Neo fights against the MACHINES.
I'm not sure what neo-neo-conservatives fight against. Probably their bulging diapers. :)
Posted on 10/17/2004 3:02:51 PM PDT by Ed Current
There's no question whom Richard Viguerie wants to see in the White House for the next four years. A founding father of the modern conservative movement, he is foursquare behind President Bush despite what he regards as undue influence from one wing of the GOP, the neoconservatives. In this, Viguerie reflects a hallowed Republican Party tradition: Mute policy differences and unite at election time.
But for Viguerie and other conservative leaders, maintaining that discipline this year is harder than usual. The Republicans' united front masks a growing struggle sparked by the president's hawkish and ambitious foreign policy--one that may burst into the open soon after the polls close, whoever wins. "Most conservatives are not comfortable with the neocons," Viguerie says. He decries the neocons as "overbearing" and "immensely influential. . . . They want to be the world's policeman. We don't feel our role is to be Don Quixote, righting all the wrongs in the world."
Viguerie's disquiet is widely shared by veteran conservative activists, who are increasingly blaming neoconservatives for placing Iraq at the center of the war on terrorism. "I'm hearing more discussion about foreign policy and the direction of the country than I have heard probably in the last 35 years," says Paul Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation. Heart and soul.
The second thoughts on Iraq are re-exposing old ideological fault lines among GOP factions--Wall Streeters, Main Streeters, budget balancers, libertarians, and neoisolationists--that see their own policy priorities jeopardized. The fight within the GOP, Viguerie predicts, "will dwarf what took place in the '60s and '70s" --between the Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller wings of the party and later between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. "It's going to be early on November 3 that the battle starts for the heart and soul of the Republican Party, and it's not going to be neat and clean," vows Viguerie, who's known for revolutionizing direct-mail fundraising on behalf of conservative candidates.
Bush loyalists like Viguerie, Weyrich, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform are worried about the soaring costs of suppressing the Iraqi insurgency and the war's impact on delaying conservative economic initiatives to cut taxes and the size of government, privatize Social Security, and expand free trade. "Bush has a choice: He can be a part of the redefinition of the party, or he can step aside," says Keene. "The neocons have had some inordinate influence and made some serious mistakes."
Some conservatives feel Bush acted hastily on Iraq and needlessly shed allies who had stood with the United States on Afghanistan, mushrooming the costs borne by Washington. Some question his switch on nation building: As a candidate in 2000 taking a traditional conservative view, he rejected it; as president, he has plunged into it in Afghanistan (which last week held its first presidential elections) and Iraq. Others are dismayed by "mistakes," such as assertions based on faulty or misused intelligence on Iraqi weapons. "If Bush loses, the pragmatists will blame it on Iraq," says John Pitney, an expert on GOP politics at California's Claremont McKenna College
Some conservatives rue the lost opportunities and the polarization from the war. "Iraq ate up half of the first term," frets a key Republican strategist who consults with the White House. He adds, "This is like being the president during Vietnam, not at the end of World War II."
Some of that debate is already bubbling to the surface. GOP Sens. Richard Lugar (chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee), Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and Lincoln Chafee have bemoaned aspects of Iraq policy. Much of the criticism, though, has a broader thrust: Traditional foreign-policy realism is reasserting itself. Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a possible presidential candidate in 2008, appears to be sketching out a realist's alternative, emphasizing rebuilding battered alliances and "an appreciation of [U.S. power's] limits." In contrast to Bush's Wilsonian rhetoric about an American calling to spread freedom and democracy, Hagel warned in Foreign Affairs that "foreign policy must not succumb to the distraction of divine mission." He told the Washington Post that the GOP "has come loose of its moorings." Lightning rod.
There are other fissures in the party of Ronald Reagan. Some Wall Street Republicans dislike unconservative deficit spending and favor the sort of internationalism practiced by Bush's father. A few have slacked off on raising funds for Bush. Libertarians, along with neoisolationists like Patrick Buchanan, oppose what they see as Bush's post-9/11 proclivity to intervene abroad.
The lightning rod for much of the unhappiness is the loose movement of thinkers and policymakers known by the shorthand "neocons." Favoring boldness in asserting American values, they supplied most of the intellectual architecture for the Iraq war, for the Bush doctrine of pre-empting potential threats, and for considering "regime change" in rogue states. For years, neoconservative stars such as Richard Perle, former head of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, and Douglas Feith, the No. 3 official at the Pentagon, had been advocating Saddam Hussein's ouster. Toppling Saddam, neocon thinking went, was the key to unlocking a shift toward democracy in the Mideast. Four days after 9/11, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neocon strategist, urged Bush at Camp David to target Iraq in the first phase of the war on terrorism. Bush opted to defer, but not abandon, that aim. Says former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, "The neocons were organized. They had intellectual content. Bush was not totally captured by it but tends in that direction." Some observers go further. "They provided coherence for a lot of elements in Bush's thinking," the late James Chace, a professor of international relations at Bard College, said shortly before his death this month. "The president is a neocon."
Whatever the case, the neocon movement has traveled a long way indeed: from historical roots in the anti-Stalinist left to the Henry "Scoop" Jackson wing of the Democratic Party and then, for many, on to become Reagan Republicans. The Bush administration has vaulted neocons into positions of unprecedented authority in the Pentagon, Vice President Cheney's office, the National Security Council, and even Colin Powell's State Department. Outside of government, neoconservatives have promoted their views through think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, publications like the Weekly Standard, and advocacy groups like the Project for the New American Century.
While they have no agreed doctrine, neoconservatives see America's unrivaled military power as a force for good and want to unleash it on sources of totalitarian evil--today, seen primarily as Islamic and Arab extremism. Neocons are often called Wilsonian (for the idealistic President Woodrow Wilson) for their emphasis on spreading democracy, especially in the Mideast. Compared with traditional conservatives, neocons are more inclined to favor unilateral force and less concerned with attracting international support.
But the neocons now find themselves in a fight for their place in the Republican Party--and in a second term, should Bush win. Former Reagan administration official Stefan Halper and former British diplomat Jonathan Clarke, in a widely discussed book called America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, charge that Bush's foreign policy was hijacked after 9/11, leading to a "betrayal of both Republican and conservative principles." Francis Fukuyama, a former State Department official in the administration of Bush's father, assailed some fellow neocons and Bush's Iraq policy in a National Interest article. He argued that Bush overlooked the need for international support to build a sense of "legitimacy" for the Iraq invasion, antagonized many by announcing a pre-emption strategy, and "went into Iraq with enormous illusions about how easy the postwar situation would be." Conservative columnists like George Will, Robert Novak, and William F. Buckley Jr. are stoking the fire. Will recently complained that ideology is crowding out facts in Bush's Iraq nation building. "This administration needs a dose of conservatism without the [neo] prefix," he wrote. Rising doubts.
Behind the scenes, movement conservatives are disputing neocon ideas as well. Says Alfred Regnery, publisher of the American Spectator and numerous conservative books, "The administration got sold a little bit by the neocons. . . . We should return to a traditional, strong Republican foreign policy: We go to war only as a last resort, and we're not in the business of building nations." Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum, says the administration needs to "finish up the job in Iraq." However, Schlafly says, "we don't think we can be the policeman of the world." She describes herself as "not a fan" of Wilsonian policies: "All this talk of democracy in Iraq is kind of ridiculous," she argues. "What's real-ly important is that they have governments that are friendly to the United States."
Weyrich also has doubts about the neocons and Iraq policy. "They were very much on the ascendancy at the beginning of the administration, but they have been tarnished," he says. Weyrich and other conservative leaders met with Bush earlier this year in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. He says that Bush rejected the realist posture adopted by his father in choosing not to occupy Iraq. "He said I want you to understand I'm not my old man," Weyrich recalls. Weyrich, however, believes "we have to get out. . . . I hate to agree with John Kerry on anything because he's a gold-plated phony. But we have become a tremendous recruiting ground for al Qaeda." Some of Weyrich's opinions skirt uncomfortably close to Kerry's attacks on Bush as being disconnected from realities on the ground in Iraq. If Iraq's transition "doesn't work, we'd better face that and not just dig a hole that's deeper and deeper," says Weyrich. "I hope he [Bush] doesn't believe his own rhetoric."
Inside the administration, senior officials suggest the neoconservatives are losing ground on policy toward Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. And Powell, who has spent much of his tenure in infighting with hawks, recently joked about "right-wing loonies" in a staff meeting when a subordinate referred to "left-wing loonies" in Cuba.
Has the neoconservative moment passed? "Neoconservatives feel under attack," says Kenneth Weinstein, chief operating officer of the Hudson Institute, an important outlet for neocon policy ideas. Says one, who would not be identified by name: "The neocons are being blamed . . . . No one wants to take the fall for what's happened in Iraq--not the neoconservatives, not the CIA, not the State Department, not the Pentagon."
Suspect leaks. Some neocons also sense an invidious undercurrent in which "neocon" is a code word for Jewish; Buchanan has asserted, for instance, that neocons are doing Israel's bidding. Their anxieties were deepened by the news leak that the FBI is probing a Pentagon analyst in Feith's office for allegedly passing a secret document to Israel through a Washington-based lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The analyst, Larry Franklin, and AIPAC deny any wrongdoing. Other leaks, too, are seen as efforts to discredit Bush and the neocons: for example, on CIA warnings of post-invasion resistance that were played down by pro-war officials. "This is political warfare," says a neocon analyst.
Under fire, neoconservatives out of government are regrouping. This summer saw the rebirth of the Committee on the Present Danger--the third incarnation of a group first launched in the 1950s and restarted in the 1970s to promote a hard line against Soviet communism. Norman Podhoretz, one of the movement's leading thinkers, laments the darkening mood of "gloom and doom," in particular the "newborn pessimism among supporters" of the Iraq war. "Things have gone not badly, not disastrously, but triumphantly," he declared at the group's inaugural conference last month. The group posits that the United States now faces another existential threat and has dubbed the struggle "World War IV," the Cold War being World War III. The group's chairman, former CIA Director James Woolsey, says its rebirth recognizes that "people are to some extent choosing up sides. . . . Get the job done or go back to the '90s" --before 9/11 and Bush's pre-emption doctrine. "A number of critics have a nostalgia for an earlier era," he warns. But with a toxic mix of Arab and Islamist totalitarianism, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorists, he says, "those days are gone with the wind."
Woolsey predicts "the long war of the 21st century" will last decades. The fight between neocons and other cons might last just as long.
I know what "neo" means. I want to know what a neoconservative is. Again, I know that that means they are new conservatives, but my question is, what is the political difference between them and just regular conservatives.
I'd like to know what their conservative agenda is supposed to be, especially people like Lincoln Chafee.
Win elections.
They know that conservatives have no place else to go.
...if they don't have any primary challengers.
"The Liberals want us to fight amongst ourselves"
You win the jackpot. The left is spouting any number of theories about which faction of the republican party is fighting with which. For reasons that are beyond me, the left has a special hatred for neo-cons. I think republicans are laid back enough that they don't think to categorize their own party like some sort of political botanists.
I think instead of poring over the carefully explained theories about how we are fighting it's best to just sit back and watch the Dems. spin themselves into irrelevence.
ne·o·con·ser·va·tive
noun (plural ne·o·con·ser·va·tives)
supporter of return to conservative values: somebody who, during the mid-1980s, began to support conservatism in society, and in politics in particular, as a reaction to the social freedoms sought throughout the 1960s and early 1970s
adjective
relating to shift toward conservatism: relating to or forming part of the shift during the mid-1980s toward social and political conservatism that occurred after the freedom movement of the 1960s and early 1970s
So, a neoconservative is like a born again Christian? Is my analogy right?
Phyllis Schlafly on foreign policy? Yiich! I didn't like her back in her heyday, she's more stupid now.
AKA Country Club Republicans. Bring back Bob Michel and his merry band of ranking members and back benchers. How 'bout that Steve Forbes.
As I understand it, "neo" as opposed to "paleo" is the difference in political view of folks like Barry Goldwater (Pro America, America First, social conservative, fiscal conservative, literal Constitution, etc.) and George W. (global vision, one world gov't., nation builder, fiscal liberal, social liberal, America=just another state equal to all the other nation-states in the world, rubber Constitution, etc.)...
With the "neo's" there will be 3 political parties...The far, far left, the far, far right and the Republican Party in the middle...
So I guess the answer is YES. Christian values are their core values.
Although there are some here who think 'neo-cons' are bad for the Republican party.
There's plenty more on Google & here on FR re: RINO Chaffee.
For reasons that are beyond me, the left has a special hatred for neo-cons."
Neo-cons are most hated because they take the liberal world-view and assumptions and turn them on their head.
You want to help the poor? then reform schools and welfare.
You want peace and freedom in the world? then defeat terrorism.
You want a culture of tolerance? Then quit running the country from the courts, and quit the PC speech codes on campus ... etc.
Neo-cons cannot be boxed into a 'reactionary' corner, and many (eg David Horowitz) are former leftists who have 'got their number'.
Liberals would prefer that all conservatives fit the 'bigotted-rube/evil-corporate-greedhead/christian-fundie' stereotypes. Neo-cons and modern Reaganite Conservatives break the mold. Libs are too lazy to have a coherent philosophy to actually debate against.
So, a neoconservative is like a born again Christian? Is my analogy right?"
:-) Hadnt thought of that, but its an apt analogy ... neo-conservatives are "Liberals who got mugged".
Any conservative who still thinks idiotically that we made a mistake in Liberating Iraq please go here ...
http://freedomstruth.blogspot.com/
And read the Saddam articles ...
Or read this, from an IRAQI:
http://messopotamian.blogspot.com/
I have been listening to the report about the WMD’s by Mr. David Kay. Now, all of you in the West must know that as far as we, the Iraqis, are concerned, we care very little that stocks of WMD’s existed or not at the time of liberation. For us Saddam and his regime were in themselves, the most lethal WMD that cost our people hundreds of thousands of victims not to mention the destruction of the economy and the very fabric of society in our afflicted country. That regime was a dead end for our people and with its continuation there was no hope whatsoever for the future. Mr. David Kay did mention something about this, and he should know, since he spent so much time in Iraq and has intimate knowledge of the situation. Saddamism is a cancer that we have yet to recover from. Western intervention lead by the U.S.A. was a God send to us, despite all the pain and misery that accompanied the operation and the repercussions that continue to rock the process of recuperation and rebirth of the nation. The U.S. soldiers are bravely standing in the thick of the turmoil and contributing with their blood and sweat not to mention the treasure of their land, towards curing us from the remaining ulcers of the disease after having performed the main surgery which no one else even dared even to think of.
Perhaps, the interests of our people were not the main consideration that led to that action; nevertheless, that does not change anything about the importance and implications for the people of Iraq of this tremendous historical act. Yes there is pain, chaos and loss; yet on the other hand, there is possibility of hope, and a clearly discernible “light at the end of tunnel”, to use this worn out phrase.
Were we better off during Saddam’s time? - A question to which many outsiders are very keen to know our answer. Well, in many respects the streets are much more insecure, yet the security that existed in Saddam’s days was like someone quietly waiting for certain death; like a cancer stricken individual carrying the disease in his guts with no hope or attempt at cure. Yes, the pain and torture may be much more terrible when the surgeon has operated and the disease is tackled; but at least there is hope of recovery and healing, and the prospect of life saving. And this is not allegory, nor a parable; this is coming from someone whose house has been standing in the midst of bombs and explosions for so long now, protected by none but the mercy and grace of the Lord; from someone who has suffered robbery, kidnapping and constant daily danger.
And here we are, trying to organize elections, trying to control the security situation, trying to restart the reconstruction, able to talk, able to think, able to watch satellite T.V., use the internet, the mobile etc. – in short everything that we have been forbidden to do before. And without the slightest hesitation, we hail with Love and Gratitude our giant U.S. friend and his allies, standing with us shoulder to shoulder, braving the elements, braving death, calumny and hatred, shedding blood; to help us heal, to help us reach the shores of safety. And make no mistake, the campaign is winning and will achieve its objectives. Make no mistake; you have already created an allied nation in the very heart of the M.E. despite all appearances, which will produce all the long term benefits and consequences so many times reiterated by President Bush, to the ridicule and insults of the profoundly mistaken, of the profoundly hating.
America, stay the course - God, Decency, Honor, Hope and everything that is virtuous and right is on your side, beside the majority of the Iraqi people. America do not waiver, for you have never waged a more noble and just campaign in your entire history. America, we are winning, God’s willing, and Victory is coming sooner than many might think.
What a load. Half the quotes aren't even related to the transition the writer is trying to connect to them.
The idea there will be some big fight is ridiculous since Bush has already taken a side.
I question the timing of this article....hmmmm...
If Bush had not removed Saddam From Iraq the Democrats and Republicans would be calling him "weak" on national security and defense. While the UN and it's Saddam apologist members (France and Germany)grew fat on oil for food kick-backs, George W. Bush did what was right, at the right time, at the right place. It's called leadership.
Neo fights against the MACHINES.
I'm not sure what neo-neo-conservatives fight against. Probably their bulging diapers. :)
I don't have to agree with everyone elses definition of conservatism. I just have to know that I fear liberalism. My idea of conservatism is freedom from government intervention in my life, coupled with strong defense and strong American indiviualism.
"I question the timing of this article....hmmmm..."
Here in nyc, especiallly around the time of the convention there was a rash of these kind of comparitive articles in the press. Anecdotally, you can't go anywhere without some lefty favoring you with their favorite conspiracy, usually straight from moveon.org or a paul krugman article. They are genuinely confused about how someone could have an opinion different from theirs.
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