Posted on 02/28/2006 8:46:11 PM PST by jb6
Edited on 02/28/2006 11:09:58 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Being someone of a liberal persuasion, it might come as a surprise that I not only sympathize with neoconservatives, I genuinely agree with much of what they have to say. Unlike traditional conservatism, neoconservative philosophy amounts to more than just “Leave us alone.” It inherently rejects both “Fortress America” isolationism and Kissingerian realism in favor of an activist foreign policy of promoting human rights and propagating democracy.
What liberal could disagree with that?
It’s no coincidence that the two ideologies overlap. Both are grounded in Wilsonian idealism. Moreover, neoconservatism wasn’t initially the product of the right-wing intellectuals, who have since become its standard bearers. Strangely enough, the original neoconservatives were radical leftists.
To be specific, they were Trotskyites.
For those of you unfamiliar with Leon Trotsky, he was one of the chief architects of the Russian Revolution. He was an idealist and a militant. Before the revolution, while he was in prison, Trotsky cultivated his famous theory of permanent revolution: a concept which would later provide the impetus for Soviet imperialism.
An independent thinker (he was originally a leader of the opposition Mensheviks), Trotsky was single handedly responsible for crafting the Red Army into a machine whose purpose was to forcibly spread his idealistic brand of Marxism across the world. Substitute “Marxism” with “democracy” and the leap from Trotskyism to neoconservatism appears remarkably diminutive.
Small as the gap may have been, neoconservatives certainly didn’t make the jump to democracy overnight. It took years of audacious brutality and cynical ideological manipulation by the Stalinist Regime before they were finally disenchanted with communism.
Left in a political vacuum, they eventually gravitated towards realpolitik. This resulted in what Francis Fukuyama calls a “realistic Wilsonianism.” The philosophy essentially boils down to this: the United States is a benign hegemon with the unique ability to create a democratic world order that respects human dignity. Hegemonic as it may be, however, the early neoconservatives believed it was imperative for the United States to act prudently, by avoiding war when possible and cautiously exercising force when not.
As a liberal, I’d say I agree with that doctrine almost in its entirety. But if that’s the case, why is it that I almost always find myself at odds with the policies of the first neoconservative administration ever: the Bush Administration?
Well, the sad fact of the matter is that neoconservatism has become a grotesque caricature of its once great former self. Gone are the days of academic nuance, realpolitik and judicious analysis of international relations. All that remains is its idealism and a throwback to its morphed Trotskyite heritage: the insufferable notion that democracy in and of itself (much like Marxism) has the power to single-handedly cure all the world’s ails.
Neoconservatism for kids – that’s what the Bush Administration is responsible for. They have cheapened their philosophy in order to produce an easily digestible version for the masses. This is more than a little reminiscent of the reductivist logic promulgated by the hippie movement in the ‘60s (when neoconservatism was at its nadir). Replace “All you need is love” with “All you need is democracy” and you essentially have what can only be described as “the new hippies.”
The biggest difference is that, unlike the hippies, the neoconservatives are actually in control of our formal institutions of power. Moreover, they have returned to the Trotskyite militarism of their deep past. What could possibly be scarier than blind idealism coupled with an aggressively militarized foreign policy?
I share President Bush’s idealism. I, too, want to see a democratized world order. In this, I believe that even the neoconservatives of today share far more than they’re willing to admit with their liberal counterparts. But the methods by which the Bush Administration is pursuing its goals are haphazard, ill-informed and overly simplistic.
What a shame it is to have another great political philosophy destroyed by yet another generation of hippies – only this time in jacket and tie.
Utter total complete LIE. This is so mind boggling stupid have to wonder which Tin Foil Hat Anti American site you found THIS lie on. Saddam was a SOVIET Client you IDIOT. Your grasp of history and fact is NONEXISTANT.
I think people are inventing labels to demonize Bush and his supporters. I doubt Bush had any deep seated desire to bring "Democracy" to the Middle East before the terrorist attacks on America. I think introducing Democracy to that part of the world is a by product of taking down the Taliban and the Butcher of Iraq and then trying to prevent Afghanistan and Iraq from falling into the hands of even worse tyrants.
If you can't find justification for your conscious decisions just keep analyzing your own navel. Sooner or later you will come up with an new theory for the existence of lint.
And our previous foreign policy was working so well
They are "less concerned with domestic issues" because they'd be laughed out of conservative circles if they made public statements on them. As others have pointed out on this thread (and I posted a direct quote in Post #20 that supports this), these so-called "neo-conservatives" were historically Marxists. It has often been said that "neo-con" is used as an anti-semitic slur of sorts, but that's not the case at all. The fact that so many of them are Jewish isn't the fault of a hard-core, principled conservative who despises their political leanings, though the fact remains that Jewish Americans make up a disproportionate share of them. But this isn't a mere coincidence. The simple truth is that almost every one of these high-profile neo-conservatives can be traced back to a Marxist political philosophy that was popular among the well-educated upper crust of most urban centers in the northeastern U.S. over the last 50 years.
Wow. I can remember when Justin Raimondo was pushing this nonsense.
It must have been a bunch of Hippie neocons who democratized West Germany and Japan after WWII....
In fact, my recent "claim to fame" is that I was one of the first people here on FreeRepublic to point out that all of the public opposition to the controversial issue related to the acquisition of P&O Ports by that UAE-owned company was complete bullsh!t.
Thank you. These clowns make me so angry. Amazing how people who always brag up their military service and sneer at everyone as "chicken hawks" can be so utterly devoid of basic military skills. If even an old grunt like me can see the stategic picture, these "military geniuses" should be able to.
No one knows what the second ammendment means! Read it, its in simple english, the right of the people to keep and bare arms shall not be infinged. Sounds very very very clear to me. Add that to the history of gun ownership, like our first battle our nation ever faught was a milita of citizens protecting its legislator from arrest. THen add well over a hundred years when not one person even claimed that we didn't have a right to own guns.
What exactly is "his approach" to: 1) economics, and 2) foreign policy.
And it is impossible to describe anything in the judiciary as "progress" until we start seeing how these Supreme Court nominees vote on important cases. But it should always be remembered that if George W. Bush had his way, Harriet Miers would be sitting on the Supreme Court right now.
Maybe it wasn't a "deep seated desire," but he sure did have an agenda in place regarding Iraq that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on America.
Which one? It's not like it's changed. We still sit in Bosnia and Kosovo, allowing islamics to purge Christians. We're still defending the Saudies. We're still forcing Israel to commit national suicide. We're still arming Pakistan. We're still feeding the Chinese dragon.
Angry isn't the word. These people with their third
party mentality gave us Carter and Clinton
I am absolutely for the destruction of the Taliban. Saddam was a bastard, er is till he meets Mr. Hangman. Still, if we wanted to end terrorism in the area effectively, or at least hamper it, the removal of the House of Vipers, the House of Saud is paramount. Look where the majority of the Sunnie islamics are coming from. Who's clerics still preach killing Americans. Whose money still goes to feed and indocternate Islamic radicals from one end of the planet to the other.
Too bad the U.N. and Bill Clinton didn't have an agenda on Iraq, instead they stood by while Saddam killed hundreds of thousands more of his own people and ignored 17 Resolutions over 12 years. And Slick Willy and the U.N. did NOTHING. The agenda was and should have been to honor the treaty that was signed in 1991 with the blood of those we lost in the first Gulf War. Allowing Saddam to ignore that agreement for all those years was an insult to everything we stand for, Saddam had to go and no amount of you calling those who wanted him removed as "NEOCONS" will change that fact
"The coup that brought the Ba'ath Party to power in 1963 was celebrated by the United States.
The CIA had a hand in it. They had funded the Ba'ath Party - of which Saddam Hussein was a young member - when it was in opposition.
US diplomat James Akins served in the Baghdad Embassy at the time. Mr. Akins said, "I knew all the Ba'ath Party leaders and I liked them".
"The CIA were definitely involved in that coup. We saw the rise of the Ba'athists as a way of replacing a pro-Soviet government with a pro-American one and you don't get that chance very often.
"Sure, some people were rounded up and shot but these were mostly communists so that didn't bother us".
This happy co-existence lasted right through the 1980s." 1
"One thing is for sure, the US will find it much harder to remove the Ba'ath Party from power in Iraq than they did putting them in power back in 1963. If more people knew about this diabolical history, they just might not be so inclined to trust the US in its current efforts to execute "regime change" in Iraq." 3
Here then are some quotations that I've gathered on this fascinating early history of CIA involvement in the vicious history of "regime change" in Iraq:In early 1963, Saddam had more important things to worry about than his outstanding bill at the Andiana Cafe. On February 8, a military coup in Baghdad, in which the Baath Party played a leading role, overthrew Qassim. Support for the conspirators was limited. In the first hours of fighting, they had only nine tanks under their control. The Baath Party had just 850 active members. But Qassim ignored warnings about the impending coup. What tipped the balance against him was the involvement of the United States. He had taken Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1961, he threatened to occupy Kuwait and nationalized part of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the foreign oil consortium that exploited Iraq's oil. In retrospect, it was the ClAs favorite coup. "We really had the ts crossed on what was happening," James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. "We regarded it as a great victory." Iraqi participants later confirmed American involvement. "We came to power on a CIA train," admitted Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party secretary general who was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror. CIA assistance reportedly included coordination of the coup plotters from the agency's station inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as well as a clandestine radio station in Kuwait and solicitation of advice from around the Middle East on who on the left should be eliminated once the coup was successful. To the end, Qassim retained his popularity in the streets of Baghdad. After his execution, his sup- porters refused to believe he was dead until the coup leaders showed pictures of his bullet-riddled body on TV and in the newspapers." 2
Sources: BBC NEWS | Programmes | From Our Own Correspondent | Saddam's parallel universe
Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, excerpt from Out of the Ashes, The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, 2000. Cited by Tim Buckley
"The CIA has been organizing "regime change" for 50 years. They have removed many governments that are unfriendly to US corporate interests and replaced them with regimes that are more likely to work closely and slavishly to carry out the economic and geopolitical desires of the US corporate elite.
But the CIA's crimes don't end when a right-wing coup has succeeded. The CIA then has to keep its repressive despots in power in order to ensure that they can put into place and then maintain a variety of unjust economic systems and structures. This is done with arms sales (and outright gifts of "surplus" weapons), glowing diplomatic support, "intelligence support" (sic) and massive economic investment (i.e., pillaging as much profit as possible by exploiting the natural resources that drew them in there in the first place, and handing out some of the spoils to a loyal local elite).
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