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Robert Kagan -- a despicable Iraq war proponent,
 a peddler of false dichotomy between neoliberalism and authoritariam

"Being  a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child molester" ~Caitlin Johnstone

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  The Neocons never cease to amaze me and their latest stunt with Venezuela falls into this bizarre category of events which are both absolutely unthinkable and simultaneously absolutely predictable. This apparent logical contradiction is the direct result of a worldview and mindset which is, I believe, unique to the Neocons: a mix of imperial hubris and infinite arrogance, a complete lack of decency, a total contempt for the rest of mankind, crass ignorance, a narcissist/sociopath's inability to have any kind of empathy or imagine another guy's reaction and, finally, last but most certainly not least, crass stupidity.

Saker, The US aggression against Venezuela as a diagnostic tool Feb 4, 2019

"And you could say in some respects this 'shadow behind the power' that makes money off war, period, no matter who's the belligerent, makes money off that volatility now, especially with computers that are able to assist them in doing so, like currency manipulation, for example, or just general speculation. And they don't care about what they're doing to the real economy, because they're raking in the dough."

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell

In his volume Cultural Insurrections, Kevin MacDonald has accurately described neoconservatism as “a complex interlocking professional and family network centered around Jewish publicists and organizers flexibly deployed to recruit the sympathies of both Jews and non-Jews in harnessing the wealth and power of the United States in the service of Israel.”[3]Kevin MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilizations, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism, The Occidental Press, 2007, p. 122. The proof of the neocons’ crypto-Israelism is their U.S. foreign policy:

“The confluence of their interests as Jews in promoting the policies of the Israeli right wing and their construction of American interests allows them to submerge or even deny the relevance of their Jewish identity while posing as American patriots. […]

Indeed, since neoconservative Zionism of the Likud Party variety is well known for promoting a confrontation between the United States and the entire Muslim world, their policy recommendations best fit a pattern of loyalty to their ethnic group, not to America.”[4]Kevin McDonald, Cultural Insurrection, op. cit., p. 66.

Laurent Guyénot, The Unz Review. Apr 8, 2019

 

 

If we choose one phase to define Robert Kagan that would be "the second rate". He is a mediocre political scientist (mostly he is a propagandist), who got his position mostly due to nepotism.  He tried to compensate this fundamental deficiency with arrogance. He fares better as a MIC propagandist. and staunch advocate of Neoconservatism. According to Wikipedia

In 2008, Kagan wrote an article titled "Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776" for World Affairs, describing the main components of American Neoconservatism as a belief in the rectitude of applying US moralism to the world stage, support for the US to act alone, the promotion of American-style liberty and democracy in other countries, the belief in American hegemony,[31] the confidence in US military power, and a distrust of international institutions.[32] According to Kagan, his foreign-policy views are "deeply rooted in American history and widely shared by Americans".[33]

But he is a talented propagandist, the lobbyist of MIC. Even such an expert in political bullsh*t as Obama admired his skills as a propagandist.   His main topic is inciting hostility to Russia. Because without this hostility there will be  no cushy MIC positions, no big money speaking gigs, no fat book deals, no ‘ThinkTanks’ gravy, no government agency appointments, and so on  and  so forth.

But as a political analyst he is intellectual mediocrity, or worse.  Looking at the history of his prognostications one can only ask, why this guy ws not send packing before.  And still is being able to publish his crap in major MSM.   Kagan has been an argent supporter of Iraq invasion, which was based on total lies, but served interesting of US MIC and , especially Israel, really well.  As neocons  are lobbyists for MIC this combination of a talent of propagandist and writer with upper mediocrity as intellectual, and, especially, as a political analyst  is actually is the defining feature of neocons intellectual, be it Kagan,, Bill Kristol, or Max Boot.

All of them advocated Iraq war and those bottomfeeders should commit hara-kiri and send all their ill gotten money to the families of the victims of Iraq war. The fact that they have access to MSM is the sign of complete domination of military industrial complex and Israel in the US political scene. 

Unable to earn "honest living" (although they probably would be good copywriters) they just discovered (or in case of Kristol and Kagan their parents discovered for them)  that being a MIC lobbyist means money they can never earn elsewhere.

American exceptionalism now confined to Washington and few others regions of the USA. But since those regions control the MSM and foreign policy, the world is finding itself more and more contemptuous of the arrogant, hypocritical superpower righteously condemning the other countries as being uncooperative just before begging for their help.

As a political analyst  Robert Kagan is a weakling and like Max Boot would be downgraded to painting house, if MIC support seize to exist. In political science you need a solid framework in order to be able to understand things to write about that. That's why some  former Trotskyites such as James Burnham were not bad political analysts. In case of Kagan, this philosophical framework is completely absent.  He writes from the preconceived agenda as if trying to mold the world to his dangerous agenda of "full spectrum dominance." At least on paper. 

Kagan was one of the cheerleaders on the disastrous for the USA geopolitical position and prestige war in Iraq and as such should commit hara-kiri. But he does not have any honor, unlike Japanese militarists. He is a typical chickenhawk.  A weakling pretending to be a war dog. 

As for his predictions about the US future and desirable course of foreign policy -- they concentrate on  the task of  preservation of the global neoliberal empire the USA established after the dissolution of the USSR. An old saying "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans" is fully applicable. 

He does not understand that the empire became too costly to maintain and the US people are paying huge price for his jingoism with their health and well well-being (and sometimes with lives). he just counting his Benjamins. The reality it does not matter -- as any lobbyist he does not care about common  Americans ("deplorable" at Hillary called them). His dual loyalty are not that uncommon for the MIC lobbyists. Neocons typically put Israel first.

In case of Max Boot some explained this shortsightness by the fact that he is a former émigré from Soviet Russia, who wanted to be "more Catholic than the Pope."  He is so pious about the USA that it creates strong negative reaction. It is also difficult for an émigré raised within based on deception culture of  fake Jewish "refugees" (in reality economic migrants) from Soviet Russia to understand the USA neoliberalism and the genesis of global imperial ambitions (aka "full spectrum dominance") that arose in late 80th among the US elite with the weakening and then collapse of the USSR.  In  an way the existence of the USSR prevented the US elite from going completely bonkers.

In case of Kagan his complete detachment from reality can partially be an be explained by greed (for a historian becoming MIC lobbyist is pretty lucrative in money dimension career move)  although such a move entails complete betrayal of his  academic upbringing and  culture.

I would stress the deep provinciality of his worldview.  The fact that  the USA geostrategic position deteriorated due the collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 and economic  rise of the EU, China, Japan and South Korea makes current US policies simply reckless and support for them akin to treason.  Correspondingly the USA military dominance also is challenged despite enormous size of Pentagon budget due to disastrous, neocon inspired wars in Middle East and Afghanistan, the rise of China (and possible alliance of China and Russia, which means the end of the US military supremacy) as well as emergence new nuclear powers such as India and Pakistan as well as (currently weak) attempts by EU to escape the vassal status and create their own army.  

Potential diminishing of the role of the dollar as world reserve currency is another  development that somewhat weaken the USA geopolitical position, although the dollar position as the "first among equals" will probably continue for foreseeable  future.  Add to this slipping technological superiority due to transition of high-tech manufacturing to China (the rise of Huawei, which currently the USA is trying  to reverse, is the result of those development)

Along with other neocons Kagan definitely helped to destroy carefully constructed  post WWII order (based on Yalta agreements), but it unclear whether what the USA instead gets is a better deal.  It is definitely created a more dangerous, less predictable geopolitical environment.

All his papers, which are also second rate (which makes him somewhat similar to Max Book, although Max Boot is mostly third rate character, which only in some cases reaches the second rate level) have value only as propaganda booklets for MIC.  He helps them to make money as a lobbyist  and is lavishly paid for his  despicable services.

Wikipedia tells us that Robert Kagan (born September 26, 1958 in Athens, Greece) is a historian, and foreign-policy commentator. He is neither. He is first a foremost MIC lobbyist but several other sleazy characters in Washington, DC  Like Max Boot this shady character is just yet another MIC wardog -- a well paid MIC lobbyist.  While Kagan is considered to be leading neoconservative, intellectually there is nothing leading in this guy.  All his  papers are filled with banalities and clichés. Her forte is promotion of American exeptionalism and jingoism. Real analysis of the situation in the worlds and attempts to decipher emerging trends, which are sine qua non for any real political analyst are absolution absent. hi mostly tried to fit the world into his brain dead neocon schemes. Valuable insight are "missing in action".  Moreover as he spend his life in the USA his papers spell with provincialism (reading Kagan you understand why British elite despise American elite as uncultured provincials).

He does not understand Western Europe, to say nothing about Russia, and China. He views them via simplistic propaganda lenses of WaPo (aka Bezos blog) and his  role of MIC lobbyist.

A co-founder of the neocon Project for the New American Century, Kagan is also is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. So he operates within the limits of  traditional neocon territory.  Concil of forign relations is probably the leading thing tank which is negating any chance for a gradual, phased dismantling of the US neoliberal empire (which after collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 is unsustainable, the question is not if, but when, and how). Creating instead a dynamic in which a sudden collapse becomes more probable.

Unfortunately Kagan has been a foreign policy adviser to US Republican presidential candidates as well as Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, when Clinton was Secretary of State under President Obama (which characterizes Hillary as a warmongering neocon  and she  really is such). He writes a monthly column on world affairs for the Washington Post, and is a contributing editor at The New Republic.

Neoconservatism runs  in the whole family as those "historians" really want to improve their material wellbeing by doubling as lobbyists for MIC. Robert Kagan is the son of historian Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale University who is viewed  by some people as specialist in the history of the Peloponnesian War. In reality he is just another  despicable neocon, and a neocon can be a good historian by definition.

False dichotomy between neoliberalism and authoritarianism

Neoliberalism is a political ideology. Authoritarianism, like democracy, is a method of government. Neoliberal authoritarianism is possible (Chile Pinochet). So is anti-neoliberal democracy, although due due to the dominance of neoliberalism and the geopolitical power of the USA which is hell-bent of destroying such regimes it is nowhere to be  seen. Any opposing the USA regime can survive if and only if it is at least partially authoritarian; otherwise the USA will quickly organize a color revolution, injecting huge amount of money to distro the will of electorate,  and install their marionette.   Even clearly neoliberal (and definitely corrupt as any neoliberal is ) president Yanukovich was deposed by Washington in a  color revolution (EuroMaydan) when it tried to play the West against Russia to get some benefits for Ukraine. Kagan's wife, Dick Cheney protégé Victoria Nuland was instrumental in this installation of far right government in Ukraine (see "Fuck the EU": neocons show EU its real place ).  See, for example, letter of G7 ambassadors to Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov(March 17, 2018) in which G7 ambassadors are urging  him to act against violent political extremist groups who might threaten to disrupt the upcoming vote and usurp the role of the Ukrainian National Police and to consider outlawing them down the road ( G7 Letter Takes Aim At Role Of Violent Extremists In Ukrainian Society, Election )

'They Intimidate Citizens, Damage Ukraine's Reputation'

In the letter that was addressed to Avakov on March 15, French Ambassador Isabelle Dumont wrote on behalf of her fellow ambassadors that "the G7 group is concerned by extreme political movements in Ukraine, whose violent actions are worrying in themselves."

"They intimidate Ukrainian citizens, attempt to usurp the role of the National Police in safeguarding elections, and damage the Ukrainian government's national and international reputation," Dumont continued, in a thinly veiled reference to the National Corps and National Militia, the far-right Azov group's political and vigilante wings, respectively.

... ... ...

'Nationalist Hate Groups'

The National Corps and National Militia were products of the Azov Battalion, a volunteer military regiment formed in the early days of the conflict against Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine that began in 2014. The battalion has been accused by international human rights groups of "war crimes" on the battlefield and has since been brought under the control of the National Guard, which is overseen by Avakov.

Members of the National Corps and National Militia have been blamed for multiple violent attacks on minorities in Ukraine, particularly Roma and LGBTI persons, in the past year.

The U.S. State Department described those far-right entities as "nationalist hate groups" in its Ukraine country report on Human Rights for 2018 released on March 13.

.... ... ...

On March 9, the National Corps and National Militia clashed with police outside the presidential administration in Kyiv and later in Cherkasy, where Poroshenko was campaigning. At least 15 police officers were wounded.

"The violent incidents of March 9 were a reminder that, just a few weeks ahead of the elections, one crucial challenge is to prevent an escalation of tensions," Dumont wrote in the letter to Avakov. "We have noted with concern that the very same groups involved in the violent incidents have registered as election observers and publicly threatened to use violence should they consider that election fraud is occurring."

Indeed, Ukraine's Central Election Commission has approved the National Militia to monitor the polling. Soon after that announcement, the group's spokesman warned that "if law enforcers turn a blind eye to outright violations and don't want to document them," then they plan to follow the lead of a group leader who said they would "punch someone in the face in the name of justice...without hesitation."

The idea the neoliberalism is necessary democratic is compete nonsense.  The nature of democracy in the USA (democracy for whom? For top one percent (or top 10% ) as in one dollar one vote?) is also open  to review. While elections are democratic, the selection of candidates is clearly undemocratic and involves intelligence agencies (which derails Sanders in 2016 elections). Modifying famous Stalin's quote we can say -- it does not matter how people vote, what matter is who is allowed to became a candidate.

Neoliberalism in its many manifestations – economic, social, political – is often imposed from above on unwilling populations in decidedly undemocratic ways. Economic neoliberalization in developing countries, for instance, is often the product of brutal direct pressure from Western lenders (neocolonialism) and the International Monetary Fund (debt slavery). It’s certainly not democratic.

The point here is that liberalism vs. authoritarianism is a false dichotomy. Just a cute propaganda cliché. If nothing else, it ignores the vast differences between different regimes which are labeled as ‘authoritarian’ or ‘democratic’. For example,  if we take Hungary it is difficult to point out were exactly it stands. Hungary certainly have democratic elections, but at the same time is has right wing government.  At the same time it is completely different from North Korea to put them into one basket of  evil "authoritarian regimes" is just silly. And this is what Kagan tried to do for the propaganda purposes. Propaganda does not needs to be logical. Just attractive and simplistic. 

So when this propagandist label both this is  not oversimplification, this is the agenda of "full spectrum dominance" in action. any state that for some reason opposes the USA hegemony is authoritarian, and vassals including Saudi are all democratic. Very convenient, and very simple.  To the rise of the " authoritarianism" should be translated from "Kagan Speak" to regular English as the state which is some way oppose the USA hegemony.

And BTW if Hungary is authoritarian, what about his favorite country -- Israel  with  far right wing politician Netanyahu at the helm and his Likud party, the program of which contains many elements that can be classified as neo-fascist ? It is close to Kahanism, which is a neofascist Jewish movement known for advocacy of violence against Arabs, both Palestinian and Arab-Israeli.

If you read the following quote  from his long long essay  In WaPo you will instantly recognize it as sophisticated propaganda treat called "demonizing the enemy"  directed on people who  does not have clear definition of what authoritarianism means

Authoritarianism has now returned as a geopolitical force, with strong nations such as China and Russia championing anti-liberalism as an alternative to a teetering liberal hegemony. … It has returned armed with new and hitherto unimaginable tools of social control and disruption … reaching into the very heart of liberal societies to undermine them from within.

Simplifying authoritarianism is both a personality type and the hierarchical method of governance used in military, large corporations and government institutions.  

As for personality type such people have a high degree of willingness to submit to authorities they perceive as established and legitimate, who adhere to societal conventions and norms and who are hostile and punitive in their attitudes towards people who do not adhere to them. Often they are "kiss up,. kick down personalities." They prefer punishment over other means of influence of deviant behaviour. They value uniformity and are in favor of using group authority, including coercion, to achieve it. In short, that corresponds to the type of people who generally flock to the Republican Party in the USA and Kagan considers himself to be a Republican. Pot, kettle, black   ;-)

As a governance type it is closely related to bureaucracy (as Thatcher said for a different topic --  "there is no alternative" ;-) . Any hierarchical organization is simultaneously authoritarian. On state governance level the extreme form authoritarianism means monarchy.  So KSA is by definition an authoritarian state. Of course, sleazy MIC stooge Kagan prefers to omit this interesting fact.

Biographic trivia

His brother, Frederick, is a military historian and author is yes another neocon. Kagan managed to get a BA in history (1980) from Yale (that's a low, almost community college level of education with some training in color revolution mechanics ;-).   But he is a good writer and talanted (abiet skeasy) propagandist journalist, who as early as 1979 he had been Editor in Chief of the Yale Political Monthly, a periodical that he is credited with reviving.

 He later earned an MPP from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a PhD in American history from American University in Washington, D.C. The latter is  as far from Ivy Scholl universities as one  can get (PhD from American University is a bad joke). so they do not cout. BA in history from Yale remain his only education and that's not enough.   He never did any important research or Ph.D. He instantly switch to journalism and propaganda.

Kagan is married to the American diplomat Victoria Nuland, who is Cheney protégée and was Ambassador to NATO. She was the State department spopeswoman which is dead end position for any diplomat. But somehow Hillary with her feminist inclinations appointed her as Assistant Secretary of European and Eurasian Affairs in the Barack Obama administration. in thsi role Nuland was one of persons responsible to EuroMaydan color revolution in Ukraine (see "F*ck the EU": State Department neocons show EU its real place)

Ideas and career[edit]

In 1983, Robert Kagan was foreign policy advisor to New York Republican Representative Jack Kemp. From 1984–86, under the administration of Ronald Reagan, he was a speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz and a member of the State Department Policy Planning Staff. From 1986–1988 he served in the State Department Bureau of Inter-American Affairs.[8]

 Kagan co-founded the now-defunct Project for the New American Century with William Kristol in 1997.[2][4][9] From 1998 until August, 2010, Kagan was a Senior Associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was appointed senior fellow in the Center on United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in September 2010.[10][11][12][13]

During the 2008 presidential campaign he served as foreign policy advisor to John McCain, the Republican Party's nominee for President of the United States in the 2008 election.[14][15]

Kagan also serves on the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board under Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton[16] and John Kerry.[17] He is also a member of the board of directors for The Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).[18]

Andrew J. Bacevich referred to Kagan as "the chief neoconservative foreign-policy theorist" in reviewing Kagan's book The Return of history and the end of dreams.[19] A profile in the The Guardian described Kagan as being "uncomfortable" with the 'neocon' title, and stated that "he insists he is 'liberal' and 'progressive' in a distinctly American tradition".[20] In 2008, Kagan wrote an article titled "Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776" for World Affairs, describing the main components of American neoconservatism as a belief in the rectitude of applying US moralism to the world stage, support for the US to act alone, the promotion of American-style liberty and democracy in other countries, the belief in American hegemony,[21] the confidence in US military power, and a distrust of international institutions.[22] Kagan describes his foreign-policy views as "deeply rooted in American history and widely shared by Americans".[23]

In 2006, Kagan wrote that Russia and China are the greatest "challenge liberalism faces today": "Nor do Russia and China welcome the liberal West's efforts to promote liberal politics around the globe, least of all in regions of strategic importance to them. ... Unfortunately, al-Qaeda may not be the only challenge liberalism faces today, or even the greatest."[24]

Writings

Despite the low quality and mainly propaganda content of his writings, Karan, as a MIC lobbyst, gets unfettered  access to all major neoliberal MSMKagan is a columnist for the Washington Post and a contributing editor at The New Republic and in the past to now defunct Weekly Standard. He has also written for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, World Affairs, and Policy Review.

Regarding Kagan's opinion piece "Problem with Powell" (Washington Post July 23, 2000), scholar Guy Roberts states that "the PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan sought to explain core differences" between the positions of the neoconservatives and those of Colin Powell.[25] In that piece, Kagan wrote

The problem with Powell is his political and strategic judgment. He doesn’t believe the United States should enter conflicts without strong public support, but he also doesn't believe that the public will support anything. That kind of iron logic rules out almost every conceivable post-Cold War intervention.[26]

Clarence Lusane has described Kagan as blaming Powell “for Saddam Hussein remaining in power” in the Washington Post piece.[27] In a subsequent opinion piece "Spotlight on Colin Powell" (Philadelphia Inquirer, February 12, 2002) Kagan praised Powell for "Articulately defending the new Bush Doctrine" and declaring "his support for "regime change" in Iraq..."[28]

In 2003, Kagan's book, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, published on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, created something of a sensation through its assertions that Europeans tended to favor peaceful resolutions of international disputes while the United States takes a more "Hobbesian" view in which some kinds of disagreement can only be settled by force, or, as he put it: "Americans are from Mars and Europe is from Venus." New York Times book reviewer, Ivo H. Daalder wrote:

When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways, writes Mr. Kagan, concluding, in words already famous in another context, 'Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.'[29]

Kagan's book, Dangerous Nation: America's Place in the World from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (2006), argued forcefully against what he considers the widespread misconception that the United States had been isolationist since its inception. It was awarded a Lepgold Prize from Georgetown University.[30]

Kagan's essay "Not Fade Away: The Myth of American Decline" (The New Republic, February 2, 2012)[31] was very positively received by President Obama. Josh Rogin reported in Foreign Policy that the president "spent more than 10 minutes talking about it...going over its arguments paragraph by paragraph."[32] That essay was excerpted from his book, The World America Made (2012).

John Bew and Kagan lectured on March 27, 2014, on Realpolitik and American Exceptionalism at the Library of Congress.[8][33]

Kagan books

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[Mar 21, 2021] Kagan's vision ans a typical neocon blideness

Mar 21, 2021 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Mar 20 2021 0:11 utc | 68

emersonreturn @64--

I'm in the middle of Armstrong's essay and am at the first reference to Kagan's vision:

"What should that role be? Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the 'evil empire,' the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America's security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world .'

It's absolutely clear that Kagan has no clue as to the reality of what is actually the objective of the Neoliberal Parasites running the Outlaw US Empire; for aside from "advancing its interests," the Parasites have zero motivation to do any of that as their sole ambition/goal is to vacuum up all the wealth they can and leave a shell just as they planned and failed with Russia, but have succeeded elsewhere. And as for principles, the reality is it has none, nor does it have any friends, just vassals and victims. This analogy by Armstrong's excellent:

"The U.S. is sitting on a dragon and it daren't get off or the dragon will kill it. But because it can't kill the dragon, it must sit on it forever: no escape. And dragon's eggs are hatching out all around: think how much bigger the Russian, Chinese and Iranian dragons are today than they were a quarter-century ago when Kagan & Co so confidently started PNAC; think how bigger they'll be in another....

"But the more sanctions, the stronger Russia gets: as an analogy, think of sanctions on Russia as similar to the over-use of antibiotics – Russia is becoming immune."

And tying it all up is this excellent summation:

"Has there ever been a subject on which people have been so wrong for so long as Russia? How many times have they said Putin's finished? Remember when cheese was going to bring him down? Always a terminal economic crisis. A year ago they were sure COVID would do it. A U.S. general is in Ukraine and Kiev's heavy weapons are moving east but, no, it's Putin who, for ego reasons – and his "failing" economy – wants the war. Why do they keep doing it? Well, it's easy money – Putin (did we tell you he was in the KGB?) wants to expand Russia and rule forever; therefore, he's about to invade somebody. He doesn't, no problem, our timely warning scared him off; we'll change the date and regurgitate it next year. In the meantime his despotic rule trembles because of some-triviality-of-the-moment. These pieces write themselves: the anti-Russia business is the easiest scam ever. And there's the difficulty of admitting you're wrong: how can somebody like Kagan, such a triumphantasiser back then, admit that it's all turned to dust and worse, turned to dust because they took his advice? Much better to press on – it's not as if anybody in the lügenpresse will call him out or deny him space. Finally, these people are locked in psychological projection: because they can only envisage military expansion, they assume the other guy is equally obsessed and so they must expand to counter his expansion. They suspect everybody of suspecting them. Their hostility sees hostility everywhere. Their belligerence finds belligerence. The hyperpower is forever compelled to respond to lesser powers. They look outside, see themselves and fear; in their mental universe the USA is arrogantly strong and fearfully weak at the same time."

The Walking Dead is finally becoming a metaphor for the Outlaw US Empire, its policies, and what it terms values--which aren't values but vices. But TWD was fiction and was thus capable of reforming itself. The Empire's goals and polices are essentially the same as in 1940 and even further back to 1913, and haven't changed very much, being just as illegal and immoral then as now. What's different are the "Dragons" which didn't exist in 1918 or 1944, and the Parasites have almost total control that's finally seeing domestic pushback.

Jackrabbit , Mar 20 2021 2:17 utc | 87

karlof1 @Mar20 0:11 #67

It's absolutely clear that Kagan has no clue as to the reality of what is actually the objective of the Neoliberal Parasites running the Outlaw US Empire.

Why do you give him the benefit of the doubt?

Are we really to believe that Kagan, and others like him, talk of these things for DECADES and yet aren't aware of the ramifications?

IMO it is absolutely clear that he knows the neoliberal reality as well as the neocon and neocolonial realities.

But we are supposed to avoid cynicism and be polite so as to not be thought a malcontent?

=

@karlof1 The need for more cynicism is a theme of mine (which I've written about at moa many times) so please don't respond in a knee-jerk way.

!!

[Jan 19, 2021] Few sights in Washington are more familiar than an intellectual urging "total war" from the safety of the keyboard

Highly recommended!
In a way neocon jingoism serve as a smoke scree to sitrct "depolables" from the decline of the standard of living under neoliberalism.
Jan 19, 2021 | www.nybooks.com

Orthodoxy of the Elites - by Jackson Lears - The New York Review of Books

By 2016 the concept of "liberal democracy," once bright with promise, had dulled into a neoliberal politics that was neither liberal nor democratic. The Democratic Party's turn toward market-driven policies, the bipartisan dismantling of the public sphere, the inflight marriage of Wall Street and Silicon Valley in the cockpit of globalization -- these interventions constituted the long con of neoliberal governance, which enriched a small minority of Americans while ravaging most of the rest.

Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers, Editor in Chief of Raritan, and the author of ­Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920, among other books. (January 2021)

[Jun 15, 2020] Opinion Are Neocons Getting Ready to Ally With Hillary Clinton by Jacob Heilbrunn

Jul 05, 2014 | www.nytimes.com
Neocons like the historian Robert Kagan may be connecting with Hillary Clinton to try to regain influence in foreign policy. Credit... Left, Stephanie Sinclair/VII via Corbis; right, Colin McPherson/Corbis

WASHINGTON -- AFTER nearly a decade in the political wilderness, the neoconservative movement is back, using the turmoil in Iraq and Ukraine to claim that it is President Obama, not the movement's interventionist foreign policy that dominated early George W. Bush-era Washington, that bears responsibility for the current round of global crises.

Even as they castigate Mr. Obama, the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver's seat of American foreign policy.

To be sure, the careers and reputations of the older generation of neocons -- Paul D. Wolfowitz, L. Paul Bremer III, Douglas J. Feith, Richard N. Perle -- are permanently buried in the sands of Iraq. And not all of them are eager to switch parties: In April, William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, said that as president Mrs. Clinton would "be a dutiful chaperone of further American decline."

But others appear to envisage a different direction -- one that might allow them to restore the neocon brand, at a time when their erstwhile home in the Republican Party is turning away from its traditional interventionist foreign policy.

It's not as outlandish as it may sound. Consider the historian Robert Kagan, the author of a recent, roundly praised article in The New Republic that amounted to a neo-neocon manifesto. He has not only avoided the vitriolic tone that has afflicted some of his intellectual brethren but also co-founded an influential bipartisan advisory group during Mrs. Clinton's time at the State Department.

Mr. Kagan has also been careful to avoid landing at standard-issue neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute; instead, he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, that citadel of liberalism headed by Strobe Talbott, who was deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton and is considered a strong candidate to become secretary of state in a new Democratic administration. (Mr. Talbott called the Kagan article "magisterial," in what amounts to a public baptism into the liberal establishment.)

Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Kagan and others have insisted on maintaining the link between modern neoconservatism and its roots in muscular Cold War liberalism. Among other things, he has frequently praised Harry S. Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, drawing a line from him straight to the neocons' favorite president: "It was not Eisenhower or Kennedy or Nixon but Reagan whose policies most resembled those of Acheson and Truman."

Other neocons have followed Mr. Kagan's careful centrism and respect for Mrs. Clinton. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in The New Republic this year that "it is clear that in administration councils she was a principled voice for a strong stand on controversial issues, whether supporting the Afghan surge or the intervention in Libya."

And the thing is, these neocons have a point. Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian rebels; likened Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, to Adolf Hitler; wholeheartedly backs Israel; and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.

It's easy to imagine Mrs. Clinton's making room for the neocons in her administration. No one could charge her with being weak on national security with the likes of Robert Kagan on board.

Of course, the neocons' latest change in tack is not just about intellectual affinity. Their longtime home, the Republican Party, where presidents and candidates from Reagan to Senator John McCain of Arizona supported large militaries and aggressive foreign policies, may well nominate for president Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has been beating an ever louder drum against American involvement abroad.

In response, Mark Salter, a former chief of staff to Senator McCain and a neocon fellow traveler, said that in the event of a Paul nomination, "Republican voters seriously concerned with national security would have no responsible recourse" but to support Mrs. Clinton for the presidency.

Still, Democratic liberal hawks, let alone the left, would have to swallow hard to accept any neocon conversion. Mrs. Clinton herself is already under fire for her foreign-policy views -- the journalist Glenn Greenwald, among others, has condemned her as "like a neocon, practically." And humanitarian interventionists like Samantha Power, the ambassador to the United Nations, who opposed the second Iraq war, recoil at the militaristic unilateralism of the neocons and their inveterate hostility to international institutions like the World Court.

But others in Mrs. Clinton's orbit, like Michael A. McFaul, the former ambassador to Russia and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a neocon haven at Stanford, are much more in line with thinkers like Mr. Kagan and Mr. Boot, especially when it comes to issues like promoting democracy and opposing Iran.

Far from ending, then, the neocon odyssey is about to continue. In 1972, Robert L. Bartley, the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal and a man who championed the early neocon stalwarts, shrewdly diagnosed the movement as representing "something of a swing group between the two major parties." Despite the partisan battles of the early 2000s, it is remarkable how very little has changed.

[Jan 30, 2020] The Neocons Strike Back by Jacob Heilbrunn

Notable quotes:
"... A chorus of neocons rushed to second his praise: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer and prominent Never Trumper, lauded Trump's intestinal fortitude, while Representative Liz Cheney hailed Trump's "decisive action." It was Carlson who was left sputtering about the forever wars. "Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades," Carlson said . "They still want it now. Let's hope they haven't finally gotten it." ..."
"... Neoconservatism as a foreign policy ideology has been badly discredited over the last two decades, thanks to the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation. It now appears that Trump intends to make Soleimani's killing -- which has nearly drawn the U.S. into yet another conflict in the Middle East and, in typical neoconservative fashion, ended up backfiring and undercutting American goals in the region -- a central part of his 2020 reelection bid . ..."
"... The neocons are starting to realize that Trump's presidency, at least when it comes to foreign policy, is no less vulnerable to hijacking than those of previous Republican presidents, including the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The leading hawks inside and outside the administration shaping its approach to Iran include Robert O'Brien, Bolton's disciple and successor as national security adviser; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook; Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; David Wurmser, a former adviser to Bolton; and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton. Perhaps no one better exemplifies the neocon ethos better than Cotton, a Kristol protégé who soaked up the teachings of the political philosopher Leo Strauss while studying at Harvard. Others who have been baying for conflict with Iran include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now Trump's personal lawyer and partner in Ukrainian crime. In June 2018, Giuliani went to Paris to address the National Council of Resistance of Iran, whose parent organization is the Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MeK. Giuliani, who has been on the payroll of the MeK for years, demanded -- what else? -- regime change. ..."
"... The fresh charge into battle of what Sidney Blumenthal once aptly referred to as an ideological light brigade brings to mind Hobbes's observation in Leviathan : "All men that are ambitious of military command are inclined to continue the causes of war; and to stir up trouble and sedition; for there is no honor military but by war; nor any such hope to mend an ill game, as by causing a new shuffle." The neocons, it appears, have caused a new shuffle. ..."
"... the killing of Soleimani revealed that the neocon military-intellectual complex is very much still intact, with the ability to spring back to life from a state of suspended animation in an instant. Its hawkish tendencies remain widely prevalent not only in the Republican Party but also in the media, the think-tank universe, and in the liberal-hawk precincts of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the influence and reach of the anti-war right remains nascent; even if this contingent has popular support, it doesn't enjoy much backing in Washington beyond the mood swings of the mercurial occupant of the Oval Office. ..."
"... The neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies that might once have seemed outré. ..."
"... But it was the neoconservatives, not the paleocons, who amassed influence in the 1990s and took over the GOP's foreign policy wing. Veteran neocons like Michael Ledeen were joined by a younger generation of journalists and policymakers that included Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol (who founded The Weekly Standard in 1994), Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas J. Feith. The neocons consistently pushed for a hard line against Iraq and Iran. In his 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed, for example, Ledeen, an expert on Italian fascism, declared that the right, rather than the left, should adhere to the revolutionary tradition of toppling dictatorships. In his 2002 book, The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen stated , "Creative destruction is our middle name. We tear down the old order every day." ..."
"... Still, a number of neocons, including David Frum, Max Boot, Anne Applebaum, Jennifer Rubin, and Kristol himself, have continued to condemn Trump vociferously for his thuggish instincts at home and abroad. They are not seeking high-profile government careers in the Trump administration and so have been able to reinvent themselves as domestic regime-change advocates, something they have done quite skillfully. In fact, their writings are more pungent now that they have been liberated from the costive confines of the movement. ..."
"... And so, urged on by Mike Pompeo, a staunch evangelical Christian, and Iraq War–era figures like David Wurmser , Trump is apparently prepared to target Iran for destruction. In a tweet, he dismissed his national security adviser, the Bolton protégé Robert O'Brien, for declaring that the strike against Soleimani would force Iran to negotiate: "Actually, I couldn't care less if they negotiate," he said . "Will be totally up to them but, no nuclear weapons and 'don't kill your protesters.'" Neocons have been quick to recognize the new, more belligerent Trump -- and the potential maneuvering room he's now created for their movement. Jonathan S. Tobin, a former editor at Commentary and a contributor to National Review , rejoiced in Haaretz that "the neo-isolationist wing of the GOP, for which Carlson is a spokesperson, is losing the struggle for control of Trump's foreign policy." Tobin, however, added an important caveat: "When it comes to Iran, Trump needs no prodding from the likes of Bolton to act like a neoconservative. Just as important, the entire notion of anyone -- be it Carlson, former White House senior advisor Steve Bannon, or any cabinet official like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- being able to control Trump is a myth." ..."
"... One reason is institutional. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Hudson Institute, and AEI have all been sounding the tocsin about Iran for decades. Once upon a time, the neocons were outliers. Now they're the new establishment, exerting a kind of gravitational pull on debate, pulling politicians and a variety of news organizations into their orbit. The Hudson Institute, for example, recently held an event with former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who exhorted Iran's Revolutionary Guard to "peel away" from the mullahs and endorsed the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign. ..."
"... Meanwhile, Wolfowitz, also writing in the Times , has popped up to warn Trump against trying to leave Syria: "To paraphrase Trotsky's aphorism about war, you may not be interested in the Middle East, but the Middle East is interested in you." With the "both-sides" ethos that prevails in the mainstream media, neocon ideas are just as good as any others for National Public Radio or The Washington Post, whose editorial page, incidentally, championed the Iraq War and has been imbued with a neocon, or at least liberal-hawk, tinge ever since Fred Hiatt took it over in 2000. ..."
"... Above all, Trump hired Michael Flynn as his first national security adviser. Flynn was the co-author with Ledeen of a creepy tract called Field of Fight, in which they demanded a crusade against the Muslim world ..."
"... At a minimum, the traditional Republican hard-line foreign policy approach has now fused with neoconservatism so that the two are virtually indistinguishable. At a maximum, neoconservatism shapes the dominant foreign policy worldview in Washington, which is why Democrats were falling over themselves to assure voters that Soleimani -- a "bad guy" -- had it coming. Any objections that his killing might boomerang back on the U.S. are met with cries from the right that Democrats are siding with the enemy. This truly is a policy of "maximum pressure" at home and abroad. ..."
Jan 23, 2020 | newrepublic.com

There was a time not so long ago, before President Donald Trump's surprise decision early this year to liquidate the Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, when it appeared that America's neoconservatives were floundering. The president was itching to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He was staging exuberant photo-ops with a beaming Kim Jong Un. He was reportedly willing to hold talks with the president of Iran, while clearly preferring trade wars to hot ones.

Indeed, this past summer, Trump's anti-interventionist supporters in the conservative media were riding high. When he refrained from attacking Iran in June after it shot down an American drone, Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared , "Donald Trump was elected president precisely to keep us out of disaster like war with Iran." Carlson went on to condemn the hawks in Trump's Cabinet and their allies, who he claimed were egging the president on -- familiar names to anyone who has followed the decades-long neoconservative project of aggressively using military force to topple unfriendly regimes and project American power over the globe. "So how did we get so close to starting [a war]?" he asked. "One of [the hawks'] key allies is the national security adviser of the United States. John Bolton is an old friend of Bill Kristol's. Together they helped plan the Iraq War."

By the time Trump met with Kim in late June, becoming the first sitting president to set foot on North Korean soil, Bolton was on the outs. Carlson was on the president's North Korean junket, while Trump's national security adviser was in Mongolia. "John Bolton is absolutely a hawk," Trump told NBC in June. "If it was up to him, he'd take on the whole world at one time, OK?" In September, Bolton was fired.

The standard-bearer of the Republican Party had made clear his distaste for the neocons' belligerent approach to global affairs, much to the neocons' own entitled chagrin. As recently as December, Bolton, now outside the tent pissing in, was hammering Trump for "bluffing" through an announcement that the administration wanted North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. "The idea that we are somehow exerting maximum pressure on North Korea is just unfortunately not true," Bolton told Axios . Then Trump ordered the drone strike on Soleimani, drastically escalating a simmering conflict between Iran and the United States. All of a sudden the roles were reversed, with Bolton praising the president and asserting that Soleimani's death was " the first step to regime change in Tehran ." A chorus of neocons rushed to second his praise: Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer and prominent Never Trumper, lauded Trump's intestinal fortitude, while Representative Liz Cheney hailed Trump's "decisive action." It was Carlson who was left sputtering about the forever wars. "Washington has wanted war with Iran for decades," Carlson said . "They still want it now. Let's hope they haven't finally gotten it."

Neoconservatism as a foreign policy ideology has been badly discredited over the last two decades, thanks to the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation. It now appears that Trump intends to make Soleimani's killing -- which has nearly drawn the U.S. into yet another conflict in the Middle East and, in typical neoconservative fashion, ended up backfiring and undercutting American goals in the region -- a central part of his 2020 reelection bid .

The anti-interventionist right is freaking out. Writing in American Greatness, Matthew Boose declared , "[T]he Trump movement, which was generated out of opposition to the foreign policy blob and its endless wars, was revealed this week to have been co-opted to a great extent by neoconservatives seeking regime change." James Antle, the editor of The American Conservative, a publication founded in 2002 to oppose the Iraq War, asked , "Did Trump betray the anti-war right?"

In the blinding flash of one drone strike, neoconservatism was easily able to reinsert itself in the national conversation.

Their concerns are not unmerited. The neocons are starting to realize that Trump's presidency, at least when it comes to foreign policy, is no less vulnerable to hijacking than those of previous Republican presidents, including the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The leading hawks inside and outside the administration shaping its approach to Iran include Robert O'Brien, Bolton's disciple and successor as national security adviser; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook; Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; David Wurmser, a former adviser to Bolton; and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton. Perhaps no one better exemplifies the neocon ethos better than Cotton, a Kristol protégé who soaked up the teachings of the political philosopher Leo Strauss while studying at Harvard. Others who have been baying for conflict with Iran include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who is now Trump's personal lawyer and partner in Ukrainian crime. In June 2018, Giuliani went to Paris to address the National Council of Resistance of Iran, whose parent organization is the Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MeK. Giuliani, who has been on the payroll of the MeK for years, demanded -- what else? -- regime change.

The fresh charge into battle of what Sidney Blumenthal once aptly referred to as an ideological light brigade brings to mind Hobbes's observation in Leviathan : "All men that are ambitious of military command are inclined to continue the causes of war; and to stir up trouble and sedition; for there is no honor military but by war; nor any such hope to mend an ill game, as by causing a new shuffle." The neocons, it appears, have caused a new shuffle.


Donald Trump has not dragged us into war with Iran (yet). But the killing of Soleimani revealed that the neocon military-intellectual complex is very much still intact, with the ability to spring back to life from a state of suspended animation in an instant. Its hawkish tendencies remain widely prevalent not only in the Republican Party but also in the media, the think-tank universe, and in the liberal-hawk precincts of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the influence and reach of the anti-war right remains nascent; even if this contingent has popular support, it doesn't enjoy much backing in Washington beyond the mood swings of the mercurial occupant of the Oval Office.

But there was a time when the neoconservative coalition was not so entrenched -- and what has turned out to be its provisional state of exile lends some critical insight into how it managed to hang around respectable policymaking circles in recent years, and how it may continue to shape American foreign policy for the foreseeable future. When the neoconservatives came on the scene in the late 1960s, the Republican old guard viewed them as interlopers. The neocons, former Trotskyists turned liberals who broke with the Democratic Party over its perceived weakness on the Cold War, stormed the citadel of Republican ideology by emphasizing the relationship between ideas and political reality. Irving Kristol, one of the original neoconservatives, mused in 1985 that " what communists call the theoretical organs always end up through a filtering process influencing a lot of people who don't even know they're being influenced. In the end, ideas rule the world because even interests are defined by ideas."

At pivotal moments in modern American foreign policy, the neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies that might once have seemed outré. Jeane Kirkpatrick's seminal 1979 essay in Commentary, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," essentially set forth the lineaments of the Reagan doctrine. She assailed Jimmy Carter for attacking friendly authoritarian leaders such as the shah of Iran and Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza. She contended that authoritarian regimes might molt into democracies, while totalitarian regimes would remain impregnable to outside influence, American or otherwise. Ronald Reagan read the essay and liked it. He named Kirkpatrick his ambassador to the United Nations, where she became the most influential neocon of the era for her denunciations of Arab regimes and defenses of Israel. Her tenure was also defined by the notion that it was perfectly acceptable for America to cozy up to noxious regimes, from apartheid South Africa to the shah's Iran, as part of the greater mission to oppose the red menace.

The neocons supplied the patina of intellectual legitimacy for policies that might once have seemed outré.

There was always tension between Reagan's affinity for authoritarian regimes and his hard-line opposition to Communist ones. His sunny persona never quite gelled with Kirkpatrick's more gelid view that communism was an immutable force, and in 1982, in a major speech to the British Parliament at Westminster emphasizing the power of democracy and free speech, he declared his intent to end the Cold War on American terms. As Reagan's second term progressed and democracy and free speech actually took hold in the waning days of the Soviet Union, many hawks declared that it was all a sham. Indeed, not a few neocons were livid, claiming that Reagan was appeasing the Soviet Union. But after the USSR collapsed, they retroactively blessed him as the anti-Communist warrior par excellence and the model for the future. The right was now a font of happy talk about the dawn of a new age of liberty based on free-market economics and American firepower.

The fall of communism, in other words, set the stage for a new neoconservative paradigm. Francis Fukuyama's The End of History appeared a decade after Kirkpatrick's essay in Commentary and just before the Berlin Wall was breached on November 9, 1989. Here was a sharp break with the saturnine, realpolitik approach that Kirkpatrick had championed. Irving Kristol regarded it as hopelessly utopian -- "I don't believe a word of it," he wrote in a response to Fukuyama. But a younger generation of neocons, led by Irving's son, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan, embraced it. Fukuyama argued that Western, liberal democracy, far from being menaced, was now the destination point of the train of world history. With communism vanquished, the neocons, bearing the good word from Fukuyama, formulated a new goal: democracy promotion, by force if necessary, as a way to hasten history and secure the global order with the U.S. at its head. The first Gulf War in 1991, precipitated by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, tested the neocons' resolve and led to a break in the GOP -- one that would presage the rise of Donald Trump. For decades, Patrick Buchanan had been regularly inveighing against what he came to call the neocon " amen corner" in and around the Washington centers of power, including A.M. Rosenthal and Charles Krauthammer, both of whom endorsed the '91 Gulf War. The neocons were frustrated by the measured approach taken by George H.W. Bush. He refused to crow about the fall of the Berlin Wall and kicked the Iraqis out of Kuwait but declined to invade Iraq and "finish the job," as his hawkish critics would later put it. Buchanan then ran for the presidency in 1992 on an America First platform, reviving a paleoconservative tradition that would partly inform Trump's dark horse run in 2016.

But it was the neoconservatives, not the paleocons, who amassed influence in the 1990s and took over the GOP's foreign policy wing. Veteran neocons like Michael Ledeen were joined by a younger generation of journalists and policymakers that included Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol (who founded The Weekly Standard in 1994), Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas J. Feith. The neocons consistently pushed for a hard line against Iraq and Iran. In his 1996 book, Freedom Betrayed, for example, Ledeen, an expert on Italian fascism, declared that the right, rather than the left, should adhere to the revolutionary tradition of toppling dictatorships. In his 2002 book, The War Against the Terror Masters, Ledeen stated , "Creative destruction is our middle name. We tear down the old order every day."

We all know the painful consequences of the neocons' obsession with creative destruction. In his second inaugural address, three and a half years after 9/11, George W. Bush cemented neoconservative ideology into presidential doctrine: "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." The neocons' hubris had already turned into nemesis in Iraq, paving the way for an anti-war candidate in Barack Obama.

But it was Trump -- by virtue of running as a Republican -- who appeared to sound neoconservatism's death knell. He announced his Buchananesque policy of "America First" in a speech at Washington's Mayflower Hotel in 2016, signaling that he would not adhere to the long-standing Reaganite principles that had animated the party establishment.

The pooh-bahs of the GOP openly declared their disdain and revulsion for Trump, leading directly to the rise of the Never Trump movement, which was dominated by neocons. The Never Trumpers ended up functioning as an informal blacklist for Trump once he became president. Elliott Abrams, for example, who was being touted for deputy secretary of state in February 2017, was rejected when Steve Bannon alerted Trump to his earlier heresies (though he later reemerged, in January 2019, as Trump's special envoy to Venezuela, where he has pushed for regime change). Not a few other members of the Republican foreign policy establishment suffered similar fates.

Kristol's The Weekly Standard, which had held the neoconservative line through the Bush years and beyond , folded in 2018. Even the office building that used to house the American Enterprise Institute and the Standard, on the corner of 17th and M streets in Washington, has been torn down, leaving an empty, boarded-up site whose symbolism speaks for itself.


Still, a number of neocons, including David Frum, Max Boot, Anne Applebaum, Jennifer Rubin, and Kristol himself, have continued to condemn Trump vociferously for his thuggish instincts at home and abroad. They are not seeking high-profile government careers in the Trump administration and so have been able to reinvent themselves as domestic regime-change advocates, something they have done quite skillfully. In fact, their writings are more pungent now that they have been liberated from the costive confines of the movement.

It was Trump -- by virtue of running as a Republican -- who appeared to sound neoconservatism's death knell.

But other neocons -- the ones who want to wield positions of influence and might -- have, more often than not, been able to hold their noses. Stephen Wertheim, writing in The New York Review of Books, has perceptively dubbed this faction the anti-globalist neocons. Led by John Bolton, they believe Trump performed a godsend by elevating the term globalism "from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics," Wertheim argued . The U.S. need not bother with pesky multilateral institutions or international agreements or the entire postwar order, for that matter -- it's now America's way or the highway.

And so, urged on by Mike Pompeo, a staunch evangelical Christian, and Iraq War–era figures like David Wurmser , Trump is apparently prepared to target Iran for destruction. In a tweet, he dismissed his national security adviser, the Bolton protégé Robert O'Brien, for declaring that the strike against Soleimani would force Iran to negotiate: "Actually, I couldn't care less if they negotiate," he said . "Will be totally up to them but, no nuclear weapons and 'don't kill your protesters.'" Neocons have been quick to recognize the new, more belligerent Trump -- and the potential maneuvering room he's now created for their movement. Jonathan S. Tobin, a former editor at Commentary and a contributor to National Review , rejoiced in Haaretz that "the neo-isolationist wing of the GOP, for which Carlson is a spokesperson, is losing the struggle for control of Trump's foreign policy." Tobin, however, added an important caveat: "When it comes to Iran, Trump needs no prodding from the likes of Bolton to act like a neoconservative. Just as important, the entire notion of anyone -- be it Carlson, former White House senior advisor Steve Bannon, or any cabinet official like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- being able to control Trump is a myth."

In other words, whether the neocons themselves are occupying top positions in the Trump administration is almost irrelevant. The ideology itself has reemerged to a degree that even Trump himself seems hard pressed to resist it -- if he even wants to.

How were the neocons able to influence another Republican presidency, one that was ostensibly dedicated to curbing their sway?

One reason is institutional. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Hudson Institute, and AEI have all been sounding the tocsin about Iran for decades. Once upon a time, the neocons were outliers. Now they're the new establishment, exerting a kind of gravitational pull on debate, pulling politicians and a variety of news organizations into their orbit. The Hudson Institute, for example, recently held an event with former Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who exhorted Iran's Revolutionary Guard to "peel away" from the mullahs and endorsed the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign. The event was hosted by Michael Doran, a former senior director on George W. Bush's National Security Council and a senior fellow at the institute, who wrote in The New York Times on January 3, "The United States has no choice, if it seeks to stay in the Middle East, but to check Iran's military power on the ground." Then there's Jamie M. Fly, a former staffer to Senator Marco Rubio who was appointed this past August to head Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; he previously co-authored an essay in Foreign Affairs contending that it isn't enough to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities: "If the United States seriously considers military action, it would be better to plan an operation that not only strikes the nuclear program but aims to destabilize the regime, potentially resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis once and for all."

Meanwhile, Wolfowitz, also writing in the Times , has popped up to warn Trump against trying to leave Syria: "To paraphrase Trotsky's aphorism about war, you may not be interested in the Middle East, but the Middle East is interested in you." With the "both-sides" ethos that prevails in the mainstream media, neocon ideas are just as good as any others for National Public Radio or The Washington Post, whose editorial page, incidentally, championed the Iraq War and has been imbued with a neocon, or at least liberal-hawk, tinge ever since Fred Hiatt took it over in 2000.

But there are plenty of institutions in Washington, and neoconservatism's seemingly inescapable influence cannot be chalked up to the swamp alone. Some etiolated form of what might be called Ledeenism lingered on before taking on new life at the outset of the Trump administration. Trump's overt animus toward Muslims, for example, meant that figures such as Frank Gaffney, who opposed arms-control treaties with Moscow as a member of the Reagan administration and resigned in protest of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, achieved a new prominence. During the Obama administration, Gaffney, the head of the Center for Security Policy, claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the White House and National Security Agency.

Above all, Trump hired Michael Flynn as his first national security adviser. Flynn was the co-author with Ledeen of a creepy tract called Field of Fight, in which they demanded a crusade against the Muslim world: "We're in a world war against a messianic mass movement of evil people." It was one of many signs that Trump was susceptible to ideas of a civilizational battle against "Islamo-fascism," which Norman Podhoretz and other neocons argued, in the wake of 9/11, would lead to World War III. In their millenarian ardor and inflexible support for Israel, the neocons find themselves in a position precisely cognate to evangelical Christians -- both groups of true believers trying to enact their vision through an apostate. But perhaps the neoconservatives' greatest strength lies in the realm of ideas that Irving Kristol identified more than three decades ago. The neocons remain the winners of that battle, not because their policies have made the world or the U.S. more secure, but by default -- because there are so few genuinely alternative ideas that are championed with equal zeal. The foreign policy discussion surrounding Soleimani's killing -- which accelerated Iran's nuclear weapons program, diminished America's influence in the Middle East, and entrenched Iran's theocratic regime -- has largely occurred on a spectrum of the neocons' making. It is a discussion that accepts premises of the beneficence of American military might and hegemony -- Hobbes's "ill game" -- and naturally bends the universe toward more war.

At a minimum, the traditional Republican hard-line foreign policy approach has now fused with neoconservatism so that the two are virtually indistinguishable. At a maximum, neoconservatism shapes the dominant foreign policy worldview in Washington, which is why Democrats were falling over themselves to assure voters that Soleimani -- a "bad guy" -- had it coming. Any objections that his killing might boomerang back on the U.S. are met with cries from the right that Democrats are siding with the enemy. This truly is a policy of "maximum pressure" at home and abroad.

As Trump takes an extreme hard line against Iran, the neoconservatives may ultimately get their long-held wish of a war with the ayatollahs. When it ends in a fresh disaster, they can always argue that it only failed because it wasn't prosecuted vigorously enough -- and the shuffle will begin again.

Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of The National Interest and the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. @ JacobHeilbrunn

Read More Politics , The Soapbox , Donald Trump , Islamic Republic of Iran , Qassem Soleimani , Bill Kristol , Irving Kristol , David Frum , John Bolton , Norman Podhoretz , Doug Feith , Paul Wolfowitz , George W. Bush , George H.W. Bush , Ronald Reagan , Pat Buchanan , Mike Pompeo , Tom Cotton , Lindsey Graham , Rudy Giuliani , Gulf War , Iraq War , Cold War , Francis Fukuyama , Jeane Kirkpatrick

[Dec 30, 2019] Sanders probably understands the situation but still is pandering to MIC, while Warren sounds like a regular neocon, another Kagan

Notable quotes:
"... "Today I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or democracies around the world," Sanders said. "In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win." ..."
"... And yet, Warren too seems in thrall to the idea that the world order is shaping up to be one in which the white hats (Western democracies) must face off against the black hats (Eurasian authoritarians). Warren says that the "combination of authoritarianism and corrupt capitalism" of Putin's Russia and Xi's China "is a fundamental threat to democracy, both here in the United States and around the world." ..."
"... The Cold War echoes here are as unmistakable as they are worrying. As Princeton and NYU professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen has written, during the first Cold War, a "totalitarian school" of Soviet studies grew up around the idea "that a totalitarian 'quest for absolute power' at home always led to the 'dynamism' in Soviet behavior abroad was a fundamental axiom of cold-war Soviet studies and of American foreign policy." ..."
"... Cold warriors in both parties frequently mistook communism as a monolithic global movement. Neoprogressives are making this mistake today when they gloss over national context, history, and culture in favor of an all-encompassing theory that puts the "authoritarian" nature of the governments they are criticizing at the center of their diagnosis. ..."
"... By citing the threat to Western democracies posed by a global authoritarian axis, the neoprogressives are repeating the same mistake made by liberal interventionists and neoconservatives. They buy into the democratic peace theory, which holds without much evidence that a world order populated by democracies is likely to be a peaceful one because democracies allegedly don't fight wars against one another. ..."
"... George McGovern once observed that U.S. foreign policy "has been based on an obsession with an international Communist conspiracy that existed more in our minds than in reality." So too the current obsession with the global authoritarians. Communism wasn't a global monolith and neither is this. By portraying it as such, neoprogressives are midwifing bad policy. ..."
"... Some of these elected figures, like Trump and Farage, are symptoms of the failure of the neoliberal economic order. Others, like Orban and Kaczyński, are responses to anti-European Union sentiment and the migrant crises that resulted from the Western interventions in Libya and Syria. Many have more to do with conditions and histories specific to their own countries. Targeting them by painting them with the same broad brush is a mistake. ..."
"... "Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days," writes neoconservative-turned-Hillary Clinton surrogate Robert Kagan, "the one for which we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism." Max Boot also finds cause for concern. Boot, a modern-day reincarnation (minus the pedigree and war record) of the hawkish Cold War-era columnist Joe Alsop, believes that "the rise of populist authoritarianism is perhaps the greatest threat we face as a world right now." ..."
Dec 30, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

You can hear echoes of progressive realism in the statements of leading progressive lawmakers such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Ro Khanna. They have put ending America's support for the Saudi war on Yemen near the top of the progressive foreign policy agenda. On the stump, Sanders now singles out the military-industrial complex and the runaway defense budget for criticism. He promises, among other things, that "we will not continue to spend $700 billion a year on the military." These are welcome developments. Yet since November of 2016, something else has emerged alongside the antiwar component of progressive foreign policy that is not so welcome. Let's call it neoprogressive internationalism, or neoprogressivism for short.

Trump's administration brought with it the Russia scandal. To attack the president and his administration, critics revived Cold War attitudes. This is now part of the neoprogressive foreign policy critique. It places an "authoritarian axis" at its center. Now countries ruled by authoritarians, nationalists, and kleptocrats can and must be checked by an American-led crusade to make the world safe for progressive values. The problem with this neoprogressive narrative of a world divided between an authoritarian axis and the liberal West is what it will lead to: ever spiraling defense budgets, more foreign adventures, more Cold Wars -- and hot ones too.

Unfortunately, Senators Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have adopted elements of the neoprogressive program. At a much remarked upon address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the site of Churchill's 1946 address, Sanders put forth a vision of a Manichean world. Instead of a world divided by the "Iron Curtain" of Soviet Communism, Sanders sees a world divided between right-wing authoritarians and the forces of progress embodied by American and Western European progressive values.

"Today I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or democracies around the world," Sanders said. "In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win."

A year later, Sanders warned that the battle between the West and an "authoritarian axis" which is "committed to tearing down a post-Second World War global order that they see as limiting their access to power and wealth." Sanders calls this "a global struggle of enormous consequence. Nothing less than the future of the -- economically, socially and environmentally -- is at stake."

Sanders's focus on this authoritarian axis is one that is shared with his intraparty rivals at the Center for American Progress (a think-tank long funded by some of the least progressive regimes on the planet), which he has pointedly criticized for smearing progressive Democrats like himself. CAP issued a report last September about "the threat presented by opportunist authoritarian regimes" which "urgently requires a rapid response."

The preoccupation with the authoritarian menace is one Sanders and CAP share with prominent progressive activists who warn about the creeping influence of what some have cynically hyped as an "authoritarian Internationale."

Cold War Calling

Senator Warren spelled out her foreign policy vision in a speech at American University in November 2018. Admirably, she criticized Saudi Arabia's savage war on Yemen, the defense industry, and neoliberal free trade agreements that have beggared the American working and middle classes.

"Foreign policy," Warren has said, "should not be run exclusively by the Pentagon." In the second round of the Democratic primary debates, Warren also called for a nuclear "no first use" policy.

And yet, Warren too seems in thrall to the idea that the world order is shaping up to be one in which the white hats (Western democracies) must face off against the black hats (Eurasian authoritarians). Warren says that the "combination of authoritarianism and corrupt capitalism" of Putin's Russia and Xi's China "is a fundamental threat to democracy, both here in the United States and around the world."

Warren also sees a rising tide of corrupt authoritarians "from Hungary to Turkey, from the Philippines to Brazil," where "wealthy elites work together to grow the state's power while the state works to grow the wealth of those who remain loyal to the leader."

The concern with the emerging authoritarian tide has become a central concern of progressive writers and thinkers. "Today, around the world," write progressive foreign policy activists Kate Kinzer and Stephen Miles, "growing authoritarianism and hate are fueled by oligarchies preying on economic, gender, and racial inequality."

Daniel Nexon, a progressive scholar of international relations, believes that "progressives must recognize that we are in a moment of fundamental crisis, featuring coordination among right-wing movements throughout the West and with the Russian government as a sponsor and supporter."

Likewise, The Nation 's Jeet Heer lays the blame for the rise of global authoritarianism at the feet of Vladimir Putin, who "seems to be pushing for an international alt-right, an informal alliance of right-wing parties held together by a shared xenophobia."

Blithely waving away concerns over sparking a new and more dangerous Cold War between the world's two nuclear superpowers, Heer advises that "the dovish left shouldn't let Cold War nightmares prevent them [from] speaking out about it." He concludes: "Leftists have to be ready to battle [Putinism] in all its forms, at home and abroad."

The Cold War echoes here are as unmistakable as they are worrying. As Princeton and NYU professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen has written, during the first Cold War, a "totalitarian school" of Soviet studies grew up around the idea "that a totalitarian 'quest for absolute power' at home always led to the 'dynamism' in Soviet behavior abroad was a fundamental axiom of cold-war Soviet studies and of American foreign policy."

Likewise, we are seeing the emergence of an "authoritarian school" which posits that the internal political dynamics of regimes such as Putin's cause them, ineffably, to follow revanchist, expansionist foreign policies.

Cold warriors in both parties frequently mistook communism as a monolithic global movement. Neoprogressives are making this mistake today when they gloss over national context, history, and culture in favor of an all-encompassing theory that puts the "authoritarian" nature of the governments they are criticizing at the center of their diagnosis.

By citing the threat to Western democracies posed by a global authoritarian axis, the neoprogressives are repeating the same mistake made by liberal interventionists and neoconservatives. They buy into the democratic peace theory, which holds without much evidence that a world order populated by democracies is likely to be a peaceful one because democracies allegedly don't fight wars against one another.

Yet as Richard Sakwa, a British scholar of Russia and Eastern Europe, writes, "it is often assumed that Russia is critical of the West because of its authoritarian character, but it cannot be taken for granted that a change of regime would automatically make the country align with the West."

George McGovern once observed that U.S. foreign policy "has been based on an obsession with an international Communist conspiracy that existed more in our minds than in reality." So too the current obsession with the global authoritarians. Communism wasn't a global monolith and neither is this. By portraying it as such, neoprogressives are midwifing bad policy.

True, some of the economic trends voters in Europe and South America are reacting to are global, but a diagnosis that links together the rise of Putin and Xi, the elections of Trump in the U.S., Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, and Kaczyński in Poland with the right-wing insurgency movements of the Le Pens in France and Farage in the UK makes little sense.

Some of these elected figures, like Trump and Farage, are symptoms of the failure of the neoliberal economic order. Others, like Orban and Kaczyński, are responses to anti-European Union sentiment and the migrant crises that resulted from the Western interventions in Libya and Syria. Many have more to do with conditions and histories specific to their own countries. Targeting them by painting them with the same broad brush is a mistake.

Echoes of Neoconservatism

The progressive foreign policy organization Win Without War includes among its 10 foreign policy goals "ending economic, racial and gender inequality around the world." The U.S., according to WWW, "must safeguard universal human rights to dignity, equality, migration and refuge."

Is it a noble sentiment? Sure. But it's every bit as unrealistic as the crusade envisioned by George W. Bush in his second inaugural address, in which he declared, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

We know full well where appeals to "universal values" have taken us in the past. Such appeals are not reliable guides for progressives if they seek to reverse the tide of unchecked American intervention abroad. But maybe we should consider whether it's a policy of realism and restraint that they actually seek. Some progressive thinkers are at least honest enough to admit as much that it is not. Nexon admits that "abandoning the infrastructure of American international influence because of its many minuses and abuses will hamstring progressives for decades to come." In other words, America's hegemonic ambitions aren't in and of themselves objectionable or self-defeating, as long as we achieve our kind of hegemony. Progressive values crusades bear more than a passing resemblance to the neoconservative crusades to remake the world in the American self-image.

"Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days," writes neoconservative-turned-Hillary Clinton surrogate Robert Kagan, "the one for which we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism." Max Boot also finds cause for concern. Boot, a modern-day reincarnation (minus the pedigree and war record) of the hawkish Cold War-era columnist Joe Alsop, believes that "the rise of populist authoritarianism is perhaps the greatest threat we face as a world right now."

Neoprogressivism, like neoconservatism, risks catering to the U.S. establishment's worst impulses by playing on a belief in American exceptionalism to embark upon yet another global crusade. This raises some questions, including whether a neoprogressive approach to the crises in Ukraine, Syria, or Libya would be substantively different from the liberal interventionist approach of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. Does a neoprogressive foreign policy organized around the concept of an "authoritarian axis" adequately address the concerns of voters in the American heartland who disproportionately suffer from the consequences of our wars and neoliberal economic policies? It was these voters, after all, who won the election for Trump.

Donald Trump's failure to keep his campaign promise to bring the forever wars to a close while fashioning a new foreign policy oriented around core U.S. national security interests provides Democrats with an opportunity. By repeatedly intervening in Syria, keeping troops in Afghanistan, kowtowing to the Israelis and Saudis, ratcheting up tensions with Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and China, Trump has ceded the anti-interventionist ground he occupied when he ran for office. He can no longer claim the mantle of restraint, a position that found support among six-in-ten Americans in 2016.

Yet with the exception of Tulsi Gabbard, for the most part the Democratic field is offering voters a foreign policy that amounts to "Trump minus belligerence." A truly progressive foreign policy must put questions of war and peace front and center. Addressing America's post 9/11 failures, military overextension, grotesquely bloated defense budget, and the ingrained militarism of our political-media establishment are the proper concerns of a progressive U.S. foreign policy.

But it is one that would place the welfare of our own citizens above all. As such, what is urgently required is the long-delayed realization of a peace dividend. The post-Cold War peace dividend that was envisioned in the early 1990s never materialized. Clinton's secretary of defense Les Aspin strangled the peace dividend in its crib by keeping the U.S. military on a footing that would allow it to fight and win two regional wars simultaneously. Unipolar fantasies of "full spectrum dominance" would come later in the decade.

One might have reasonably expected an effort by the Obama administration to realize a post-bin Laden peace dividend, but the forever wars dragged on and on. In a New Yorker profile from earlier this year, Sanders asked the right question: "Do we really need to spend more than the next ten nations combined on the military, when our infrastructure is collapsing and kids can't afford to go to college?"

The answer is obvious. And yet, how likely is it that progressives will be able realize their vision of a more just, more equal American society if we have to mobilize to face a global authoritarian axis led by Russia and China?

FDR's Good Neighbor Policy

The unipolar world of the first post-Cold War decade is well behind us now. As the world becomes more and more multipolar, powers like China, Russia, Iran, India, and the U.S. will find increasing occasion to clash. A peaceful multipolar world requires stability. And stability requires balance.

In the absence of stability, none of the goods progressives see as desirable can take root. This world order would put a premium on stability and security rather than any specific set of values. An ethical, progressive foreign policy is one which understands that great powers have security interests of their own. "Spheres of influence" are not 19th century anachronisms, but essential to regional security: in Europe, the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere.

It is a policy that would reject crusades to spread American values the world over. "The greatest thing America can do for the rest of the world," George Kennan once observed, "is to make a success of what it is doing here on this continent and to bring itself to a point where its own internal life is one of harmony, stability and self-assurance."

Progressive realism doesn't call for global crusades that seek to conquer the hearts and minds of others. It is not bound up in the hoary self-mythology of American Exceptionalism. It is boring. It puts a premium on the value of human life. It foreswears doing harm so that good may come. It is not a clarion call in the manner of John F. Kennedy who pledged to "to pay any price, bear any burden." It does not lend itself to the cheap moralizing of celebrity presidential speechwriters. In ordinary language, a summation of such a policy would go something like: "we will bear a reasonable price as long as identifiable U.S. security interests are at stake."

A policy that seeks to wind down the global war on terror, slash the defense budget, and shrink our global footprint won't inspire. It will, however, save lives. Such a policy has its roots in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural address. "In the field of World policy," said Roosevelt, "I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor, the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others, the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a World of neighbors."

What came to be known as the "Good Neighbor" policy was further explicated by FDR's Secretary of State Cordell Hull at the Montevideo Conference in 1933, when he stated that "No country has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another." Historian David C. Hendrickson sees this as an example of FDR's principles of "liberal pluralism," which included "respect for the integrity and importance of other states" and "non-intervention in the domestic affairs of neighboring states."

These ought to serve as the foundations on which to build a truly progressive foreign policy. They represent a return to the best traditions of the Democratic Party and would likely resonate with those very same blocs of voters that made up the New Deal coalition that the neoliberal iteration of the Democratic Party has largely shunned but will sorely need in order to unseat Trump. And yet, proponents of a neoprogressive foreign policy seem intent on running away from a popular policy of realism and restraint on which Trump has failed to deliver.

James W. Carden is contributing writer for foreign affairs at The Nation and a member of the Board of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.

[Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

Highly recommended!
Dec 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Dec 16 2019 20:51 utc | 22

Neocons lie should properly be called "threat inflation"

The underlying critical point-at-issue is credibility as I noted in my comment on b's 2017 article. I've since linked to tweets and other items by that trio; the one major change seems to have been the epiphany by them that they needed to go to where the action is and report it from there to regain their credibility.

The fact remains that used car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility sans a confession as to why they feel the need to lie to sell cars.

Their actions belie the guilt they feel for their choices, but a confession works much better at assuaging the soul while helping convince the audience that the change in heart's genuine. And that's the point as b notes--genuineness, whose first predicate is credibility.

[Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Neocons are lobbyists for MIC, the it is MIC that is the center of this this cult. People like Kriston, Kagan and Max Boot are just well paid prostituttes on MIC, which includes intelligence agencies as a very important part -- the bridge to Wall Street so to speak.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us. ..."
Jul 18, 2017 | medium.com

Glenn Greenwald has just published a very important article in The Intercept that I would have everyone in America read if I could. Titled "With New D.C. Policy Group, Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons", Greenwald's excellent piece details the frustratingly under-reported way that the leaders of the neoconservative death cult have been realigning with the Democratic party.

This pivot back to the party of neoconservatism's origin is one of the most significant political events of the new millennium, but aside from a handful of sharp political analysts like Greenwald it's been going largely undiscussed. This is weird, and we need to start talking about it. A lot. Their willful alignment with neoconservatism should be the very first thing anyone ever talks about when discussing the Democratic party.

When you hear someone complaining that the Democratic party has no platform besides being anti-Trump, your response should be, "Yeah it does. Their platform is the omnicidal death cult of neoconservatism."

It's absolutely insane that neoconservatism is still a thing, let alone still a thing that mainstream America tends to regard as a perfectly legitimate set of opinions for a human being to have. As what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts rightly calls "the most dangerous ideology that has ever existed," neoconservatism has used its nonpartisan bloodlust to work with the Democratic party for the purpose of escalating tensions with Russia on multiple fronts, bringing our species to the brink of what could very well end up being a world war with a nuclear superpower and its allies.

This is not okay. Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives. Check out leading neoconservative Bill Kristol's response to the aforementioned Intercept article:

... ... ...

Okay, leaving aside the fact that this bloodthirsty psychopath is saying neocons "won" a Cold War that neocons have deliberately reignited by fanning the flames of the Russia hysteria and pushing for more escalations , how insane is it that we live in a society where a public figure can just be like, "Yeah, I'm a neocon, I advocate for using military aggression to maintain US hegemony and I think it's great," and have that be okay? These people kill children. Neoconservatism means piles upon piles of child corpses. It means devoting the resources of a nation that won't even provide its citizens with a real healthcare system to widespread warfare and all the death, destruction, chaos, terrorism, rape and suffering that necessarily comes with war. The only way that you can possibly regard neoconservatism as just one more set of political opinions is if you completely compartmentalize away from the reality of everything that it is.

This should not happen. The tensions with Russia that these monsters have worked so hard to escalate could blow up at any moment; there are too many moving parts, too many things that could go wrong. The last Cold War brought our species within a hair's breadth of total annihilation due to our inability to foresee all possible complications which can arise from such a contest, and these depraved death cultists are trying to drag us back into another one. Nothing is worth that. Nothing is worth risking the life of every organism on earth, but they're risking it all for geopolitical influence.

... ... ...

I've had a very interesting last 24 hours. My article about Senator John McCain (which I titled "Please Just Fucking Die Already" because the title I really wanted to use seemed a bit crass) has received an amount of attention that I'm not accustomed to, from CNN to USA Today to the Washington Post . I watched Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar talking about me on The View . They called me a "Bernie Sanders person." It was a trip. Apparently some very low-level Republican with a few hundred Twitter followers went and retweeted my article with an approving caption, and that sort of thing is worthy of coast-to-coast mainstream coverage in today's America.

This has of course brought in a deluge of angry comments, mostly from people whose social media pages are full of Russiagate nonsense , showing where McCain's current support base comes from. Some call him a war hero, some talk about him like he's a perfectly fine politician, some defend him as just a normal person whose politics I happen to disagree with.

This is insane. This man has actively and enthusiastically pushed for every single act of military aggression that America has engaged in, and some that it hasn't , throughout his entire career. He makes Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton look like a dove. When you look at John McCain, the very first thing you see should not be a former presidential candidate, a former POW or an Arizona Senator; the first thing you see should be the piles of human corpses that he has helped to create. This is not a normal kind of person, and I still do sincerely hope that he dies of natural causes before he can do any more harm.

Can we change this about ourselves, please? None of us should have to live in a world where pushing for more bombing campaigns at every opportunity is an acceptable agenda for a public figure to have. Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us.

-- -- --

I'm a 100 percent reader-funded journalist so if you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following me on Twitter , or throwing some money into my hat on Patreon .

[Sep 13, 2019] Tucker Carlson Pushes for End of the Neo-cons Reuters and Haaretz

Notable quotes:
"... Yes, people tend to forget that Bolton and all the other neocons are worshipers at the altar of a secular religion imported to the US by members of the Frankfurt School of Trotskyite German professors in the 1930s. These people had attempted get the Nazis to consider them allies in a quest for an ordered world. Alas for them they found that the Nazi scum would not accept them and in fact began preparations to hunt them down. ..."
"... Thus the migration to America and in particular to the University of Chicago where they developed their credo of world revolution under that guidance of a few philosopher kings like Leo Strauss, the Wohlstetters and other academic "geniuses" They also began an enthusiastic campaign of recruitment of enthusiastic graduate students who carefully disguised themselves as whatever was most useful politically. ..."
Sep 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"Carlson concluded by warning about the many other Boltons in the federal bureaucracy, saying that "war may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons, it's always good business."

He went on to slam Trump's special representative for Iran and contender to replace Bolton, Brian Hook, as an "unapologetic neocon" who "has undisguised contempt for President Trump, and he particularly dislikes the president's nationalist foreign policy." Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif echoed Carlson hours later in a tweet, arguing that "Thirst for war – maximum pressure – should go with the warmonger-in-chief." Reuters and Haaretz

-------------

Yes, people tend to forget that Bolton and all the other neocons are worshipers at the altar of a secular religion imported to the US by members of the Frankfurt School of Trotskyite German professors in the 1930s. These people had attempted get the Nazis to consider them allies in a quest for an ordered world. Alas for them they found that the Nazi scum would not accept them and in fact began preparations to hunt them down.

Thus the migration to America and in particular to the University of Chicago where they developed their credo of world revolution under that guidance of a few philosopher kings like Leo Strauss, the Wohlstetters and other academic "geniuses" They also began an enthusiastic campaign of recruitment of enthusiastic graduate students who carefully disguised themselves as whatever was most useful politically.

They are not conservative at all, not one bit. Carlson was absolutely right about that.

They despise nationalism. They despise the idea of countries. In that regard they are like all groups who aspire to globalist dominion for their particular ideas.

They should all be driven from government. pl

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-trump-bolton-neo-cons-iran-fox-news-tucker-carlson-1.7833399?=&ts=_1568393219979b

[Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

Highly recommended!
Apr 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us know how evil and disgusting that person is? It's true of the leader of every nation which refuses to allow itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, it's true of anti-establishment political candidates, and it's true of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its political and media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they'll be far less likely to take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they'll be far more likely to consent to Assange's imprisonment, thereby establishing a precedent for the future prosecution of leak-publishing journalists around the world. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you're suspicious of him you won't believe anything he's saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it's as good as putting a bullet in his head.

Those of us who value truth and light need to fight this smear campaign in order to keep our fellow man from signing off on a major leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia, and a big part of that means being able to argue against those smears and disinformation wherever they appear. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any kind of centralized source of information which comprehensively debunks all the smears in a thorough and engaging way, so with the help of hundreds of tips from my readers and social media followers I'm going to attempt to make one here. What follows is my attempt at creating a tool kit people can use to fight against Assange smears wherever they encounter them, by refuting the disinformation with truth and solid argumentation.

This article is an ongoing project which will be updated regularly where it appears on Medium and caitlinjohnstone.com as new information comes in and new smears spring up in need of refutation.

[Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran.

Highly recommended!
Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Return of the Just April 14, 2019 at 10:46 am

You're right. I see people like Robert Kagan's opinions being respectfully asked on foreign affairs, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams being hired to direct our foreign policy.

The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they're angling for war with Iran.

It's preposterous and sickening. And it can't be allowed to stand, so you can't just stand off and say you're "wrecked". Keep fighting, as you're doing. I will fight it until I can't fight anymore.

Ken Zaretzke , says: April 14, 2019 at 3:38 pm
Fact-bedeviled JohnT: “McCain was a problem for this nation? Sweet Jesus! There quite simply is no rational adult on the planet who buys that nonsense.”

McCain had close ties to the military-industrial complex. He was a backer of post-Cold War NATO. He was a neoconservative darling. He never heard of a dictator that he didn’t want to depose with boots on the ground, with the possible exception of various Saudi dictators (the oil-weaponry-torture nexus). He promoted pseudo-accountability of government in campaign finance but blocked accountability for the Pentagon and State Department when he co-chaired the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs with John Kerry.

And, perhaps partly because of the head trauma and/or emotional wounds he suffered at the hands of Chinese-backed Commies, it’s plausible to think he was regarded by the willy-nilly plotters of the deep state as a manipulable, and thus useful, conduit of domestic subversion via the bogus Steele dossier.

Unfortunately, the episode that most defines McCain’s life is the very last one–his being a pawn of M-16 in the the deep state’s years-long attempt to derail the presidency of Donald Trump.

Joe Dokes , says: April 14, 2019 at 11:55 pm
Measuring success means determining goals. The goals of most wars is to enrich the people in charge. So, by this metric, the war was a success. The rest of it is just props and propaganda.
Andrew Stergiou , says: April 15, 2019 at 5:11 am
“Pyrrhic Victory” look it up the Roman Empire Won but lost if the US is invaded and the government does not defend it I would like to start my own defense: But the knee jerk politics that stirs America’s cannon fodder citizens is a painful reminder of a history of jingoist lies where at times some left and right agree at least for a short moment before the rich and powerful push their weight to have their way.

If All politics is relative Right wingers are the the left of what? Nuclear destruction? or Slavery?

Peter Smith , says: April 15, 2019 at 5:13 am
My goodness! I am also a veteran, but of the Vietnam war, and my father was a career officer from 1939-1961 as a paratrooper first, and later as an intelligence officer. He argued vigorously against our Vietnam involvement, and was cashiered for his intellectual honesty. A combat veteran’s views are meaningless when the political winds are blowing.

Simply put, we have killed thousands of our kids in service of the colonial empires left to us by the British and the French after WWII. More practice at incompetent strategies and tactics does not make us more competent–it merely extends the blunders and pain; viz the French for two CENTURIES against the Britsh during the battles over Normandy while the Planagenet kings worked to hold their viking-won inheritance.

At least then, kings risked their own lives. Generals fight because the LIKE it…a lot. Prior failures are only practice to the, regardless of the cost in lives of the kids we tried to raise well, and who were slaughtered for no gain.

We don’t need the empire, and we certainly shouldn’t fight for the corrupt businessmen who have profited from the never-ending conflicts. Let’s spend those trillions at home, so long as we also police our government to keep both Democrat and Republican politicians from feathering their own nests. Term limits and prosecutions will help us, but only if we are vigilant. Wars distract our attention while corruption is rampant at home.

Fayez Abedaziz , says: April 12, 2019 at 12:25 am
Thanks, I appreciate this article.
I’ll make two points, my own opinion:
it’s the same story as Vietnam, the bull about how the politicians or anti-war demonstrators tied the military ‘hand,’ blah, blah.
Nonsense. Invading a nation and slaughtering people in their towns, houses…gee…what’s wrong with that, eh?
The average American has a primitive mind when it comes to such matters.
Second point I have, is that both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Hillary and Trump should be dragged to a world court, given a fair trial and locked up for life with hard labor… oh, and Cheney too,for all those families, in half a dozen nations, especially the children overseas that suffered/died from these creeps.
And, the families of dead or maimed American troops should be apologized to and compensation paid by several million dollars to each.
The people I named above make me sick, because I have feelings and a conscience. Can you dig?
kingdomofgodflag.info , says: April 12, 2019 at 8:19 am
Though there is a worldly justification for killing to obtain or maintain freedoms, there is no Christian justification for it. Which suggests that Christians who die while doing it, die in vain.

America’s wars are prosecuted by a military that includes Christians. They seldom question the killing their country orders them to do, as though the will of the government is that of the will of God. Is that a safe assumption for them to make? German Christian soldiers made that assumption regarding their government in 1939. Who was there to tell them otherwise? The Church failed, including the chaplains. (The Southern Baptist Convention declared the invasion of Iraq a just war in 2003.) These wars need to be assessed by Just War criteria. Christian soldiers need to know when to exercise selective conscientious objection, for it is better to go to prison than to kill without God’s approval. If Just War theory is irrelevant, the default response is Christian Pacifism.

Mark Thomason , says: April 12, 2019 at 10:43 am
“has gone un-investigated, unheard of, or unpunished.”

The one guy who did tell us has just been arrested for doing exactly that.

The arrest is cheered by those who fantasize about Russiagate, but it is expressly FOR telling us about these things.

Stephen J. , says: April 12, 2019 at 10:51 am
“Iraq Wrecked” a lot of innocent people. Millions are dead, cities reduced to rubble, homes and businesses destroyed and it was all a damned lie. And the perpetrators are Free.
Now there is sectarian violence too, where once there was a semblance of harmony amongst various denominations. See article link below.

“Are The Christians Slaughtered in The Middle East Victims of the Actions of Western War Criminals and Their Terrorist Supporting NATO ‘Allies’”?

http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/04/are-christians-slaughtered-in-middle.html

the the , says: April 12, 2019 at 11:53 am
We are a globalist open borders and mass immigration nation. We stand for nothing. To serve in this nation’s military is very stupid. You aren’t defending anything. You are just a tool of globalism. Again, we don’t secure our borders. That’s a very big give away to what’s going on.
the the , says: April 12, 2019 at 11:57 am
If our nation’s military really was an American military concerned with our security we would have secured our border after 9/11, reduced all immigration, deported ALL muslims, and that’s it. Just secure the borders and expel Muslims! That’s all we needed to do.

Instead we killed so many people and imported many many more Muslims! And we call this compassion. Its insane.

Kouros , says: April 12, 2019 at 12:02 pm
Maybe if Talibans get back in power they will destroy the opium. You know, like they did when they were first in power…. It seems that wherever Americans get involved, drugs follow…
JohnT , says: April 12, 2019 at 2:03 pm
“Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” In Eisenhower’s televised farewell address January 17, 1961.
Rational thought would lead one to believe such words from a fellow with his credentials would have had a useful effect. But it didn’t. In point of fact, in the likes of Eric Prince and his supporters the notion of war as a profit center is quite literally a family affair.
Ken Zaretzke , says: April 12, 2019 at 2:10 pm
The military-industrial complex couldn’t accomplish this all by its lonesome self. The deep state was doing its thing. The two things overlap but aren’t the same. The deep state is not only or mainly about business profits, but about power. Power in the world means empire, which requires a military-industrial complex but is not reducible to it.

We now have a rare opportunity to unveil the workings of the deep state, but it will require a special counsel, and a lengthy written report, on the doings in the 2016 election of the FBI (Comey, Strzok, et. al.), and collaterally the CIA and DIA (Brennan and Clapper). Also the British government (M-16), John McCain, and maybe Bush and Obama judges on the FISA courts.

[Apr 15, 2019] Neoliberal globalization is under sieve, countries that refuse to unconditionally open markts to transnationals and be vassal of Washington are now labeled as authoritarian

This slur "authoritarian state" is now peddled by neocons as synonym for the "countries we do not like"
This neocons in not very inventive... We already saw this line from Robert Kagan, who actually is a better writer. This neocon/neolib pressitute can't even use proper terms such as "neoliberalism" and "Washington consensus"
And slide to far-right nationalism and neo-fascism is direct result of neoliberalism dominance for the last 40 years (since Carter) and sliding of the standard of living of workers and the middle class.
Notable quotes:
"... Both countries have touted the virtues of their systems, while arguing that Western values are a source of decadence, amorality and disorder in the Western world. ..."
Apr 15, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

Liberalism Is Under Siege. Conservatives Can Save It. - Bloomberg By Hal Brands

As international rivalry intensifies, the core strategic task for the U.S.-led democratic community is to contain the geopolitical influence and political disruption caused by authoritarian great powers, namely China and Russia. Yet that task is made all the harder because illiberalism -- and sympathy for those illiberal powers -- is simultaneously surging among key actors on the political right. If the U.S. and its allies are to succeed in the great global rivalry of the 21st century, the right must confront the threat of illiberalism within its ranks -- just as the left did during a previous twilight struggle in the 20th century.

... ... ...

This time, the threat is not expansionist communism, but a combination of autocracy and geopolitical revisionism. China has been moving toward a dystopian future of high-tech authoritarianism, as it pushes for greater power and influence overseas. Putin's Russia has consolidated an illiberal oligarchy, while using information warfare, political meddling and other tools to subvert liberal democracies in Europe, the U.S. and beyond.

Both countries have touted the virtues of their systems, while arguing that Western values are a source of decadence, amorality and disorder in the Western world.

... ... ...

It is not for nothing that the political scientist Marc Plattner has written that the gravest threat to liberal democracy today is “that it will end up being abandoned by substantial segments of the right.” And even in the U.S., there are alarming signs that conservative commitment to the norms of liberal democracy is under strain.

Hal Brands at [email protected]

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Che Guevara10 hours ago ,

Communism was not a threat, but actually benefited the world in many ways.
It was communism that put pressure on capitalism to provide labor a fair share of wealth and income. As soon as Soviet communism collapsed, capitalism returned to its avaricious roots, resulting in stagnant wages for the working class. And the pauperization of the working class in recent decades is the cause for the current revolt against liberal capitalism.
So it was the competition from communism that was helping capitalism to stay healthy. Without it capitalism has degenerated into a Dickensian dystopia. We should therefore welcome any alternative socio-economic models to liberal capitalism.

EmilyEnso Che Guevara7 hours ago ,

It was communism that put pressure on capitalism to provide labor a fair
share of wealth and income. As soon as Soviet communism collapsed,
capitalism returned to

Thats a great point Che.
I have never ever looked at it from that angle.
Interesting.

EeeYepBlowing Whistles EmilyEnso7 hours ago ,

The odd thing is that both communism and capitalism are both controlled from the same evil hidden hand!!!

George Evans Che Guevara8 hours ago ,

the success of the Chinese efforts may just be the spur needed...

brad_sk13 hours ago ,

Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, who has long been a leading conservative intellectual, warns that this disillusion with liberal democracy “is clearly present among American conservatives, and not just among the ‘alt-right.’

Honest and real conservatives are far and fewer in today's MAGA/tea party infested GOP. Forget career politicians like Ted Cruz or McConnell, even the previously decent conservative think tanks/pundits like from NR or Erik Erickson or others have all given up on any principles and just bow at the altar of Trump now.

Sebastian Cremmington brad_sk29 minutes ago ,

No they haven’t, Trump decided to put McConnell in charge so of course the #neverTrumpers like the McConnell presidency...which consists of appointing Republican judges at record pace and little else.

johnny sunshine brad_sk4 hours ago ,

Or they've become the right wing of the Democratic party.

dnjake12 hours ago ,

The biggest need is to resist holy warriors like Hal Brands who want to destroy the world if it resists their version of revealed truth. They are the biggest threat to the human future. The United States has to learn to live in a world that it cannot control. The American goal should be to work towards a constructive human future not some kind of holy war to impose American control on the rest of the world. The United States is the biggest military spender. In recent history, It has been the world's global aggressor.

It has an history of wars that have made little difference whether America won or lost them. Perhaps the United States could succeed with some kind of genocide that wiped out all of the parts of the world that refuse to accept American supremacy. But, short of that kind of disgrace, the United States is not going to succeed in achieving any meaningful goal through war. As long as America does not destroy the world, the future is going to be determined by economic competition and the destinies that the people of different parts of the world choose for themselves.

dav123411 hours ago ,

The author needs a reality check. Much of what he says is in his imagination.

emno33 hours ago ,

I had wondered if it was noticed the Liberalism was dying. The world has turned hard right, with all the anger, nationalism, do-as-I-say, and social intolerance. I don't even the children of today.

Camus534 hours ago ,

I might suggest that liberals themselves are destroying their freedoms with illogical illiberal liberalism.

YOU can't do that, say that, act like that, think like that...no no no...we must act and be correct, nice, polite, all forgiving and never critical.

Huh?

The freedoms that so many of us marched for, fought for, voted for, sang about (thank gawd the music still lives), got bloody for, even died for, are slipping away quicker than you can say me, me, me...it's all about me.

Maybe...small maybe...our youth can once again awaken America and the world's conscience. Maybe? Maybe not!

Mark Miller9 hours ago ,

"Just as the Cold War left broke with communism"

Wha? It seems our LIttle Cultural Revolution is just warming up. Wait till AOC et al are all growed up.

"This is a moment when the “free world” needs to be strong and united."

Is this the same "free" world that jails grandmothers over contested historical views? That has reneged on free speech?

Thanks to a truly ethnomasochistic immigration policy, I assure you that this will not happen. The West will be lucky if squeaks through this period without a civil war.

[Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry

Highly recommended!
This article by late Robert Parry is from 2016 but is still relevant in context of the current Ukrainian elections and the color revolution is Venezuela. The power of neoliberal propaganda is simply tremendous. For foreign events it is able to distort the story to such an extent that the most famous quote of CIA director William Casey "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" looks like constatation of already accomplished goal.
Apr 11, 2016 | consortiumnews.com

Exclusive: Several weeks before Ukraine's 2014 coup, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Nuland had already picked Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be the future leader, but now "Yats" is no longer the guy, writes Robert Parry.

In reporting on the resignation of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the major U.S. newspapers either ignored or distorted Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's infamous intercepted phone call before the 2014 coup in which she declared "Yats is the guy!"

Though Nuland's phone call introduced many Americans to the previously obscure Yatsenyuk, its timing – a few weeks before the ouster of elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych – was never helpful to Washington's desired narrative of the Ukrainian people rising up on their own to oust a corrupt leader.

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.

Instead, the conversation between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt sounded like two proconsuls picking which Ukrainian politicians would lead the new government. Nuland also disparaged the less aggressive approach of the European Union with the pithy put-down: "Fuck the E.U.!"

More importantly, the intercepted call, released onto YouTube in early February 2014, represented powerful evidence that these senior U.S. officials were plotting – or at least collaborating in – a coup d'etat against Ukraine's democratically elected president. So, the U.S. government and the mainstream U.S. media have since consigned this revealing discussion to the Great Memory Hole.

On Monday, in reporting on Yatsenyuk's Sunday speech in which he announced that he is stepping down, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal didn't mention the Nuland-Pyatt conversation at all. The New York Times did mention the call but misled its readers regarding its timing, making it appear as if the call followed rather than preceded the coup. That way the call sounded like two American officials routinely appraising Ukraine's future leaders, not plotting to oust one government and install another.

The Times article by Andrew E. Kramer said: "Before Mr. Yatsenyuk's appointment as prime minister in 2014, a leaked recording of a telephone conversation between Victoria J. Nuland, a United States assistant secretary of state, and the American ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, seemed to underscore the West's support for his candidacy. 'Yats is the guy,' Ms. Nuland had said."

Notice, however, that if you didn't know that the conversation occurred in late January or early February 2014, you wouldn't know that it preceded the Feb. 22, 2014 coup. You might have thought that it was just a supportive chat before Yatsenyuk got his new job.

You also wouldn't know that much of the Nuland-Pyatt conversation focused on how they were going to "glue this thing" or "midwife this thing," comments sounding like prima facie evidence that the U.S. government was engaged in "regime change" in Ukraine, on Russia's border.

The 'No Coup' Conclusion

But Kramer's lack of specificity about the timing and substance of the call fits with a long pattern of New York Times' bias in its coverage of the Ukraine crisis. On Jan. 4, 2015, nearly a year after the U.S.-backed coup, the Times published an "investigation" article declaring that there never had been a coup. It was just a case of President Yanukovych deciding to leave and not coming back.

That article reached its conclusion, in part, by ignoring the evidence of a coup, including the Nuland-Pyatt phone call. The story was co-written by Kramer and so it is interesting to know that he was at least aware of the "Yats is the guy" reference although it was ignored in last year's long-form article.

Instead, Kramer and his co-author Andrew Higgins took pains to mock anyone who actually looked at the evidence and dared reach the disfavored conclusion about a coup. If you did, you were some rube deluded by Russian propaganda.

"Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych's ouster to what it portrays as a violent, 'neo-fascist' coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular uprising," Higgins and Kramer wrote . "Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin's line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych's government, questions remain about how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely."

The Times' article concluded that Yanukovych "was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone else. The allies' desertion, fueled in large part by fear, was accelerated by the seizing by protesters of a large stock of weapons in the west of the country. But just as important, the review of the final hours shows, was the panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych's own efforts to make peace."

Yet, one might wonder what the Times thinks a coup looks like. Indeed, the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.

The way those coups played out is now historically well known. Secret U.S. government operatives planted nasty propaganda about the targeted leader, stirred up political and economic chaos, conspired with rival political leaders, spread rumors of worse violence to come and then – as political institutions collapsed – watched as the scared but duly elected leader made a hasty departure.

In Iran, the coup reinstalled the autocratic Shah who then ruled with a heavy hand for the next quarter century; in Guatemala, the coup led to more than three decades of brutal military regimes and the killing of some 200,000 Guatemalans.

Coups don't have to involve army tanks occupying the public squares, although that is an alternative model which follows many of the same initial steps except that the military is brought in at the end. The military coup was a common approach especially in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

' Color Revolutions'

But the preferred method in more recent years has been the "color revolution," which operates behind the façade of a "peaceful" popular uprising and international pressure on the targeted leader to show restraint until it's too late to stop the coup. Despite the restraint, the leader is still accused of gross human rights violations, all the better to justify his removal.

Later, the ousted leader may get an image makeover; instead of a cruel bully, he is ridiculed for not showing sufficient resolve and letting his base of support melt away, as happened with Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.

But the reality of what happened in Ukraine was never hard to figure out. Nor did you have to be inside "the Russian propaganda bubble" to recognize it. George Friedman, the founder of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, called Yanukovych's overthrow "the most blatant coup in history."

Which is what it appears if you consider the evidence. The first step in the process was to create tensions around the issue of pulling Ukraine out of Russia's economic orbit and capturing it in the European Union's gravity, a plan defined by influential American neocons in 2013.

On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has been a major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At the time, Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress to the tune of about $100 million a year, was financing scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists, paying for journalists and organizing business groups.

As for the even bigger prize -- Putin -- Gershman wrote: "Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."

At that time, in early fall 2013, Ukraine's President Yanukovych was exploring the idea of reaching out to Europe with an association agreement. But he got cold feet in November 2013 when economic experts in Kiev advised him that the Ukrainian economy would suffer a $160 billion hit if it separated from Russia, its eastern neighbor and major trading partner. There was also the West's demand that Ukraine accept a harsh austerity plan from the International Monetary Fund.

Yanukovych wanted more time for the E.U. negotiations, but his decision angered many western Ukrainians who saw their future more attached to Europe than Russia. Tens of thousands of protesters began camping out at Maidan Square in Kiev, with Yanukovych ordering the police to show restraint.

Meanwhile, with Yanukovych shifting back toward Russia, which was offering a more generous $15 billion loan and discounted natural gas, he soon became the target of American neocons and the U.S. media, which portrayed Ukraine's political unrest as a black-and-white case of a brutal and corrupt Yanukovych opposed by a saintly "pro-democracy" movement.

Cheering an Uprising

The Maidan uprising was urged on by American neocons, including Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Nuland, who passed out cookies at the Maidan and reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their "European aspirations."

A screen shot of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland speaking to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, at an event sponsored by Chevron, with its logo to Nuland's left.

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, also showed up, standing on stage with right-wing extremists from the Svoboda Party and telling the crowd that the United States was with them in their challenge to the Ukrainian government.

As the winter progressed, the protests grew more violent. Neo-Nazi and other extremist elements from Lviv and other western Ukrainian cities began arriving in well-organized brigades or "sotins" of 100 trained street fighters. Police were attacked with firebombs and other weapons as the violent protesters began seizing government buildings and unfurling Nazi banners and even a Confederate flag.

Though Yanukovych continued to order his police to show restraint, he was still depicted in the major U.S. news media as a brutal thug who was callously murdering his own people. The chaos reached a climax on Feb. 20 when mysterious snipers opened fire, killing both police and protesters. As the police retreated, the militants advanced brandishing firearms and other weapons. The confrontation led to significant loss of life, pushing the death toll to around 80 including more than a dozen police.

U.S. diplomats and the mainstream U.S. press immediately blamed Yanukovych for the sniper attack, though the circumstances remain murky to this day and some investigations have suggested that the lethal sniper fire came from buildings controlled by Right Sektor extremists.

To tamp down the worsening violence, a shaken Yanukovych signed a European-brokered deal on Feb. 21, in which he accepted reduced powers and an early election so he could be voted out of office. He also agreed to requests from Vice President Joe Biden to pull back the police.

The precipitous police withdrawal opened the path for the neo-Nazis and other street fighters to seize presidential offices and force Yanukovych and his officials to flee for their lives. The new coup regime was immediately declared "legitimate" by the U.S. State Department with Yanukovych sought on murder charges. Nuland's favorite, Yatsenyuk, became the new prime minister.

Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted protesters versus a black-hatted president. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who fired on unarmed supporters of "democracy." The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American people heard from the major media.

The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: "More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February."

The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and peaceful Maidan protests.

Any reference to a "coup" was dismissed as "Russian propaganda." There was a parallel determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians simply became "Russian aggression."

Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine's Azov battalion. (As filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)

This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II – reached absurd levels as The New York Times and The Washington Post buried references to the neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.

The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by quoting one militia commander as calling them "romantic" gestures by impressionable young men. [See Consortiumnews.com's " Ukraine's 'Romantic' Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers ."]

But today – more than two years after what U.S. and Ukrainian officials like to call "the Revolution of Dignity" – the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government is sinking into dysfunction, reliant on handouts from the IMF and Western governments.

And, in a move perhaps now more symbolic than substantive, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is stepping down. Yats is no longer the guy.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).


Khalid Talaat , April 16, 2016 at 20:39

Is it too far fetched to think that all these color revolutions are a perfection of the process to unleash another fake color revolution, only this time it is a Red, White and Blue revolution here at home? Those that continue to booze and snooze while watching the tube will not know the difference until it is too late.

The freedom and tranquility of our country depends on finding and implementing a counterweight to the presstitutes and their propaganda. The alternative is too destructive in its natural development.

Abe , April 15, 2016 at 18:49

Yats and Porko are the guys who broke Ukraine. By the end of December 2015, Ukraine's gross domestic product had shrunk around 19 percent in comparison with 2013. Its decimated industrial sector needs less fuel. Yatsie did a heck of a job.

Abe , April 15, 2016 at 18:35

Carl Gershman: "Ukraine is the biggest prize" -- Paragraph 6 of https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/former-soviet-states-stand-up-to-russia-will-the-us/2013/09/26/b5ad2be4-246a-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html

David Smith , April 12, 2016 at 13:51

The timing of "Yats" departure is ominous. Mid-April, six weeks from now would be the first chance to renew the invasion of DPR Donesk/Lugansk."Yats" failed in 2014, and didn't try in 2015. Who is "the new guy"? Will the new Prime Minister begin raving about renewing the holy war to recover the lost oblasts? 2016 is really Ukraine's last chance. Ukraine refuses to implement Minsk2, and they have been receiving lots of new weapons. I believe President Putin put the Syrian operation on " standby" not only to avoid approaching the border, provoking a Turkish intervention, but also so he can give undistracted attention to DPR Donesk/Lugansk.

Bill Rood , April 12, 2016 at 11:50

I guess I must be inside the Russian propaganda bubble. It was obvious to me when I looked at the YouTube videos of policemen burning after being hit with Molotov cocktails.

We played the same game of encouraging government "restraint" in Syria, where we demanded Assad free "political prisoners," but we now accuse him of deliberately encouraging ISIS by freeing those people, so that he can point to ISIS and ask, "Do you want that?" Targeted leaders are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Andrei , April 12, 2016 at 10:26

"the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954", Romania 1989 Shots were fired by snipers in order to stirr the crowds (sounds familiar?) and also by the army after Ceasescu ran away, which resulted in civilians getting murdered. Could it possibly be that it was said : "Iliescu (next elected president) is the guy!" ?

Joe L. , April 12, 2016 at 11:00

Check out the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela 2002, that is very similar with protesters, snipers on rooftops, IMF immediately offering loans to the new coup government, new government positions for the coup plotters, complacency with the media – propaganda, funding by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy etc. John Pilger documents how the coup occurred in his documentary "War on Democracy" – https://vimeo.com/16724719 .

archaos , April 12, 2016 at 09:45

It was noted in the minutes of Verkhovna Rada almost 2 years before Maidan 2 , that Geoffrey Pyatt was fomenting and funding destabilisation of Ukraine.
All of Svoboda Nazis in parliament (and other fascisti) then booed the MP who stated this.

Mark Thomason , April 12, 2016 at 06:57

Also, the Dutch voted "no" on the economic agreement the coup was meant to force through instead of the Russian agreement accepted by the President it overthrew. Now both "Yats" and the economic agreement are gone. All that is left is the war. Neocons are still happen. They wanted the war. They really want to overthrow Putin, and Ukraine was just a tool in that.

Realist , April 12, 2016 at 05:51

You're right, it doesn't have to be the military that carries out a coup by deploying tanks on the National Mall. In 2000, it was the United States Supreme Court that exceeded its constitutional authority and installed George W. Bush as president, though in reality he had lost that election. I wonder when that move will rightfully be characterized as a coup by the historians.

Bryan Hemming , April 12, 2016 at 04:00

"On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has been a major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Russian President Vladimir Putin."

It should be remembered that Victoria Nuland took up the post of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in Washington on September 18, 2013.

Coincidentally, two other women closely connected to events in Ukraine were also in Washington during September 2013.

Friend of Nuland and boss of the IMF, which has its own HQ in Washington, Christine Lagarde was swift to respond to a Ukraine request for IMF loans on February 27th 2014, just five days after the removal of Yanukovych on February 22nd. Lagarde is pictured with Baronness Catherine Ashton in Washington in a Facebook entry dated September 30th 2013. Ashton was High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy at the time.

Though visiting Kiev at the same time as Nuland in February 2014 Catherine Ashton never appeared in public with her, which seems a little odd considering the women were on the same mission, and talking to the same people. Nevertheless, despite appearing shy of being photographed with each other the two women weren't quite so shy of being pictured with leaders of the coup, including the right wing extremist, Oleh Tyahnybok.

Ashton refused to be drawn into commenting on Nuland's "Fuck the E.U.!" outburst, describing Nuland as "a friend of mine." The two women certainly weren't strangers, they had worked closely together before. September 2012 saw them involved in discussions with Iran negotiator Saeed Jalili over the country's supposed nuclear arms ambitions.

The question is not so much whether the three women talked about Ukraine's future – it would be ridiculous to think they did not – but how closely they worked together, and exactly how closely they might have been involved in events leading up to the overthrow of the legitimate government in Kiev. More on this here:

https://bryanhemming.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/double-double-toil-and-trouble-the-cauldron-of-kiev/

Pablo Diablo , April 11, 2016 at 22:56

Another failed "regime change". Aren't these guys (Neoconservatives) great. They fail, piss off/kill millions, yet seem to keep making money and retaining power. Time to WAKE UP AMERICA.

Skip Edwards , April 11, 2016 at 20:06

Read "The Devil'Chessboard" by David Talbot to understand what has been occurring as a result of America's Dark, Shadow government, an un-elected bunch of vicious psychopaths controlling our destiny; unless stopped. Get a clue and realize that "Yats is our guy" Victoria Nuland was Hillary Clinton's "gal." Hillary Clinton is Robert Kagen's "gal." Time to flush all these rats out of the hold and get on with our lives.

Joe L. , April 11, 2016 at 18:40

Mr. Parry thank you for delving into the proven history of coups and the parallels with Ukraine. It amazes me how anyone can outright deny this was a coup especially if they know anything about US coups going back to WW2 (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, attempt in Venezuela 2002 etc. – and there are a whole slew more). I read before, as you have rightly pointed out, that in 1953 the CIA led a propaganda campaign in Iran against Mossadegh as well as financing opposition protesters and opposition government officials. Another angle, as well, is looking historically back to what papers such as the New York Times were reporting around the time of the coup in Iran – especially when we know that the US/Britain overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh for their own oil interests (British Petroleum):

New York Times: "Mossadegh Plays with Fire" (August 15, 1953):

The world has so many trouble spots these days that one is apt to pass over the odd one here and there to preserve a little peace of mind. It would be well, however, to keep an eye on Iran, where matters are going from bad to worse, thanks to the machinations of Premier Mossadegh.

Some of us used to ascribe our inability to persuade Dr. Mossadegh of the validity of our ideas to the impossibility of making him understand or see things our way. We thought of him as a sincere, well-meaning, patriotic Iranian, who had a different point of view and made different deductions from the same set of facts. We now know that he is a power-hungry, personally ambitious, ruthless demagogue who is trampling upon the liberties of his own people. We have seen this onetime champion of liberty maintain martial law, curb freedom of the press, radio, speech and assembly, resort to illegal arrests and torture, dismiss the Senate, destroy the power of the Shah, take over control of the army, and now he is about to destroy the Majlis, which is the lower house of Parliament.

His power would seem to be complete, but he has alienated the traditional ruling classes -the aristocrats, landlords, financiers and tribal leaders. These elements are anti-Communist. So is the Shah and so are the army leaders and the urban middle classes. There is a traditional, historic fear, suspicion and dislike of Russia and the Russians. The peasants, who make up the overwhelming mass of the population, are illiterate and nonpolitical. Finally, there is still no evidence that the Tudeh (Communist) party is strong enough or well enough organized, financed and led to take power.

All this simply means that there is no immediate danger of a Communist coup or Russian intervention. On the other hand, Dr. Mossadegh is encouraging the Tudeh and is following policies which will make the Communists more and more dangerous. He is a sorcerer's apprentice, calling up forces he will not be able to control.

Iran is a weak, divided, poverty-stricken country which possesses an immense latent wealth in oil and a crucial strategic position. This is very different from neighboring Turkey, a strong, united, determined and advanced nation, which can afford to deal with the Russians because she has nothing to fear -and therefore the West has nothing to fear. Thanks largely to Dr. Mossadegh, there is much to fear in Iran.

http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/new-york-times/august-15-1953/

My feeling is that the biggest sin that our society has is forgetting history. If we remembered history I would think that it would be very difficult to pull off coups but most media does not revisit history which proves US coups even against democracies. I actually think that the coup that occurred in Ukraine was similar to the attempted coup in Venezuela in 2002 with snipers on rooftops, immediate blame for the deaths on Hugo Chavez where media manipulated the footage, immediate acceptance of the temporary coup government by the US Government, immediately offering IMF loans for the new coup government, government positions for many of the coup plotters, and let us not leave out the funding for the coup coming from USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. I also remember seeing the New York Times immediately blaming Chavez and praising the coup but when the coup was overturned and US fingerprints started to become revealed (with many of the coup plotters fleeing to the US) then the New York Times wrote a limited retraction buried in their paper. Shameless.

SFOMARCO , April 11, 2016 at 15:16

How was NED able to finance "scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists, paying for journalists and organizing business groups", not to mention to host such dignitaries as Cookie Nuland, Loser McCain and assorted Bidens? Seems like a recipe for a coup "hidden in plain sight".

Bob Van Noy , April 11, 2016 at 14:36

Ukraine, one would hope, represents the "Bridge Too Far" moment for the proponents of regime change. Surely Americans must be catching on to what we do for selected nations in the name of "giving them their freedoms". The Kagan Family, empowered by their newly endorsed candidate for President, Hillary Clinton, will feel justified in carrying on a new cold war, this time world wide. Of course they will not be doing the fighting, they, like Dick Cheney are the self appointed intellects of geopolitical chess, much like The Georgetown Set of the Kennedy era, they perceive themselves as the only ones smart enough to plan America's future.

Helen Marshall , April 11, 2016 at 17:11

I wish. How many Americans know ANYTHNG about what has happened in Ukraine, about Crimea and its history, and/or could even locate them on a map?

Pastor Agnostic , April 12, 2016 at 04:11

Nuland is merely the inhouse, PNAC female version of Sidney Blumenthal. Which raises the scary question. Who would she pick to be SecState?

[Mar 22, 2019] I wonder what Mr. Kagan has to say now about authoritarian regimes?!

Mar 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

As usual, Trump made the announcement of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials...

President Donald Trump's tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.

U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week's meetings between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential announcement this week.

No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before Trump's decision, and the diplomats responsible for implementing the policy were left in the dark.

Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing of Trump's message.

After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do. Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be responsible for carrying out his policies and dealing with the international fallout, and that is probably why so many of his policy decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The substance of most of Trump's foreign policy decisions was never likely to be good, but the lack of an organized policy process on major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than they would otherwise be.

There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors.

Kouros , March 21, 2019 at 11:39 pm

I wonder what Mr. Kagan has to say now about "authoritarian" regimes?!

[Mar 17, 2017] Chickenhawks from Kagan family

Notable quotes:
"... "The Warrior Kagan Family", that must have been Greenwald's big joke, I hope. Those people give a meaning to the name chickenhawks, they would not know from which end a gun fires, but they certainly know how to get millions killed by others. ..."
"... Their money ensures that their aggressive writings still get published in the usual Deep State media. I particularly liked a touch of light humor by Mr Parry: "There was also hope that a President Hillary Clinton would recognize how sympatico the liberal hawks and the neocons were by promoting Robert Kagan's neocon wife, Victoria Nuland, to Secretary of State." ..."
"... What is troublesome is with the Kagan's screaming out, 'watch the Russians, beware of the Russians' and with the 24/7 MSM alarm bells going off over Russia, will the Trump Adminstration need to craft their foreign policy around the likes of these Russia Haters? ..."
"... The common denominator is profit and increased market share fueled by greed ..Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of the average USA investor who fuels the stock market looking for the best return on his/her money. ..."
"... After finding this early warning essay by Cartalucci I have often wondered that if our MSM were to have scooped this kind of news regarding the travels of Senator John McCain would the tragedy of Benghazi have never happened. ..."
"... http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/03/john-mccain-founding-father-of.html ..."
"... Plus this article adds insight to how the Deep State operates. McCain should be the one held for high treason, but as things are that will never happen. The more you may learn the more you may find that Donald Trump seems to be less of a problem than we all know. Now that isn't an endorsement of Trump, as much as it is a heads up to notice who all is behind the curtain. ..."
"... I recommend reading the latest blog by Moon of Alabama and enlightened comments. You will get further details on what the Kagans' plans are – what they would have done for sure under their L'Amour Toujours, Clinton as President. ..."
"... I read that moonofalabama, b is always right on. In fact b and Robert Parry are excellent examples of how 'small' is good. http://journal-neo.org/2017/03/15/us-expands-defacto-syrian-invasion/ The above article by Tony Cartalucci is along the same lines as moonofalabama. ..."
"... Excellent point – how to quickly recognise psychopaths: "psychopathy is the habit of using emotionally loaded language in tones which betray no actual connection to the content". A large proportion of our politicians fit the description. ..."
"... "I noted two years ago in an article entitled "A Family Business of Perpetual War": "Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats. This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks." ..."
"... "the so-called "#Resistance" to Trump's presidency and President Obama's unprecedented use of his intelligence agencies to paint Trump as a Russian "Manchurian candidate" gave new hope to the neocons and their agenda. It has taken them a few months to reorganize and regroup but they now see hope in pressuring Trump so hard regarding Russia that he will have little choice but to buy into their belligerent schemes. As often is the case, the Family Kagan has charted the course of action – batter Republicans into joining the all-out Russia-bashing and then persuade a softened Trump to launch a full-scale invasion of Syria. In this endeavor, the Kagans have Democrats and liberals as the foot soldiers." ..."
"... For instance, Robert's brother Frederick works at the American Enterprise Institute, which has long benefited from the largesse of the Military-Industrial Complex, and his wife Kimberly runs her own think tank called the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). ..."
"... Andrew Bacevich referred to Kagan as "the chief neoconservative foreign-policy theorist" in reviewing Kagan's book The Return of history and the end of dreams.[21] ..."
"... Here's Andrew Bacevich's 2014 piece on the Kagans: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/duplicity-ideologues ..."
"... But Mr Parry, I think it will also be interesting to examine the 'Vault 7' disclosure with regards to this Russia bashing. If the CIA has the ability to put out any email or documentation without a trail as to its origin, the Kagans could be shown as the charlatans they are if it was the CIA who meddled with the US election. ..."
"... "The US military will try to take Raqqa from ISIS with the help of the Kurds in coordination with Syrian government forces. The Syrian government will also destroy al Qaeda in Idleb. The chance that Trump will pick up on any of these neo-con plans is practically zero. But who knows?" ..."
"... On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show, Friedman demanded that the Russia hacking allegations be treated as a casus belli: "That was a 9/11 scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor scale event." Both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 led to wars. ..."
"... It's just reported on Global Research that Russia has absorbed 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees since the US 2014 coup and Europe 900,000 more, according to a Kremlin parliamentarian in February. Thanks to Victoria Nuland! ..."
"... Far too much money which MIC wants play with. ..and as Admiral Thomas Moorer commented, " No American President can stand up to Israel " ..."
"... the virulent fixation on Russia is out of control. ..."
Mar 17, 2017 | consortiumnews.com
Bart in Virginia March 15, 2017 at 6:49 pm

It's not the Family Kagan, but rather as Glenn Greenwald dubbed them, The Warrior Kagan Family with a trade mark sign as suffix.

I'll bet Victoria resigned from State, seeing her future there granting visas in Baku.

Thanks, Robert, I haven't had a Kagan fix in quite a while!

Kiza , March 15, 2017 at 8:26 pm

"The Warrior Kagan Family", that must have been Greenwald's big joke, I hope. Those people give a meaning to the name chickenhawks, they would not know from which end a gun fires, but they certainly know how to get millions killed by others.

As to Mr Parry, calling them the American neocon royalty, it certainly is some foul-mouth royalty, telling another Zio servant EU to get f'ed.

Thank you Robert Parry for a great article, just like Bart I was wondering what happened to the cookie distributing "royalty" after the Clinton fail. It is not surprising that they are now learning to manipulate outcomes from the opposition. Their money ensures that their aggressive writings still get published in the usual Deep State media. I particularly liked a touch of light humor by Mr Parry: "There was also hope that a President Hillary Clinton would recognize how sympatico the liberal hawks and the neocons were by promoting Robert Kagan's neocon wife, Victoria Nuland, to Secretary of State."

Between the Clinton liberals and the Ziocons C'est une Affaire d'Amour Toujours , as Pepé Le Pew likes to say.

Skip Edwards , March 15, 2017 at 11:28 pm

"The Warrior Kagan Family", that must have been Greenwald's big joke, I hope. Those people give a meaning to the name chickenhawks, they would not know from which end a gun fires, but they certainly know how to get millions killed by others.

I learned how to laugh again; and, at the expense of all those despicable Kagen's.

Joe Tedesky , March 15, 2017 at 11:49 pm

KIza there is good news inside Robert Parry's article if you look for it. One good thing is that Hillary isn't the president, and if she were one could only imagine what her and the Kagan's would be up to right now. The other piece of good news, is that the Kagan's are writing op-eds and not working for the Trump Adminstration.

Now I have read somewhere where the U.S. is working with Russia, and that for the most part for now has to be done on the low key. Of course with news being 'fake' and all of that, who's to know?

What is troublesome is with the Kagan's screaming out, 'watch the Russians, beware of the Russians' and with the 24/7 MSM alarm bells going off over Russia, will the Trump Adminstration need to craft their foreign policy around the likes of these Russia Haters?

Cheney and Rumsfeld developed 'the Continuity of Government Program' and I'm wondering if that cast of characters could seep into the mix of things? Plus don't forget the ever reliable CIA So with all of that working against you, one could only wonder if Ghandi and Jesus could do much better up against this evil array of villains.

Joe Tedesky , March 16, 2017 at 12:10 am

Here is something worth reading Tony Cartalucci explains the Deep State, and goes on to talk about how it may be defeated. Here's a hint, the world will not be run by the New World Order.

http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2017/03/exposing-real-deep-state.html

John , March 16, 2017 at 11:28 am

Very good link, Joe!! The common denominator is profit and increased market share fueled by greed ..Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of the average USA investor who fuels the stock market looking for the best return on his/her money. I would not look for much altruistic behavioral changes in human nature Greed is still the preferred method of operation .and firmly in control ..

Common Tater , March 16, 2017 at 11:30 am

Joe T.
Excellent article, thanks!

D5-5 , March 16, 2017 at 12:29 pm

Joe, many thanks for this powerful link on the deep state, and its explanation of the multi-polar conditions needed, and as happening, plus the link you supplied below related to what's going on in Syria, also clear and helpful.

Joe Tedesky , March 16, 2017 at 3:30 pm

I'm glad that you all found the link to be informative. I am posting another link to a Tony Cartalucci article that got my attention of his work a few years ago, and ever since I look forward to reading his reporting.

This link is interesting for the fact that the original article was published March 2012 which was somewhere in the neighborhood of six months before the deadly attack took place in Benghazi. After finding this early warning essay by Cartalucci I have often wondered that if our MSM were to have scooped this kind of news regarding the travels of Senator John McCain would the tragedy of Benghazi have never happened.

http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/03/john-mccain-founding-father-of.html

Plus this article adds insight to how the Deep State operates. McCain should be the one held for high treason, but as things are that will never happen. The more you may learn the more you may find that Donald Trump seems to be less of a problem than we all know. Now that isn't an endorsement of Trump, as much as it is a heads up to notice who all is behind the curtain.

Curious , March 16, 2017 at 5:16 pm

Thanks for the two links Joe. I didn't think it was possible for me to dislike McCain more than I already did, but I was wrong. I did like Senator Pauls' comment about McCain today however. He basically said McCain is a perfect example of why we should have term limits in the Senate, which is so true.

Kiza , March 16, 2017 at 12:24 am

Oh no, I did not mean that it is bad news this is why I wrote that the Kagans are learning to spew hate from the opposition not from the government. Like D5-5, I recommend reading the latest blog by Moon of Alabama and enlightened comments. You will get further details on what the Kagans' plans are – what they would have done for sure under their L'Amour Toujours, Clinton as President.

As to Jesus, he self-sacrificed himself to show the way out of human predicament. Jesus was fighting against such ideologues of hate and moneychangers as the Kagans, who are an exemplar of the mad-gleaming-eye-greedy-finger types so well known in the old Europe. Just observe the first photo to the article: she looks like she would murder just about any baby in the world to take her sweet candy.

Joe Tedesky , March 16, 2017 at 1:08 am

I read that moonofalabama, b is always right on. In fact b and Robert Parry are excellent examples of how 'small' is good.

http://journal-neo.org/2017/03/15/us-expands-defacto-syrian-invasion/

The above article by Tony Cartalucci is along the same lines as moonofalabama.

At this stage of the game the best that I can put forward with, is we got to take one day at a time, in order to make sense of whatever the real news is going on inside Syria. From one article to another it's hard to tell who's fighting, or going to fight who. With the atmosphere here in America I'm waiting for an arrest to be made if you talk favorably about Russia, or Putin. Seriously, our MSM cable news networks are going hells bells on this Russian hacking, Russian tampering with our democracy, Russia has a puppet in the White House, Russia _______fill in the blank. We have gone totally nuts this time, and it looks like we are going to stay that way for awhile.

I always like to ponder the politics that would have prevailed during the time of Jesus. If you get a grasp on that then Jesus really stands out better for what he was preaching too, and preaching against. I'm sure Herod or Ceasar had their Kagan's around in their day, and who knows how discreetly those ancient Kagan's could have whispered vile and nasty ideas of war and conquest into their leaders head. When it's all about power and money it's easy to lose ones head, or so they say. Let's all hope the Kagan's amount to be nothing more than sore losers.

Peter Loeb , March 16, 2017 at 6:13 am

WITH MCCAIN AS HELPER

A good comment Joe Tedesky.

As to Syria, we already have invaded and already plan more (see Defense Appropriation). Of interest would be Putin's response on the ground.

(When Netanyahu went to Moskow to ask for help in getting Syria to reign in Iran, he was referred to the sovereign government of Syria! Is the current (and future) US invasion of the sovereign state of Syria at the invitation of the Syrian Government??

Ans: No! See UN Charter on aggression, I think it is Article 4(2) if memory serves. Besides the current administration wants to make all its sins of commission such as drones done by the CIA Which is to say covert and not accountable to anyone (such as DOD, White House etc.).Our invasion will evidently be
accountable to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

I am certain Moscow has a plan, a response (diplomatic or otherwise).

Donald Trump likes war and being "Commander-in-Chief". All countries involved in war are always absolutely persuaded that their victory will be quick, easy etc.It also helps(??) the US economy as all wars have for hundreds of years. No one will oppose more money for defense. I have already contacted my Mass. Senators in regard to funds for the invasion of Syria as well as my Congressional Representative. (I expect little support. All lawgivers are dependent on AIPAC support )

--Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA

Joe Tedesky , March 16, 2017 at 10:15 am

Except for Desert Storm every war has lasted long past it's end date, and even one could argue over Desert Storm if you add in the time of occupation or establishing no fly zones to how long we have been there.

I'm not all that sure yet that Trump likes war. There are times he stresses peace, after he rally's the people around a powerful military speech. Now, what I do worry about is the people around him. NIkki Haley just recently in a NBC interview said how we should never trust Russia. Wow, and she is our UN ambassador. So much for statesmanship and diplomacy.

As far as our CIA goes they are going to get everyone on this planet killed. It's long overdue to crunch the CIA down to being an information gatherer and stop with the convert intrigue. If we factor in stability and the quality of human life, then tell me about the one CIA operation which has been a success. The CIA's interference, and trashing of foreign government sovereignty is a disgrace, and should I add be prosecuted as a war crime in the highest order. If Trump could shred the CIA into a thousand pieces then I say, do it Mr President.

The real problem we face while attempting to establish the Yinon Plan, is that we will finally either partner with Russia somehow over something, or end up fighting Russia and possibly not fight them through proxies. I don't see either Russia or the U.S. using nukes on each other at first, but I would be praying for the poor souls in places such as Iran, Yemen, or places like that. And while we are at it North and South Korea, and once again Japan would most likely be countries well inside the lines of being in jeopardy.

Russia, and China, should be our natural allies, but there's nothing natural about our country's foreign policy when world hegemony overrides man's human nature to life in peace.

John , March 16, 2017 at 4:24 pm

Joe,

The other piece of good news is that they are actually starting to walk back the Russia hacked the election an we can prove it nonsense. Read Glenn Greenwald's latest piece at The Intercept. At long last sir have they actually some human decency? Nah!!!

Joe Tedesky , March 16, 2017 at 4:52 pm

Thanks John I will be sure to read Greenwald's article, but you know we in America need a bogey man .so if not Russia then who?

Dominic Pukallus , March 16, 2017 at 4:43 am

Concerning the foul-mouthing, I was disturbed to hear such strong talk (at least to this earthy soul) in such a delicate voice. To me a sign of psychopathy is the habit of using emotionally loaded language in tones which betray no actual connection to the content. Another is causing the killing of no small amount of people with a large amount of apparent unconcern, but then again that's a net which would drag an alarming amount of people from corridors of power. Perhaps the majority of these have mastered the art of matching tone and content in their requirement to at least appear Human to their subjects.

Kiza , March 16, 2017 at 6:00 am

Excellent point – how to quickly recognise psychopaths: "psychopathy is the habit of using emotionally loaded language in tones which betray no actual connection to the content". A large proportion of our politicians fit the description. Thank you.

Nastarana , March 16, 2017 at 10:34 am

Kiza, Please don't forget that is a "sign of psychopathy". There are other kinds of derangement in which the unfortunate sufferers are prone to the use of inappropriate body language and verbal tone, but are not necessarily a danger to others. As for the Kagans, I consider them to be criminals, plain and simple.

Anon , March 16, 2017 at 1:31 pm

I am waiting to see the male ballerina "foot soldiers" demanding transgender bathrooms in the trenches.

Joe Tedesky , March 16, 2017 at 3:46 pm

Anon in 1919 Max Sennett was way ahead of you. You might get a kick out of watching Sennett's movie called 'Yankee Doodle in Berlin'. It is a story about an American soldier dressed as a woman going behind enemy lines to entice the Kaiser. Also notice the slanted propaganda of the way American Hollywood film producers were characterizing the Germans. We are all but a product of who came before us I'm sad to say .but hey enjoy the silent flick anyway.

https://archive.org/details/YankeeDoodleInBerlin

Oh and with all due respect let's at least give a salute to Chelsea Manning.

BART GRUZALSKI PROF. EMERITUS , March 16, 2017 at 9:26 am

BART IN VIRGINIA!!

Are you really "Bart" as in short for "Bartholomew"!!!!

Parry, thank you for a GREAT article.

Early on you pegged them:

"Back pontificating on prominent op-ed pages, the Family Kagan now is pushing for an expanded U.S. military invasion of Syria and baiting Republicans for not joining more enthusiastically in the anti-Russian witch hunt over Moscow's alleged help in electing Donald Trump."

Then skillfully reminding us: "I noted two years ago in an article entitled "A Family Business of Perpetual War": "Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats. This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks."

Your conclusion is actually overly optimistic:

"the so-called "#Resistance" to Trump's presidency and President Obama's unprecedented use of his intelligence agencies to paint Trump as a Russian "Manchurian candidate" gave new hope to the neocons and their agenda. It has taken them a few months to reorganize and regroup but they now see hope in pressuring Trump so hard regarding Russia that he will have little choice but to buy into their belligerent schemes. As often is the case, the Family Kagan has charted the course of action – batter Republicans into joining the all-out Russia-bashing and then persuade a softened Trump to launch a full-scale invasion of Syria. In this endeavor, the Kagans have Democrats and liberals as the foot soldiers."

Instead, the Deep State is preparing to begin getting rid of Trump on June 1st:

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/video-on-june-1st-the-deep-state-will-move-to-overthrow-trump-there-is-a-secret-agenda-to-allow-a-crisis-and-get-rid-of-the-president_03142017

IF you the reader haven't read my "The Deep State Versus President Trump" it is time (on Amazon for only $12.95 or less).

Parry, I will immediately post this EXCELLENT article on Facebook. Because my wife and I are living "by the skin of our teeth" on social security, I can't make a donation, but I will send in an article on why the Deep State wants Trump gone as a pro bono contribution. Hope you think it is worthy of publication.

Dr. Bart Gruzalski, Professor Emeritus, Philosophy (ethics, public policy) and Religion (books: "On the Buddha": "On Gandhi"; and "Why Christians and World-Peace Advocates Voted for President Donald Trump"), Northeastern University, Boston, MA-and the only Ph.D. in philosophy among the thousands that I and my mentor Professor Samuel Gorovitz know who voted for and supports Trump [no, Sam was and is opposed to our POTUS].

dineesh , March 15, 2017 at 7:01 pm

Who is behind them rascals?

evelync , March 15, 2017 at 8:22 pm

Good question! And I don't know the answer, but I googled the question and FWIW depending on the reliability of the writers of the articles, here's what I found:

"A Family Business

There's also a family-business aspect to these wars and confrontations, since the Kagans collectively serve not just to start conflicts but to profit from grateful military contractors who kick back a share of the money to the think tanks that employ the Kagans.

For instance, Robert's brother Frederick works at the American Enterprise Institute, which has long benefited from the largesse of the Military-Industrial Complex, and his wife Kimberly runs her own think tank called the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

According to ISW's annual reports, its original supporters were mostly right-wing foundations, such as the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, but it was later backed by a host of national security contractors, including major ones like General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and CACI, as well as lesser-known firms such as DynCorp International, which provided training for Afghan police, and Palantir, a technology company founded with the backing of the CIA's venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir supplied software to US military intelligence in Afghanistan.

Since its founding in 2007, ISW has focused mostly on wars in the Middle East, especially Iraq and Afghanistan, including closely cooperating with Gen. David Petraeus when he commanded US forces in those countries. However, more recently, ISW has begun reporting extensively on the civil war in Ukraine. [See "Neocons Guided Petraeus on Afghan War."]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-26/meet-kagans-seeking-war-end-world

from wikipedia:

"In 1983, Robert Kagan was foreign policy advisor to New York Republican Representative Jack Kemp. From 1984–86, under the administration of Ronald Reagan, he was a speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz and a member of the United States Department of State Policy Planning Staff. From 1986–1988 he served in the State Department Bureau of Inter-American Affairs.[10]

In 1997, Kagan co-founded the now-defunct neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century with William Kristol.[3][5][11] Through the work of the PNAC, Kagan was a strong advocate of the Iraq war.

From 1998 until August, 2010, Kagan was a Senior Associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was appointed senior fellow in the Center on United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in September 2010.[12][13][14][15] He is also a member of the board of directors for the neoconservative think tank The Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).[16]

During the 2008 presidential campaign he served as foreign policy advisor to John McCain, the Republican Party's nominee for President of the United States in the 2008 election.[17][18]

Since 2011, Kagan has also served on the 25-member State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board under Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton[19] and John Kerry.[20]

Andrew Bacevich referred to Kagan as "the chief neoconservative foreign-policy theorist" in reviewing Kagan's book The Return of history and the end of dreams.[21]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kagan

also check out the footnotes from the wiki article ..

Here's Andrew Bacevich's 2014 piece on the Kagans: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/duplicity-ideologues

Bottom line, though, it seems like the Kagans have been at the center of Washington policy think for decades and decades and therefore fit neatly within the comfort zone of powerful people who carry out U.S. foreign policy – Republicans and Democrats.
That's who we are, apparently ..
I recently saw Wally Shawn's play in NYC – 'Evening at the Talk House', an amazing play about who we are – or have become .
https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/theater-review-evening-at-the-talk-house-is-wallace-shawns-political-party-trick-021617
http://www.vulture.com/2017/02/theater-evening-at-the-talk-house-and-escaped-alone.html

Bill Bodden , March 15, 2017 at 11:26 pm

Thank you for your research and report

jaycee , March 15, 2017 at 9:28 pm

It's not too difficult to identify the think-tanks the Kagans belong to or run. These organizations have web sites, and the web sites usually list who the funders are. That's the information you seek.

For example, the Institute for the Study of War is supported by the likes of General Dynamics, CACI, Microsoft, Centerra, Capital Bank, etc.

Diana , March 16, 2017 at 7:02 am

Robbie Martin has produced a three-part documentary on them rascals called "A Very Heavy Agenda." It's well worth watching, but it's expensive the box set of the three DVDs costs $50.00. I opted for the Vimeo version, where each part can be purchased for $6.99 or rented for $2.99. You can watch the trailers and learn more at http://averyheavyagenda.com .

Diana , March 16, 2017 at 8:10 am

You can find the Vimeo versions at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/averyheavyagenda . Watch the trailer for Part 3 and you will see that it refers to Robert Parry's "Family Kagan" article.

Sam , March 16, 2017 at 7:03 am

The ME warmongers are largely zionist Jews, including the Kagan/Nulands and the 2003 Iraq War II sponsors SecDef Wolfowitz and his Israeli spy operatives Perl, Feith, and Wurmser installed at CIA/DIA/NSA offices to select known-bad "intelligence" to incite war. The Kochs are of course complicit. Any who aren't zionist Jews are after their stolen US funds to Israel, fed to stink tanks and political bribe donations.

The war in Iraq was such a success that the US was forced out having ensured the pro-Iran government it most feared, having built AlQaeda from a CIA proxy to a regional and then a worldwide enemy, and having guaranteed the violent Sunni uprising now called IS. Read Bamford's Pretext for War. Don't we need more of those wars.

BART GRUZALSKI PROF. EMERITUS , March 16, 2017 at 9:29 am

dineesh,

This is a reply to your (lost in the undergrowth): MORE RASCALS, in fact, THE ENTIRE DEEP STATE.

dineesh's question: Who is behind those rascals.

D5-5 , March 15, 2017 at 7:17 pm

Take a look at Moon of Alabama on this Kagan rehash. The comments in response to the analysis also recommended. Posted today.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/03/third-times-the-charm-the-neocons-want-another-sunni-insurgency.html

Sally Snyder , March 15, 2017 at 7:18 pm

As shown in this article, the United States is using ammunition in Syria that is adding to the already significant problems that Syrians are facing:

http://viableopposition.blogspot.ca/2017/02/the-united-states-and-cancer-of-warfare.html

Apparently, the lessons taught in Iraq have been forgotten.

Scott , March 15, 2017 at 8:06 pm

A lesson can be had only by those willing to learn. Democrats just lost over 900 seats across state and federal offices and even that proved not to be a teachable moment.

Curious , March 15, 2017 at 7:50 pm

What a disturbing headline. I had hoped they would have been neutered after the Hillary defeat.

But Mr Parry, I think it will also be interesting to examine the 'Vault 7' disclosure with regards to this Russia bashing. If the CIA has the ability to put out any email or documentation without a trail as to its origin, the Kagans could be shown as the charlatans they are if it was the CIA who meddled with the US election. It would shake their entire platform of blaming Russia to the core. It is difficult enough as it is to tell the originator of many internal docs leaked to the public, so the blame game is false as it is. I would welcome more release of the CIA vault 7 if only to show how often the CIA is involved in internal US politics and "homeland" situations. This meddling is supposedly against the law.

One could only hope.

Tannenhouser , March 15, 2017 at 8:26 pm

Not only that .A 'democrats' views are so symbiotic to a kagans shows they play for the same team while occasionally wearing different color jersey's. Curious indeed . I share your hope.

Jonathan , March 16, 2017 at 12:49 pm

In connection with the legality of CIA meddling in internal affairs, and the Trump wire-tapping charge, Scott Ritter has made what seems to be a rather good point in a recent article published in Truthdig. The article digs a little deeper into the matter and comes up with a surprising and quite optimistic conclusion.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/trumps_wiretapping_charge_could_contain_some_explosive_truth_20170314

D5-5 , March 15, 2017 at 8:32 pm

As b says, analyst at Moon of Alabama (he's German by the way) on this topic, "The US military will try to take Raqqa from ISIS with the help of the Kurds in coordination with Syrian government forces. The Syrian government will also destroy al Qaeda in Idleb. The chance that Trump will pick up on any of these neo-con plans is practically zero. But who knows?"

He also finds the Kaganista notions on a THIRD try at raising "the moderates" to get rid of Assad "drinking the kool aid."

My question is how does this troop infusion, made problematical as Assad has not okayed it, calling it illegal, and which includes 2500 "tip of the spear" paratroopers in Kuwait, move the situation on, additional to (or beyond) the goal of cleaning out ISIS? To what, why? Suppose ISIS defeated (replaced in how long by another ISIS unless the political/economic situation changes for the sunnis) then what? Trump does an Obama and the US leaves again? Or cuts a deal with the neocons on pipeline projects etc?

LJ , March 15, 2017 at 9:01 pm

I read that article. The Qatar Turkey Pipeline was one of the hoped for outcomes of the Regime Change in Syria . This was problematic for Russia and will remain so. If the USA>NATO>EU thought that they could bring Turkey into the fold with this pipeline it might make sense but right now this is very unlikely.

Personally I do not think Trump and Tillerson would go for World War .Do not forget that China is allied with Russia on this and they see Syria as very important to the completion of One Belt One Road'. Israel's role in the region and in Syria should not be forgotten ever. They are anxious about the Golan and Russia and they always want the USA to attack Iran. So does Saudi Arabia and you may have noticed the Saudi Foreign Minister dropping a comment a couple days ago that this planned action against Hezbollah and Iran is very much on the table.

There are many heads on the chopping block right now not just Assad's, enemies and allies also. The Planners cannot control the outcome in Turkey (We played our card already), in Iraq, in Syria or in Lebanon. WE are not liked. All the USA can do at this point is destroy, we can never win hearts and minds in the Middle East.. Can of Worms.

Joe Tedesky , March 16, 2017 at 1:23 am

I think the biggest worry is to hope that whoever loses can bear the cost of loss. This Syrian war I don't think at this point is as much about ISIS as it is about land. Land for pipelines mostly, but land for a whole host of other reasons as well. Sunni, Shia, and Kurds, are the predominant people who are fighting for space, but so are countries like Turkey, Saudi's, and the Israeli's in the Golan Heights. So stretching pipelines, and building new one road infrastrutures need land oh and let's not forget the Shia Crescent and Iran. This area is so messed up I'm not that sure even the winner will have won much more than a big headache.

Enjoyed reading both of your comments, and thought I'd make some noise to accompany your conversation.

MEexpert , March 16, 2017 at 2:41 am

Joe, both the Syrian and Iraq wars now have two purposes. First is to prevent the dreaded "Shia Crescent," and the second is to protect Israel. The latest surge in Iraq and Syria by the US forces is to keep the perpetual wars going by creating "Sunni" zones in Iraq and Syria. When the Iraqi Army and the Shia militias were battling the ISIS, there were no US boots on the ground. Same thing in Syria. Consider the timing of this surge. ISIS is almost routed in Iraq and Syria and all of a sudden Trump sends ground forces to help mop up the remnants of ISIS.

The real purpose is not to clean up ISIS but to prevent the government forces to establish rule in Mosul. Saudi Arabia wants that part to remain Sunni. This way Iran doesn't win. The US wants to divide Iraq in three parts, Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish, as has been her plan all along. Similarly, in Syria, if Assad wins the whole of Syria is under his rule. By inserting herself in the war, the US wants to set up a Sunni section on behalf of Saudi Arabia and Israel, to be a thorn in Assad's side and a Kurdish side to punish Erdogan for his behavior and keep him occupied. The wars will continue in the Middle East, the Military-Industrial Complex will continue to sell weapons and Israel will be worry free.

What I don't understand is why is US so against the Shias. I can understand Israel's position. Israel got her rear end kicked twice by a tiny Hezbollah force but why US. It can't be just to please Israel or is it? So much bloodshed just for that.

Sam , March 16, 2017 at 7:13 am

The US is involved solely to get political campaign funds from Israel stolen from US "aid".

Joe Tedesky , March 16, 2017 at 10:25 am

Going back to the old communist days and Nassar the U.S. sided with Israel. That was back at a time when we Americans were exposed to the propaganda that Israeli's were like us Americans, and all Arabs were crazy. We were fine with Iran as long as we had the Shad there to protect our interest. The Iran Hostage event was excellent PR to demonize Iran for over a forty year period, and life goes on.

You and I along with many others here believe now is a great time to hit the Middle East reset button .now how do we convince our country's leadership to do that, is the question.

John P , March 16, 2017 at 8:49 pm

Good article and I think you hit the nails on the heads MEexpert. Your final paragraph, I think the U.S. wants a stable ally in the region and they believe Israel fills that roll, even though I see little common interest in eithers ambitions, one for stability the other for annexations. Perhaps the U.S. politicians hold their noses and hope.

Sam , March 16, 2017 at 7:21 am

The Qatar-Turkey pipeline concept tried to break the "Shiite crescent" of Iran/Iraq/Syria/Lebanon and compete with the southern Russia-Turkey pipeline; otherwise they would not be seeking war near pipelines that could more easily have coexisted.

MEexpert , March 16, 2017 at 2:57 am

"Suppose ISIS defeated (replaced in how long by another ISIS unless the political/economic situation changes for the sunnis) then what?"

Why such concern about the Sunnis? In Iraq only 20% population is Sunni. Yet Saddam, a Sunni, ruled more that 60% Shias for 35 years and other Sunni rulers before that. There was no concern for their feelings or their safety by Papa Bush in 1991 or after that when Saddam gassed the Shias and the Kurds. Bahrain, on the other hand, at one time was 90% Shia with a Sunni ruler, thanks to the British. The Emir of Bahrain has been systematically stripping the Shias of their citizenship and importing Sunnis from other countries and giving them Citizenship by recruiting them into the Bahraini Armed Forces. Even when the uprising started in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia moved in there to put the uprising down, all US did was to send down the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs to reassure the Emir of Bahrain and to make sure that the 5th fleet was safe.

D5-5 , March 16, 2017 at 1:02 pm

@ ME Expert:

Thank you for your comments! I'm looking at the above responses, including the additional link on Syria from Joe, which provides historical perspective also, in terms of US establishing a presence in eastern Syria to be "a thorn in Assad's side" as you say, and continue to push for regional control allied with Israel and Saudi Arabia, et al.

On your question why such concern about the Sunnis, here's my impression, which could be too simple.

With the conquest of Iraq and Bremer's releasing the 400,000 military, a highly Shia favored sort of revenge government program fell into place, favoring Shias and leading to problems for Sunnis (including high unemployment) that led on to the creation of ISIS. If similar economic and political problems are not dealt with, wiping out this iteration of ISIS could lead to another version of it. I also have the impression the potential number of these dissatisfied, as potential recruits, could number in many millions (not sure how many). I don't intend to take a position favoring Sunnis, but am trying to understand the complexity of the grievances of whomever. As part of this, my understanding is that many members of ISIS are not head-chopping maniacs but joined as ISIS was the only available opposing force.

On your question why is the US so against the Shias, my impression is they haven't been against the Shias in Iraq, while simultaneously (and shortsightedly) exercising no influence on fair governance of Iraq following the 03 invasion, and this favoritism favored the Shias there and stirred Sunni resistance. But, I'm thinking, the animosity toward Shias elsewhere is related to alignments in the region, toward dominating the entire region, including taking down Syria and Iran. So it's not so much animosity toward Shias per se as it is to regime change uncooperative rulers, whether in Lebanon, Syria, or Iran, with their Shia populations (and lately of course throw in Russia). At stake is pipelines of various sorts, and water rights, and overall in terms of globalism and full spectrum dominance taking over the entire middle east region.

I welcome being straightened out on where I'm correct or too simplistic. Thanks again.

D5-5 , March 16, 2017 at 1:08 pm

Meant to say INcorrect or too simplistic!

LJ , March 16, 2017 at 1:48 pm

The politics of divide and conquer can create strange bedfellows. There is deep routed historical enmity between the Sunnis and Shiites to begin with. Search Twelver. The US has allies and enemies, Bottom line, Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil and Israel has a lot of political power through it's representatives in the USA especially but also in Britain and France. The Iranians were our friends too after the USA overthrow their Democratic Government in 1953 and installed the Shah and the CIA set up ZAVAK to protect him. It worked until he got weak. . Iran's enmity with the USA and Israel is well supported by facts . So is Hezbollah's enmity as is the enmity of Palestinians living in camps in stateless exile in Lebanon and elsewhere. . We don't necessarily hate Shias. It's policy. A fun fact to know and tell is that the Saudis pump oil from under the feet of the Shia minority in Saudi Arabia. who have live near the Persian Gulf since they were Persians and Zoroastrians. Also The US 5th Fleet is stationed in Bahrain courtesy of a treaty with the Sunni Rulers of the 90% Shiite nation. Yemen in the same story. Policy is a reason why during the Bush years the USA began referring to the Persian Gulf as the Arabian Gulf. So too, When I was young Yemen was not unified. It will never be. Houthis are being oppressed in a genocidal manner right now with US backing because House of Saud sits on the Thrown of Damocles . That is why the King of Saudi Arabia is on a worldwide tour shaking hands with Xi in China yesterday. etc.,,,, ad nauseum

Joe Tedesky , March 16, 2017 at 4:16 pm

I wouldn't argue with any of you who are commenting here on this thread, because I agree with all of you. I would like to point out that when Iraq fell the Shia (Shiites) became the popular ruling segment of Iraq, and then came General David Petraeus. The Sunni Awakening has had profound ramifications on what we are up against now, if we should be up against anything at all since most of what we are dealing with is U.S. inspired. The ultimate goal was to descale Iraq away from Iranian influence, and this social engineering by the U.S. could not have been a bigger mistake than what it's turned out to be. Now we are turning Yemen into our new Cambodia, and this will also turn out to be an even bigger mistake unless better minds prevail inside of our White House (if the Oval Office even has the deciding decision on this). Take a look at a map and see where Iran is, and then see where we are positioning ourselves. My thoughts are that Iran is the final goal, and until Iran is brought down, done of us will get a good nights sleep hoping to wake up to a peaceful world. Also don't take that last sentence of mine to be an endorsement to attack Iran. I am more than happy to let Iran be Iran.

https://warontherocks.com/2016/11/waking-up-to-the-truth-about-the-sunni-awakening/

If we wish to end war, then let's quit fighting them!

MEexpert , March 16, 2017 at 5:57 pm

I agree Iran is the real target. The Afghan and Iraq wars were less against Al-Qaeda, since there was no Al-Qaeda in Iraq, but more against Iran. George Bush wanted to establish bases around Iran. In addition to these two countries, he wanted to establish one more in Turkmenistan. US already had a base in Turkey. Turkmenistan refused to allow any US base. Turkey refused the use of Turkish base to launch an attack on Iran. US got bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq. So the attack on Iran never came. Mind you, the largest US base in Iraq is near the Iran border.

The dismantling of the Iraqi army wasn't the only thing Paul Bremer did wrong. He gave veto power to the minority Kurds and Sunnis. That is the reason for the non-functional Iraqi government. Nothing gets done. The Kurds are taking advantage of this situation and with the help of US are consolidating their territorial position. Saudi Arabia doesn't want another Shia government as its neighbor and so keeps the sectarian war going adding to the instability of the government.

D5-5 , March 16, 2017 at 7:56 pm

I keep trying to post a link to The Saker for Feb 7 this year, and it keeps disappearing. Easy to find, however. His analysis on what war with Iran would mean is excellent. "US vs Iran a war of apples vs. oranges."

LJ , March 15, 2017 at 8:36 pm

Pence seems to be on board already as are McCain and Graham.I agree we can't can't on the Pelosi, Feinstein, Schumer's Liberal wing of the Democrats here. Maybe the Trump's Generals will save us? Yeah right. The House of Representatives ? Not likely . Strange days indeed .,

CitizenOne , March 15, 2017 at 9:45 pm

I was not aware of the Kagan's role and I thank you for doing the due diligence on outlining how this family is intertwined with recent misadventures. But also it is kind of picking at Nits. This is a smallish operation. It does not compare to the decades long operation of Cheney to privatize the DOD, teach his corporate buddies a Halliburton how to cash in, dream of further cashing in himself with PNAC and the Carlyle Group, gin up a war, destabilize the middle east and get a pass from the media. Cheney and Bush ignored all of the warnings from the FBI and the CIA that Saudi terrorists were planning an attack which would instantly make the Carlyle Group the wealthiest private equity firm on the planet.

I agree it is all planned. Planned well in advance. The goal is to become rich by creating a war or wars.

I realize it is aimed at a microscopic part of the picture but fails to connect the dots of Kagan and PNAC and 9/11. Cheney's own admission that short of "A New Pearl Harbor" Americans would not likely go along with his dreams of launching preemptive wars reveal a naked desire to become rich along with his buddies over at the Carlyle Group which snatched up defense stocks when the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR was disintegrating. While the rest of the World was celebrating the possibility of future peace with Russia, The PNAC folks were buying up stock in the defense industry and were dreaming of a war. which they created by ignoring all of the signs that 9/11 was underway. I get that they felt some future democratic branch of the government would botch an opportunity to create a fake enemy in Iraq and would fail to launch a war.

But the facts are the whole thing was avoidable and was pushed with a mountain of lies which the major media simply regurgitated leading us to war.

It doesn't end there. While we are now busy banning millions of people from coming to America because they might be terrorists, the real terrorists from abroad and here at home with Islamic ties were all known by the authorities. Yet they did nothing to stop them and instead have used their failures as excuses to create chaos which they hope will lead to more violence.

How does a guy who went to the FBI and confessed was delusional and heard voices in his head trying to convert him to an ISIS terrorist then be allowed to board an airplane with a gun?

How was the underpants bomber allowed on a plane when his parents called the US Consulate to inform US officials that their son was getting on that plane with a bomb. Yet we let this person on a plane. Why has the media never investigated this failure?

It is failure after failure with gross incompetence from federal authorities charged with our security that has led to terrorist acts and not the failure to keep millions of people from traveling here.

The Boston Marathon bombers were singled out to US intelligence agencies by none other than the Russians that they were terrorists but we let them in. No investigation of that but banning entire nations is an option we have now tried twice. What about the failure of intelligence to flag two people who were singled out as terrorists?

There is a much bigger story here.

The US government and intelligence agencies have obviously allowed terrorist attacks to happen. This has happened time and time again and yet the media focuses on the terrorists time and time again while ignoring and under reporting the backstory of how we just let it happen.

It can be rationalized by a reasoned argument that we must allow some attacks to focus our efforts on thwarting even bigger attacks like nuclear attacks but there has been no action by the government to actually improve security so what is the point.

The meaningless act of taking ones shoes off at an airport is only not copied by forcing us to all strip down to our underpants based on a similar event to the shoe bomber because people would not tolerate being forced to take off all their clothes.

Now since an FAA test of airport security revealed that guns were not detected 95% of the time we are all preparing for pat downs. Nobody is examining the reason that 95% of the time somebody with a gun in their baggage gets through security which is supposedly equipped with machines that can spot guns. Where is the investigation of the machines since they fail so often?

There are all sorts of similar stories which all conclude that we are faced with a rational reason that our government needs to allow some terrorist action to happen which in turn turns our state increasingly toward a militaristic police state.

What I have a problem with is that we are more likely to be attacked by known terrorists and that nobody seems to be concerned with. I guess that allowing terrorist attacks provides the political concurrence to launch trillion dollar wars against other nations all for profit and put spy cupcakes in our refrigerators. Watch out! There's a camera just below the icing on the cupcake! Don't eat it!

We can't just ignore home grown terrorists like the shooters in California who, while on a watch list, were allowed to purchase weapons or the crazy guy who told FBI ISIS was inside his head to board an airplane with a gun and do nothing to investigate these intelligence failures and instead use them to seek Apple to grant access to all our information on smartphones and order travel bans for millions of people while justifying turning our TVs into Big Brother.

We can't ignore the obvious windfalls of Cheney and his pals at the Carlyle group to grow rich by allowing terrorists to kill thousands of people.

If we are going to spill blood in preparation for war, then we need to make sure we are doing everything in our power to prevent it and especially not to seek to become rich from it. We also need to protect our privacy.

So now it comes down to making Russia the new enemy. We have to reinvent an old enemy to justify further reasons for keeping America strong. But we spend ten times the money on our National Defense than the Russians do. Where does that line up with weakness? How do we just invent some myth that there are liberators working abroad in Ukraine and Syria to justify military spending just like we invented Vietnam? Has Vietnam attacked us recently? I think not. Is Syria a serious player in the international terrorism game? I think not.

Here is a suggestion. Apply all that money used to create advanced defensive capability into an industry aimed at real security.

Destabilizing the whole World to get rich is a bad idea. Getting rich by providing the means of nonmilitary industry aimed at enhancing security is a good idea. Easy money is a crime. Earning it the hard way is an honest living.

Time for the easy money folks to be sidelined and for the people interested in long term survival to hold power.

Bruce Walker , March 16, 2017 at 9:36 am

Anyone in the USA who can say they are not aware of the Kagan clan no nothing and should not be writing such a long comment. Go back to sleep.

CitizenOne , March 16, 2017 at 7:48 pm

That would be spelled: knows nothing
Perhaps you should wake up, learn to spell, and spend more than a lazy moment trolling me. If you have something intelligent to say we are all waiting with baited breath.

CitizenOne , March 16, 2017 at 7:54 pm

Well I guess I have to forgive Bruce Walker for not being a very good speller.

That would be : bated breath.

My bad.

geoff , March 15, 2017 at 10:07 pm

kagans never fail to excite. a package of madness on my monitor and how the hell did they get to screw things up. oh!! scuse me yes, hillary whatsaname!!!

Brad N , March 15, 2017 at 10:15 pm

The picture painted here is actually rather dismal when one considers the long term consequences of having such nonsense going on. Trump as possible savior from a war with Russia is a really hard pill to swallow. Very hard indeed, it is worth repeating. I have no confidence in his consistency at all. As for this article, I wish I could find fault with the analysis presented here. Sadly, I cannot.

Chris Jonsson , March 15, 2017 at 10:37 pm

War, Inc. A family owned and operated corporation.

TheSkepticalCynic , March 15, 2017 at 10:39 pm

Fuck the Kagans

LJ , March 15, 2017 at 10:43 pm

But they might multiply!

Fran Macadam , March 15, 2017 at 10:42 pm

"Despite his overall unfitness for the presidency, Trump defeated Clinton,"

I greatly appreciate Mr. Parry's reporting and insights. However, I believe that the determination of fitness for the Presidency is determined by the voters and democracy determines who is qualified.

Sam , March 16, 2017 at 7:35 am

If only we had a democracy, Fran. But in fact elections and mass media are controlled by money, and our Constitution has no protection of these tools of democracy from money power, because there were no businesses then larger than plantations and small ships that would be small businesses today. We do not have a democracy now.

Bill Bodden , March 15, 2017 at 10:44 pm

On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show, Friedman demanded that the Russia hacking allegations be treated as a casus belli: "That was a 9/11 scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor scale event." Both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 led to wars.

This quote suggests it is time to send a team of men with a strait-jacket into the New York Times to cart this nutcase off to the loony bin. Come to think of it, maybe they should take several strait-jackets with them and clean out the editorial staff.

Gregory Herr , March 16, 2017 at 6:17 pm

It's absolutely asinine isn't it?! I'll have to take a look, but I'll bet there wasn't a snicker or even a raised eyebrow when Friedman (the oh-so-serious-in-the-know hushed-toned Friedman who reveled in promoting the Iraq killing field) spittled his brain drool. He really should be referred. At the very least, he should have been called out for his absurdity before being excused at the next commercial break.

It's amazing how people like Kagan & Friedman can straight-face their farcical musings about Russian "interference". It's funny too how they can go on about the integrity and reliability of democratic processes when it is precisely the compromise of such that Wikileaks revealed. As noted by Mr. Parry:

" by all accounts, the WikiLeaks-released emails were real and revealed wrongdoing by leading Democrats, such as the Democratic National Committee's tilting of the primaries against Sen. Bernie Sanders and in favor of Clinton. The emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta disclosed the contents of Clinton's paid speeches to Wall Street, which she was trying to hide from voters, as well as some pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation. In other words, the WikiLeaks' releases helped inform American voters about abuses to the U.S. democratic process. The emails were not "disinformation" or "fake news." They were real news."

So much for real news in this country. And my God Mr. Kagan, Trump doesn't necessarily have faith in the findings or motives of the "intelligence community". I wonder why.

I hope the Kagans find their karma. Oh, and that weasel Friedman too.

Bill Bodden , March 15, 2017 at 10:48 pm

Given the wars the Kagans have helped promote and the consequences of these wars, surely there is some crime they could be charged with.

MEexpert , March 16, 2017 at 11:29 pm

We wish.

F. G. Sanford , March 15, 2017 at 11:21 pm

The desperation with which neocons are baiting for a new Cold War suggests that there is something much bigger than "election hacking" that needs covering up. Profit motives aside, the cost-benefit ratio looks more like a ploy to stay out of jail. Not that anyone in the "deep state" ever faces penalties for High Crimes and Misdemeanors, but it must be a nagging thought to anyone familiar with Julius Streicher and Alfred Rosenberg.

Jessica K , March 16, 2017 at 12:11 am

Institute for the Study of War, that says it all! I remember when Dennis Kucinich as Representative from Ohio introduced a bill to create a Department of Peace. It didn't go very far.

I also did not know about Frederick and Kimberly Kagan. How many more of these Kagans can be spawned?

Thanks for a good warning, Robert Parry. These people must dream of war at night. I hope Trump and Tillerson are wary of them.

Eric Bischoff , March 16, 2017 at 9:11 am

"How many more of these Kagans can be spawned?"

Yes and how many more Devos and Princes can we afford as well. Or how many Bushes, Clintons or Trumps!

Sr. Gibbonk , March 16, 2017 at 1:10 am

Ah yes, The Project for a New American Century manifesto: primary authors Robert Kagan and William Kristol on behalf of the neocon cabal and the European colonial Zionist project. Another demonstration that narrow, selfish interests, greed and the thirst for power drive this world. And all the while there are two great storms brewing on the horizon, each capable of driving our's and the majority of this earth's species to extinction. One, perhaps the most imminent, is the very real possibility of nuclear annihilation which is being spearheaded by the reckless ideologues and predatory capitalist deep state demagogues in their quest for Full Spectrum Dominance of global affairs. Even if the dire specter of nuclear holocaust is somehow avoided the global corporate world's avaricious, boundless appetite for short term profits, especially through fossil fuel extraction, will make the worst predictions of climate change inevitable: ecological collapse and along with it the collapse not only of nation states but of the human capacity to reason. How will the great nuclear powers, flailing like dinosaurs during the Permian-Triassic extinction - also known as The Great Dying - not then Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds?

Stygg , March 16, 2017 at 6:44 pm

FWIW, dinosaurs did not yet exist by the end of the Permian.

Eric Downey , March 16, 2017 at 3:15 am

Robert Parry thank you, and please continue your hard work. Our best hope for peace lies with Trump, Bannon, Tillerson and the Generals. It sounds crazy (and it is!) but they are well suited because they are aligned with a good chunk of the vocal electorate. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) proposed a bill Stop Arming Terrorists Act, and it has a companion in the Senate, sponsored by Rand Paul:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/rand-paul-joins-tulsi-gabbard-calling-congress-stop-funding-isis-al-qaeda/225868/

This is an informed electorate taking action. Parry is doing his job by informing us. Our job is to support H.R.608 and S.532.

Gary , March 16, 2017 at 5:05 am

There are so many in Washington who deserve to be tried for crimes against humanity that it is difficult to know where one would start. Actually, come to think of it, the Kagan family would be a great place to start! Then of course we'd have to move on to Bill and Hillary and another highly deserving couple Samantha Powers and hubby Cass Sustien of "cognitive infiltration" fame. Apparently psychopaths do find each other quite attractive, though who knows how many homicidal fantasies these particular spouses might actually harbor toward each other??

Seema Gillani , March 16, 2017 at 7:00 am

Trump has been neutralised to become a puppet of deep state. The world should expect the war business as usual.

Geoffrey de Galles , March 16, 2017 at 7:44 am

If I were the Kagans with as loaded an agenda as they share in the worldwide assertion of American exceptionalism, then I would consider the POTUS's Achilles heel to be Jared Kushner and his wife; and, in a more or less gentle and subtle way, would endeavour first to establish a relationship with them as a means of gradually bringing the pater familias around to my bellicose and imperialistic way of thinking. Myself, I consider the Kagans (among many others) to be the true enemy of the people. But that's my concern - viz., with trying to anticipate and out-think the enemy. So best watch out in that direction.

fudmier , March 16, 2017 at 8:00 am

The problem here is lack of ideal structure to for the concerned to become involved with
No one has outlined the ideal America as seen from the point of everyday Americans..
these 340,000,000 millions have no idea what to be for and against because they have
no structure and no purpose .. seems to me developing that structure (culture, education,
health care, voting rights, financial security, infra structure, and the like).
Developing the structure is a first step to mounting the support Trump needs to make the right decisions..
Trump himself lacks that structure.. Once the structure becomes a household word everyone knows the
right decision they might agree to disagree on its implementation but the result intended is in plain view.

Bryan Hemming , March 16, 2017 at 8:17 am

Why would the Russians need to undermine democracy in the United States when the Democratic and Republican party machines are doing such a marvellous job of it by themselves?

Del Spurlock , March 16, 2017 at 8:51 am

EXCEPTIONAL

Donald Kagan
Spawned a tribe
Of tinhorn
Warriors

Practice war he
Said to them
Make men
Sacrifice
Their reason and
Their rectitude
Their dreams of paradise.

Make them fear
The empty space
Filled with conjured devils
Make them sacrifice their young
To save god's holy settlers.

Make Obama toe their line
Add John Lewis too
Watch Black leaders
Act so dumb
And crap on King to Boot.

Roberto , March 16, 2017 at 9:01 am

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXspsfoPX50

Roberto , March 16, 2017 at 8:57 am

The title should be, "How To Turn Unemployment Into A Great Day At The Gallows."

Eric Bischoff , March 16, 2017 at 9:08 am

Aren't there laws that the Kagan family are breaking? Seems to me we should start with them and arrest them for the lies that took the Bush regime into the Middle East wars and definitely for the Ukraine coup. They are financing and spreading terrorism therefore the money and the financiers behind these war think tanks are also guilty. This goes all the way to the Koch Brothers and they should be arrested as well! Why are we, the peace crusaders, on the defensive. We need to go on the offensive. Enough already!

Dan Kuhn , March 16, 2017 at 10:17 am

As P T barnum said " Theres a sucker born every minute". The real question is ; Are the American people going to get suckered into a war with Russia and or China? Given their past record of seriously questioning the propaganda put out by the Kagans et all i am not too hopeful over this present push to what will be a catastrophic war.

LJ , March 16, 2017 at 2:26 pm

It's all talk. We can't beat the Taliban or the Viet Cong or the Mexican and Central American drug Gangs on the ground if it comes to that. Russia? China? That's funny. This is to justify perpetuation of the status quo in this nation. We the People can't be allowed to pick up our heads and gaze at reality. We need to be preoccupied with the BS. Political Correctness has done it's job now we have to spend a bunch of money on imaginary threats so billionaires and bankers can get richer and we can all pretend that they matter and that this is fair and justified and Democracy in action , We need idiotic Generals in charge and tough talking politicians too. Obfuscation, whatever word or combination of words you like . It's fascistic crap. We the People didn't want more war in Syria under Obama . Nothing has changed , next time it won't matter if 90% of calls to Congressional offices are against a war. This is what Eisenhower said would happen back in 1958 though the entrenchment of the Military Industrial Financial Cyber Intelligence Complex.

exiled off mainstreet , March 16, 2017 at 10:26 am

Rather than being extolled and given mainstream platforms to exercise their baleful interests, the Kagans should face some sort of legal accountability as professional war criminals.

Stiv , March 16, 2017 at 11:42 am

Jesus Christ. Yea yea yea. Same old same old. In searching for a sign of light after the elections, the best I was able to do is " well at least Nuland won't be Secretary of State". But to go on and on and on

Isn't there more important stuff going on? How about the "Hard diplomacy" Trumpistas are spouting about?

It's been funny .in a sick way to see Trump and administration figures using the same language as Parry and his hangers on. "McCarthyism", "Deep State" are used every other paragraph.

It's been noted a marked shift towards the Trump administration talking points in commentary here at Consortium "news". Even the "fake news" debacle is furthered here.

And not in the right direction.

My question .When does the news start, Robert?

D5-5 , March 16, 2017 at 1:17 pm

You know it's possible you're so angry you're not really paying attention. It you think there's been a "marked shift towards Trump administration talking points in commentary here" you're not really reading what's here, just swiftly glancing and stamping your foot with irritation. Why don't you provide a little news yourself instead of your same old same old bitching all the time?

MEexpert , March 16, 2017 at 11:53 pm

Here is that link to Saker's article:

http://www.unz.com/tsaker/u-s-against-iran-a-war-of-apples-vs-oranges/

Gregory Herr , March 16, 2017 at 6:41 pm

So your grasp of what has "importance" is not aligned with CN and the thrust of its commentary. I think you've made that clear on several ad nauseam occasions.
I should think that if this site was about reiterating Trump Administration talking points, we'd have the "hard diplomacy" thing covered by now. If you are concerned about what Mr. Parry publishes, submit articles on what you think is important. If you are concerned about the level or direction of commentary here, contribute with something substantive.

LJ , March 16, 2017 at 10:18 pm

Well, the Trump team players even Donald himself need to defend themselves for their own reasons. I think most commenters here are a little worried and rightly so for their own reasons, I personally do not like the vilification of all things Russian and the obvious McCarthy like tactics that have been going on calling for a witch hunt, a special prosecutor on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations. Democrats aren't calling out for justice they want to geld Trump but Pense would be even worse. Maybe it's time tobelieve in Democracy at some level.

John , March 16, 2017 at 12:06 pm

The Kagans are simply supplying a strategy to further a growing agenda ..The average USA citizen's strategy is complacency and their agenda is simply to do nothing ..This is why the 1% rule over the 99% ..

Jessica K , March 16, 2017 at 12:17 pm

Tony Cartaluccu's article on The Deep State is excellent, thank you, Joe. The multipolar world he speaks of, which Putin often refers to, is what the neocon imperialists such as the Kagans don't want, but they're getting it, anyway. Since the days of the Iraq War, many great alternative journalists, such as this website, have exposed and continue to expose the facts behind deep state propaganda so these folks can't dominate as they used to. The USA doesn't look so good to a lot of nations after the disasters created by the regime change proxy wars. Despite the badmouthing of Putin and Russia in the US, many other countries aren't signing on to that attitude, from what I've read. I have just read that China wants to help rebuild Syria, since Syria is an important geographic route on their One Belt, One Road project. If the US can't recognize it can't remain top dog forever and that it's a multipolar world, it might find itself isolated.

Dag , March 16, 2017 at 1:23 pm

The Kagans should be in prison for all the crimes they've enabled, all the lives they've destroyed.

Airman Sparky , March 16, 2017 at 1:33 pm

Robert Parry & Glenn Greenwald are at the top of my short list of real-life, courageous, truth-telling heroes but, for today, Kiza reigns supreme with her tour de force:"Between the Clinton liberals and the Ziocons C'est une Affaire d'Amour Toujours, as Pepé Le Pew likes to say."
Massive props, Zika, for referencing Pepe, HRC, & neocons in a single sentence

Ted , March 16, 2017 at 2:00 pm

OK, I get it about the Kagans, but I still don't trust Putin.

Jessica K , March 16, 2017 at 2:52 pm

So then, Ted, why don't you move to Russia so that you can do an objective evaluation of the country and under Putin? Of course, Russian is not an easy language to learn! It's just reported on Global Research that Russia has absorbed 2.5 million Ukrainian refugees since the US 2014 coup and Europe 900,000 more, according to a Kremlin parliamentarian in February. Thanks to Victoria Nuland!

Ted , March 16, 2017 at 4:46 pm

Hmm that's a response I would expect at TheBlaze – knee-jerk and black-and-white. Perhaps I should learn Russian. Are you offering to teach me, comrade?

J'hon Doe II , March 16, 2017 at 3:39 pm

UK/US is the Last Empire and Trump is an 'angel-of-death'.
Nothing good can or will from his spurious administration .

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2016/11/09/20161111_trump1.jpg

Brad Isherwood , March 16, 2017 at 4:39 pm

The PNAC psychopaths did their part in 911. The conquer 7 Nations in 5 years for Israel has been delayed.

The MIC has Al qeada,ISIS. ..even Muslim Brotherhood, ..all over the place, to give the MIC years and years. ..even another decade or more war pleasuring. Trump kicked huge gift to the Military. ..before the Ides of March arrived.

The Saudi/Qatar block have invested multi millions in regime change Assad. The trained Mercs forces, logistics, weapons. posture against Iran, and the dream of Pipelines.

Erdogan the Mad Caliph is the receiver of the Terrorists from Saudi or Libya and other, the reciever of the pipelines.
Israel will not give back the Golan .wants Hezbollah gone from near its Safe Zone.

Far too much money which MIC wants play with. ..and as Admiral Thomas Moorer commented, " No American President can stand up to Israel "

US boots going back into Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Iraq, going into Syria, media bleating about US needs go back to Libya and fix that mess.

Trump is where on his supposed non intervention promises? The John McCain and Deep State media rush against Russia with lies like WMD Iraq. Is this Deja Vu

Jessica K , March 16, 2017 at 5:18 pm

Ted, my comment was sarcastic because you did not back up your opinion with any facts. The situation is getting very sticky with now Canada's Foreign Minister getting into the smearfest. Freeland just pulled out the Crimean Tatars as being victims of Russian aggression, and I, knowing nothing about the issue, had to start digging, which began with US articles supporting brutalization by Russia, some from 2016. Digging out further are some articles that this is not the case, Tatars supported going with Russia as Crimeans voted. All which supports that propaganda is rife, is there a free press anymore, and the virulent fixation on Russia is out of control. And my position is that some politicians are willing to take us to extinction to get their way, while we have a planet with many problems we should be addressing.

[Sep 10, 2016] Donald Trump and the Danger of the Imperial Presidency

Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post. ..."
"... If undertaken in earnest, the exercise will prove uncomfortable. The establishment centrists who oppose Trump worry, as they should, that he will violate the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, yet few spoke up when Michael Bloomberg presided over a secret program that profiled and spied on Muslim American students, sowing mistrust while generating zero counterterrorism leads. ..."
"... The establishment centrists who denounced Edward Snowden would have to admit that, if Trump is half as bad as they fear, Americans will be better served knowing the scope and capabilities of NSA surveillance than living in ignorance of it. Some will be forced to admit to themselves that they hope the military remains sprinkled with whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning to speak out against serious abuses. ..."
"... For 16 years or more, establishment centrists have been complicit in a historically reckless trend. Come 2017, it may place Donald Trump at a big table, much like the one on The Apprentice ..."
May 24, 2016 | www.theatlantic.com

End the Imperial Presidency Before It's Too Late

Why aren't the critics comparing Donald Trump to a fascist acknowledging that the office he seeks is too powerful?

Wake up, establishment centrists: Donald Trump is coming!

After the Vietnam War and Watergate and the spying scandals uncovered by the Church Committee and the Nixon Administration cronies who nearly firebombed the Brookings Institution, Americans were briefly inclined to rein in executive power-a rebuke to Richard Nixon's claim that "if the president does it, that means it's not illegal." Powerful committees were created to oversee misconduct-prone spy agencies. The War Powers Resolution revived a legislative check on warmaking. "In 34 years," Vice President Dick Cheney would lament to ABC News in a January 2002 interview, "I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job. I feel an obligation... to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors."

The Bush Administration aggressively moved to expand executive power, drawing on the dubious legal maneuvering of David Addington, John Yoo, and their enablers. Starting in 2005, the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, would repeatedly insist that Bush's assertions of executive power violated the Constitution. Nonetheless, Obama inherited a newly powerful executive branch, just as Cheney had hoped. And rather than dismantle it, Obama spent two terms lending the imprimatur of centrist, establishment bipartisanship to Cheney's vision.

Now, Donald Trump is coming.

Civil libertarians have long warned the partisans who trusted Bush and Obama, and the establishment centrists who couldn't imagine anyone in the White House besides an Al Gore or John Kerry or John McCain or Mitt Romney, that they were underestimating both the seriousness of civil liberties abuses under Bush and Obama and the likelihood of even less responsible leaders wreaking havoc in the White House.

Three years ago, in " All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama ," I warned that "more and more, we're counting on having angels in office and making ourselves vulnerable to devils," and that come January, 2017, an unknown person would enter the Oval Office and inherit all of these precedents:

Now, Donald Trump is coming. And many establishment centrists are professing alarm. There is nothing more establishment than Robert Kagan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, writing an op-ed in the Washington Post. He begins by observing that if Trump wins, his coalition will include tens of millions of Americans.

"Imagine the power he would wield then," Kagan wrote . "In addition to all that comes from being the leader of a mass following, he would also have the immense powers of the American presidency at his command: the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, the military. Who would dare to oppose him then? Certainly not a Republican Party that laid down before him even when he was comparatively weak. And is a man like Trump, with infinitely greater power in his hands, likely to become more humble, more judicious, more generous, less vengeful than he is today, than he has been his whole life? Does vast power un-corrupt?"

Kagan's article seemed well-received and widely shared among establishment centrists.

Yet neither he nor most others who share his fears have yet acknowledged their bygone failures of imagination, or granted that civil libertarians were right: The establishment has permitted the American presidency to get dangerously powerful.

While writing or sharing articles that compare Trump to Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, few if any have called on Obama or Congress to act now " to tyrant-proof the White House ." However much they fear Trump, however rhetorically maximalist they are in warning against his elevation, even the prospect of him controlling the entire apparatus of the national security state is not enough to cause them to rethink their reckless embrace of what Gene Healy calls " The Cult of the Presidency ," a centrist religion that persisted across the Bush administration's torture chambers and the Obama administration's unlawful War in Libya.

With a reality-TV bully is on the doorstep of the White House, still they hesitate to urge reform to a branch of government they've long regarded as more than co-equal.

They needn't wait for the Nixon-era abuses to replay themselves as farce or worse to change course. Their inaction is irresponsible. Just as the conservative movement is duty bound to grapple with its role in a populist demagogue seizing control of the Republican Party, establishment centrists ought to grapple with the implicit blessing they've given to the extraordinary powers Trump would inherit, and that even the less-risky choice, Hillary Clinton, would likely abuse.

If undertaken in earnest, the exercise will prove uncomfortable. The establishment centrists who oppose Trump worry, as they should, that he will violate the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, yet few spoke up when Michael Bloomberg presided over a secret program that profiled and spied on Muslim American students, sowing mistrust while generating zero counterterrorism leads.

The establishment centrists who denounced Edward Snowden would have to admit that, if Trump is half as bad as they fear, Americans will be better served knowing the scope and capabilities of NSA surveillance than living in ignorance of it. Some will be forced to admit to themselves that they hope the military remains sprinkled with whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning to speak out against serious abuses.

For 16 years or more, establishment centrists have been complicit in a historically reckless trend. Come 2017, it may place Donald Trump at a big table, much like the one on The Apprentice , where he'll decide not which B-list celebrity to fire, but which humans to kill. Establishment centrists could work to strip the presidency of that power.

Instead they do nothing.

[Aug 23, 2016] Are the Clintons Israeli Agents by Philip Giraldi

I think to the extent Israel elite interests are congruent with interests of the US neocons Clinton is pro-Israel. If they stray, she can change. The key here are interests of global corporations and neoliberal globalization. As such Israel is just a pawn in a big game.
Notable quotes:
"... So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead of those of the United States? I know there are advocates for any number of foreign states running around loose in Washington but the friends of Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely because there are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and they are both extremely well-funded and very successful. Now deceased former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were, respectively, often referred to as the congressman and senator from Israel. And there are many more: Chuck Schumer, Chuck Grassley, Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey, Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman, Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name only a few in the Congress. All are major recipients of Israel related PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter what Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States. ..."
"... And then there are the Clintons. One only has to go back to Bill's one-sided pro-Israeli diplomacy at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the game was played. And then there was the widely condemned January 2001 last minute pardon of Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a major contributor to the Clintons, to realize that there was always a deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved ..."
"... Trump's crime, per Morell, is that he is disloyal to the United States because he is not sufficiently hostile to the evil Vladimir Putin, which somehow means that he is being manipulated by the clever Russian. Trump has indeed called for a positive working relationship with Putin to accomplish, among other objectives, the crushing of ISIS. And he is otherwise in favor of leaving Bashar al-Assad of Syria alone while also being disinclined to get involved in any additional military interventions in the Middle East or elsewhere, which pretty much makes him the antithesis of the Clintonian foreign policy promoted by Morell. ..."
"... The leading individual foreign donor to the Clinton Foundation between 1999 and 2014 was Ukrainian Viktor Pinchuk, who "directed between $10 and $25 million" to its Global Initiative, has let the Clintons use his private jet, attended Bill's Hollywood 65 th birthday celebration and hosted daughter Chelsea and her husband on a trip to Ukraine. Pinchuk is a Jewish oligarch married to the daughter of notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. He is very closely tied to Israel, a supporter of regime change in his country, who was simultaneously donating money and also lobbying in Washington while Hillary was Secretary of State and promoting a similar agenda as part of her $5 billion program to "democratize" Ukraine. Clinton arranged a dozen meetings with substantive State Department officers for Pinchuk. ..."
"... Clinton supported Israel's actions in the 2014 Gaza War, which killed more than 500 children, describing them as an appropriate response to a situation that was provoked by Hamas. On the campaign trail recently husband Bill disingenuously defended Hillary's position on Gaza, saying that "Hamas is really smart. When they decide to rocket Israel they insinuate themselves in the hospitals, in the schools " placing all the blame for the large number of civilian casualties on the Palestinians, not on the Israelis. When the media began to report on the plight of the civilians trapped in Gaza Hillary dismissed the impending humanitarian catastrophe, saying "They're trapped by their leadership, unfortunately." ..."
"... Earlier, as a Senator from New York, Hillary supported Israel's building of the separation barrier on Palestinian land and cheer-led a crowd at a pro-Israel rally that praised Israel's 2006 devastation of Lebanon and Gaza. She nonsensically characterized and justified the bombing campaign as "efforts to send messages to Hamas, Hezbollah, to the Syrians, to the Iranians – to all who seek death and domination instead of life and freedom " More than nine hundred civilians died in the onslaught and when a vote came up subsequently in Congress to stop the supply of cluster bombs to countries that use them on civilians Hillary voted against the bill together with 69 other pro-Israel senators. ..."
"... Hillary enjoys a particularly close relationship with Netanyahu, writing in November , "I would also invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in office." She has worked diligently to "reaffirm the unbreakable bond with Israel – and Benjamin Netanyahu." She has boasted of her being one of the promoters of annual increases in aid to Israel while she was in the Senate and Secretary of State and takes credit for repeatedly using America's Security Council veto to defend it in the United Nations. ..."
"... o you know how Prince Bandar was coaching G.W. Bush to circumvent the enmity of neocons towards his father? ..."
"... It looks very much like the US public is starting to mirror the Eastern European public under Communism by automatically disregarding government media + there's the added feature of the internet as a new kind of high-powered Samizdat, that clearly worries the Establishment. ..."
Aug 23, 2016 | The Unz Review
On August 5th, Michael Morell, a former acting Director of the CIA, pilloried GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, concluding that he was an "unwitting agent of Russia." Morell, who entitled his New York Times op-ed "I Ran the CIA and now I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton," described the process whereby Trump had been so corrupted. According to Morell, Putin, it seems, as a wily ex-career intelligence officer, is "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation."

I have previously observed how incomprehensible the designation of "unwitting agent" used in a sentence together with "recruited" is, but perhaps I should add something more about Morell that might not be clear to the casual reader. Morell was an Agency analyst, not a spy, who spent nearly his entire career in and around Washington. The high point of his CIA experience consisted of briefing George W. Bush on the President's Daily Brief (PDB).

Morell was not trained in the arduous CIA operational tradecraft course which agent recruiters and handlers go through. This means that his understanding of intelligence operations and agents is, to put it politely, derivative. If he had gone through the course he would understand that when you recruit an agent you control him and tell him what to do. The agent might not know whom exactly he is really answering to as in a false flag operation, but he cannot be unwitting.

Morell appears to have a tendency to make promises that others will have to deliver on, but perhaps that's what delegation by senior U.S. government officials is all about. He was also not trained in CIA paramilitary operations, which perhaps should be considered when he drops comments about the desirability of "covertly" killing Russians and Iranians to make a point that they should not oppose U.S. policies in Syria, as he did in a softball interview with Charlie Rose on August 6th.

Morell appears to be oblivious to the possibility that going around assassinating foreigners might be regarded as state sponsored terrorism and could well ignite World War 3. And, as is characteristic of chickenhawks, it is highly unlikely that he was intending that either he or his immediate family should go out and cut the throats or blow the heads off of those foreign devils who seek to derail the Pax Americana. Nor would he expect to be in the firing line when the relatives of those victims seek revenge. Someone else with the proper training would be found to do all that messy stuff and take the consequences.

Be that as it may, Morell was a very senior officer and perhaps we should accept that he might know something that the rest of us have missed, so let's just assume that he kind of misspoke and give him a pass on the "recruited unwitting agent" expression. Instead let's look for other American political figures who just might be either deliberately or inadvertently serving the interests of a foreign government, which is presumably actually what Michael Morell meant to convey regarding Trump. To be sure a well-run McCarthy-esque ferreting out of individuals who just might be disloyal provides an excellent opportunity to undertake a purge of those who either by thought, word or deed might be guilty of unacceptable levels of coziness with foreign interests.

So who is guilty of putting the interests of a foreign government ahead of those of the United States? I know there are advocates for any number of foreign states running around loose in Washington but the friends of Israel in government and the media come immediately to mind largely because there are so many of them, they are very much in-your-face and they are both extremely well-funded and very successful. Now deceased former Congressman Tom Lantos and Senator Frank Lautenberg were, respectively, often referred to as the congressman and senator from Israel. And there are many more: Chuck Schumer, Chuck Grassley, Ben Cardin, Bob Menendez, Tom Cotton, Mark Kirk, Nita Lowey, Ted Deutch, Brad Sherman, Ileana-Ros Lehtinen and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to name only a few in the Congress. All are major recipients of Israel related PAC money and all are reliable defenders of Israel no matter what Benjamin Netanyahu does and no matter how it effects the United States.

And then there are the Clintons. One only has to go back to Bill's one-sided pro-Israeli diplomacy at Camp David in 2000 to discern how the game was played. And then there was the widely condemned January 2001 last minute pardon of Mossad agent Marc Rich, whose wife Denise was a major contributor to the Clintons, to realize that there was always a deference to Israeli interests particularly when money was involved. The only problem is that the Clintons, relying on Morell's formulation, might more reasonably be described as witting agents of Israel rather than unwitting as they have certainly known what they have been doing and have been actively supporting Israeli policies even when damaging to U.S. interests since they first emerged from the primordial political swamps in Arkansas. If one were completely cynical it might be possible to suggest that they understood from the beginning that pandering to Israel and gaining access to Jewish power and money would be a major component in their rise to political prominence. It certainly has worked out that way.

Trump's crime, per Morell, is that he is disloyal to the United States because he is not sufficiently hostile to the evil Vladimir Putin, which somehow means that he is being manipulated by the clever Russian. Trump has indeed called for a positive working relationship with Putin to accomplish, among other objectives, the crushing of ISIS. And he is otherwise in favor of leaving Bashar al-Assad of Syria alone while also being disinclined to get involved in any additional military interventions in the Middle East or elsewhere, which pretty much makes him the antithesis of the Clintonian foreign policy promoted by Morell.

In comparison with the deeply and profoundly corrupt Clintons, Trump's alleged foreign policy perfidy makes him appear to be pretty much a boy scout. To understand the Clintons one might consider the hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it from foreign sources, that have flowed into the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was Secretary of State. And there is the clear email evidence that Hillary exploited her government position to favor both foreign and domestic financial supporters.

The leading individual foreign donor to the Clinton Foundation between 1999 and 2014 was Ukrainian Viktor Pinchuk, who "directed between $10 and $25 million" to its Global Initiative, has let the Clintons use his private jet, attended Bill's Hollywood 65th birthday celebration and hosted daughter Chelsea and her husband on a trip to Ukraine. Pinchuk is a Jewish oligarch married to the daughter of notoriously corrupt former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma. He is very closely tied to Israel, a supporter of regime change in his country, who was simultaneously donating money and also lobbying in Washington while Hillary was Secretary of State and promoting a similar agenda as part of her $5 billion program to "democratize" Ukraine. Clinton arranged a dozen meetings with substantive State Department officers for Pinchuk.

Hillary and Bill's predilection for all things Israeli and her promise to do even more in the future is a matter of public record. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz asserted that of all the political candidates in the primaries "Clinton had the longest public record of engagement with Israel, and has spent decades diligently defending the Jewish state." In a speech to AIPAC in March she promised to take the "U.S.-Israel alliance to the next level." Hillary's current principal financial supporter in her presidential run is Haim Saban, an Israeli who has described himself as a "one issue" guy and that issue is Israel.

Hillary Clinton boasts of having "stood with Israel my entire career." Her website promises to maintain "Israel's qualitative military edge to ensure the IDF is equipped to deter and defeat aggression from the full spectrum of threats," "stand up against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS)," and "cut off efforts to unilaterally recognize Palestinian statehood outside of the context of negotiations with Israel." In a letter to Haim Saban, Hillary declared that "we need to make countering BDS a priority," which means she is prepared to support laws limiting First Amendment rights in the U.S. in defense of perceived Israeli interests.

As part of the Obama Administration Hillary Clinton at first supported his attempts to pressure Israel over its illegal settlements but has now backed off from that position, only rarely criticizing them as a "problem" but never advocating any steps to persuade Netanyahu to reverse his policy. Notably, she has repeatedly decried terroristic attacks on Israelis but has never acknowledged the brutality of the Israeli occupation of much of the West Bank in spite of the fact that ten Palestinians are killed for each Jewish victim of the ongoing violence.

Clinton supported Israel's actions in the 2014 Gaza War, which killed more than 500 children, describing them as an appropriate response to a situation that was provoked by Hamas. On the campaign trail recently husband Bill disingenuously defended Hillary's position on Gaza, saying that "Hamas is really smart. When they decide to rocket Israel they insinuate themselves in the hospitals, in the schools " placing all the blame for the large number of civilian casualties on the Palestinians, not on the Israelis. When the media began to report on the plight of the civilians trapped in Gaza Hillary dismissed the impending humanitarian catastrophe, saying "They're trapped by their leadership, unfortunately."

Earlier, as a Senator from New York, Hillary supported Israel's building of the separation barrier on Palestinian land and cheer-led a crowd at a pro-Israel rally that praised Israel's 2006 devastation of Lebanon and Gaza. She nonsensically characterized and justified the bombing campaign as "efforts to send messages to Hamas, Hezbollah, to the Syrians, to the Iranians – to all who seek death and domination instead of life and freedom " More than nine hundred civilians died in the onslaught and when a vote came up subsequently in Congress to stop the supply of cluster bombs to countries that use them on civilians Hillary voted against the bill together with 69 other pro-Israel senators.

Hillary enjoys a particularly close relationship with Netanyahu, writing in November, "I would also invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in office." She has worked diligently to "reaffirm the unbreakable bond with Israel – and Benjamin Netanyahu." She has boasted of her being one of the promoters of annual increases in aid to Israel while she was in the Senate and Secretary of State and takes credit for repeatedly using America's Security Council veto to defend it in the United Nations.

So I think it is pretty clear who is the presidential candidate promoting the interests of a foreign country and it ain't Trump. Hillary would no doubt argue that Israel is a friend and Russia is not, an interesting point of view as Israel is not in fact an ally and has spied on us and copied our military technology to re-export to countries like China. Indeed, the most damaging spy in U.S. history Jonathan Pollard worked for Israel. In spite of all that Israel continues to tap our treasury for billions of dollars a year while still ignoring Washington when requests are made to moderate policies that damage American interests. Against that, what exactly has Moscow done to harm us since the Cold War ended? And who is advocating even more pressure on Russia and increasing the rewards for Israel, presumably in the completely illogical belief that to do so will somehow bring some benefit to the American people? Hillary Clinton.

utu, August 23, 2016 at 4:29 am GMT • 100 Words

Find the true reason why G.H. Bush was not allowed to get the 2nd term. Do you remember his attempt to reign in Yitzhak Shamir when GHB was riding high popularity wave after the Desert Storm? Do you remember anti-Bush Safire and Friedman columns in NYT week after week? Why Ross Perrot was called in? Don't you see similarity with Teddy Rosevelt's run to prevent Taft's reelection and securing Wilson's win? Do you know how Prince Bandar was coaching G.W. Bush to circumvent the enmity of neocons towards his father? Answer these questions and you will know for whom Bill Clinton worked. One more thing, Clinton did not touch Palestinian issue until last several months of his presidency. He did not make G.H. Bush's mistake.

Miro23, August 23, 2016 at 5:45 am GMT • 100 Words

This a straightforward factual article about the Clinton sellout to Israel. So the question may come down to the effectiveness of MSM propaganda.

It looks very much like the US public is starting to mirror the Eastern European public under Communism by automatically disregarding government media + there's the added feature of the internet as a new kind of high-powered Samizdat, that clearly worries the Establishment.

If the script follows through, then there's a good likelihood that the Establishment and their façade players (Clintons, Bush, Romney, McCain etc) are reaching the end of the line, since like in E.Europe, there's a background problem of economic failure and extreme élite/public inequality that can no longer be hidden.

Philip Giraldi, August 23, 2016 at 10:32 am GMT • 100 Words

@hbm

hbm – the FBI concluded that someone working in the White House was MEGA but they decided that they did not necessarily have enough evidence to convince a jury. He is still around and appears in the media. As I would prefer not to get sued I will not name him but he is not a Clinton (though he worked for them as well as for the two Bushes).

[Aug 05, 2016] Government Involvement in 9-11

Notable quotes:
"... PNAC members, and signees to its policy documents, include: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wofowitz, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Scooter Libby, Elliot Abrams, Richard Armitage, William Bennet, William Kristol, and Zalmy Khalilzad - men with their hands deep in the private defense, oil, and multi-national corporate industries poised to make vast sums of money and secure huge tracts of power and influence if PNAC policy evolved into U.S. Government policy. Nine months after they rose to power, and assumed central positions of leadership up and down the spectrum of military, civilian, domestic, and international agencies, they got their 'New Pearl Harbor'. And PNAC policy essentially evolved into the Bush Administration's official agenda. While this alarmingly convenient coincidence does not prove anything in and of itself, it does establish motive. And it certainly would raise the eyebrows of concern from any serious investigator looking into the facts of September 11. ..."
"... In an interview with journalist Alex Jones , Hilton reports that, under the supervision of Strauss, his senior thesis detailed a plan to establish a Presidential Dictatorship using a fabricated 'Pearl Harbor-like incident' as justification. He further states that he, Perle, Wolfowitz, and other students of Strauss discussed an array of different plots and incidents 'like September 11th' and 'flying airplanes into buildings way back in the 60s'. ..."
www.911hardfacts.com
In the summer of 2000, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neo-conservative think tank riddled with soon to be Bush administration officials and advisors, issued a document calling for the radical restructuring of U.S. government and military policies. It advocated the massive expansion of defense spending, the re-invasion of Iraq, the military and economic securing of Afghanistan and Central Asia, increased centralized power and funds for the CIA, FBI, and NSA, among a slew of other policies that would, in the near future, be enacted upon their ascension to power. In the same document, they cite a potential problem with their plan. Referring to the goals of transforming the U.S. and global power structure, the paper states that because of the American Public's slant toward ideas of democracy and freedom, "this process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." (ibid.)

PNAC members, and signees to its policy documents, include: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wofowitz, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Scooter Libby, Elliot Abrams, Richard Armitage, William Bennet, William Kristol, and Zalmy Khalilzad - men with their hands deep in the private defense, oil, and multi-national corporate industries poised to make vast sums of money and secure huge tracts of power and influence if PNAC policy evolved into U.S. Government policy. Nine months after they rose to power, and assumed central positions of leadership up and down the spectrum of military, civilian, domestic, and international agencies, they got their 'New Pearl Harbor'. And PNAC policy essentially evolved into the Bush Administration's official agenda. While this alarmingly convenient coincidence does not prove anything in and of itself, it does establish motive. And it certainly would raise the eyebrows of concern from any serious investigator looking into the facts of September 11.

Another alarming coincidence surrounding PNAC and September 11 has been revealed by attorney Stanley Hilton. Hilton, a graduate of Harvard Law School and former senior advisor and lead counsel for Bob Dole, attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate in the 1960s. He studied under the infamous Leo Strauss, considered by many the father of neo-conservatism. Fellow students and acquaintances of Hilton's at the time included Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. In an interview with journalist Alex Jones, Hilton reports that, under the supervision of Strauss, his senior thesis detailed a plan to establish a Presidential Dictatorship using a fabricated 'Pearl Harbor-like incident' as justification. He further states that he, Perle, Wolfowitz, and other students of Strauss discussed an array of different plots and incidents 'like September 11th' and 'flying airplanes into buildings way back in the 60s'.

In light of these revelations, it is no surprise that Hilton has been trying to blow the whistle on government involvement in 9/11 for years. He has also filed a lawsuit against the government on behalf of a number of victims' families. As a result of his actions, Hilton has been harassed, threatened, burgled, and hounded repeatedly by the authorities.

[Jun 13, 2016] Why Trump Is Panicking

Notable quotes:
"... National Review ..."
"... If Donald Trump, as seems more than likely, prevails in the GOP primary, then a number of neocons may defect to the Clinton campaign. Already Robert Kagan announced in the Washington Post ..."
"... The impulse of the neocons to return to the Democratic Party should not be wholly surprising. In 1972, for example, Robert L. Bartley, the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... For its part, neoconservatism has always had a nationalistic streak. But Trump represents everything that the neocons believed that they had purged from the GOP. He represents continuity with the Buchananite wing, the belief that America should tend to its own knitting before launching hopeless wars abroad. When it comes to foreign policy, however, the second generation of neocons such as Kagan does not trace its lineage back to Ohio Senator Robert Taft but to the one that Republicans in the early 1950s reviled: the Truman administration. ..."
The National Interest
Anyone looking for further converts to the Hillary Clinton campaign might do well to look at the Marco Rubio campaign. If Clinton is the leading liberal hawk, Rubio is the foremost neocon candidate. In 2014 National Review published an article about him titled "The neocons return."

Whether it's Cuba or Iran or Russia, he stakes out the most intransigent line: "I disagree with voices in my own party who argue we should not engage at all, who warn we should heed the words of John Quincy Adams not to go 'abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.'" Not surprisingly, he's surrounded himself with neocon advisers, ranging from Max Boot to Jamie Fly to Elliott Abrams.

If Donald Trump, as seems more than likely, prevails in the GOP primary, then a number of neocons may defect to the Clinton campaign. Already Robert Kagan announced in the Washington Post on Thursday that he intends to back Hillary Clinton if Donald Trump receives the GOP nomination. The fact is that the loyalty of the neocons has always been to an ideology of American exceptionalism, not to a particular party.

This is what separates the neocon conversion to Clinton from previous examples of Republicans endorsing Barack Obama. Colin Powell wasn't making an ideological statement. He was making a practical one, based on his distaste for where the GOP was headed. For the neocons this is a much more heartfelt moment. They have invested decades in trying to reshape the GOP into their own image, and were quite successful at it. But now a formidable challenge is taking place as the GOP reverts to its traditional heritage.

The impulse of the neocons to return to the Democratic Party should not be wholly surprising. In 1972, for example, Robert L. Bartley, the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, wrote that the fledgling neoconservatives represented "something of a swing group between the two major parties." He was right. The neoconservatives had their home in the Democratic Party in the 1960s. Then they marched rightward, in reaction to the rise of the adversary culture inside the Democratic Party. George McGovern's run for the presidency in 1972, followed by the Jimmy Carter presidency, sent them into the arms of Ronald Reagan and the GOP.

But it wasn't until the George W. Bush presidency that the neocons became the dominant foreign policy force inside the GOP. They promptly proceeded to wreck his presidency by championing the war in Iraq. Today, having wrecked it, they are now threatening to bolt the GOP and support Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump for the presidency.

Something like this scenario is what I predicted in the New York Times in July 2014. Trump wasn't around then as a force inside the GOP. But already it seemed clear that some of the leading neocons such as Kagan were receptive to Clinton. Now, in a Washington Post column, Kagan has gone all in.

He decries Republican obstructionism, antipathy to Obama, and the rise of Trump. The tone is apocalyptic. According to Kagan,

"So what to do now? The Republicans' creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out. For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be."

This itself represents a curious case of neocon hyperbole. Kagan is an eloquent writer, but he elides the fact that many of Trump's positions are not all that different from what the GOP has espoused in the past when it comes to domestic issues. It is on foreign affairs where Trump represents a marked shift and it is this that truly troubles the neocon wing.

Trump has made it clear that he's dubious about foreign interventions. He's indicated that he would treat with Russian president Vladimir Putin. His entire foreign policy credo, such as it is, seems to have a Jacksonian pedigree-don't tread on me.

For its part, neoconservatism has always had a nationalistic streak. But Trump represents everything that the neocons believed that they had purged from the GOP. He represents continuity with the Buchananite wing, the belief that America should tend to its own knitting before launching hopeless wars abroad. When it comes to foreign policy, however, the second generation of neocons such as Kagan does not trace its lineage back to Ohio Senator Robert Taft but to the one that Republicans in the early 1950s reviled: the Truman administration.

Here we come full circle. The origins of the neocons are in the Democratic Party. Should Clinton become the Democratic nominee and Trump the Republican one, a number of neocons may make common cause with Clinton. Watch Rubio's ranks first.

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of the National Interest.

[Jun 13, 2016] Neocon Kagan Endorses Hillary Clinton

Notable quotes:
"... Prominent neocon Robert Kagan has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president, saying she represents the best hope for saving the United States from populist billionaire Donald Trump, who has repudiated the neoconservative cause of U.S. military interventions in line with Israel's interests. ..."
"... Then referring to himself, he added, "For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The [Republican] party cannot be saved, but the country still can be." ..."
"... Kagan, who I've known since the 1980s when he was a rising star on Ronald Reagan's State Department propaganda team (selling violent right-wing policies in Central America), has been signaling his affection for Clinton for some time, at least since she appointed him as an adviser to her State Department and promoted his wife Victoria Nuland, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, to be the State Department's chief spokesperson. Largely because of Clinton's patronage, Nuland rose to assistant secretary of state for European affairs and oversaw the provocative "regime change" in Ukraine in 2014. ..."
"... "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else." ..."
"... Now, Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century wrote the blueprint for George W. Bush's disastrous Iraq War, is now abandoning the Republican Party in favor of Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... While Kagan's op-ed surely makes some accurate points about Republicans, his endorsement of Hillary Clinton raises a different issue for Democrats: Do they want a presidential candidate who someone as savvy as Kagan knows will perpetuate neocon strategies around the world? Do Democrats really trust Hillary Clinton to handle delicate issues, such as the Syrian conflict, without resorting to escalations that may make the neocon disasters under George W. Bush look minor by comparison? ..."
"... Perhaps Robert Kagan's endorsement of Hillary Clinton and what that underscores about the likely foreign policy of a second Clinton presidency might finally force war or peace to the fore of the campaign. ..."
"... America's Stolen Narrative, ..."
Feb 25, 2016 | Consortiumnews

Exclusive: Hillary Clinton's cozy ties to Washington's powerful neocons have paid off with the endorsement of Robert Kagan, one of the most influential neocons. But it also should raise questions among Democrats about what kind of foreign policy a President Hillary Clinton would pursue, writes Robert Parry.

Prominent neocon Robert Kagan has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president, saying she represents the best hope for saving the United States from populist billionaire Donald Trump, who has repudiated the neoconservative cause of U.S. military interventions in line with Israel's interests.

In a Washington Post op-ed published on Thursday, Kagan excoriated the Republican Party for creating the conditions for Trump's rise and then asked, "So what to do now? The Republicans' creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out."

Then referring to himself, he added, "For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The [Republican] party cannot be saved, but the country still can be."

While many of Kagan's observations about the Republican tolerance and even encouragement of bigotry are correct, the fact that a leading neocon, a co-founder of the infamous Project for the New American Century, has endorsed Clinton raises questions for Democrats who have so far given the former New York senator and Secretary of State mostly a pass on her pro-interventionist policies.

The fact is that Clinton has generally marched in lock step with the neocons as they have implemented an aggressive "regime change" strategy against governments and political movements that don't toe Washington's line or that deviate from Israel's goals in the Middle East. So she has backed coups, such as in Honduras (2009) and Ukraine (2014); invasions, such as Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011); and subversions such as Syria (from 2011 to the present) all with various degrees of disastrous results.

Yet, with the failure of Republican establishment candidates to gain political traction against Trump, Clinton has clearly become the choice of many neoconservatives and "liberal interventionists" who favor continuation of U.S. imperial designs around the world. The question for Democrats now is whether they wish to perpetuate those war-like policies by sticking with Clinton or should switch to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who offers a somewhat less aggressive (though vaguely defined) foreign policy.

Sanders has undermined his appeal to anti-imperialist Democrats by muting his criticism of Clinton's "regime change" strategies and concentrating relentlessly on his message of "income inequality" for which Clinton has disingenuously dubbed him a "single-issue candidate." Whether Sanders has the will and the time to reorient his campaign to question Clinton's status as the new neocon choice remains in doubt.

A Reagan Propagandist

Kagan, who I've known since the 1980s when he was a rising star on Ronald Reagan's State Department propaganda team (selling violent right-wing policies in Central America), has been signaling his affection for Clinton for some time, at least since she appointed him as an adviser to her State Department and promoted his wife Victoria Nuland, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, to be the State Department's chief spokesperson. Largely because of Clinton's patronage, Nuland rose to assistant secretary of state for European affairs and oversaw the provocative "regime change" in Ukraine in 2014.

Later in 2014, Kagan told The New York Times that he hoped that his neocon views which he had begun to call "liberal interventionist" would prevail in a possible Hillary Clinton administration. The Times reported that Clinton "remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes" and quoted Kagan as saying:

"I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else."

Now, Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century wrote the blueprint for George W. Bush's disastrous Iraq War, is now abandoning the Republican Party in favor of Hillary Clinton.

... ... ...

While Kagan's op-ed surely makes some accurate points about Republicans, his endorsement of Hillary Clinton raises a different issue for Democrats: Do they want a presidential candidate who someone as savvy as Kagan knows will perpetuate neocon strategies around the world? Do Democrats really trust Hillary Clinton to handle delicate issues, such as the Syrian conflict, without resorting to escalations that may make the neocon disasters under George W. Bush look minor by comparison?

Will Clinton even follow the latest neocon dream of "regime change" in Moscow as the ultimate way of collapsing Israel's lesser obstacles - Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian resistance? Does Clinton have the wisdom to understand that neocon schemes are often half-baked (remember "the cakewalk" in Iraq) and that the risk of overthrowing Vladimir Putin in Moscow might lead not to some new pliable version of Boris Yeltsin but to a dangerous Russian nationalist ready to use the nuclear codes to defend Mother Russia? (For all Putin's faults, he is a calculating adversary, not a crazy one.)

The fact that none of these life-and-death foreign policy questions has been thoroughly or intelligently explored during the Democratic presidential campaign is a failure of both the mainstream media moderators and the two candidates, Sanders and Clinton, neither of whom seems to want a serious or meaningful debate about these existential issues.

Perhaps Robert Kagan's endorsement of Hillary Clinton and what that underscores about the likely foreign policy of a second Clinton presidency might finally force war or peace to the fore of the campaign.

[For more on the powerful Kagan family, see Consortiumnews.com's "A Family Business of Perpetual War."]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

[Jun 13, 2016] Neocon Kagan Endorses Hillary Clinton

Notable quotes:
"... Prominent neocon Robert Kagan has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president, saying she represents the best hope for saving the United States from populist billionaire Donald Trump, who has repudiated the neoconservative cause of U.S. military interventions in line with Israel's interests. ..."
"... Then referring to himself, he added, "For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The [Republican] party cannot be saved, but the country still can be." ..."
"... Kagan, who I've known since the 1980s when he was a rising star on Ronald Reagan's State Department propaganda team (selling violent right-wing policies in Central America), has been signaling his affection for Clinton for some time, at least since she appointed him as an adviser to her State Department and promoted his wife Victoria Nuland, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, to be the State Department's chief spokesperson. Largely because of Clinton's patronage, Nuland rose to assistant secretary of state for European affairs and oversaw the provocative "regime change" in Ukraine in 2014. ..."
"... "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else." ..."
"... Now, Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century wrote the blueprint for George W. Bush's disastrous Iraq War, is now abandoning the Republican Party in favor of Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... While Kagan's op-ed surely makes some accurate points about Republicans, his endorsement of Hillary Clinton raises a different issue for Democrats: Do they want a presidential candidate who someone as savvy as Kagan knows will perpetuate neocon strategies around the world? Do Democrats really trust Hillary Clinton to handle delicate issues, such as the Syrian conflict, without resorting to escalations that may make the neocon disasters under George W. Bush look minor by comparison? ..."
"... Perhaps Robert Kagan's endorsement of Hillary Clinton and what that underscores about the likely foreign policy of a second Clinton presidency might finally force war or peace to the fore of the campaign. ..."
"... America's Stolen Narrative, ..."
Feb 25, 2016 | Consortiumnews

Exclusive: Hillary Clinton's cozy ties to Washington's powerful neocons have paid off with the endorsement of Robert Kagan, one of the most influential neocons. But it also should raise questions among Democrats about what kind of foreign policy a President Hillary Clinton would pursue, writes Robert Parry.

Prominent neocon Robert Kagan has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president, saying she represents the best hope for saving the United States from populist billionaire Donald Trump, who has repudiated the neoconservative cause of U.S. military interventions in line with Israel's interests.

In a Washington Post op-ed published on Thursday, Kagan excoriated the Republican Party for creating the conditions for Trump's rise and then asked, "So what to do now? The Republicans' creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out."

Then referring to himself, he added, "For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The [Republican] party cannot be saved, but the country still can be."

While many of Kagan's observations about the Republican tolerance and even encouragement of bigotry are correct, the fact that a leading neocon, a co-founder of the infamous Project for the New American Century, has endorsed Clinton raises questions for Democrats who have so far given the former New York senator and Secretary of State mostly a pass on her pro-interventionist policies.

The fact is that Clinton has generally marched in lock step with the neocons as they have implemented an aggressive "regime change" strategy against governments and political movements that don't toe Washington's line or that deviate from Israel's goals in the Middle East. So she has backed coups, such as in Honduras (2009) and Ukraine (2014); invasions, such as Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011); and subversions such as Syria (from 2011 to the present) all with various degrees of disastrous results.

Yet, with the failure of Republican establishment candidates to gain political traction against Trump, Clinton has clearly become the choice of many neoconservatives and "liberal interventionists" who favor continuation of U.S. imperial designs around the world. The question for Democrats now is whether they wish to perpetuate those war-like policies by sticking with Clinton or should switch to Sen. Bernie Sanders, who offers a somewhat less aggressive (though vaguely defined) foreign policy.

Sanders has undermined his appeal to anti-imperialist Democrats by muting his criticism of Clinton's "regime change" strategies and concentrating relentlessly on his message of "income inequality" for which Clinton has disingenuously dubbed him a "single-issue candidate." Whether Sanders has the will and the time to reorient his campaign to question Clinton's status as the new neocon choice remains in doubt.

A Reagan Propagandist

Kagan, who I've known since the 1980s when he was a rising star on Ronald Reagan's State Department propaganda team (selling violent right-wing policies in Central America), has been signaling his affection for Clinton for some time, at least since she appointed him as an adviser to her State Department and promoted his wife Victoria Nuland, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, to be the State Department's chief spokesperson. Largely because of Clinton's patronage, Nuland rose to assistant secretary of state for European affairs and oversaw the provocative "regime change" in Ukraine in 2014.

Later in 2014, Kagan told The New York Times that he hoped that his neocon views which he had begun to call "liberal interventionist" would prevail in a possible Hillary Clinton administration. The Times reported that Clinton "remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes" and quoted Kagan as saying:

"I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else."

Now, Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century wrote the blueprint for George W. Bush's disastrous Iraq War, is now abandoning the Republican Party in favor of Hillary Clinton.

... ... ...

While Kagan's op-ed surely makes some accurate points about Republicans, his endorsement of Hillary Clinton raises a different issue for Democrats: Do they want a presidential candidate who someone as savvy as Kagan knows will perpetuate neocon strategies around the world? Do Democrats really trust Hillary Clinton to handle delicate issues, such as the Syrian conflict, without resorting to escalations that may make the neocon disasters under George W. Bush look minor by comparison?

Will Clinton even follow the latest neocon dream of "regime change" in Moscow as the ultimate way of collapsing Israel's lesser obstacles - Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian resistance? Does Clinton have the wisdom to understand that neocon schemes are often half-baked (remember "the cakewalk" in Iraq) and that the risk of overthrowing Vladimir Putin in Moscow might lead not to some new pliable version of Boris Yeltsin but to a dangerous Russian nationalist ready to use the nuclear codes to defend Mother Russia? (For all Putin's faults, he is a calculating adversary, not a crazy one.)

The fact that none of these life-and-death foreign policy questions has been thoroughly or intelligently explored during the Democratic presidential campaign is a failure of both the mainstream media moderators and the two candidates, Sanders and Clinton, neither of whom seems to want a serious or meaningful debate about these existential issues.

Perhaps Robert Kagan's endorsement of Hillary Clinton and what that underscores about the likely foreign policy of a second Clinton presidency might finally force war or peace to the fore of the campaign.

[For more on the powerful Kagan family, see Consortiumnews.com's "A Family Business of Perpetual War."]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

[April 24, 2016] Robert Kagan - Right Web - Institute for Policy Studies

An excellent overview, much better then in Wikipedia.
April 24, 2016 | Institute for Policy Studies

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.

Robert Kagan is a neoconservative writer and historian based at the Brookings Institution. A longtime proponent of an aggressive, interventionist U.S. foreign policy, Kagan has played an influential role in shaping the neoconservative agenda for more than two decades.

Kagan was a cofounder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a now defunct pressure group that helped build Beltway support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. In the early years of the Obama administration, he reprised this role as a cofounder of the Foreign Policy Initiative, a PNAC successor group.

He has also served as an adviser to the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a board member of the U.S. Committee on NATO, an "international patron" of the UK-based Henry Jackson Society, a contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, and a foreign policy adviser to the Republican presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and John McCain.

Despite Kagan's GOP bona fides, during the 2016 presidential primaries he described himself as a "former Republican" because of his disappointment over the party's 2016 presidential candidates. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Kagan expressed particular concern about the rise of Donald Trump, whom he called "the most successful demagogue-charlatan in the history of U.S. politics." Blaming the Republican Party for the creation of Trump and the emergence of other disastrous candidates like Sen. Ted Cruz, Kagan wrote in the Post, "For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be."[1]

In 2014, Kagan foreshadowed his endorsement of Hillary Clinton during an interview with the New York Times. "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy," he said. "If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else."[2]

Kagan has also maintained a number of bipartisan affiliations. He has visited the Obama White House, for example, and helped establish a bipartisan civilian advisory board for Democratic Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.[3] According to one report, "Kagan has also been careful to avoid landing at standard-issue neocon think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute" and has "insisted on maintaining the link between modern neoconservatism and its roots in muscular Cold War liberalism." Kagan has even shied away from the "neoconservative" label, saying he prefers to be described as a "liberal interventionist."[4]

U.S. Intervention and the "Global Order"

A key theme in Kagan's work concerns the maintenance of the "liberal world order," which as he perceives it amounts to a U.S.-enforced international state system. "In my view, the willingness of the United States to use force and to threaten to use force to defend its interests and the liberal world order has been an essential and unavoidable part of sustaining that world order since the end of World War II," he wrote in a 2014 column for the Washington Post.[5]

Kagan spelled out this view in a long 2014 essay for The New Republic. Entitled "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire," the piece argued that active, forceful U.S. intervention in the affairs of other countries had reshaped the international system for the better. "In the twenty-first century, no less than in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, force remains the ultima ratio," he claimed. "If there has been less aggression, less ethnic cleansing, less territorial conquest over the past 70 years, it is because the United States and its allies have both punished and deterred aggression, have intervened, sometimes, to prevent ethnic cleansing, and have gone to war to reverse territorial conquest."[6]

Kagan warned darkly that if the United States didn't enforce its will on the international system, other powers would. "When Vladimir Putin failed to achieve his goals in Ukraine through political and economic means, he turned to force, because he believed that he could," Kagan wrote. He added: "What might China do were it not hemmed in by a ring of powerful nations backed by the United States? For that matter, what would Japan do if it were much more powerful and much less dependent on the United States for its security? We have not had to find out the answers to these questions, not yet, because American predominance, the American alliance system, and the economic, political, and institutional aspects of the present order, all ultimately dependent on power, have mostly kept the lid closed on this Pandora's box."

Lamenting public war weariness and the Obama administration's reluctance to intervene in Syria and Ukraine, among other venues, Kagan warned that "there is no democratic superpower waiting in the wings to save the world if this democratic superpower falters."[7]

Some liberal hawks and neoconservatives hailed the piece as a rejoinder to the prevailing public skepticism in the United States about the use of force overseas. According to the New York Times, it "struck such a nerve in the White House that many in the foreign policy establishment considered part of Mr. Obama's speech [in June 2014] at West Point outlining a narrower vision for American force in world affairs to be a rebuttal, and the president even invited Mr. Kagan to lunch to compare world views."[8]

However, Kagan's critics argued that he had badly exaggerated the role of the United States in shaping world events throughout the post-World War II period and glossed over many of Washington's more morally dubious policies. Calling Kagan a "polemicist and an ideologue," Andrew Bacevich argued that the piece's central assertions about the benevolence of U.S. foreign policy failed to stand up "to even casual scrutiny." Among other things, Bacevich said Kagan had overlooked Washington's steadfast support for violent, anti-democratic forces in its own sphere of influence, as well as neglected to seriously consider the fallout from catastrophic interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. "If Americans appear disinclined to have a go at overthrowing Syria's Assad or at restoring the Crimea to Ukrainian control, it's due to their common-sense assessment of what U.S. policy in very recent years has produced," Bacevich concluded. "On this subject, astonishingly, Kagan has almost nothing to say."[9]

Writing for the realist National Interest, Jacob Heilbrunn observed that Kagan's 2014 ode to American superpower "is not a novel thesis. Rather, it is Kagan's latest variation on a theme that he has consistently sounded on behalf of American global activism" since at least the 1990s. "Superpowers don't retire," Heilbrunn quipped, "but Robert Kagan should."[10]

Kagan followed on the New Republic essay with a September 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "America's Dangerous Aversion to Conflict," which bemoaned the "yearning for an escape from the burdens of power and a reprieve from the tragic realities of human existence." He compared the current world order to pre-World War II Europe, writing: "As we head deeper into our version of the 1930s, we may be quite shocked, just as our forebears were, at how quickly things fall apart."[11]

In response, John Heilbrunn of the National Interest wrote: "The military solution that Kagan appears to endorse, first and foremost, is hardly the best ambassador for freedom and democracy. Quite the contrary. … Maybe Kagan should have more confidence in America and its values. For all his disdain for declinism, Kagan, in blaming America first, comes dangerously close to submitting to it himself."[12]

Hawkish Track Record

Kagan hails from a well established neoconservative family. He is the son of the conservative classicist Donald Kagan and the brother of Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who helped promote the U.S. "troop surge" in Iraq. His spouse is Victoria Nuland, a veteran diplomat and former deputy national security adviser to Dick Cheney who is often credited as an editor of Kagan's work.[13]

Kagan launched his career in the early 1980s as a foreign policy adviser to Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY), a future vice presidential candidate who was closely associated with the hawkish wing of the Republican Party. Then, after a stint on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Kagan was appointed by Elliott Abrams in 1985 to head the Office of Public Diplomacy, which was created to push for U.S. support of the anti-communist "Contra" rebels in Nicaragua. (In his 1996 book A Twilight Struggle, which was touted as the "definitive history" of the U.S. anti-Sandinista campaign, Kagan neglected to mention Abrams' subsequent criminal conviction for lying to Congress about the Reagan administration's support for the Contras).[14] Kagan served in the State Department until 1988, leaving the government to become a public scholar.

In 1997, in a bid to press the Clinton administration to pursue a "Reaganite" foreign policy, Kagan and veteran neoconservative activist William Kristol cofounded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Among other hawkish policies, the group played a key role in building elite support for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, issuing an open letter after the 9/11 attacks arguing that the United States should respond by invading Iraq "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack."[15]

Resistance to the movement for war in Iraq from Europe and elsewhere spurred Kagan, who was then based at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to sharpen his theses on U.S. interventionism. In a 2002 article for Policy Review that became the basis for his book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003), Kagan argued, "On the all-important question of power-the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power-American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant's 'Perpetual Peace.' The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might."[16]

Of Paradise and Power was widely panned for its support of U.S. unilateralism. Reviewing the book, leftist historian Howard Zinn wrote that "it is part of the corruption of contemporary language that an analysis of American foreign policy by a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace should argue for the right of the United States to use military force, regardless of international law, and international opinion, whenever it unilaterally decides its 'national interest' requires it." Zinn opined that Kagan's book supplies "intellectual justification, superficial as it is, for the bullying and violence of United States foreign policy."[17]

Kagan maintained his support for the Iraq War even after many of his assertions about the conflict-including that it would come to an early close and that the Bush administration's claims about WMDs in the country would be vindicated-proved wildly inaccurate.[18] Instead of walking back his support, however, Kagan called for a troop escalation. "It is precisely the illusion that a political solution is possible in the midst of rampant violence that has gotten us where we are today," he wrote in November 2006. "What's needed in Iraq are not more clever plans but more U.S. troops to provide the security to make any plan workable. Even those seeking a way out of Iraq as soon as possible should understand the need for an immediate surge in U.S. troop levels to provide the stability necessary so that eventual withdrawal will not produce chaos and an implosion of the Iraqi state."[19]

In March 2009, around the time that President Obama announced a plan to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, Kagan and Kristol launched the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), which liberal blogger Matt Duss dubbed "The Project for the Rehabilitation of Neoconservatism."[20] Among Kagan's early forays on behalf of the group, he promoted the escalation of the war in Afghanistan[21] and criticized the Obama administration for not taking a more confrontational line on Iran.[22]

FPI's platform "is a watered-down version of the bellicose neoconservative program that worked so well over the past decade, producing a disastrous war in Iraq and a deteriorating situation in Central Asia and bringing America's image around the world to new lows," wrote Harvard international relations professor Stephen M. Walt for Foreign Policy. "The new group's modus operandi is likely to be similar to the old Project for a New American Century: bombard Washington with press releases and email alerts, draft open letters to be signed by assorted pundits and former policymakers, and organize conferences intended to advance the group's interventionist agenda."[23]

Kagan has on occasion broken with some of his neoconservative colleagues.

One notable instance occurred in 2013, following a coup in Egypt that toppled the country's elected Muslim Brotherhood government and restored the military to power. While some neoconservatives argued that the Egyptian military would be a more reliable U.S. ally than the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, Kagan argued unequivocally that support for the military's dictatorial rule was short-sighted. It has become "fashionable," Kagan wrote, "to argue that Muslim Arabs are incapable of democracy-this after so many millions of them came out to vote in Egypt, only to see Western democracies do little or nothing when the product of their votes was overthrown." He went on to call for "a complete suspension of all aid to Egypt, especially military aid, until there is a new democratic government, freely elected with the full participation of all parties and groups in Egypt, including the Muslim Brotherhood."[24]

Kagan's critique was notable in part for its direct confrontation with the U.S. "Israel lobby," which largely supported sending aid to Egypt's coup government. "To Israel, which has never supported democracy anywhere in the Middle East except Israel," wrote Kagan, "the presence of a brutal military dictatorship bent on the extermination of Islamism is not only tolerable but desirable." But, he added, "in Egypt, U.S. interests and Israel's perceptions of its own interests sharply diverge. If one believes that any hope for moderation in the Arab world requires finding moderate voices not only among secularists but also among Islamists, America's current strategy in Egypt is producing the opposite result."[25]

Kagan is the author of several books on U.S. interventionism, including A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990 (1996), Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003), Dangerous Nation: America's Place in the World from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (2006), The Return of History and the End of Dreams (2008), and The World America Made (2012).

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Sources

[Nov 23, 2015] The Crisis of World Order

It's the same PNAC propaganda all over again.
Notable quotes:
"... From the man who brought you the Iraq war and the rise of ISIS--how to solve the ISIS crisis. ..."
"... Youd think ppl who brought the Iraq war, the best recruiters of ISIS, would be nowhere to be seen; but no, are telling how to deal w/ISIS. ..."
"... Narrative is the foundation of their skewed analysis. Their object is to sell perpetual war using super high tech, exquisitely expensive, contractor maintained versions of WW II formations to expired resources eternally for the profits they deliver. They starve the safety net to pay for their income security. ..."
"... ... In July of last year, the New York Times ran two pieces tying Clinton to the neoconservative movement. In "The Next Act of the Neocons," (*) Jacob Heilbrunn argued that neocons like historian Robert Kagan are putting their lot in with Clinton in an effort to stay relevant while the GOP shies away from its past interventionism and embraces politicians like Senator Rand Paul: ..."
"... And the thing is, these neocons have a point. Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian rebels; likened Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, to Adolf Hitler; wholeheartedly backs Israel; and stresses the importance of promoting democracy. ..."
"... It's easy to imagine Mrs. Clinton's making room for the neocons in her administration. No one could charge her with being weak on national security with the likes of Robert Kagan on board ..."
"... Kagan served on Clinton's bipartisan foreign policy advisory board when she was Secretary of State, has deep neocon roots. ..."
"... A month before the Heilbrunn piece, the Times profiled Kagan ( ..."
"... ), who was critical of Obama's foreign policy, but supported Clinton. "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy," Kagan told the Times. "If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue … it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that." ... ..."
"... Are Neocons Getting Ready to Ally With Hillary Clinton? http://nyti.ms/1qJ4eLN ..."
"... Robert Kagan Strikes a Nerve With Article on Obama Policy http://nyti.ms/UEuqtB ..."
"... doublethink has become synonymous with relieving cognitive dissonance by ignoring the contradiction between two world views – or even of deliberately seeking to relieve cognitive dissonance. (Wikipedia) ..."
Nov. 20, 2015 | WSJ

...Europe was not in great shape before the refugee crisis and the terrorist attacks. The prolonged Eurozone crisis eroded the legitimacy of European political institutions and the centrist parties that run them, while weakening the economies of key European powers. The old troika-Britain, France and Germany-that used to provide leadership on the continent and with whom the U.S. worked most closely to set the global agenda is no more. Britain is a pale shadow of its former self. Once the indispensable partner for the U.S., influential in both Washington and Brussels, the mediator between America and Europe, Britain is now unmoored, drifting away from both. The Labor Party, once led by Tony Blair, is now headed by an anti-American pacifist, while the ruling Conservative government boasts of its "very special relationship" with China.

... ... ...

There is a Russian angle, too. Many of these parties, and even some mainstream political movements across the continent, are funded by Russia and make little secret of their affinity for Moscow. Thus Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has praised "illiberalism" and made common ideological cause with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In Germany, a whole class of businesspeople, politicians, and current and former government officials, led by former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, presses constantly for normalized relations with Moscow. It sometimes seems, in Germany and perhaps in all of Europe, as if the only person standing in the way of full alliance with Russia is German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Now the Syrian crisis has further bolstered Russia's position. Although Europeans generally share Washington's discomfort with Moscow's support for Mr. Assad and Russia's bombing of moderate Syrian rebels, in the wake of the Paris attacks, any plausible partner in the fight against Islamic State seems worth enlisting. In France, former President Nicolas Sarkozy has long been an advocate for Russia, but now his calls for partnership with Moscow are echoed by President François Hollande, who seeks a "grand coalition" with Russia to fight Islamic State.

Where does the U.S. fit into all this? The Europeans no longer know, any more than American allies in the Middle East do. Most Europeans still like Mr. Obama. After President George W. Bush and the Iraq war, Europeans have gotten the kind of American president they wanted. But in the current crisis, this new, more restrained and intensely cautious post-Iraq America has less to offer than the old superpower, with all its arrogance and belligerence.

The flip side of European pleasure at America's newfound Venusian outlook is the perception, widely shared around the world, that the U.S. is a declining superpower, and that even if it is not objectively weaker than it once was, its leaders' willingness to deploy power on behalf of its interests, and on behalf of the West, has greatly diminished. As former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer recently put it, the U.S. "quite obviously, is no longer willing-or able-to play its old role."

Mr. Fischer was referring specifically to America's role as the dominant power in the Middle East, but since the refugee crisis and the attacks in Paris, America's unwillingness to play that role has reverberations and implications well beyond the Middle East. What the U.S. now does or doesn't do in Syria will affect the future stability of Europe, the strength of trans-Atlantic relations and therefore the well-being of the liberal world order.

This is no doubt the last thing that Mr. Obama wants to hear, and possibly to believe. Certainly he would not deny that the stakes have gone up since the refugee crisis and especially since Paris. At the very least, Islamic State has proven both its desire and its ability to carry out massive, coordinated attacks in a major European city. It is not unthinkable that it could carry out a similar attack in an American city. This is new.

... ... ...

In 2002, a British statesman-scholar issued a quiet warning. "The challenge to the postmodern world," the diplomat Robert Cooper argued, was that while Europeans might operate within their borders as if power no longer mattered, in the world outside Europe, they needed to be prepared to use force just as in earlier eras. "Among ourselves, we keep the law, but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle," he wrote. Europeans didn't heed this warning, or at least didn't heed it sufficiently. They failed to arm themselves for the jungle, materially and spiritually, and now that the jungle has entered the European garden, they are at a loss.

With the exercise of power barely an option, despite what Mr. Hollande promises, Europeans are likely to feel their only choice is to build fences, both within Europe and along its periphery-even if in the process they destroy the very essence of the European project. It is this sentiment that has the Le Pens of Europe soaring in the polls.

What would such an effort look like? First, it would require establishing a safe zone in Syria, providing the millions of would-be refugees still in the country a place to stay and the hundreds of thousands who have fled to Europe a place to which to return. To establish such a zone, American military officials estimate, would require not only U.S. air power but ground forces numbering up to 30,000. Once the safe zone was established, many of those troops could be replaced by forces from Europe, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, but the initial force would have to be largely American.

In addition, a further 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops would be required to uproot Islamic State from the haven it has created in Syria and to help local forces uproot it in Iraq. Many of those troops could then be replaced by NATO and other international forces to hold the territory and provide a safe zone for rebuilding the areas shattered by Islamic State rule.

At the same time, an internationally negotiated and blessed process of transition in Syria should take place, ushering the bloodstained Mr. Assad from power and establishing a new provisional government to hold nationwide elections. The heretofore immovable Mr. Assad would face an entirely new set of military facts on the ground, with the Syrian opposition now backed by U.S. forces and air power, the Syrian air force grounded and Russian bombing halted. Throughout the transition period, and probably beyond even the first rounds of elections, an international peacekeeping force-made up of French, Turkish, American and other NATO forces as well as Arab troops-would have to remain in Syria until a reasonable level of stability, security and inter-sectarian trust was achieved.

Is such a plan so unthinkable? In recent years, the mere mention of U.S. ground troops has been enough to stop any conversation. Americans, or at least the intelligentsia and political class, remain traumatized by Iraq, and all calculations about what to do in Syria have been driven by that trauma. Mr. Obama's advisers have been reluctant to present him with options that include even smaller numbers of ground forces, assuming that he would reject them. And Mr. Obama has, in turn, rejected his advisers' less ambitious proposals on the reasonable grounds that they would probably be insufficient.

This dynamic has kept the president sneering at those who have wanted to do more but have been reluctant to be honest about how much more. But it has also allowed him to be comfortable settling for minimal, pressure-relieving approaches that he must know cannot succeed but which at least have the virtue of avoiding the much larger commitment that he has so far refused to make.

The president has also been inclined to reject options that don't promise to "solve" the problems of Syria, Iraq and the Middle East. He doesn't want to send troops only to put "a lid on things."

In this respect, he is entranced, like most Americans, by the image of the decisive engagement followed by the victorious return home. But that happy picture is a myth. Even after the iconic American victory in World War II, the U.S. didn't come home. Keeping a lid on things is exactly what the U.S. has done these past 70 years. That is how the U.S. created this liberal world order.

In Asia, American forces have kept a lid on what had been, and would likely be again, a dangerous multisided conflict involving China, Japan, Korea, India and who knows who else. In Europe, American forces put a lid on what had been a chronic state of insecurity and war, making it possible to lay the foundations of the European Union. In the Balkans, the presence of U.S. and European troops has kept a lid on what had been an escalating cycle of ethnic conflict. In Libya, a similar international force, with even a small American contingent, could have kept the lid on that country's boiling caldron, perhaps long enough to give a new, more inclusive government a chance.

Preserving a liberal world order and international security is all about placing lids on regions of turmoil. In any case, as my Brookings Institution colleague Thomas Wright observes, whether or not you want to keep a lid on something really ought to depend on what's under the lid.

At practically any other time in the last 70 years, the idea of dispatching even 50,000 troops to fight an organization of Islamic State's description would not have seemed too risky or too costly to most Americans. In 1990-91, President George H.W. Bush, now revered as a judicious and prudent leader, sent half a million troops across the globe to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, a country that not one American in a million could find on a map and which the U.S. had no obligation to defend. In 1989, he sent 30,000 troops to invade Panama to topple an illegitimate, drug-peddling dictator. During the Cold War, when presidents sent more than 300,000 troops to Korea and more than 500,000 troops to Vietnam, the idea of sending 50,000 troops to fight a large and virulently anti-American terrorist organization that had seized territory in the Middle East, and from that territory had already launched a murderous attack on a major Western city, would have seemed barely worth an argument.

Not today. Americans remain paralyzed by Iraq, Republicans almost as much as Democrats, and Mr. Obama is both the political beneficiary and the living symbol of this paralysis. Whether he has the desire or capacity to adjust to changing circumstances is an open question. Other presidents have-from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton-each of whom was forced to recalibrate what the loss or fracturing of Europe would mean to American interests. In Mr. Obama's case, however, such a late-in-the-game recalculation seems less likely. He may be the first president since the end of World War II who simply doesn't care what happens to Europe.

If so, it is, again, a great irony for Europe, and perhaps a tragic one. Having excoriated the U.S. for invading Iraq, Europeans played no small part in bringing on the crisis of confidence and conscience that today prevents Americans from doing what may be necessary to meet the Middle Eastern crisis that has Europe reeling. Perhaps there are Europeans today wishing that the U.S. will not compound its error of commission in Iraq by making an equally unfortunate error of omission in Syria. They can certainly hope.

Mr. Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of "Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order" and, most recently, "The World America Made."

Selected Skeptical Comments
anne said... , November 22, 2015 at 05:50 AM
https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan

Branko Milanovic ‏@BrankoMilan

From the man who brought you the Iraq war and the rise of ISIS--how to solve the ISIS crisis.

Strobe Talbott @strobetalbott

A clarion call by @BrookingsFP's Bob Kagan. Hope (& bet) POTUS has read it. Would-be successors should as well. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-crisis-of-world-order-1448052095

9:03 AM - 21 Nov 2015

anne said in reply to anne... , November 22, 2015 at 05:50 AM

https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/668114578866221056

Branko Milanovic‏ @BrankoMilan

You'd think ppl who brought the Iraq war, the best recruiters of ISIS, would be nowhere to be seen; but no, are telling how to deal w/ISIS.

ilsm said in reply to anne...

Narrative is the foundation of their skewed analysis. Their object is to sell perpetual war using super high tech, exquisitely expensive, contractor maintained versions of WW II formations to expired resources eternally for the profits they deliver. They starve the safety net to pay for their income security.


Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to anne...

Neoconservativism Is Down But Not Out of the 2016 Race

http://bloom.bg/1EpwSou
via @Bloomberg - February 18, 2015

... In July of last year, the New York Times ran two pieces tying Clinton to the neoconservative movement. In "The Next Act of the Neocons," (*) Jacob Heilbrunn argued that neocons like historian Robert Kagan are putting their lot in with Clinton in an effort to stay relevant while the GOP shies away from its past interventionism and embraces politicians like Senator Rand Paul:

'Other neocons have followed Mr. Kagan's careful centrism and respect for Mrs. Clinton. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in the New Republic this year that "it is clear that in administration councils she was a principled voice for a strong stand on controversial issues, whether supporting the Afghan surge or the intervention in Libya."

And the thing is, these neocons have a point. Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war; supported sending arms to Syrian rebels; likened Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, to Adolf Hitler; wholeheartedly backs Israel; and stresses the importance of promoting democracy.

It's easy to imagine Mrs. Clinton's making room for the neocons in her administration. No one could charge her with being weak on national security with the likes of Robert Kagan on board.'

(The story also notes, prematurely, that the careers of older neocons like Wolfowitz are "permanently buried in the sands of Iraq.")

Kagan served on Clinton's bipartisan foreign policy advisory board when she was Secretary of State, has deep neocon roots. He was part of the Project for a New American Century, a now-defunct think tank that spanned much of the second Bush presidency and supported a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity." PNAC counted Kagan, Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol, and Jeb Bush among its members. In 1998, some of its members-including Wolfowitz, Kagan, and Rumsfeld-signed an open letter to President Bill Clinton asking him to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

A month before the Heilbrunn piece, the Times profiled Kagan (#), who was critical of Obama's foreign policy, but supported Clinton. "I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy," Kagan told the Times. "If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue … it's something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that." ...

*- Are Neocons Getting Ready to Ally With Hillary Clinton? http://nyti.ms/1qJ4eLN

#- Robert Kagan Strikes a Nerve With Article on Obama Policy http://nyti.ms/UEuqtB

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs...

(I may be a HRC supporter but Neocons still make me anxious.)

'doublethink has become synonymous with relieving cognitive dissonance by ignoring the contradiction between two world views – or even of deliberately seeking to relieve cognitive dissonance.' (Wikipedia)


[Jul 27, 2015] Meet The Kagans Seeking War To The End Of The World

"...Kagan, who cut his teeth as a propaganda specialist in support of the Reagan administration's brutal Central American policies in the 1980s, is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post's neocon-dominated opinion pages."
Jul 26, 2015 | Zero Hedge
Submitted by Robert Parry, via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

If the neoconservatives have their way again, US ground troops will reoccupy Iraq, the US military will take out Syria's secular government (likely helping Al Qaeda and the Islamic State take over), and the US Congress will not only kill the Iran nuclear deal but follow that with a massive increase in military spending.

Like spraying lighter fluid on a roaring barbecue, the neocons also want a military escalation in Ukraine to burn the ethnic Russians out of the east, and the neocons dream of spreading the blaze to Moscow with the goal of forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin. In other words, more and more fires of Imperial "regime change" abroad even as the last embers of the American Republic die at home.

Much of this "strategy" is personified by a single Washington power couple: arch-neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and an early advocate of the Iraq War, and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who engineered last year's coup in Ukraine that started a nasty civil war and created a confrontation between nuclear-armed United States and Russia.

Kagan, who cut his teeth as a propaganda specialist in support of the Reagan administration's brutal Central American policies in the 1980s, is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post's neocon-dominated opinion pages.

On Friday, Kagan's column baited the Republican Party to do more than just object to President Barack Obama's Iranian nuclear deal. Kagan called for an all-out commitment to neoconservative goals, including military escalations in the Middle East, belligerence toward Russia and casting aside fiscal discipline in favor of funneling tens of billions of new dollars to the Pentagon.

Kagan also showed how the neocons' world view remains the conventional wisdom of Official Washington despite their disastrous Iraq War. The neocon narrative gets repeated over and over in the mainstream media no matter how delusional it is.

For instance, a sane person might trace the origins of the bloodthirsty Islamic State back to President George W. Bush's neocon-inspired Iraq War when this hyper-violent Sunni movement began as "Al Qaeda in Iraq" blowing up Shiite mosques and instigating sectarian bloodshed. It later expanded into Syria where Sunni militants were seeking the ouster of a secular regime led by Alawites, a Shiite offshoot. Though changing its name to the Islamic State, the movement continued with its trademark brutality.

But Kagan doesn't acknowledge that he and his fellow neocons bear any responsibility for this head-chopping phenomenon. In his neocon narrative, the Islamic State gets blamed on Iran and Syria, even though those governments are leading much of the resistance to the Islamic State and its former colleagues in Al Qaeda, which in Syria backs a separate terrorist organization, the Nusra Front.

But here is how Kagan explains the situation to the Smart People of Official Washington:

Critics of the recent nuclear deal struck between Iran and the United States are entirely right to point out the serious challenge that will now be posed by the Islamic republic. It is an aspiring hegemon in an important region of the world.

It is deeply engaged in a region-wide war that encompasses Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, the Gulf States and the Palestinian territories. It subsidizes the murderous but collapsing regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and therefore bears primary responsibility for the growing strength of the Islamic State and other radical jihadist forces in that country and in neighboring Iraq, where it is simultaneously expanding its influence and inflaming sectarian violence.

The Real Hegemon

While ranting about "Iranian hegemony," Kagan called for direct military intervention by the world's true hegemonic power, the United States. He wants the US military to weigh in against Iran on the side of two far more militarily advanced regional powers, Israel and Saudi Arabia, whose combined weapons spending dwarfs Iran's and includes – with Israel – a sophisticated nuclear arsenal.

Yet reality has never had much relationship to neocon ideology. Kagan continued:

Any serious strategy aimed at resisting Iranian hegemony has also required confronting Iran on the several fronts of the Middle East battlefield. In Syria, it has required a determined policy to remove Assad by force, using US air power to provide cover for civilians and create a safe zone for Syrians willing to fight.

In Iraq, it has required using American forces to push back and destroy the forces of the Islamic State so that we would not have to rely, de facto, on Iranian power to do the job. Overall, it has required a greater US military commitment to the region, a reversal of both the perceived and the real withdrawal of American power.

And therefore it has required a reversal of the downward trend in US defense spending, especially the undoing of the sequestration of defense funds, which has made it harder for the military even to think about addressing these challenges, should it be called upon to do so. So the question for Republicans who are rightly warning of the danger posed by Iran is: What have they done to make it possible for the United States to begin to have any strategy for responding?

In Kagan's call for war and more war, we're seeing, again, the consequence of failing to hold neocons accountable after they pushed the country into the illegal and catastrophic Iraq War by selling lies about weapons of mass destruction and telling tales about how easy it would be.

Instead of facing a purge that should have followed the Iraq calamity, the neocons consolidated their power, holding onto key jobs in US foreign policy, ensconcing themselves in influential think tanks, and remaining the go-to experts for mainstream media coverage. Being wrong about Iraq has almost become a badge of honor in the upside-down world of Official Washington.

But we need to unpack the truckload of sophistry that Kagan is peddling. First, it is simply crazy to talk about "Iranian hegemony." That was part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rhetoric before the US Congress on March 3 about Iran "gobbling up" nations – and it has now become a neocon-driven litany, but it is no more real just because it gets repeated endlessly.

For instance, take the Iraq case. It has a Shiite-led government not because Iran invaded Iraq, but because the United States did. After the US military ousted Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, the United States stood up a new government dominated by Shiites who, in turn, sought friendly relations with their co-religionists in Iran, which is entirely understandable and represents no aggression by Iran. Then, after the Islamic State's dramatic military gains across Iraq last summer, the Iraqi government turned to Iran for military assistance, also no surprise.

Back to Iraq

However, leaving aside Kagan's delusional hyperbole about Iran, look at what he's proposing. He wants to return a sizable US occupation force to Iraq, apparently caring little about the US soldiers who were rotated multiple times into the war zone where almost 4,500 died (along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis). Having promoted Iraq War I and having paid no price, Kagan now wants to give us Iraq War II.

But that's not enough. Kagan wants the US military to intervene to make sure the secular government of Syria is overthrown, even though the almost certain winners would be Sunni extremists from the Islamic State or Al Qaeda's Nusra Front. Such a victory could lead to genocides against Syria's Christians, Alawites, Shiites and other minorities. At that point, there would be tremendous pressure for a full-scale US invasion and occupation of Syria, too.

That may be why Kagan wants to throw tens of billions of dollar more into the military-industrial complex, although the true price tag for Kagan's new wars would likely run into the trillions of dollars. Yet, Kagan still isn't satisfied. He wants even more military spending to confront "growing Chinese power, an aggressive Russia and an increasingly hegemonic Iran."

In his conclusion, Kagan mocks the Republicans for not backing up their tough talk: "So, yes, by all means, rail about the [Iran] deal. We all look forward to the hours of floor speeches and campaign speeches that lie ahead. But it will be hard to take Republican criticisms seriously unless they start doing the things that are in their power to do to begin to address the challenge."

While it's true that Kagan is now "just" a neocon ideologue – albeit one with important platforms to present his views – his wife Assistant Secretary of State Nuland shares his foreign policy views and even edits many of his articles. As she told The New York Times last year, "nothing goes out of the house that I don't think is worthy of his talents. Let's put it that way." [See "Obama's True Foreign Policy 'Weakness.'"]

But Nuland is a foreign policy force of her own, considered by some in Washington to be the up-and-coming "star" at the State Department. By organizing the "regime change" in Ukraine – with the violent overthrow of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 – Nuland also earned her spurs as an accomplished neocon.

Nuland has even outdone her husband, who may get "credit" for the Iraq War and the resulting chaos, but Nuland did him one better, instigating Cold War II and reviving hostilities between nuclear-armed Russia and the United States. After all, that's where the really big money will go – toward modernizing nuclear arsenals and ordering top-of-the-line strategic weaponry.

A Family Business

There's also a family-business aspect to these wars and confrontations, since the Kagans collectively serve not just to start conflicts but to profit from grateful military contractors who kick back a share of the money to the think tanks that employ the Kagans.

For instance, Robert's brother Frederick works at the American Enterprise Institute, which has long benefited from the largesse of the Military-Industrial Complex, and his wife Kimberly runs her own think tank called the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

According to ISW's annual reports, its original supporters were mostly right-wing foundations, such as the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, but it was later backed by a host of national security contractors, including major ones like General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and CACI, as well as lesser-known firms such as DynCorp International, which provided training for Afghan police, and Palantir, a technology company founded with the backing of the CIA's venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir supplied software to US military intelligence in Afghanistan.

Since its founding in 2007, ISW has focused mostly on wars in the Middle East, especially Iraq and Afghanistan, including closely cooperating with Gen. David Petraeus when he commanded US forces in those countries. However, more recently, ISW has begun reporting extensively on the civil war in Ukraine. [See "Neocons Guided Petraeus on Afghan War."]

So, to understand the enduring influence of the neocons – and the Kagan clan, in particular – you have to appreciate the money connections between the business of war and the business of selling war. When the military contractors do well, the think tanks that advocate for heightened global tensions do well, too.

And, it doesn't hurt to have friends and family inside the government making sure that policymakers do their part to give war a chance - and to give peace the old heave-ho.

Latina Lover

Nudelman and the Kagans are minions of the Military Industrial Complex, mouthpieces for hire. Their job is to create wars for profit, enriching their masters.


Bay of Pigs

And what does Donald Trump have to say about these liars and weasels?

greenskeeper carl

While he has been critical ad the Iraq war in general and bush and Obamas handling of it, I doubt he'd go so far as to go after the architects of it. Even though he has gone after the two biggest neocons in the senate, graham and McCain, he didn't call them out for being neocons, he called them out for being douchebags for other reasons.

Doing so would likely turn off a lot of supporters, even if trump himself feels that way. Few politicians have the guts to really 'go there' , Ron Paul was really the only one. Most of trumps supporters are red meat republicans, who while they are, correctly, fed up with all the warfare, they won't go so far as to call it all a 'mistake' since they still buy into the meme that by criticizing that they aren't 'supporting the troops' or are being unpatriotic.

James_Cole

However, leaving aside Kagan's delusional hyperbole about Iran, look at what he's proposing.

If US became allied with Iran instead of saudi arabia the world would be a much better / peaceful place. So long as SA didn't start dropping nukes all over the place.

Iran hasn't started any wars, recently had a female mathematician win the fields medal & is right now fighting ISIS. SA starts wars frequently, was home to most of the 9/11 hijackers + al qaeda + almost certainly funds ISIS to some extent & is stuck in the 15th century. Why the fuck is SA the bff in the ME & not Iran?? They both have oil.

US should just admit a few past mistakes in Iran and then bring them back into the fold. You can do it US&A! For the good of humanity :)

cowdogg

Much more ambitious than just filling the coffers of the arms industry. The Kagans are Netanyahu's operatives who are doing their best to instigate a US war with both Russia and China. The idea is that all parties will destroy each other and leave little Israel and it's hundreds of nuclear weapons as masters of the earth. It is going to take a while longer to get it going so in the meantime the Kagans will be contented for the US to conquer Iraq and Syria and incorporate them into Greater Israel.

Ignatius

Family business combined with a satanic ideology in service of a profitable crime: war.

Luther van Theses

Lies about Iraq are not confined to "weapons of mass destruction."

1. The Baath regime headed by Saddam Hussein was secular, not "Sunni."

2. There is no evidence that Saddam "oppressed the Shiites."

3. There is no evidence that "Saddam gassed the Kurds."

The Goebbels-method beliefs about Iraq are held all across the political spectrum. As a result, millions of Iraqis die and nobody gives a shit.

Contrarian View

This article should never have been published in ZH. It doesn't meet even the low ZH standards of rigor and intellectual honesty. The idea that the Kagans are representative of all "neocons" is ludicrous to anyone who actually knows any neocons.

The article's assertion that it was the Iraq war that birthed ISIS, rather than Obama's support of Islamic extremism, shows how ignorant the author is.

By William Kristol and Robert Kagan

William Kristol is Editor of The Weekly Standard. Robert Kagan is a Contributing Editor of The Weekly Standard.

See more by William Kristol See more by Robert Kaganclose

From our July/August 1996 Issue

THE TEPID CONSENSUS

In foreign policy, conservatives are adrift. They disdain the Wilsonian multilateralism of the Clinton administration; they are tempted by, but so far have resisted, the neoisolationism of Patrick Buchanan; for now, they lean uncertainly on some version of the conservative realism of Henry Kissinger and his disciples. Thus, in this year's election campaign, they speak vaguely of replacing Clinton's vacillation with a steady, adult foreign policy under Robert Dole. But Clinton has not vacillated that much recently, and Dole was reduced a few weeks ago to asserting, in what was heralded as a major address, that there really are differences in foreign policy between him and the president, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. But the fault is not Dole's; in truth, there has been little attempt to set forth the outlines of a conservative view of the world and America's proper role in it.

Is such an attempt necessary, or even possible? For the past few years, Americans, from the foreign policy big thinker to the man on the street, have assumed it is not. Rather, this is supposed to be a time for unshouldering the vast responsibilities the United States acquired at the end of the Second World War and for concentrating its energies at home. The collapse of the Soviet Empire has made possible a return to normalcy in American foreign and defense policy, allowing the adoption of a more limited definition of the national interest, with a commensurate reduction in overseas involvement and defense spending.

Republicans and conservatives at first tended to be wary of this new post-Cold War consensus. But they joined it rapidly after 1992, in the wake of the defeat of the quintessential foreign policy president by a candidate who promised to focus like a laser on the domestic economy. Now conservatives tailor their foreign and defense policies to fit the presumed new political reality: an American public that is indifferent, if not hostile, to foreign policy and commitments abroad, more interested in balancing the budget than in leading the world, and more intent on cashing in the peace dividend than on spending to deter and fight future wars. Most conservatives have chosen to acquiesce in rather than challenge this public mood.

In a way, the current situation is reminiscent of the mid-1970s. But Ronald Reagan mounted a bold challenge to the tepid consensus of that era a consensus that favored accommodation to and coexistence with the Soviet Union, accepted the inevitability of America's declining power, and considered any change in the status quo either too frightening or too expensive. Proposing a controversial vision of ideological and strategic victory over the forces of international communism, Reagan called for an end to complacency in the face of the Soviet threat, large increases in defense spending, resistance to communist advances in the Third World, and greater moral clarity and purpose in U.S. foreign policy. He championed American exceptionalism when it was deeply unfashionable. Perhaps most significant, he refused to accept the limits on American power imposed by the domestic political realities that others assumed were fixed.

Many smart people regarded Reagan with scorn or alarm. Liberal Democrats still reeling from the Vietnam War were, of course, appalled by his zealotry. So were many of Reagan's fellow Republicans, especially the Kissingerian realists then dominant in foreign affairs. Reagan declared war on his own party, took on Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination (primarily over issues of foreign policy), and trained his guns on Kissinger, whose stewardship of U.S. foreign policy, he charged, had coincided precisely with the loss of U.S. military supremacy. Although Reagan lost the battle to unseat Ford, he won the fight at the Republican convention for a platform plank on morality in foreign policy. Ultimately, he succeeded in transforming the Republican party, the conservative movement in America, and, after his election to the presidency in 1980, the country and the world.

BENEVOLENT HEGEMONY

Twenty years later, it is time once again to challenge an indifferent America and a confused American conservatism. Today's lukewarm consensus about America's reduced role in a post-Cold War world is wrong. Conservatives should not accede to it; it is bad for the country and, incidentally, bad for conservatism. Conservatives will not be able to govern America over the long term if they fail to offer a more elevated vision of America's international role.

What should that role be? Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the evil empire, the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America's security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world.

The aspiration to benevolent hegemony might strike some as either hubristic or morally suspect. But a hegemon is nothing more or less than a leader with preponderant influence and authority over all others in its domain. That is America's position in the world today. The leaders of Russia and China understand this. At their April summit meeting, Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin joined in denouncing hegemonism in the post-Cold War world. They meant this as a complaint about the United States. It should be taken as a compliment and a guide to action.

Consider the events of just the past six months, a period that few observers would consider remarkable for its drama on the world stage. In East Asia, the carrier task forces of the U.S. Seventh Fleet helped deter Chinese aggression against democratic Taiwan, and the 35,000 American troops stationed in South Korea helped deter a possible invasion by the rulers in Pyongyang. In Europe, the United States sent 20,000 ground troops to implement a peace agreement in the former Yugoslavia, maintained 100,000 in Western Europe as a symbolic commitment to European stability and security, and intervened diplomatically to prevent the escalation of a conflict between Greece and Turkey. In the Middle East, the United States maintained the deployment of thousands of soldiers and a strong naval presence in the Persian Gulf region to deter possible aggression by Saddam Hussein's Iraq or the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran, and it mediated in the conflict between Israel and Syria in Lebanon. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States completed the withdrawal of 15,000 soldiers after restoring a semblance of democratic government in Haiti and, almost without public notice, prevented a military coup in Paraguay. In Africa, a U.S. expeditionary force rescued Americans and others trapped in the Liberian civil conflict.

These were just the most visible American actions of the past six months, and just those of a military or diplomatic nature. During the same period, the United States made a thousand decisions in international economic forums, both as a government and as an amalgam of large corporations and individual entrepreneurs, that shaped the lives and fortunes of billions around the globe. America influenced both the external and internal behavior of other countries through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Through the United Nations, it maintained sanctions on rogue states such as Libya, Iran, and Iraq. Through aid programs, the United States tried to shore up friendly democratic regimes in developing nations. The enormous web of the global economic system, with the United States at the center, combined with the pervasive influence of American ideas and culture, allowed Americans to wield influence in many other ways of which they were entirely unconscious. The simple truth of this era was stated last year by a Serb leader trying to explain Slobodan Milosevic's decision to finally seek rapprochement with Washington. As a pragmatist, the Serbian politician said, Milosevic knows that all satellites of the United States are in a better position than those that are not satellites.

And America's allies are in a better position than those who are not its allies. Most of the world's major powers welcome U.S. global involvement and prefer America's benevolent hegemony to the alternatives. Instead of having to compete for dominant global influence with many other powers, therefore, the United States finds both the Europeans and the Japanese -- after the United States, the two most powerful forces in the world -- supportive of its world leadership role. Those who anticipated the dissolution of these alliances once the common threat of the Soviet Union disappeared have been proved wrong. The principal concern of America's allies these days is not that it will be too dominant but that it will withdraw.

Somehow most Americans have failed to notice that they have never had it so good. They have never lived in a world more conducive to their fundamental interests in a liberal international order, the spread of freedom and democratic governance, an international economic system of free-market capitalism and free trade, and the security of Americans not only to live within their own borders but to travel and do business safely and without encumbrance almost anywhere in the world. Americans have taken these remarkable benefits of the post-Cold War era for granted, partly because it has all seemed so easy. Despite misguided warnings of imperial overstretch, the United States has so far exercised its hegemony without any noticeable strain, and it has done so despite the fact that Americans appear to be in a more insular mood than at any time since before the Second World War. The events of the last six months have excited no particular interest among Americans and, indeed, seem to have been regarded with the same routine indifference as breathing and eating.

And that is the problem. The most difficult thing to preserve is that which does not appear to need preserving. The dominant strategic and ideological position the United States now enjoys is the product of foreign policies and defense strategies that are no longer being pursued. Americans have come to take the fruits of their hegemonic power for granted. During the Cold War, the strategies of deterrence and containment worked so well in checking the ambitions of America's adversaries that many American liberals denied that our adversaries had ambitions or even, for that matter, that America had adversaries. Today the lack of a visible threat to U.S. vital interests or to world peace has tempted Americans to absentmindedly dismantle the material and spiritual foundations on which their national well-being has been based. They do not notice that potential challengers are deterred before even contemplating confrontation by their overwhelming power and influence.

The ubiquitous post-Cold War question -- where is the threat? -- is thus misconceived. In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it, the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness. American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible. To achieve this goal, the United States needs a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military supremacy and moral confidence.

THREE IMPERATIVES

Setting forth the broad outlines of such a foreign policy is more important for the moment than deciding the best way to handle all the individual issues that have preoccupied U.S. policymakers and analysts. Whether or not the United States continues to grant most-favored-nation status to China is less important than whether it has an overall strategy for containing, influencing, and ultimately seeking to change the regime in Beijing. Whether NATO expands this year or five years from now is less important than whether NATO remains strong, active, cohesive, and under decisive American leadership. Whether America builds 20 b-2 bombers or 30 is less important than giving its military planners enough money to make intelligent choices that are driven more by strategic than by budget requirements. But it is clear that a neo-Reaganite foreign policy would have several implications.

The defense budget. Republicans declared victory last year when they added $7 billion to President Clinton's defense budget. But the hard truth is that Washington -- now spending about $260 billion per year on defense -- probably needs to spend about $60-$80 billion more each year in order to preserve America's role as global hegemon. The United States currently devotes about three percent of its GNP to defense. U.S. defense planners, who must make guesses about a future that is impossible to predict with confidence, are increasingly being forced to place all their chips on one guess or another. They are being asked to predict whether the future is likely to bring more conflicts like the Gulf War or peacekeeping operations like those in Bosnia and Haiti, or more great power confrontations similar to the Cold War. The best answer to these questions is: who can tell? The odds are that in the coming decades America may face all these kinds of conflict, as well as some that have yet to be imagined.

For the past few years, American military supremacy has been living off a legacy, specifically, the legacy of Ronald Reagan. As former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell once noted, it was Reagan's military, built in the 1980s to deter the Soviet Union, that won the war against Iraq. No serious analyst of American military capabilities today doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet America's responsibilities to itself and to world peace. The United States may no longer have the wherewithal to defend against threats to America's vital interests in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, much less to extend America's current global preeminence well into the future.

The current readiness of U.S. forces is in decline, but so is their ability to maintain an advantage in high technology weapons over the coming decades. In the search for some way to meet extensive strategic requirements with inadequate resources, defense planners have engaged in strategic fratricide. Those who favor current readiness have been pitted against those who favor high-tech research and development; those who favor maintaining American forward deployment at bases around the world have been arrayed against those who insist that for the sake of economizing the job be accomplished at long range without bases. The military is forced to choose between army combat divisions and the next generation of bombers, between lift capacities and force projection, between short-range and long-range deterrence. Constructing a military force appropriate to a nation's commitments and its resources is never an easy task, and there are always limits that compel difficult choices. But today's limits are far too severe; the choices they compel are too dramatic; and because military strategy and planning are far from exact sciences, the United States is dangerously cutting its margin for error.

The defense budget crisis is now at hand. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General John Shalikashvili has complained that the weapons procurement budget has been reduced to perilously low levels, and he has understated the problem. Since 1985, the research and development budget has been cut by 57 percent; the procurement budget has been cut 71 percent. Both the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress have achieved budget savings over the next few years by pushing necessary procurement decisions into the next century. The Clinton administration's so-called Bottom-Up Review of U.S. defense strategy has been rightly dismissed by Democrats like Senate Armed Services Committee member Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) as already inadequate to the present and certainly to the future. Both the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office have projected a shortfall of $50 billion to $100 billion over the next five years in funding just for existing force levels and procurement plans.

These shortfalls do not even take into account the development of new weapons, like a missile defense system capable of protecting American territory against missiles launched from rogue states such as North Korea or shielding, say, Los Angeles from nuclear intimidation by the Chinese during the next crisis in the Taiwan Strait. Deployment of such a system could cost more than $10 billion a year.

Add together the needed increases in the procurement budget called for by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the justifiable increases in funding for existing forces to make up the shortfalls identified by the GAO and the CBO, and it becomes obvious that an increase in defense spending by $60 billion to $80 billion is not a radical proposal. It is simply what the United States will require to keep the peace and defend its interests over the coming decades.

If this number sounds like a budget-buster, it should not. Today, defense spending is less than 20 percent of the total federal budget. In 1962, before the Vietnam War, defense spending ran at almost 50 percent of the overall budget. In 1978, before the Carter-Reagan defense buildup, it was about 23 percent. Increases of the size required to pursue a neo-Reaganite foreign policy today would require returning to about that level of defense spending -- still less than one-quarter of the federal budget.

These days, some critics complain about the fact that the United States spends more on defense than the next six major powers combined. But the enormous disparity between U.S. military strength and that of any potential challenger is a good thing for America and the world. After all, America's world role is entirely different from that of the other powers. The more Washington is able to make clear that it is futile to compete with American power, either in size of forces or in technological capabilities, the less chance there is that countries like China or Iran will entertain ambitions of upsetting the present world order. And that means the United States will be able to save money in the long run, for it is much cheaper to deter a war than to fight one. Americans should be glad that their defense capabilities are as great as the next six powers combined. Indeed, they may even want to enshrine this disparity in U.S. defense strategy. Great Britain in the late 19th century maintained a two-power standard for its navy, insisting that at all times the British navy should be as large as the next two naval powers combined, whoever they might be. Perhaps the United States should inaugurate such a two- (or three-, or four-) power standard of its own, which would preserve its military supremacy regardless of the near-term global threats.

Citizen involvement. A gap is growing, meanwhile, between America's professional military, uncomfortable with some of the missions that the new American role requires, and a civilian population increasingly unaware of or indifferent to the importance of its military's efforts abroad. U.S. military leaders harbor justifiable suspicions that while they serve as a kind of foreign legion, doing the hard work of American-style empire management, American civilians at home, preoccupied with the distribution of tax breaks and government benefits, will not come to their support when the going gets tough. Weak political leadership and a poor job of educating the citizenry to the responsibilities of global hegemony have created an increasingly distinct and alienated military culture. Ask any mechanic or mess boy on an aircraft carrier why he is patrolling the oceans, and he can give a more sophisticated explanation of power projection than 99 percent of American college graduates. It is foolish to imagine that the United States can lead the world effectively while the overwhelming majority of the population neither understands nor is involved, in any real way, with its international mission.

The president and other political leaders can take steps to close the growing separation of civilian and military cultures in our society. They can remind civilians of the sacrifices being made by U.S. forces overseas and explain what those sacrifices are for. A clear statement of America's global mission can help the public understand why U.S. troops are deployed overseas and can help reassure military leaders of public support in difficult circumstances. It could also lay the groundwork for reasserting more comprehensive civilian control over the military.

There could be further efforts to involve more citizens in military service. Perhaps the United States has reached the point where a return to the draft is not feasible because of the high degree of professionalization of the military services. But there are other ways to lower the barriers between civilian and military life. Expanded forms of reserve service could give many more Americans experience of the military and an appreciation of military virtues. Conservatives preach that citizenship is not only about rights but also about responsibilities. There is no more profound responsibility than the defense of the nation and its principles.

Moral clarity. Finally, American foreign policy should be informed with a clear moral purpose, based on the understanding that its moral goals and its fundamental national interests are almost always in harmony. The United States achieved its present position of strength not by practicing a foreign policy of live and let live, nor by passively waiting for threats to arise, but by actively promoting American principles of governance abroad -- democracy, free markets, respect for liberty. During the Reagan years, the United States pressed for changes in right-wing and left-wing dictatorships alike, among both friends and foes -- in the Philippines, South Korea, Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union. The purpose was not Wilsonian idealistic whimsy. The policy of putting pressure on authoritarian and totalitarian regimes had practical aims and, in the end, delivered strategic benefits. Support for American principles around the world can be sustained only by continuing exertion of American influence. Some of that influence comes from the aid provided to friendly regimes that are trying to carry out democratic and free-market reforms. However strong the case for reform of foreign aid programs, they deserve to be maintained as a useful way of exerting American influence abroad. And sometimes exerting that influence means not just supporting U.S. friends and gently pressuring other nations, but actively pursuing policies -- in Iran, Cuba, or China, for instance -- intended ultimately to bring about a change of regime. In any case, the United States should not blindly do business with every nation, no matter its regime. Armand Hammerism should not be a tenet of conservative foreign policy.

FROM NSC-68 TO 1996

This sweeping, neo-Reaganite foreign policy agenda may seem ambitious for these tepid times. Politicians in both parties will protest that the American people will not support the burdens of such a policy. There are two answers to this criticism.

First, it is already clear that, on the present course, Washington will find it increasingly impossible to fulfill even the less ambitious foreign policies of the realists, including the defense of so-called vital interests in Europe and Asia. Without a broad, sustaining foreign policy vision, the American people will be inclined to withdraw from the world and will lose sight of their abiding interest in vigorous world leadership. Without a sense of mission, they will seek deeper and deeper cuts in the defense and foreign affairs budgets and gradually decimate the tools of U.S. hegemony.

Consider what has happened in only the past few years. Ronald Reagan's exceptionalist appeal did not survive the presidency of George Bush, where self-proclaimed pragmatists like James Baker found it easier to justify the Gulf War to the American people in terms of jobs than as a defense of a world order shaped to suit American interests and principles. Then, having discarded the overarching Reaganite vision that had sustained a globally active foreign policy through the last decade of the Cold War, the Bush administration in 1992 saw its own prodigious foreign policy successes swept into the dustbin by Clinton political adviser James Carville's campaign logic: It's the economy, stupid. By the time conservatives took their seats as the congressional opposition in 1993, they had abandoned not only Reaganism but to some degree foreign policy itself.

Now the common wisdom holds that Dole's solid victory over Buchanan in the primaries constituted a triumphant reassertion of conservative internationalism over neoisolationism. But the common wisdom may prove wrong. On the stump during the Republican primaries this year, what little passion and energy there was on foreign policy issues came from Buchanan and his followers. Over the past four years Buchanan's fiery America First rhetoric has filled the vacuum among conservatives created by the abandonment of Reagan's very different kind of patriotic mission. It is now an open question how long the beleaguered conservative realists will be able to resist the combined assault of Buchanan's isolationism of the heart and the Republican budget hawks on Capitol Hill.

History also shows, however, that the American people can be summoned to meet the challenges of global leadership if statesmen make the case loudly, cogently, and persistently. As troubles arise and the need to act becomes clear, those who have laid the foundation for a necessary shift in policy have a chance to lead Americans onto a new course. In 1950, Paul Nitze and other Truman administration officials drafted the famous planning document NSC-68, a call for an all-out effort to meet the Soviet challenge that included a full-scale ideological confrontation and massive increases in defense spending. At first, their proposals languished. President Truman, worried about angering a hostile, budget-conscious Congress and an American public which was enjoying an era of peace and prosperity, for months refused to approve the defense spending proposals. It took the North Korean invasion of South Korea to allow the administration to rally support for the prescriptions of NSC-68. Before the Korean War, American politicians were fighting over whether the defense budget ought to be $15 billion or $16 billion; most believed more defense spending would bankrupt the nation. The next year, the defense budget was over $50 billion.

A similar sequence of events unfolded in the 1970s. When Reagan and the Scoop Jackson Democrats began sounding the alarm about the Soviet danger, the American public was not ready to listen. Then came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of American hostages in Iran. By the time Jimmy Carter professed to have learned more about the Soviet Union than he had ever known before, Reagan and his fellow conservatives in both parties had laid the intellectual foundation for the military buildup of the 1980s.

AN ELEVATED PATRIOTISM

In theory, either party could lay the groundwork for a neo-Reaganite foreign policy over the next decade. The Democrats, after all, led the nation to assume its new global responsibilities in the late 1940s and early 1950s under President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. It is unlikely, however, that they are prepared to pursue such a course today. Republicans may have lost their way in the last few years, but the Democrats are still recovering from their post-Vietnam trauma of two decades ago. President Clinton has proved a better manager of foreign policy than many expected, but he has not been up to the larger task of preparing and inspiring the nation to embrace the role of global leadership. He, too, has tailored his internationalist activism to fit the constraints of a popular mood that White House pollsters believe is disinclined to sacrifice blood and treasure in the name of overseas commitments. His Pentagon officials talk more about exit strategies than about national objectives. His administration has promised global leadership on the cheap, refusing to seek the levels of defense spending needed to meet the broad goals it claims to want to achieve in the world. Even Clinton's boldest overseas adventures, in Bosnia and Haiti, have come only after strenuous and prolonged efforts to avoid intervention.

Republicans are surely the genuine heirs to the Reagan tradition. The 1994 election is often said to have represented one last victory for Ronald Reagan's domestic agenda. But Reagan's earlier successes rested as much on foreign as on domestic policy. Over the long term, victory for American conservatives depends on recapturing the spirit of Reagan's foreign policy as well.

Indeed, American conservatism cannot govern by domestic policy alone. In the 1990s conservatives have built their agenda on two pillars of Reaganism: relimiting government to curtail the most intrusive and counterproductive aspects of the modern welfare state, and reversing the widespread collapse of morals and standards in American society. But it is hard to imagine conservatives achieving a lasting political realignment in this country without the third pillar: a coherent set of foreign policy principles that at least bear some resemblance to those propounded by Reagan. The remoralization of America at home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy. For both follow from Americans belief that the principles of the Declaration of Independence are not merely the choices of a particular culture but are universal, enduring, self-evident truths. That has been, after all, the main point of the conservatives war against a relativistic multiculturalism. For conservatives to preach the importance of upholding the core elements of the Western tradition at home, but to profess indifference to the fate of American principles abroad, is an inconsistency that cannot help but gnaw at the heart of conservatism.

Conservatives these days succumb easily to the charming old metaphor of the United States as a city on a hill. They hark back, as George Kennan did in these pages not long ago, to the admonition of John Quincy Adams that America ought not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. But why not? The alternative is to leave monsters on the loose, ravaging and pillaging to their hearts' content, as Americans stand by and watch. What may have been wise counsel in 1823, when America was a small, isolated power in a world of European giants, is no longer so, when America is the giant. Because America has the capacity to contain or destroy many of the world's monsters, most of which can be found without much searching, and because the responsibility for the peace and security of the international order rests so heavily on America's shoulders, a policy of sitting atop a hill and leading by example becomes in practice a policy of cowardice and dishonor.

And more is at stake than honor. Without a broader, more enlightened understanding of America's interests, conservatism will too easily degenerate into the pinched nationalism of Buchanan's America First, where the appeal to narrow self-interest masks a deeper form of self-loathing. A true conservatism of the heart ought to emphasize both personal and national responsibility, relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking from American foreign policy -- and from American conservatism -- in recent years. George Kennan was right 50 years ago in his famous X article: the American people ought to feel a certain gratitude to a Providence, which by providing [them] with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear. This is as true today -- if less obviously so -- as it was at the beginning of the Cold War.

A neo-Reaganite foreign policy would be good for conservatives, good for America, and good for the world. It is worth recalling that the most successful Republican presidents of this century, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, both inspired Americans to assume cheerfully the new international responsibilities that went with increased power and influence. Both celebrated American exceptionalism. Both made Americans proud of their leading role in world affairs. Deprived of the support of an elevated patriotism, bereft of the ability to appeal to national honor, conservatives will ultimately fail in their effort to govern America. And Americans will fail in their responsibility to lead the world.

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