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The Death of Neoconservatism by David Donadio November 20, 2008 American presidential elections are often best read as verdicts on the administrations that precede them, and in that light, Barack Obama’s victory on November 5 marks the long-overdue death of neoconservatism. I doubt the Democrats are going to build an everlasting majority with disaffected conservative realists, or even hang on to those realists forever – let’s wait a few months until the showroom shine fades from Obama’s administration, or just a few minutes if it turns out the Clintons really are going to enjoy a third term over at the...

If you're interested in figuring out where the Republicans went wrong and why they no longer have any connection to anything that could properly be called conservatism, I recommend this fine essay by Paul Gottfried in the latest issue of The American Conservative. Here is how Gottfried debunks the notion that John McCain is in any way the philosophical successor to the man who preceded him in representing Arizona in the U.S. Senate: "McCain may hold the Senate seat that was once Goldwater's, but he is in no way his philosophical successor. The 2008 election was a contest between two...

BY now you've probably heard: The GOP is becoming too regional, too white, too old to compete nationally. Democrats look like the cast of "Rent," while Republicans look like diehard fans of "Matlock" and "Murder, She Wrote." Fine. The GOP needs to win over more Hispanics, young people, suburban women. That sounds plausible. But what does "win over" mean? To listen to many pundits, it means Republicans must become Democrats. The GOP has become too socially conservative, and if it wants to win the support of mainstream voters, it will need to become more socially liberal. If only the party...

Another part of Bush's speech dealt with the supposed spread of "democracy" in the Muslim world: "He [Bush] also offered plenty of praise for democratic advances, naming countries like Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco and Jordan. 'The light of liberty is beginning to shine,' he said." Is he crazy? In Turkey, the so-called "light of liberty" is undoing Kemalism, putting the secularists in the universities, the judiciary, and the army, under great pressure, and bringing Islam back, step by grim step, as Erdogan and now Gul, cleverly backed by all kinds of people, including the shadowy millionaire Fethullah Gulen, probe and...

"Frankly, I can be wrong, but I do not think that America can carry to the presidency a candidate as on the left as Barack Obama." Norman Podhoretz, May 14, 2008 Check the link for the complete interview on Iraq, Iran, the WoT, neoconservatism and US presidential elections.

From our earliest days, Americans have supported the promotion of democracy around the world, often by force and without undue heed to international institutions. William Henry Seward, a founder of the Republican Party and Lincoln's secretary of State, argued that it was America's mission to lead the way "to the universal restoration of power to the governed." A generation earlier, statesman Henry Clay championed the idea that America had the "duty to share with the rest of mankind this most precious gift" of liberty. Both world wars, Korea and Vietnam would be inconceivable without accounting for America's dedication to the...

I know there are a few competing priorities, but at this moment in our long life as a nation I can think of no more urgent task for Congress than to pass emergency legislation banning the further use of the word “neocon.” At least until a committee of deep thinkers can get together to agree on a commonly accepted definition. (A starting point may be the Robert Kagan essay I referred to in an earlier posting.) Until that happens, its use will only continue to muddy and obfuscate the debate over otherwise important issues. Exhibit 2,348,485 of this terminological confusion...

In the foreign policy establishment, among progressives of all stripes, and even for significant segments of the conservative movement, "neoconservatism" has come to stand for all that has gone wrong in American foreign policy over the last seven years -- especially in Iraq. Yet much of the criticism misses the mark. For starters, it's worth noting that the president, vice president, secretary of defense, secretary of state and the national security adviser all lacked neoconservative roots. And insofar as neoconservative thinkers influenced Iraq policy, the problem was not with neoconservative principles, but the failure to fully appreciate the implications of...

They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons By Jacob Heilbrunn Doubleday, 320 pages, $26 ...It is about a mindset, one that has been decisively shaped by the Jewish immigrant experience, by the Holocaust, and by the twentieth-century struggle against totalitarianism. . . . [H]owever much they may deny it, neoconservatism is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon, reflecting a subset of Jewish concerns." Some critics have questioned the predominant role played in the movement by Jews, and especially their unstinting support of Israel. Some have even suggested that the neocons' advocacy for war with Iraq was...

Not long ago, while visiting a friend at Oxford University, I found myself in a heated political discussion with a Scotsman. The subject of our dispute was the Iraq war, but the conversation turned toward the rise of latent anti-Semitism in once-respectable quarters of British opinion. Two years earlier, a story entitled “A Kosher Conspiracy?,” illustrated by a gold Star of David plunged into the heart of the Union Jack, graced the cover of Britain’s most prominent left-wing magazine, The New Statesman. Since then, the intellectual climate had only worsened. In response to my remark that many use the...

The Giuliani candidacy has polarized politically conservative Christians and Jews — perhaps less over Rudy’s position on abortion than, more subtly, over a question of emphasis. Who’s right? The Jewish “neoconservatives,” who make up more than half of Giuliani’s star foreign-policy advisory team (Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, Martin Kramer, and David Frum)? Or Christians, like Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who would not rule out supporting a third party candidate if Giuliani gets the nomination? To adjudicate the dispute, I propose an appeal to the part of the Bible on whose authority Jews (like myself) and Christians...

Have America's troubles in Iraq sounded the death knell of neoconservatism, the political ideology that is said to be behind our presence there? Over the past year, there has been no shortage of voices saying so, many with undisguised glee. Abroad, the Times of London heralded "the end of an ideological era in Washington," while the Toronto Globe and Mail reported with satisfaction that neoconservatism has been "decisively wiped out." Observers here at home have agreed. To the historian Douglas Brinkley, Democratic electoral victories in November 2006 spelled "the death of the neoconservative movement," while at National Review Online John...

Have America’s troubles in Iraq sounded the death knell of neoconservatism, the political ideology that is said to be behind our presence there? Over the past year, there has been no shortage of voices saying so, many with undisguised glee. Abroad, the Times of London heralded “the end of an ideological era in Washington,” while the Toronto Globe and Mail reported with satisfaction that neoconservatism has been “decisively wiped out.” Observers here at home have agreed. To the historian Douglas Brinkley, Democratic electoral victories in November 2006 spelled “the death of the neoconservative movement,” while at National Review Online John...

It is not unreasonable to see the race for the Republican Party's presidential nomination eventually boiling down to the two men currently atop the GOP polls, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson. But if this happens, it will be a race between something more than just the men. It will be a battle between two distinctly different political philosophies. In Sunday's New York Daily News, the paper's Senior Correspondent David Saltonstall has authored a very revealing piece, Neocon hawks go all-out for Giuliani: They are officially known as Rudy Giuliani's senior foreign policy advisory board, but they also could be dubbed...

So-called "neo" conservatism has its roots in a Marxist view of the world. So it is not surprising that the neocons are trying to silence their most prominent conservative critic. That would be Texas Rep. Ron Paul. He outraged the neocons during the Republican presidential debate last week by advocating that the GOP return to the traditional conservative stance of noninterventionism. Paul invoked the ghost of Robert Taft, the GOP Senate leader who fought entry into NATO. And he also pointed out that messing around in the Mideast creates risks here at home. That prompted Rudy Giuliani to interrupt Paul...

World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz faces mounting criticism from directors of the international lending organization, who say he relies on a coterie of political cronies who are advisers with little expertise in development while driving away seasoned managers. Half of the bank's 29 highest-level executives have departed since Wolfowitz, the former US deputy defense secretary and an neo-conservative architect of President George WBush's invasion of Iraq, took office in June 2005. Among them was Christiaan Poortman, vice president for the Middle East and a 30-year World Bank veteran, who left in September after resisting pressure to speed up the pace...

Steady condemnation from conservatives for the Iraq Study Group report may be providing some cover to the Bush administration as it completes its own review of strategy in Iraq, apparently with little enthusiasm for the panel's prescription of U.S. troop withdrawal and dialogue with Syria and Iran. The criticism of the panel, co-chaired by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former representative Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), has burst forth from the leading institutions of the right: the National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Weekly Standard; conservative talk radio; and scholars at some of...

RUSH: To the phones we go. We'll start in West Palm Beach here across the bridge. This is Chris, and welcome, sir. Nice to have you with us. CALLER: Hey, Rush, thanks for having me here. Hey, it amazes me. I don't think George Washington wanted war with the British as badly as you want war with Iran, and this troubles me that you have somehow got the American people to believe that if we didn't attack Iraq and if we don't go into Iran, somehow Al-Qaeda is going to come over here and conquer Washington, DC. Now, I don't...

Surrender as 'Realism' Retreat would win us no friends and lose us no adversaries. Foreign policy realism is ascendant these days, we are told. This would be encouraging if true, because our foreign policy must indeed be realistic. But what passes for "realism" today has very little to do with reality. Indeed, if you look at some of the "realist" proposals on the table, "realism" has come to be a kind of code word for surrendering American interests and American allies, as well as American principles, in the Middle East. Thus, the "realists" advise us to seek Syria's help in...

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | While leading the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the summer of 2003, David Kay received a phone call from "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, who wanted a particular place searched: "The vice president wants to know if you've looked at this area. We have indications — and here are the geocoordinates — that something's buried there." Kay and his experts located the area on the map. It was in the middle of Lebanon. This story from Bob Woodward's "State of Denial" would be hilarious were it not about war. The vignette is...