Posted on 07/23/2007 9:53:54 PM PDT by Coleus
I frequently meet people who claim to have no idea of the difference between traditional conservatism and so-called "neo" conservatism.
The other day I came upon an amusing song parody by a right- wing Vietnam vet named George Gould that goes a long way toward explaining the difference. It's titled "The Neocon National Anthem" and it is set to the tune of the Vietnam War-era hit "The Ballad of the Green Berets." ''Laptop warriors from the sky, "Fearless men who send others to die ''Men whose every word's a lie ''The brave men of the AEI."
The AEI is the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank whose minions convinced the gullible George Bush to invade Iraq as the first step in "liberating" the Mideast. The geniuses at AEI never ex plained just why we would want to liberate a bunch of religious nuts who hate us. But shortly after U.S troops occupied Baghdad in 2003, they were ecstatic. AEI fellow Richard Perle wrote a piece headlined "Relax, celebrate victory" in which he asserted that the Iraq war had "ended quickly with few civilian casualties ... It ended without the Arab world rising up against us, as the war's critics feared, without the quag mire they predicted, without the heavy losses in house-to-house fighting they warned us to ex pect."
Oops. The laptop warriors forgot to buy the software that ex plained what to do with Iraq once they had occupied it. Gould, who has the parody posted at his Web site (http:// georgegould.blogspot.com), finds a direct parallel to the armchair intellectuals who bungled Vietnam, where he served two tours with the Army.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
I think the NeoCons saw Iraq as a Banana Republic not Iraq as a jihady free fire zone.
The NeoCons provided the mental firepower for GWB, when the going got tough, they left or were asked to leave the Bush Administration.
I think people that merely make the concepts in neo-conservatism nothing but a cartoon version of reality is just as stupid as a leftist who treat ALL Conservatives are cartoons. Both the leftists and the blind neo-con haters employ nothing but emotions and NO intellectual process.
There are certainly wrong headed concepts in neo-conservatism but they are FAR better allies than ANY leftist could EVER be. To treat them the way the idiot from the star-ledger and you do is foolish.
“Far better allies...”?
Perhaps, it’s hard to tell, they all have left the Administration and or repudiating their support for the Iraq War.
Freidman, Fukiyama etc. have all ran away from it as fast their gucci loafers could carry them, leaving the Republican Party in tough shape going into 2008.
How many of those ‘laptop warriors’ died on planes, in the World Trade Center, or at the Pentagon, I wonder... Oh, right, don’t mention our dead from brutal acts of terrorism except on 9/11, lest you make political hay out of it.
Our biggest mistake in Iraq was not having someone stand forward to do the official surrender ceremony. It left things unanswered and in confusion. Of course, the UN taking off as soon as possible after they arrived after the war was over didn’t help at all.
The thinkers abandoned Iraq before the ‘laptop warriors’ did. But, yeah, the UN is as teflon as the Clintons are.
NeoCons aka It’s the Joooooos.
Paul Mulshine also wrote this
Smoking out the real Rush [Mulshine]
Newark Star Ledger ^ | 10/12/03 | Paul Mulshine
Rush Limbaugh, while amusing and often insightful, is not a conservative. He is simply an entertainer who uses conservatism to sell a wide range of products.
Mulshine loves fiction.
Our largest mistake (so far it isn’t over in Iraq yet) is relying too much on Sec Rumsfeld’s vision, and not enough on Colin Powel’s advice.
Rumsfeld won, small footprint, banana republic small force, Powel correctly pointed out that we needed 500,000 or so soldiers to not only conquer, but to secure the victory.
And what does pointint ot 9/11 have to do with “The thinkers abandoning Iraq before the NeoCons did”? The “thinkers” WERE the NeoCons.
Perhaps, but what do the “Jooos” have to do with a NeoCon mistake? If they weren’t joooos, would you say the same thing?
INOW, being jewish has nothing to do with making a mistake.
The original neocons were a band of liberal intellectuals who rebelled against the Democratic Party's leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s. At first the neocons clustered around Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism. The neocons, in the famous formulation of one of their leaders, Irving Kristol, were "liberals mugged by reality."
What the Heck Is a Neocon? by Max Boot. Wall Street Journal December 30, 2002
These hit pieces are a dime a dozen with the same undertone.
Either you don’t get it or don’t want to
Rumsfeld won, small footprint, banana republic small force, Powel correctly pointed out that we needed 500,000 or so soldiers to not only conquer, but to secure the victory.
Let me phone the democratically elected government in Iraq and let them know we're still at war with them. The war was a success; the aftermath far less so, mostly because of the ambiguity when you don't have a surrender and you've conquered a nation you didn't want. Something that I'm pretty sure has never happened in the history of the world.
So you think a formal surrender would mean something?? Goodness, you write as if these are civilized people we are “occupying”. The Jihadists will never surrender; if they did, they wouldn’t be Jihadists.
Yeah, it means something. Without a surrender, there's always the open claim 'we'll eventually win.' It's an important component, always will be.
That’s true but most of them are not conservative in that they have no problem with big government. They are, to quote Fred Barnes, “big government” conservatives. Apparently Fred never grasped the meaning of “oxymoron”.
They’re not social conservatives for the most part either. Krauthammer actually wrote that the war in Iraq was about the right of sexual expression.
Many of them are just liberals with an interventionist foreign policy. They are traditional Wilsonian Democrats.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the same plan that was used in Vietnam?
While some object to the term few seem to have a problem with paleo-con; i.e., us Goldwater conservatives.
More than once I've read comments by these liberals that "racist" paleo-cons should be kicked out of "their" GOP.
You could send ten million troops to Iraq and it wouldn’t make any difference. All it would do is provide ten million targets to the insurgents under the powellesque rules of engagement that still pervade.
The Democrats in the senate and the house, the media and the left in general, plus a bit of Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ (IE: Globalism with a touch of capitalism); not Rumsfeld is responsible for the current and recent past in Iraq.
I agree. We have plenty of troops who are handcuffed by Washington from doing their jobs. If they do their jobs, they are put on trial by the military. We need to take out Mookie al-Sadr, bulldoze Sadr City, and gun down whatever crawls out of that den of vipers.
You would be correct, if we were fighting in Vietnam.
Why fight Vietnam all over, when we kicked Saddam out of Kuwait, a small country, we had 500,000 people to do it, now we were going to invade and control Iraq with 200,000?
And some of that number were denied access to Iraq via Turkey.
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