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Who will be the last neoconservative?

David Brooks
David Brooks

Robert Kagan is a neoconservative. He signed all the Project for a New Century letters telling George W. Bush that Israel’s war was America’s war and we should invade Iraq and replace Saddam and bring democracy to the Middle East. I can’t find those letters on-line any more. It appears that the PNAC site has been suspended. Some regretful neocon has evidently been scrubbing those letters from history. (Ala Lady Macbeth, “Out damn spot.”)

And Kagan is pivoting. He has a good piece up at the Washington Post saying that the U.S. should not be supporting the military government in Egypt.

Those in the Obama administration and Congress who favor continued U.S. military aid to the dictatorship in Cairo insist that although such aid may run counter to American ideals, it does serve American interests. I would argue the contrary, that American interests are being harmed every day that support continues.

Far from aiding the United States in the struggle against terrorism, as the Egyptian military dictatorship and its supporters claim, the military’s brutal crackdown on Egypt’s Islamists is creating a new generation of terrorists.

Kagan even distances the U.S. from Israel, saying that Israel has supported authoritarian regimes across the Arab world, and that’s its problem.

Kagan is getting off the neoconservative bus because it’s doing a bus plunge off a mountain road. Iraq is catching up with the war planners at last. People in D.C. don’t want to hear from neoconservatives.

Who will be the last neocon? Maybe David Brooks of the New York Times. He still believes. On Friday he was on NPR saying that the US needs to continue to run the world, and keep up the global stream of goods and services, or everyone’s prosperity will suffer:

We’ve got a death by a thousand cuts problem, where no individual problem around the world, whether it’s Ukraine or Iran or even the Chinese throwing their weight around in the oceans over there is worth a massive overall response. Nonetheless, you take all these things together and they really degrade the world order, the order that we’ve counted on for the free movement of peoples and goods. And you just sense this degradation of this whole system that we really do rely upon. And I’m not quite sure how we build that system back up. But there’s no question the world order is fraying, and along with it the prosperity and the security of lots of small nations as they get threatened by larger regional nations.

The problem with his theory is that “a massive overall response” means a meaningful threat of military action. And very few American politicians now want to invade another country halfway around the world– certainly not Syria or the Ukraine.

As Brooks concedes, even the Republican Party are abandoning his philosophy of the threat of force. Explaining why the Republicans are all still harping about Benghazi, he said:

And my analysis would be they want to attack the Obama foreign policy but they don’t themselves believe in any affirmative foreign policy, and any use of American power abroad. And so, this is a sort of a way to do that and please Rand Paul followers.

Those Rand Paul followers are broadly representative of an opposition to the use of force. Neocons believe in the use of force. Or they used to. Happily they’re getting lonelier by the minute.

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Ah Phil– they are just ‘going to ground’.

Sadly, there’s always going to be more hiding under rocks, waiting to slither out @- any time and rally.

I wish it weren’t so. That MIC, etc…..potent, addictive stuff.

Whoa the PNAC website suspended. Copied a fair amount of their stuff long ago. Now if I can find it. Spent a couple of years back in 2003, 2004 trying to read everything on that site. The blueprint for where the Bush administration (and yes Hillary Clinton too would be headed) was headed in foreign policy was all right there.

They made it so easy to follow their plans.

As to who will be the last neocon..there are plenty. Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Micheal Ledeen, Makovsky, Ros Lehtinen, Cheney, Boxer in some ways, Bolton, Schumer, Hillary Clinton.. Terry Gross for heavens sake….come on there are plenty of neo-cons out there. Tom Friedman continually pushes mis information about Iran. Many of the neo cons are all stationed in the think tanks in D.C. Scooter Libby etc. Would make for a great piece providing a more recent update of where they are. Wurmsers, Feith, Addington, Luti, Hannah etc etc. If Clinton gets in I truly believe she will do everything in her power to follow the neocon lead in the middle east. She will be a neocon in the highest position in the world…. again.

One neocon takes a small hit. Condi Rice
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/03/condoleezza-rice-rutgers-commencement_n_5259180.html

Is the decline of Zionism in America and neoconservatism unrelated? Hardly, because neoconservatism was in large part started by former Marxist Zionist Jews who didn’t trust the left to hold the line on Israel in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the ’67 occupation.

Secondly, Brooks argument is really weak. He confuses a world order with an American-led world, which are hardly the same thing.

American power peaked, I’d say, in the 50s and the 60s. In the 1950s, it could basically replace the leader of Iran without too much of an effort. That’d be impossible even by the 1990s, when the FSU fell and America was this monolithic hegemon.

And during the 2000s, when American went on a rampage, was that an “orderly world”?

If anything we will see more order, not less, as the American imperial class, which David Brooks and people like Tom Friedman both belong to, can no longer reasonably call for intervention everywhere(and by everywhere I really mean mostly in the Middle East to whoever Israel is not on friendly terms with).

The tragedy of modern democracies, of course, is that the warmongers who are absolutely indirectly responsible for the carnage that they advocated get to walk off scott free, without any punishment, and get interviewed by radio stations like NPR where they get the red carpet treatment as if nothing happened.

Could not find Libby at the Hudson Institute any longer. But Doug Feith, Fukuyama, Shulsky,
http://www.hudson.org/experts

Bolton, Donnelly, Kagan, Rubin, Perle, Gary Schmidt, Wolfowitz, Yoo many of the neocons still standing, pushing from their safe think tank caves inserting their agenda wherever they can. End up on talk shows like NPR’s Terry Gross, Diane Rehm show. You can bet some of these folks or younger neocon versions of their mentors ( with same middle east agenda http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1438.htm ( will end up on the Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy teams. They are in stalled positions but I don’t believe for long.
http://www.aei.org/scholar/

“It appears that the PNAC site has been suspended. Some regretful neocon has evidently been scrubbing those letters from history.”

it matters not. Those PNAC letters are embedded in a special loop in our brains. We will never forget those flucking neocons and their wonderful plans for Israel — with friends like these…

Phil, thx for WaPo link, I will read it with interest. Also, why are you no longer posting my comments?