rdr, once again you confuse me. I think there may be SOME dispute about the neo-con label but you are missing the main point here, which you obviously wouldn't agree with anyway: an identifiable group is getting singled out as having hijacked the otherwise freedom loving, reluctant-warmaking US government. If it hadn't been for THEM, goes this line of reasoning, none of this stuff would have happened.<br><br>And who are them...ahem....they?<br><br>Well, you are right that some people toss folks like Rumsfeld into the mix, but neo = new. These are the "new" conservatives who came out of a new left, then cold war liberal background. <br><br>Here's how Michael Lind alleged "centrist" from the New America Foundation puts it, quoted on anti-war.com. <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><br>The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defense intellectuals. (They are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right.) Inside the government, the chief defense intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defense secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, No. 3 at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protégé who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R. Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned his unpaid chairmanship of a defense department advisory body after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defense secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.<br><br>Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy." They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians. <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lind1.html">www.antiwar.com/orig/lind1.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>I think this is what MOST of America is thinking of when they say "neo-conservative". Some old timey rightwingers in a predominately Jewish group of former leftists. And, I think "Commentary" magazine is considered to be a central publication for this group. <br><br>Interestingly, it was another libertarian (well, I don't know that Lind is libertarian, but anti-war.com is) who tipped me off to the CIA role in grooming these folks for whatever their role ultimately is. I posted it before. You didn't like it, but seems relevant to me. <br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><br>After the Hitler-Stalin pact, the neoconservatives moved from cafeteria Trotskyites to apologists for the US warfare state without missing a beat, as Justin Raimondo shows in his 1993 Reclaiming the American Right. The CIA’s role in establishing the influence of the neocons came out in the late 60s, though the revelations were obscured by the primary actors’ denials of knowledge of the covert funding. The premiere organization of the anti-Stalinist left, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, provided a base of operations to launch a left-intellectual crusade against the Soviet Union. The revelation that the Congress was a CIA front destroyed the organization’s credibility, and it went belly up despite the best efforts of the Ford Foundation to keep it afloat. The Congress disappeared, but as Raimondo notes, "the core group later came to be known as the neoconservatives."<br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/pavlik2.html">www.lewrockwell.com/orig/pavlik2.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>CIA funding or not, Jewish or not, this group is now getting the blame for all that is wrong with American foreign policy. It interested me in fact that one of the main organizations leading the charge is "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity." The spokesperson is Ray McGovern, but I can't find a website for them. The VIPS email address is simply
vips@counterpunch.org.<br><br>So that should at least register a "hmmmm" in the alert reader. Why center a group of allegedly "nonpartisan" intelligence professionals within the avowedly partisan Counterpunch? It's NOT like they needed help with publicity. Their open letters got play all OVER the place. And if you look them up you find about five "known members" listed (like at Wikipedia and Sourcewatch) and three who are "thought" to be members. <br><br><br>Now, to make this game clear, let us look at this article from two of the members of VIPS (who later resigned from the organization). This article spells out EXACTLY what the CIA, or "former CIA members" mean when they say neo-con. It also spells out exactly the point we are making. Now, perhaps you agree that American policy has been hijacked by Israelis thru their operatives in the "neo-con" community. Plenty of folks on this site sure think that. As does much of the entire 9/11 "truth movement". So this article should that be your inclination, will make you happy. <br><br>It doesn't make me happy. And furthermore, it cements the idea that our imperialistic and fascist agenda is merely a glitch caused by "outsiders" working on behalf of a foreign nation. This is just an excerpt. It's a long article:<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>A Rose By Another Other Name<br>The Bush Administration's Dual Loyalties<br><br>by KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON<br>former CIA political analysts<br><br>Since the long-forgotten days when the State Department's Middle East policy was run by a group of so-called Arabists, U.S. policy on Israel and the Arab world has increasingly become the purview of officials well known for tilting toward Israel. From the 1920s roughly to 1990, Arabists, who had a personal history and an educational background in the Arab world and were accused by supporters of Israel of being totally biased toward Arab interests, held sway at the State Department and, despite having limited power in the policymaking circles of any administration, helped maintain some semblance of U.S. balance by keeping policy from tipping over totally toward Israel. But Arabists have been steadily replaced by their exact opposites, what some observers are calling Israelists, and policymaking circles throughout government now no longer even make a pretense of exhibiting balance between Israeli and Arab, particularly Palestinian, interests.<br><br>In the Clinton administration, the three most senior State Department officials dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli peace process were all partisans of Israel to one degree or another. All had lived at least for brief periods in Israel and maintained ties with Israel while in office, occasionally vacationing there. One of these officials had worked both as a pro-Israel lobbyist and as director of a pro-Israel think tank in Washington before taking a position in the Clinton administration from which he helped make policy on Palestinian-Israeli issues. Another has headed the pro-Israel think tank since leaving government.<br><br>The link between active promoters of Israeli interests and policymaking circles is stronger by several orders of magnitude in the Bush administration, which is peppered with people who have long records of activism on behalf of Israel in the United States, of policy advocacy in Israel, and of promoting an agenda for Israel often at odds with existing U.S. policy. These people, who can fairly be called Israeli loyalists, are now at all levels of government, from desk officers at the Defense Department to the deputy secretary level at both State and Defense, as well as on the National Security Council staff and in the vice president's office.<br><br>We still tiptoe around putting a name to this phenomenon. We write articles about the neo-conservatives' agenda on U.S.-Israeli relations and imply that in the neo-con universe there is little light between the two countries. We talk openly about the Israeli bias in the U.S. media. We make wry jokes about Congress being "Israeli-occupied territory." Jason Vest in The Nation magazine reported forthrightly that some of the think tanks that hold sway over Bush administration thinking see no difference between U.S. and Israeli national security interests. But we never pronounce the particular words that best describe the real meaning of those observations and wry remarks. It's time, however, that we say the words out loud and deal with what they really signify.<br><br>Dual loyalties. The issue we are dealing with in the Bush administration is dual loyalties-the double allegiance of those myriad officials at high and middle levels who cannot distinguish U.S. interests from Israeli interests, who baldly promote the supposed identity of interests between the United States and Israel, who spent their early careers giving policy advice to right-wing Israeli governments and now give the identical advice to a right-wing U.S. government, and who, one suspects, are so wrapped up in their concern for the fate of Israel that they honestly do not know whether their own passion about advancing the U.S. imperium is motivated primarily by America-first patriotism or is governed first and foremost by a desire to secure Israel's safety and predominance in the Middle East through the advancement of the U.S. imperium.<br><br>"Dual loyalties" has always been one of those red flags posted around the subject of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, something that induces horrified gasps and rapid heartbeats because of its implication of Jewish disloyalty to the United States and the common assumption that anyone who would speak such a canard is ipso facto an anti-Semite. (We have a Jewish friend who is not bothered by the term in the least, who believes that U.S. and Israeli interests should be identical and sees it as perfectly natural for American Jews to feel as much loyalty to Israel as they do to the United States. But this is clearly not the usual reaction when the subject of dual loyalties arises.)<br><br>Although much has been written about the neo-cons who dot the Bush administration, the treatment of the their ties to Israel has generally been very gingerly. Although much has come to light recently about the fact that ridding Iraq both of its leader and of its weapons inventory has been on the neo-con agenda since long before there was a Bush administration, little has been said about the link between this goal and the neo-cons' overriding desire to provide greater security for Israel. But an examination of the cast of characters in Bush administration policymaking circles reveals a startlingly pervasive network of pro-Israel activists, and an examination of the neo-cons' voluminous written record shows that Israel comes up constantly as a neo-con reference point, always mentioned with the United States as the beneficiary of a recommended policy, always linked with the United States when national interests are at issue.<br><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/christison1213.html">www.counterpunch.org/christison1213.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>I could easily find MANY such articles, but I thought the delicious irony of "former" cia officers writing on the "leftist" Counterpunch was too good to pass up. And their analysis is quite clear. <br><br>So the question is, are these neo-cons really at the heart of a powergrab that hijacked an otherwise peace-loving nation and bullied it into a war that served no country's interest save Israel? Because that's really the way it's going to get spun. It's been spun that way from the beginning by folks like the Christisons and by folks like Michael Rivero and many, many others. Even Cindy Sheehan was alleged to have said that her son "died for Israel".<br><br><br><br>Personally, I don't think the political power structure in this country is quite that easy to hijack. I think that the Iraq war is simply more of the same...only worse. <br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=dreamsend@rigorousintuition>Dreams End</A> at: 11/28/05 1:36 am<br></i>
by robertdreed » Sun Nov 27, 2005 5:40 pm