(Cackle---and here I thought dinoparty was the one that sounded unintelligent).
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This past spring Kristol acknowledged that the NeoCons had successfully purged the isolationists such as Paul and PB from the GOP and were moving to purge the Realists, especially the older realists such as Hagel, Scowcroft, Baker, Kissinger, Schultz, Lugar etc.
And let's not forget the pukeneos' very fave sport---kicking social conservatives to the curb----as they squat in the Repub party.
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FYI---EXCERPT How did the neocons – a small group at odds with most of the US foreign policy elite – manage to capture the Bush administration---and be given the WH Office of Special OPs?
Few neos supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared Bush II would be like the first – a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf War and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process – and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. Neos supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination.
Then neos had a stroke of luck – VP Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the Nov election and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hard-line allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network of neos, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
The neocons took advantage of GW Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father---a Second World War vet, onetime ambassador to China, director of the CIA, and VP---GWB was a thinly-educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor has more power).
The younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and toward Wolfowitz ("Wolfie," as he calls him) even before 9/11 gave GWB something he had lacked: a life's mission other than following in dad's footsteps. There were signs of estrangement between the cautious father and the crusading son: in 2002, veterans of the first Bush admin--including Baker, Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly against an invasion of Iraq without authorization from Congress and the UN.
It is not clear that George W fully understood the grand strategy that neo Wolfowitz and other aides were unfolding. GWB seemed genuinely to believe that there was an imminent threat to the US from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction," something the leading neocons said in public but were far too intelligent to believe themselves.
The Neo's "Project for the New American Century" urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with possible links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on the USto invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon, and to threaten states such as Syria and Iran with US attacks if they continued to sponsor terrorism.
Claims that the invasion was not to protect the American people but to make the Middle East safe for Israel are dismissed by the neocons as vicious anti-Semitism.
Yet (in 2003) Syria, Iran and Iraq were bitter enemies, with their weapons pointed at each other, and the terrorists they sponsor targeted Israel rather than the US. The neocons urged all-out war with Iran next, though by any rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear arsenal is, for the US, a far greater problem. (Michael Lind circa 2003)