Thanks. Yes, I learned about them in school, during my book-larning and such. But in my book (and Webster's book, I'd wager) these people are still called isolationists and nativists.
I don't like or need redundant words.
The Reagan Doctrine, IMHO was a paleo-con inspired policy of letting the natives fight the cold war.
That's interesting. Meanwhile, I could find a dozen other Freepers I've corresponded with who'd insist that Reagan was, or was advised by, or was unduly influenced by "neocons", and that our every foreign policy endeavor starting from WWII was a "neocon" thing.
So do you see why I get confused and keep asking for some semblance of a definition of "neocon"? Whether Reagan was or was not a "neocon" seems to depend not on anything intrinsic to Reagan, but on who I'm talking to at the moment.
That's a problem for people who try to insist that "neocon" is a useful term.
The fact that some of those we helped arm (Saddam, what was to be al-Qaeda) were scum bags animates (again my opinion) neo-cn thinking in that we have to do it ourselves.
Which people are these "neocons" who, in your opinion, are animated by the fact that we armed thugs during the Cold War into thinking that we have to fight this new war ourselves?
And oh yeah, these people you have in mind, why are they "neocons"? How do they fit the definition of a "neocon"? (And oh yeah, what is that definition, in your view, by the way?)
Just wonderin' (as usual). I won't hold my breath for solid answers. (as usual)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,854714,00.html
Democrat hawk whose ghost guides Bush
Scoop Jackson's body is 20 years in the grave but his spirit goes marching on
Julian Borger in Washington
Friday December 6, 2002
The Guardian
One man more than any other can credibly claim the intellectual and political credit for the Bush administration's bellicose showdown with Iraq and its muscular new doctrine of pre-emption. This lynchpin politician is not a member of the government, not even a Republican, but a maverick Democrat senator who has been dead for nearly 20 years.
Henry "Scoop" Jackson is the common thread linking the hawk ideologues who have taken the driving seat since September 11.
Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, the two leading strategists at the defence department, and Richard Perle, an unusual but influential Pentagon adviser, are all former Democrats who worked for Jackson in the 70s, and looked on him as their mentor.
Mr Perle still claims to be a registered Democrat, in honour of the late senator for Washington state, and Mr Wolfowitz has been known to describe himself as a "Scoop Jackson Republican".
This week President Bush put another Jackson protege, Elliott Abrams, in charge of White House policy in the Middle East.
Mr Abrams, who was convicted for misleading Congress about the Iran-contra affair (money secretly raised by selling arms to Iran sent to the contra guerrillas in Nicaragua), remains fiercely loyal to the source of his anti-communist zeal.
He recently argued that the Jackson's "insistence on a 'moral realism", combining American power with principled support of human rights and democratic allies, helped to prevent disaster during America's post-Vietnam crisis of detente, malaise, and the Brezhnev Doctrine."
Another acolyte, Frank Gaffney, runs the centre for security policy, a rightwing thinktank which has served as an incubator for the emerging themes of Bush foreign policy since September 11: the assertive use of military power, an aggressive pre-emptive approach to emerging threats, and uncompromising support for the Likud party and its policies in Israel.
"Jackson's influence is more powerful now than when he was alive," said Charles Horner, who worked beside Mr Perle on the senator's staff, in his "bunker" - Room 135 in the Senate office building, from where they fought against detente and the peaceniks in their own party.
A well-founded nation
Mr Horner, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, another Washington crucible of conservative ideas, said: "For the Democrats in the 70s the ideas of the anti-war movement transmogrified into an attack on national security.
"There was a lot of stridently anti-American rhetoric, with America demonised as a force for evil."
In contrast, Jackson and his followers insisted that the US was a "well-founded nation" which could be a force for good in the world if it was not afraid to use its strength.
From Room 135 "Scoops Troops" fought every international arms control treaty that came the Senate's way, successfully blocking ratification of the Salt2 treaty until it was buried by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Jackson also pushed for trade sanctions against Moscow until it allowed the emigration of Soviet Jews: a policy he saw as the perfect marriage of hard-nosed diplomacy and moral principle.
To bring that day closer, and in the name of melding foreign policy with moral principles, Jackson fought for and won trade sanctions on Moscow for its refusal to allow the mass emigration.
His beliefs, and much of his staff, were gratefully taken up by Ronald Reagan in 1980, with Jackson's blessing.
Before that the Democrats, not the Republicans, had the reputation of being the war party. Woodrow Wilson took the reluctant country into the first world war, and Franklin Roosevelt did the same in the second. Harry Truman took the anti-communist struggle to Korea, and the Vietnam war was pursued first by John Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson.
Jackson, who arrived in the capital as a young congressman in 1941, "came to believe that you have to confront evil with power", as Mr Horner put it, and saw himself as upholding a Democratic tradition which married social support for civil rights and equality at home with unflinching military support for democracy abroad.
His instincts were honed into a political ideology with the help of Dorothy Fosdick, daughter of a New York priest and famous pacifist, Harry Fosdick, who served as Jackson's foreign policy adviser for 28 years. Today's grey eminences behind the "war on terror" were once young apprentices under her supervision.
As his party turned against the Vietnam war, Jackson formed a faction called the Coaltion for a Democratic Majority, intent on steering the leadereship away from detente, pacifism and isolationism.
He sought the party's presidential nomination but lost to relative pacifists both times, first George McGovern and then Jimmy Carter, whose presidency he then pilloried bitterly in the Senate.
He had minimal stage presence, and his ascetic personality - he did not drink, listen to music, follow sports or pursue hobbies - had little popular appeal. When Robert Redford visited his offices Jackson had no idea who he was.
Jackson died in 1983 and therefore missed the collapse of communism he had long predicted, but his former disciples are united in the belief that he, as much as Ronald Reagan, helped the US to "win" the Cold war. They see him as the light guiding the evolving Bush security doctrine, and they should know: they are directing it.