Neo-Conservatives Abandon Conservative Tradition

[FaDe]

Conservatism is a confusing creed, and especially so these days when there are so few conservatives around. If that sounds odd in an era that is almost universally characterized as an "era of conservatism," you have to consider those who apply the label of "conservative" to themselves.

Two weeks ago, writing in The Wall Street Journal, William Kristol and David Brooks of the neo-conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard, unbosomed their latest thoughts about what conservatives should do and think. This is not a new habit for them; they've been doing the same thing for several years, but few have ever paid much attention. Now some are.

The main message of Mr. Kristol and Mr. Brooks is that conservatives for too long have denounced "government," and they endorsed what they called "nationalism" and adopted as its icons the figures of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay,

Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. One problem with that is that the "nationalism" the two neo-cons endorse is a nationalism those earlier nationalists wouldn't recognize.

According to its architects, the new neo-con nationalism is supposed to believe in open borders and free trade, though Hamilton opposed immigration, Clay wanted to send blacks back to Africa, and neither Lincoln nor Roosevelt was exactly a racial egalitarian. As for free trade, not a single one of them believed in it, and all of them are famous for their strong support of economic nationalism and protectionism.

OK, so Mr, Kristol and Mr. Brooks don't know much about history, but that's the least of their confusions. Where they really tip over the edge and what really made conservatives as well as liberals sit up and bark was their general view of government.

The new neo-con nationalism, they write, "isn't unfriendly to government, properly understood," and "How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?" The neo-cons, as their rivals the paleo-conservatives or Old Right have always said about them, have never met a big government they didn't like.

The Kristol-Brooks version of Big Government Conservatism has already been lambasted by conservatives Paul Craig Roberts and Robert Novak, but one non-conservative who is quick to embrace their new Big Government nationalism is liberal E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post. Like Teddy Roosevelt, Mr. Dionne is dee-lighted with the New Testament of the right according to Bill and David. Mr. Dionne found in an interview that "New Dealism doesn't bother Kristol," and the editor of the Weekly Standard told him, "Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy and, for that matter, Lyndon Johnson are big facts in American history. Are we willing to say that the country is worse off because of FDR or JFK or LBJ? I'm not willing to say that."

But virtually every other American who has claimed the name "conservative" since the 1930s has been willing to say it, and most of them say so today. FDR, JFK and LBJ and their legacies have been disasters for this country, domestically and abroad, and if you don't believe that, you have to abandon literally everything conservatism has represented since the New Deal. No wonder this is a "conservatism" that Mr. Dionne can approve.

What Mr. Kristol and Mr. Brooks contrive to miss completely is that most conservatives don't "hate" government. They just don't believe that the kind of swollen state that the neo-con heroes helped build and neo-cons today want to conserve is legitimate. It's not authorized by the Constitution, and its emergence in the last 50 years or so is a deviation from the course on which the founding fathers set the nation.

The Constitution establishes the framework for both authorizing the legitimate activities of the federal government and at the same time limiting it by the structure of the state it prescribes. "Big Government" for Americans is by definition government that has no authority in the Constitution, and it is precisely that kind that Mr. Kristol and Mr. Brooks are eager to save and to get their own hands on. Nowhere in their exposition of "American greatness" is there any mention of the Constitution at all.

"How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?" Very easily, if the government does what ours does today -- punish the innocent and reward criminals, wreck the cultural and social fabric of its own people, conspire against their economic prosperity, fail to protect legitimate national interests, and wage pointless wars against nations that have never harmed any American. To make no distinction between the nation and the state is a concept alien to conservatism as well as liberalism, properly understood.
It is an idea more appropriate on the lips of Leonid Brezhnev than on those of any American of any American persuasion.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

[Sinclair]

Huh? Nationalism favoring open borders and free trade? Heh? Did I read that right? What kind of Kool-Aid have I been drinking?

[SmallTimeThug]

.......are terrible dangerous and dishonest people.


http://pilger.carlton.com/print/124759

The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the world's resources, it said, was "some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the "new Pearl Harbor", described as "the opportunity of ages". The extremists who have since exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups and "think-tanks" were established to avenge the American "defeat" in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a "peace dividend" following the cold war. The Project for the New American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime.

One of George W Bush's "thinkers" is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about "total war", I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America's "war on terror". "No stages," he said. "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

Perle is one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century, the PNAC. Other founders include Dick Cheney, now vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, I Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, William J Bennett, Reagan's education secretary, and Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan. These are the modern chartists of American terrorism. The PNAC's seminal report, Rebuilding America's Defences: strategy, forces and resources for a new century, was a blueprint of American aims in all but name. Two years ago it recommended an increase in arms-spending by $48bn so that Washington could "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars". This has happened. It said the United States should develop "bunker-buster" nuclear weapons and make "star wars" a national priority. This is happening. It said that, in the event of Bush taking power, Iraq should be a target. And so it is.

As for Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction", these were dismissed, in so many words, as a convenient excuse, which it is. "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification," it says, "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." How has this grand strategy been implemented? A series of articles in the Washington Post, co-authored by Bob Woodward of Watergate fame and based on long interviews with senior members of the Bush administration, reveals how 11 September was manipulated.

On the morning of 12 September 2001, without any evidence of who the hijackers were, Rumsfeld demanded that the US attack Iraq. According to Woodward, Rumsfeld told a cabinet meeting that Iraq should be "a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism". Iraq was temporarily spared only because Colin Powell, the secretary of state, persuaded Bush that "public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible". Afghanistan was chosen as the softer option. If Jonathan Steele's estimate in the Guardian is correct, some 20,000 people in Afghanistan paid the price of this debate with their lives.

Time and again, 11 September is described as an "opportunity". In last April's New Yorker, the investigative reporter Nicholas Lemann wrote that Bush's most senior adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told him she had called together senior members of the National Security Council and asked them "to think about 'how do you capitalise on these opportunities'", which she compared with those of "1945 to 1947": the start of the cold war. Since 11 September, America has established bases at the gateways to all the major sources of fossil fuels, especially central Asia. The Unocal oil company is to build a pipeline across Afghanistan. Bush has scrapped the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, the war crimes provisions of the International Criminal Court and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. He has said he will use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states "if necessary". Under cover of propaganda about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the Bush regime is developing new weapons of mass destruction that undermine international treaties on biological and chemical warfare.

In the Los Angeles Times, the military analyst William Arkin describes a secret army set up by Donald Rumsfeld, similar to those run by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and which Congress outlawed. This "super-intelligence support activity" will bring together the "CIA and military covert action, information warfare, and deception". According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld, the new organisation, known by its Orwellian moniker as the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG, will provoke terrorist attacks which would then require "counter-attack" by the United States on countries "harbouring the terrorists".

In other words, innocent people will be killed by the United States. This is reminiscent of Operation Northwoods, the plan put to President Kennedy by his military chiefs for a phoney terrorist campaign - complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans - as justification for an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy rejected it. He was assassinated a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but with resources undreamt of in 1963 and with no global rival to invite caution. You have to keep reminding yourself this is not fantasy: that truly dangerous men, such as Perle and Rumsfeld and Cheney, have power. The thread running through their ruminations is the importance of the media: "the prioritised task of bringing on board journalists of repute to accept our position".

"Our position" is code for lying. Certainly, as a journalist, I have never known official lying to be more pervasive than today. We may laugh at the vacuities in Tony Blair's "Iraq dossier" and Jack Straw's inept lie that Iraq has developed a nuclear bomb (which his minions rushed to "explain"). But the more insidious lies, justifying an unprovoked attack on Iraq and linking it to would-be terrorists who are said to lurk in every Tube station, are routinely channelled as news. They are not news; they are black propaganda.

This corruption makes journalists and broadcasters mere ventriloquists' dummies. An attack on a nation of 22 million suffering people is discussed by liberal commentators as if it were a subject at an academic seminar, at which pieces can be pushed around a map, as the old imperialists used to do.

The issue for these humanitarians is not primarily the brutality of modern imperial domination, but how "bad" Saddam Hussein is. There is no admission that their decision to join the war party further seals the fate of perhaps thousands of innocent Iraqis condemned to wait on America's international death row. Their doublethink will not work. You cannot support murderous piracy in the name of humanitarianism. Moreover, the extremes of American fundamentalism that we now face have been staring at us for too long for those of good heart and sense not to recognise them.

[Patrician]

Originally posted by SmallTimeThug
.......are terrible dangerous and dishonest people.

were you not the one rebuking me for stereotyping liberals??? lol!

[Patrician]

You and renee jump from bashing neocons to jews with one silly stereotype after another. Don't you habe anything else you think about that you might want to post on?