natalia took in 1951 precisely when the period of the Cold War had started to unfold. In a letter to the Executive Committee of the Fourth International and to the Socialist Workers Party in the USA she stated:

Obsessed by old and outmoded formulations, you continue to consider the Stalinist state as a workers’ state. I cannot and will not follow you on this point…. It should be clear to all that Stalinism has completely destroyed the revolution. And yet you continue to say that Russia is still, under this iniquitous regime, a workers’ state.

This is a precise rejection of the pre-1940 formulae of her husband in regard to the “defence of the USSR as a degenerated workers state,” describing this attitude as representing “old and outmoded formulations.”[15]

Laying down a course that was to push neo-Trotskyists such as Shachtman, Burnham and Hook increasingly into the U.S. camp during the Cold War (which she referred to as the “third world war”), and beyond to the present day, Natalia stated in alluding to the Korean War:

The most intolerable is the position on war to which you have committed yourselves. The third world war threatening humanity places the revolutionary movement before the most difficult and complex situations, the gravest decisions…. But faced with the events of recent years, you continue to call for the defence of the Stalinist state, and to commit the whole movement to it. Now, you even support the Stalinist armies in the war which is crucifying the Korean people.

I cannot and will not follow you on this point…. I find that I must tell you that I find no other way out than to say openly that our disagreements make it impossible for me to stay any longer in your ranks.[16]

Sundry Trotskyite groups continue to adhere to Natalia’s stance.[17]

Congress for Cultural Freedom

It was from such an anti-Soviet milieu among the Left that the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) emerged. A CIA front to co-opt Leftist-intellectuals to the U.S. side during the Cold War on the shared basis of anti-Sovietism, the CCF came out of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom organised in 1938 with John Dewey.[18] In 1948 Hook’s Americans for Intellectual Freedom came to the attention of the Office of Political Coordination, a newly formed branch of the CIA. From these the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was founded in 1951.

The founding conference of the CCF was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1949, as a provocation to the Soviet-sponsored peace conference at the Waldorf supported by a number of the American literati. The CIA article on the CCF states:

A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sidney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.[19]

It should be kept in mind that when the CIA, and even someone as well-informed as Frances Stonor Saunders refers to Hook et al as being “anti-communist,” this was nothing of the kind; they were anti-Stalinists, with Trotskyism being the predominant line. Hook was a co-founder of the American Workers Party and promoted its merger with Socialist Workers’ Party to form the Workers Party of the United States, although Hook did not join. Hook did however become the honorary president of the influential Social Democrats USA, another Trotskyite deviation.[20]

Hook was editing The New Leader, a Marxist publication whose executive editor from 1937-1961 was a Russian emigrant, Sol Levitas, a Menshevik who had been mayor of Vladivostok[21] and who had worked with the Bolshevik leaders Trotsky and Bukharin.[22] Saunders quotes Tom Braden of the CIA as stating that The New Leader was kept alive through subsidies that Braden gave to Levitas.[23] Partisan Review[24] was another Leftist magazine saved from financial ruin by the CIA and certain CIA-connected wealthy patrons such as the Rockefellers, after an appeal for funds from Hook.[25]

Hook had stated at the start of the Cold War:

Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses–yes, even among the soldiers–of Stalin’s own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the people.[26]

This position expressed by Hook was essentially neo-Trotskyist and what became official U.S. Cold War doctrine can be discerned. Hook pursued the same line as that of Shachtman, his colleague James Burnham, and Natalia Trotsky. During the 1960s, Hook critiqued the New Left and became an outspoken supporter of the Vietnam War. In 1984 he was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities to give the annual Jefferson Lecture, “the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities”.[27] On 23 May 1985 Hook was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Reagan. Edward S Shapiro writing in the American “conservative” journal First Principles, summarises Hook’s position thusly:

One of America’s leading anticommunist intellectuals, Hook supported American entry into the Korean War, the isolation of Red China, the efforts of the United States government to maintain a qualitative edge in nuclear weapons, the Johnson administration’s attempt to preserve a pro-western regime in South Vietnam, and the campaign of the Reagan administration to overthrow the communist regime in Nicaragua.

Those both within and outside of conservative circles viewed Hook as one of the gurus of the neoconservative revival during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1985, President Reagan presented Hook with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for being one of the first “to warn the intellectual world of its moral obligations and personal stake in the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism.”[28]

Again, there is the disingenuous description of Hook as an ‘anticommunist’, obscuring the fundamentally Trotskyist origins of both neo-conservativism and post-World War II American foreign policy.

Shachtmanism and the Cold War

During the 1960s Shachtmanism aligned with the Democratic Party while maintaining an influence in the New Left. By the 1960s they were supporting America’s policy in Vietnam, just as Natalia had supported America in Korea. In 1972 the Shachtmanists endorsed Senator Henry Jackson for the Democratic presidential nomination against Leftist George McGovern whom they regarded as an appeaser toward the USSR. Jackson was both pro-war and vehemently anti-Soviet, advocating a “hawkish” position on foreign policy towards the USSR. Like Hook, Jackson was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by Reagan in 1984.

At this time Tom Kahn, a prominent Shachtmanist and an organizer of the AFL-CIO, was Jackson’s chief speechwriter.[29] Kahn became pivotal in the development of American foreign policy during the Cold War and after. Many of Sen. Jackson’s aides were to become prominent in the “neo-conservative” movement, including Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, all of whom had been involved to some extent with Trotskyism at an early stage, and all of whom became prominent in the Administration of George H W Bush, as well as being noted for their hawkish stance on foreign policy.

Tom Kahn, who remained an avid follower of Shachtmanism, explained his mentor’s position on Vietnam, while insisting that Shachtman never compromised his “socialism”:

His views on Vietnam were, and are, unpopular on the Left. He had no illusions about the South Vietnamese government, but neither was he confused about the totalitarian nature of the North Vietnamese regime. In the South there were manifest possibilities for a democratic development.… He knew that those democratic possibilities would be crushed if Hanoi’s military takeover of the South succeeded. He considered the frustration of the attempt to be a worthy objective of American policy.…[30]

This position can be readily seen as neo-Trotskyist. The line has been consistent, and inevitably led to a pro-U.S. position.

National Endowment for Democracy

Just as the Congress for Cultural Freedom was to a significant extent a Trotskyist response to the Cold War, the post-Cold War era required a new response, and again Trotskyists of the Shachmanite-Hook lines took the forefront.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was established in 1983 at the prompting of Tom Kahn, and endorsed by an Act of Congress introduced by Congressman George Agree. Carl Gershman, a Shachtmanite, was appointed president of NED in 1984, and remains so.[31] Gershman was a co-founder and an Executive Director (1974-1980) of Social Democrats USA.[32]

Congressman Agree and Kahn believed that the USA needed a means apart from the CIA of supporting subversive movements against the USSR. Kahn, who became International Affairs Director of the AFL-CIO, had been in close contact with Solidarity in Poland, and had been involved with AFL-CIO meetings with Leftists from Latin America and South Africa. [33]

Kahn started his political activism with the Young Socialist League, the youth wing of Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League and the Young People’s Socialist League, which he continued to support until his death in 1992.[34] In particular, he supported Shachtman’s opposition to the USSR as the primary obstacle to world socialism,[35] and built up an anti-Soviet network throughout the world in “opposition to the accommodationist policies of détente”.[36] There was a particular focus on assisting Solidarity in Poland from 1980.[37]

The neo-Trotskyists had in fact created, under U.S. auspices, precisely the anti-Soviet underground network that Stalin had feared, and that had been alleged against the Trotskyist and Bukharin Opposition bloc during the Moscow trials of 1936-1938. Whatever the truth or otherwise of the Moscow trial allegations – and confessions – what was alleged by the Stalinists during the 1930s had become reality shortly after World War II, and played a significant role in the destruction of the Soviet bloc.

Racehlle Horowitz’s eulogy to Kahn ends with her confidence that had he been alive, he would have been a vigorous supporter of the war in Iraq.[38]

NED is funded by the U.S. Congress and supports “activists and scholars” with 1000 grants in over 90 countries. NED describes its program of “democratic initiatives” (sic) as operating in Poland (through the trade union Solidarity), Chile, Nicaragua, Eastern Europe (to aid in the democratic transition following the demise of the Soviet bloc), South Africa, Burma, China, Tibet, North Korea and the Balkans. “Serbia’s electoral breakthrough in the fall of 2000″ was achieved by supporting “a number of civic groups.” “More recently, following 9/11 and the NED Board’s adoption of its third strategic document, special funding has been provided for countries with substantial Muslim populations in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.”[39] The programme and strategies are thus very similar to those funded by George Soros.Islamofascists — The New Stalinists

While Putin’s Russia remains a major concern of the present cadre of neo-Trotskyists, Islam has become a significant new world bogeyman for the neo-Trotskyists to continue what amounts to the present-day version of the permanent revolution. The neo-Trotskyists have conjoined the words Fascist and Islam to coin a substitute for Stalinism as the perpetual villain: Islamofascism.

The term Islamofascism seems to have been coined and has been popularised by “neo-conservative” Stephen Schwartz, Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism. Schwartz takes credit for being “the first Westerner to use the neologism in this context,” making reference to its use by George W Bush and “other prominent figures,” which was written of by Schwartz in 2001 in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Schwartz states that the term should be used precisely in regard to certain Islamic movements and states, “because of their congruence with the defining characteristics of classic fascism, especially in its most historically-significant form — German National Socialism.”[40]

The background of Schwartz is as a supporter of the Trotskyist Fomento Obrero Revolucionario during the 1930s. Writing for the Cold War-derived magazine National Review, which had many Trotskyists at its formation, including in particular James Burnham, Schwartz states:

To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who alone, and pursued from country to country, and finally laid low in his own blood, said no to Soviet coddling of Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic.… to my last breath, and without apology. Let the neo-fascists, and Stalinists in their second childhood make of it what they will.[41]

Schwartz continues to affectionately refer to Trotsky as “L.D.” (Lev Davidovitch), writing: “To a great extent, I still consider myself to be one of the great disciples of L.D.”

Schwartz states of the origins of the “neo-conservative movement”:

And the fact is that many of the original generation of neoconservatives had a background of association with Trotskyism in its Shachtmanite iteration — that is, they belonged to or sympathized with a trend in radical leftism that followed the principle of opposition to the Soviet betrayal of the revolution to its logical end. The Shachtmanites, in the 1960s, joined the AFL-CIO in its best Cold War period, and many became staunch Reaganites.[42]

That American foreign policy is fundamentally Trotskyist can be discerned through the ideological statements on foreign policy that use terms such as “creative destruction,” “constant conflict”, and “American world revolutionary mission”. For example, Maj. Ralph Peters, a prominent military strategist, appears to have coined the term “constant conflict.”[43] He writes of America’s world revolutionary mission, stating candidly:

We have entered an age of constant conflict…. We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent…. There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the U.S. armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.[44]

Michael Ledeen, in similar terms to that of Peters, and in thoroughly neo-Trotskyist mode, calls on the USA to fulfil its “historic mission” of “exporting the democratic revolution” throughout the world.[45] Like Peters, Ledeen predicates this world revolution as a necessary part of the “war on terrorism,” but emphasises also that “world revolution” is the “historic mission” of the USA and always has been. Writing in the National Review Ledeen states:

…[W]e are the one truly revolutionary country in the world, as we have been for more than 200 years. Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically, and that is precisely why the tyrants hate us, and are driven to attack us. Freedom is our most lethal weapon, and the oppressed peoples of the fanatic regimes are our greatest assets. They need to hear and see that we are with them, and that the Western mission is to set them free, under leaders who will respect them and preserve their freedom.[46]

Conclusion

Trotskyism provided the ideological basis for U.S. foreign policy, orientating U.S. foreign policy as a development from Wilsonian global liberal-democracy to what has become America’s “world revolutionary mission.” Trotskyist motivation came very shortly to be dominated by a hatred of the USSR, seeing Russia as the major obstacle to world socialism, and the USA as the only force capable of halting the USSR. From the neo-Trotskyist perspective, dialectically, capitalism became preferable to Stalinism. Capitalism represented a stage towards socialism; Stalinism was an aberration historically. Trotskyists readily joined with the CIA during the Cold War, and in the post-Cold War world have continued to have an influence, in particular ideologically, as it is now expressed by non-Trotskyists from Ledeen to Reagan and Bush. The ideology has not been repudiated by Obama.

“The permanent revolution” has been substituted for “constant conflict,” and “creative destruction;” Stalinism has been substituted for Islamofascism; Russia has been replaced by the USA as the “one truly revolutionary country in the world;” and the “world proletarian revolution” has metamorphosed into the “global democratic revolution.” Have the allegedly “paranoid” concerns of Stalin been vindicated?

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/05/03/americas-world-revolution-neo-trotskyist-foundations-of-u-s-foreign-policy/0/

How’s that Arab Spring working out for you, neocons?

Published: Tuesday, February 07, 2012
By Paul Mulshine / The Star Ledger

http://media.nj.com/ledgerupdates_impact/photo/10422751-large.jpg
George W. Bush: What made him think liberating our enemies was a good idea?

Last year when the Arab Spring was going strong, neoconservative deep thinker William Kristol offered this deep thought: “We can’t make all right with the world. But we can make some things in the world a little better.”

Says who? Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise all over the Mideast. And the other day, we learned how the leaders of Egypt employed their newfound freedom: They announced they are going to put 19 American aid workers on trial. Their alleged crime? Spreading democracy.

That in itself ought to represent a fitting end to the so-called “neo” conservative strategy in foreign affairs. Add in the rise of those Islamic fundamentalist parties in Libya, Syria and, for that matter, Iraq, and any rational thinker would have to conclude the neocon experiment was the biggest failure in the history of American foreign policy.

The reason for its failure is not hard to find. Like bad generals, the neocons were fighting the next war with the tactics from the last. Promoting democracy worked like a charm when it came to the Cold War. Why wouldn’t it work in the so-called “War on Terror”?

Elliott Abrams is still trying to figure that out. Abrams was part of the Reagan administration team that so nicely dissected the Soviet empire. When he joined the administration of George W. Bush as an adviser on global democracy strategy, Abrams assumed the same tricks would work in the Mideast.

In a recent article in the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, Abrams makes the case that the Arab Spring proves “neoconservatives were right all along.”

To his credit, Abrams at least gets the categories right. He doesn’t pretend that the opponents of the neocons are the members of the Obama administration, who differ only in detail with the neocon agenda. He correctly notes that its opponents are the “realists,” those ex-diplomats, ex-CIA spies and ex-military men who are under no illusions about the wisdom of liberating people who don’t share our interests.

Abrams spends most of the essay arguing that things might still work out fine in the Mideast. But he also allows that “the pessimists might yet be proved right — any comparison of the Arab lands to Eastern Europe suggests that many positive elements are missing, not least the magnet and model of the European Union.”

He’s getting warm. But the real problem with any comparison of the Mideast to Eastern Europe is that there is no comparison.

That was obvious in 2004 to one of the more prominent realists. John Mearsheimer is a political science professor at the University of Chicago and a military veteran. In 2003, he predicted that the initial invasion of Iraq would go well, but the occupation would be a disaster.

After that debacle arrived on schedule, I called him and asked why the realists got it right and the neocons got it wrong.

Simple, Mearsheimer said. The neocons assume that the impulse that’s hard-wired into humans is democracy. It’s not. It’s nationalism. The nationalistic urge worked to our advantage in the Cold War. The Soviets were occupying the nations of Eastern Europe. The people of those nations shared, with Americans, the goal of getting rid of the Soviets.

In the Mideast, he said, the neocons managed to turn the nationalistic urge against us by invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. “When you occupy their countries, people fight back,” he said.

In retrospect, that hardly seems like a particularly deep insight. The neocons still haven’t figured it out. On the question of invading Iran, the consensus of all the Republican presidential contenders not named Ron Paul seems to be that the third time pays for all.

It still hasn’t occurred to these deep thinkers that the current crisis with Iran has its roots in the democratic revolution of 1979. Once the Iranians had liberated themselves from a dictatorship, they promptly created a republic that reflected their values rather than ours.

Like the newly liberated Egyptians, these people put their own interests above America’s. Why do these Mideasterners persist in doing that sort of thing?

Perhaps they don’t have the benefit of reading Kristol and Abrams, as we do.

HERE'S that column in which I quoted Mearsheimer in 2004. It was in my pre-blog era, so I present it now for your reading pleasure. Note how Kristol seems not to have learned a single thing in the past eight years:

On Friday, this page ran a column by leading neoconservative Bill Kristol on the issue of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's botched handling of the Iraq war. The day before, an interoffice e-mail gave a synopsis of the column:

"Bill Kristol says it's time for Rumsfeld to go," the e-mail read. "He blames everybody but himself."

For a second there, I thought the "he" in that second sentence applied to Kristol rather than Rumsfeld. There's a lot of blame to go around for this mess, and Kristol certainly deserves his share.

Kristol is the editor of the Weekly Standard, the magazine that, true to its name, sets the standard for neoconservative philosophy in America. That philosophy differs from old-fashioned conservatism in the area of foreign policy. Old-fashioned conservatives want either to crush potential enemies or leave them alone. The neocons can't figure out whether they want to conquer them or cuddle up to them.

That sort of thing never works. But instead of admitting that the conquer-or-cuddle philosophy is flawed, Kristol blamed Rumsfeld for its execution.

"All defense secretaries in wartime have made misjudgments," he wrote. "Some have stubbornly persisted in their misjudgments. But has any so breezily dodged responsibility and so glibly passed the buck?"

Good question. Let's apply it to Kristol and the other neocons. Here's how Kristol envisioned the war back in September 2002:

"We can remove Saddam because that could start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy, and it would weaken the radicals who use terror, who sponsor terror. I think the single best thing we can do is hurry up and get rid of Saddam."

Oops. Instead of weakening the radicals, the neocons managed to create thousands of new ones.

As for the old-fashioned conservatives, they saw this one coming. A month before the war began, Pat Buchanan predicted, "This Wilsonian ambition will end in disaster for this country."

John Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and a military veteran, foresaw exactly where things would go wrong. He predicted that the initial invasion of Iraq would go well but the occupation would be a disastrous diversion from the so-called "war on terror."

"Every dollar spent occupying Iraq is a dollar not spent dismantling terrorist networks abroad or improving security at home," Mearsheimer wrote just before the invasion. "Invasion and occupation would increase anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and help Osama bin Laden win more followers."

He got that right. I phoned Mearsheimer the other day and asked him where he thought the neocons drifted from reality.

"They thought you could go into Iraq and effect regime change and produce a new democracy that would be stable and pro-Israel and that would let us have bases," he said. "Then you move on to the next target."

Instead of moving on, they're stuck in Iraq. Neocons posed as realists, but their conception of human nature was anything but realistic, he said.

"They believe democracy is the most powerful political ideology," he said. "You go in and remove the regime and this democratic impulse that's hard-wired into every individual would manifest itself and Iraq would become a democracy."

The problem, said Mearsheimer. is that the impulse that's hard-wired into human nature isn't democracy. It's nationalism.

"Once you trigger nationalism, an insurgency invariably results," he said. "When you occupy their countries, people fight back.”

He added, "We were successful in the Cold War because it was the Soviets who were occupying Eastern Europe."

But now we're the occupiers - and we're stuck. Instead of going on to Syria or Iran, the United States is stuck sorting out a deadly and expensive mess in Iraq.

So much for that "chain reaction in the Arab world" Kristol anticipated, the one that would be "very healthy." It's not too healthy for the Americans in its way - and the lack of armor on their vehicles is just a tiny screwup in a vast universe of bad moves.

Mearsheimer doesn't expect the neocons to admit that the fault lay more in their strategy than in its execution. "I don't expect them to take the blame," he said. "Rumsfeld is going to be the fall guy."

Perhaps so. And if the defense secretary feels like writing an opinion piece giving his views on how well the editor of the Weekly Standard is doing his job, The Star-Ledger will be glad to run it.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2012/02/hows_that_arab_spring_working.html

These guys' recent ancestors, and their ilk, were Trotskyites for Pete's sake. They still honor the memory of Lenin's Left hand man who founded the Red Army, which ordered the murders of the Romanoff family in a Yekaterburg cellar.

While it's too late now, George Washington's warnings about meddling in other nations' affairs and avoiding massive debt remain true. Foisting our wretched situation on others...especially in the Ummah....is bizarre. Mohommedans, across the board, see us as occupying satans with no moral grounding. Worse, there's obvious truth in their charges. We've aerial bombings, drones, invasions, assassinations and misery to the Ummah. Now, we even support al qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood to destroy our own interests. We have the Israelis deliver weapons we supply to the Palestinians...that the Palestinians will use to kill Israelis. A glimpse of Rodham tells us it's all insane.

The record shows, Obama labored in a Saul Alinsky organization for years, while Rodham dedicated her college years to his Neo-Marxist views, seeking him out for an interview. Alinsky advised infiltrating government, churches etc. and underming them. The current attack by Obama on Roman Catholics is in line with these Alinsky tactics, as Pelosi arrogantly complains about the Catholic "conscience thing".

Let's remember, Alinsky even dedicated his most important book, "Rules for Radicals" to Lucifer, who at least won his own kingdom....according to Saul.

Neo-Cons and Neo-Marxists agree on one thing, like Lucifer...overthrowing the world. They're the opposite of George Washington, and...as we've seen...a once great nation is diminished by their revolutionary beliefs. With them around, spending our troops' lives and our very fortune, we're as safe as the Romanoff Family in 1918.