November 5, 2007 | Human Events
HE: Why aren't we doing more [about Iran meddling in Iraq]? I sat in general Gen. Vines'office in Baghdad two Decembers ago and got an extensive briefing on the EFPs (explosively-formed penetrators) being manufactured in Iran, sent into Iraq to kill American troops. And when I asked some senior Defense Department officials about that I didn't get a straight answer. I came away with the impression that they were under instructions from the president to not do anything about it. What's going on?
JB: Well I think if you look at statements from our commanders in Iraq over the past six months, it is a cry for help against the Iranian role inside Iraq. And I worry that the reason we're not being more aggressive in defending ourselves inside Iraq is that it would disrupt the EU Three negotiations over the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Why has the administration been unwilling to talk about the Israeli raid on September the 6th? Many people believe that it's because if the full truth came out, the Six Party talks would go into the tank. That's not a legitimate reason to keep the Iranian presence in Iraq, or the North Korean presence in Syria from the American people. And I think it's a real risk for Republicans especially, that if there are reasons why this information is being withheld, it will come back to haunt them later.
[In other words, Bush's Iraq policy is hurting his Iran policy. Doggoneit, why can't we have, like, a win-win? Shoot! Heck!
Idiotically, these neocons can't make the logical connection that orderly withdraw from Iraq would strengthen our position vis-a-vis Iran, and perhaps even "gift" Tehran a whole new host of preoccupying problems trying to manage its relationships with its chaotic neighbor. But Iraq is not about geostrategy anymore -- it's about saving Republican face, and saving the blessed option of pre-emptive war for future use by neocon Administrations. - J ]
[...]
JB: Well I would say, and I say this in the book, that there is really only one reform we really need [in the UN] and that is to move from assessed to voluntary contributions. If we could move our money around to wherever we wanted, I tell you reform would go just like that. (Snaps fingers) It would be a wonder to behold.
HE: What's the odds of actually setting up an alternative to the UN?
JB: I think it's very difficult. I know a number of people have proposed it but what you would need, a United Democratic Nations for example, you'd need the Europeans to join.
HE: And they ain't going to give up their playground.
JB: They like the UN the way it is. I think I try and show in the book, what many Americans find counter-intuitive, that a big part of the problem is not the Third World, it's the Europeans, who are cloning in some respect, the European Union in the UN system. Dealing with the Third World countries is easier in some respects, because you can put it right on the table, and sometimes you can make a deal with them.
[I.e. you can usually buy off or intimidate Third World countries, but it's much harder to do that with industrialized European democracies. What Bolton wants is a UN that represents only American interests. Such an "ideal" UN would, however, for obvious reasons, be useful to nobody but America, and would be a perfect farce of an institution. - J ]
[...]
JB: Russia -- I wouldn't give up on Russia. I think they have legitimate security concerns from Islamic fundamentalism, not only on their border but in their country. Putin has gone in the wrong direction, in many respects I think we've lost opportunities with Putin that we had in the early days of the administration that we don't have now.
HE: Can you elaborate a little on that?
JB: Well Putin acquiesced in our getting out of the ABM Treaty, he acquiesced in the Treaty of Moscow, which is the perfect arms control treaty -- it's three pages long, and it lasts for ten years and it's effective for one day. He allowed former Warsaw Pact members to join NATO. Now he criticizes us for all of this for his own domestic political purposes, but in part he can say "I can see the way the world is now and if the US wants this, fine, we'll go along with it."
[ Bolton's hubris is a perfect illustration of what's been wrong with U.S. policy toward Russia since President Clinton. Bolton can't fathom (or else admit) that Russia has real national interests other than combating Islamic terrorism. U.S. policy toward Russia since 1991 has basically been to rely on Russia's seeing "the way the world is now," i.e. seeing that American interests are real and paramount, whereas weakling Russia's interests are secondary and disposable. Oil at $100 a barrel is just one way a newly confident Russia can in fact remind America that Russian interests are not of secondary importance. - J ]
Neocon II: Lie Hard with a Vengeance
By Matt Taibbi
June 15, 2007
Call it the Leslie Nielsen effect. Your first attempt at a show-biz career fizzles out and dies, but your failure is so quirky and charming that it wins you a whole second career. Think Robert Goulet, Bill Shatner, even John Travolta. America loves a brave second act, particularly one that doesn't mind doing a take or two with egg still on his face.
What the Zucker brothers did for actors, the neocons are now doing for politics. In the first six years of the Bush presidency the administration's ideological nucleus -- a tribe of humorless conservative revolutionaries led by Dick Cheney and including the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith and Elliott Abrams -- racked up a startling record in matters of official policy. From their juking of the case for the Iraq War to their Jacobin-esque purges within the government's intelligence apparatus to their paranoid and sometimes criminal fragging of political enemies great and minor, the neoconservatives working for George Bush botched virtually every important move they made in the last six years.
Moreover, each time they used the presidency's bully pulpit to make a prediction, be it about the post-invasion spread of democracy in the Middle East, the utility of Iraqi oil revenues in financing the occupation, or the chilling effect our presence in Iraq would have on Palestinian resolve, more or less exactly the opposite ended up taking place.
And yet, despite the walloping defeat of the Republicans in the 2006 midterm elections that seemed to spell the end of neocon rule in Washington, the clowns are once again spilling out of the Volkswagen. Lately the neocons seem to be all over the public airwaves, and not as the targets of purgative public flogging or tarring ceremonies, but as the subjects of serious interviews, with respected journalists treating them like real human beings with real opinions. Even worse, a few are still in office, and appear to be cooking up a last-minute encore before the curtain finally comes down in '08.
Richard Perle, the former head of the Defense Policy Board, known in the Beltway as the "Prince of Darkness," has been on TV a lot lately in a much-publicized public spat with former CIA director George Tenet, who recently accused Perle of targeting Iraq days after 9/11. John Bolton, former UN-hating ambassador to the UN, recently won the Bradley Prize for "outstanding intellectual achievement" -- achievement that presumably includes helping make the case for the Iraq disaster and support for a future invasion of Iran. In his acceptance speech, Bolton cheekily credited Tehran, Pyongyang and other rogue nations for his success, thanking them just for "being themselves." And while Scooter Libby crashed at trial, Doug Feith soft-landed into a tenure track at Georgetown, where he will now teach history, a subject he spent the past five years or so violently misinterpreting.
The neocons remain a bold presence in the media for a number of reasons. Number one, they still have real political power. Dick Cheney is still the vice president, and the Pentagon is still guided heavily by the neocon-dominated Office of Special Plans (OSP), where the power is now reportedly concentrated in an office called the Iranian Directorate, charged with helping make the case for war with Iran. Amid all the public hand-wringing about a congressional demand for an Iraq withdrawal timeline, Washington is abuzz with rumors that the neocons are loading up for one last historical Hail Mary, a "long bomb" to throw at Tehran before Bush leaves office. The knowledge that they are crazy enough to try something like that makes people in the capital take them seriously.
But beyond that, there just hasn't been any effort in the media to identify and really make clear the root causes of the Iraq policy failure. In the current Washington mythology -- a mythology reflected in public statements of everyone from John McCain to Hillary Clinton -- the Iraq War blew up in our faces for logistical reasons, because we didn't send enough troops, or have a sound occupation plan, or have an "understanding of the insurgency." It was the right war, wrong execution, wrong defense secretary. The failure had nothing to do with the mistake of placing our bets on a radical revolutionary policy of "pre-emptive invasion," or with the White House's authoritarian efforts to castrate the Pentagon and the CIA and replace them with their own intelligence-gathering and policymaking apparatuses.
The neocons may have been proven wrong in the particulars, and to ordinary people their legacy may turn out to be a nightmarish Middle East bloodbath and decades of debt, but in Washington they're still revered as canny operators who swept two election seasons with a drooling mannequin for a candidate and for years ruled Washington with almost Caligulan abandon. They were idiots in terms of how the world worked, but they understood power in the Beltway better than Nixon, better than Clinton, better really than any White House clan since the Roosevelt years. That's why they'll keep getting top billing on talk shows and invites to all the best Washington parties, even if, as seems likely, they leave office 18 months from now with half the planet in flames.
In Washington there is no shame in being wrong; there's only shame in losing. The neocons were wrong as hell, but they were also winners. That's why no one should expect them to go away now. That's especially true since their only real competition in the intellectual arena is the cynical third-way corporatism of the Democratic party, a tenuous and depressing alliance of business interests and New-Deal interest groups whose most persuasive "idea" is that it is not neo-conservatism. The neocons, wrong and stupid as they might be, at least represent a clearly-articulated dream of unchecked greed, power and big-stick foreign conquest that appeals in an elemental way to the dark side of the American psyche. Until America rejects that dream -- and don't hold your breath for that -- don't count on the Boltons and the Perles disappearing from view.
