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October 10, 2012 | Right Web
In late September 2001, less than 10 days after the 9/11 attacks, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)-a group of prominent neoconservatives, liberal interventionists, and members of the religious right who advocated a host of U.S.-led regime changes in the Middle East-drafted a letter to President George W. Bush, commending his promise to "go after terrorism wherever we find it in the world" and offering a number of recommendations for the remainder of the president's term.[1] The steps outlined in the letter were prescient in predicting Bush's foreign policy priorities (and to a lesser extent, the priorities of his successor, Barack Obama).[2]
In addition to their advocacy positions on Iraq (invade immediately), Israel (support unconditionally), and military spending (abide "no hesitation in requesting whatever funds for defense are needed"), the signatories urged a tougher stance on Hezbollah, as well as its state sponsors in Damascus and Tehran.
In the letter, they argued that "any war against terrorism must target Hezbollah," and urged the administration to "demand that Iran and Syria immediately cease all military, financial, and political support for Hezbollah and its operations. Should Iran and Syria refuse to comply, the administration should consider appropriate measures of retaliation against these known state sponsors of terrorism."
Today, as Syria remains mired in a seemingly limitless spiral of violence, the question arises-what has become of this attack-Syria coalition and what, if anything, has changed in its view of U.S. intervention?
Target: Syria
Because of the many ties between PNAC and the Bush administration, it came as little surprise to close observers that the Bush administration eventually followed much of the letter's advice with respect to Syria.[3] After supporting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the Bush administration capitalized on the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Al-Hariri to galvanize political opposition to Hezbollah (and Syria by proxy), culminating in the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanese territory.
Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, produced a "Road Map for Syria" proposing a number of military options for weakening the Syrian regime, including "docking an aircraft carrier within Syrian territorial waters" and "using proxies to undermine Syrian intelligence agents inside Lebanon."[4] Meanwhile, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad with a long list of U.S. demands, including that Syria cooperate in the "war on terrorism" in Iraq, end its support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad, and withdraw its troops from Lebanon.[5]
The administration's pressure was highly effective in the heady days after Hariri's assassination, and the Assad regime scrambled to provide the Bush administration with an acceptable counteroffer to prevent a second "regime change" in the region. Bahjat Suleiman, the chief of the internal branch of Syria's General Intelligence Directorate, took the unprecedented step of publishing an article in the Lebanese daily al-Safir, where he outlined a course of action that could be acceptable to the Syrian regime. In the article, he implied that Assad would be willing to rein in Hezbollah, control Palestinian armed groups and Salafi extremists in Lebanon, and secure Iraq's long border with Syria in order to guarantee the regime's preservation.[6]
The offer fell on deaf ears. Fresh off the invasion of Iraq, U.S. neoconservatives and their allies were optimistic that strong and uncompromising force- and unconditional support for the enemies of their enemies-would be sufficient to reshape the regional order. "There's no reason to think engagement with Syria will bring about any change," said letter signatory Richard Perle in 2006. He argued that Syria "has never been weaker, and we should take advantage of that."[7]
Assad Rebounds
Backed into a corner and facing an existential crisis unlike any it had previously experienced, the regime chose instead to double down and force Washington's hand. Assad worked to subvert the U.S. experiment in the Middle East, exploiting Syria's proximity to Iraq and Lebanon to undermine the Bush administration's cornerstone projects. Syrian intelligence services suddenly began to wreak havoc along the Syrian-Iraqi border, while political machinations in Lebanon helped the regime regain the upper hand in the Lebanese parliament.[8]
The tide quickly turned against Washington as an increasing number of complicating factors undermined its regional leverage. The implosion of Iraq, the rebounding political power of Syria's allies in Lebanon, the deteriorating state of Afghanistan, and growing discontent at home forced the Bush administration to retreat from its hardline anti-Syrian approach. Thus assured of its safety, Damascus quickly reverted to its old ways.
The neoconservative-led PNAC coalition that had once pushed for a unified and hard-fisted approach to redesigning the Middle East was also crumbling in the face of these and other failures.
Though much of the beltway intelligentsia originally supported the "war on terror" in all its iterations, ensuing disasters deeply undermined the neoconservative ideology as well as its liberal interventionist counterpart. Some of the original signatories of the letter, like [9] became deeply critical of the Bush administration's policies; others, however, maintained a strong allegiance to their hawkish worldview and continued to defend it against any perceived modifications by the Obama administration.
The ongoing crisis in Syria, however, has become something of a litmus test for these individuals, and the coalition has begun to resemble its old self. But the emerging consensus among Washington's Syria hawks belies the complexity of the circumstances surrounding Syria's spiraling civil war, the difficulty of pro-war ideologues to adapt to modern international conflicts, and the dangers of the zero-sum approach to Syria currently circulating through Washington.
Syria Redux
PNAC's dyed-in-the-wool neoconservatives-the ideologues most responsible for the formulation of the Bush doctrine-have mostly stayed true to the priorities laid forth in the PNAC letter, and they've found new energy in calling for regime change in Syria. Most of the signatories to that September 2011 letter-including the likes of William Kristol, Jeffrey Bergner, Seth Cropsey, Midge Decter, Thomas Donnelly, Nicholas Eberstadt, Aaron Friedberg, Jeffrey Gedmin, Rueul Marc Gerecht, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, John Lehman, Clifford May, Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, and Gary Schmitt-have largely kept their initial worldview intact, even if their earlier predictions for a Middle East "democratized" by American arms has proved dramatically off mark.
Many of these same individuals and their fellow travelers are at the forefront of the current push to escalate Syria's ongoing civil war, arguing that active U.S. support for Syrian rebels-or outright military intervention-would hasten the fall of Bashar Al-Assad and maximize U.S. interests. A recent New York Times op-ed by Max Boot, a frequent PNAC letter signatory, and Michael Doran, a Bush National Security Council member, is a case in point. In promoting direct U.S. intervention in Syria, the authors-remarkably-were unable to identify any negative consequences of such engagement, instead identifying a plethora of positive developments for U.S. interests, such as improving ties with Turkey, "diminishing" Iran, and "equipping reliable partners" within Syria's internal opposition.
In February, many of the same individuals who signed the September 2001 PNAC letter-this time operating under the mantle of successor organizations like the Foreign Policy Initiative and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies-penned a missive to President Barack Obama, arguing that the only way to "win" the civil war, and ensure that Syrian security forces do not regain the upper hand, is to supply the Syrian opposition movement with sufficient capital, weapons, and intelligence to overwhelm government forces on the battlefield. The signers urged Obama to "immediately establish safe zones within Syrian territory," as well as to "provide a full range of direct assistance, including self-defense aid to the [Free Syrian Army]."[10]
The neoconservative establishment, along with a growing number of liberal interventionist allies, explicitly rejected all overtures for negotiation and compromise. They consistently mocked or undermined efforts by the United Nations and the Arab League to mediate the dispute and reach a diplomatic settlement, warning that "the United States cannot continue to defer its strategic and moral responsibilities in Syria to regional actors such as the Arab League, or to wait for consent from the Assad regime's protectors, Russia and China."[11]
"If we were being serious in the Middle East," William Kristol recently said on Bill Bennett's "Morning in America" radio program, "we would be using air strikes in Syria [and] we would topple the Assad regime."
Evolving Militarization
Though Obama has been reticent to embrace full-on militarization of the conflict-preferring instead an approach that relies more on diplomatic pressure and crippling economic sanctions-the continued stalemate has nudged policymakers ever closer to openly arming the rebels. Already the administration has steadily increased the military capabilities of the armed opposition elements, drifting away from its original policy of providing diplomatic support only.
Though this escalation has significantly narrowed the possibilities for any diplomatic solution to the conflict, foreign policy hawks have chided the administration for not going further. In a column for the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer lambasted Obama for seeking international support against Syria "as he stands by and watches Syria burn."[12]
In an earlier column, Krauthammer wrote that "the fate of the Assad regime is geopolitically crucial" in the campaign to undermine Iran: "Imperial regimes can crack when they are driven out of their major foreign outposts…[and] the fall of Bashar al-Assad's Syria could be similarly ominous for Iran." As in the 2001 letter, he argued that all America's regional ambitions can be met, "so long as we do not compromise with Russia or relent until Assad falls."[13]
Similarly, Rueul Marc Gerecht used the pages of the Wall Street Journal to chastise the Obama administration's inaction and advocate a "a muscular CIA operation…to pour anti-tank, antiaircraft, and anti-personnel weaponry through gaping holes in the regime's border security." Gerecht acknowledged that such a policy would mirror the Syrian regime's own machinations in 2006, when it "encouraged suicide bombers and other lethal cross-border trade against the U.S. in Iraq."[14]
The parallels with Washington's approach to Syria in 2006 are both ominous and telling. In effect, the same approach of uncompromising militancy is being advocated by the same individuals, and all indications point to a similarly disastrous outcome.
The Syrian National Council, along with its supporters in Washington, has decided that there can be no compromise with the Assad regime.[15] The Syrian government, as it did the last time it faced total intransigence in Washington, has adopted a similarly uncompromising stance. Faced with the prospect of annihilation, Assad has refused to acknowledge the demands of the protestors, and has met every challenge with overwhelming violence. In so doing, it has confirmed for the armed opposition that the Assad regime has no intention for dialogue, compromise, or reform, and the only remaining option is a zero-sum fight to the death.
Considering the scope and horror of the regime's massacres in the past two years alone, this conclusion may seem reasonable. But it overlooks-and in many ways undermines-alternative approaches that have been drowned out by the same voices that called for Syria's destruction less than a decade ago.
Looking Forward
The illegitimacy of the Syrian regime is beyond question, but the manner and process of its ouster are not. The armed opposition appears to enjoy limited popular legitimacy,[16] in part because it has committed its own share of atrocities[15] and has been deeply compromised by its affiliations with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United States.
Popular movements within the country have offered a number of alternative pathways out of the conflict. Syrians on both sides have put down their weapons and started channels of dialogue to find a way out of their current impasse.[18] Even the Local Coordination Committees (LCC), the grassroots groups most responsible for organizing the uprising, have publicly stated that dialogue with the regime is the only credible way to pull the country out of civil war. A statement issued by the LCC in July emphasized "the importance of ending the military and intelligence solution and immediately transitioning to the political process."[19]
The Syrian revolution remains one in which the vast majority of participants simply want freedom, dignity, and an escape from the brutality of the Assad regime. However, an overreliance on the military capabilities of an unrepresentative few is unlikely to bring about such an outcome. Instead it has produced an even more intransigent government and an opposition that is ever more dependent on the support of foreign powers, with both sides fully committed to the total annihilation of the other.
As the violence escalates, the window for dialogue narrows, and voices from the diaspora calling for maximalist objectives will only serve to narrow these opportunities further. The same individuals who squandered an opportunity to weaken Assad's grip on power in 2006 have embarked on a similar course of action five years later, with no real modifications but the same grand expectations.
The result, as before, is likely to be one in which everyone loses.
Samer Araabi is a contributor to Right Web.
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Amazon.com
David Friedman (St James, NY) See all my reviews
Original, Incisive, Nonpartisan, January 22, 2006
...The body of the book analyzes how the legitimate attempt to recover from the national trauma of Vietnam led ultimately to a militarism increasingly reflected in crucial aspects of American life. In religion he traces how a "crusade" theory of warfare has supplanted the more mainstream "just war" theory. In popular culture he discusses the rise of a genre of pop fiction and movies reflecting a glamorized and uncritical idealization of war (he examines "An Officer and A Gentleman", "Rambo: First Blood Part II", and "Top Gun" as examples).
In politics he identifies the neo-conservative movement as bringing into the mainstream ideas that "a decade earlier might have seemed reckless or preposterous"; for example the idea that the United States is "the most revolutionary force on earth" with an "inescapable mission" to spread democracy -- by the sword if necessary. Bacevich calls these ideas "inverted Trotskyism", and notes that the neo-conservative movement shares with Mao the assumption that revolution springs "from the barrel of a gun".
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Jul 24, 2013 | Veterans Today
But Bolshevism in its ideological form did not die out then. It has been reincarnated in two identical and Jewish revolutionary movements: Zionism and neoconservatism. Both are almost politically indistinguishable and, like Bolshevism, both seek to implicitly destroy Western civilization in all of its manifestations.Bolshevism was evil but the mass hysteria did not fully grasp the extent of its evilness until it was almost too late. Zionism's evilness, on the other hand, is being displayed right in front of us, but no politician is brave enough to break its political power. For example, Joel Greenberg of the New York Times wrote way back in 1993 that
"Amnesty International, in a human rights report in July, said Palestinian detainees under interrogation are 'systematically tortured or ill-treated' by Israel. The International Committee of the Red Cross, whose representatives regularly visit Palestinian prisoners, has accused Israel of using interrogation methods that violate the Fourth Geneva Convention on treatment of civilians in occupied areas…
"Human rights monitors estimate that 500 Palestinian detainees are subjected to such treatment each month and that at least 30,000 have been interrogated since the beginning of the anti-Israel uprising in December 1987"[13]
This massive brutality has been going on for decades and in many different forms. Just last year, nine Israeli teenagers were convicted of brutally attacking a Palestinian teenager by the name of Jamal Julani. When one of the convicted teenagers was asked how he would respond if Julani had died from the incident, he said,
"Great. Let him die. He's an Arab son of a bitch. What did he think, that he would curse my mother? When I attacked him I was going to stab him in the ribs to let him realize my mom is no child's play. He knows exactly why he is in the hospital."[14] The other teenagers responded with a similar voice:
"We went to look for Arabs, to hit them and beat the crap out of them, and I went ahead of everyone and I met the Arab who was swearing. I got upset and yelled, 'Here's an Arab,' and some more guys came with me and then R. [the 15-year-old girl perceived as the instigator] got there and gave him a slap in the back. He tried to get up but I hit him with my foot in his pelvic area, and then all the guys beat him up. He had a face that required a beating."[15]
He also declared, "You can't go by Damascus Gate without getting stabbed. So why do they come here? I beat him and I'd beat him again."[16] A year later, Jamal was still undergoing medical care.[17]
How many Americans do you think know about what happened to Jamal? Get a microphone and start asking the average American even at your neighborhood. The answer will surprise you.
In March 2012, a gunman by the name of Mohamed Merah went into a Jewish day school in Toulouse, France, and killed three Jewish children and one rabbi. My heart went out to the families of those killed. Everyone should sympathize in tragic situations like these, and these acts of evil should not be tolerated.
The story was covered by almost every major news outlet in the Western world and in Israel.[18] Report after report followed the incident, almost nonstop, and some of those newspapers ran four or five stories of the same incident. One rabbi declared that the incident happened because of "jealousy" on the part of Gentiles about "God's chosen people."[19]
Yet around the same time, hundreds of Beitar Jerusalem fans beat up Arab workers at the capital's Malha shopping center in what was called "a mass lynching attempt," but not one person was arrested.[20]
The fans were even chanting "Death to Arabs,"[21] but one of the Arab workers declared that the police arrived more than one hour late.[22] The police justified their decision not to arrest anyone by saying that there were no complaints, and therefore no arrests were necessary.[23]
None of the major news outlets reported the story, except the Jerusalem Post, the Independent, and Haaretz. The Jerusalem Post only ran the story after some 150 protesters flooded the scene.
When Mohamed Merah gunned down the three children and the rabbi, Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post declared without any substantial evidence that Western elites were accomplices, claiming that these acts of evil formed "the physical and moral landscape of our time."[24]
Where was Glick, then, when those Palestinians were beaten? Isn't this the "moral landscape" of Zionist ideology? (French officials said after investigation that there was "no evidence" linking Merah to Al-Qaida.[25])
Another incident-that even shocked former CIA operative Philip Giraldi-was the May 2012 riots in Tel Aviv, where African immigrants were targeted. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times all stayed silent.[26]
On May 28, five young Israelis smashed the door of an internet café owned by Yorusalem Mestun, a 22 year-old. They "pulled a knife on her, while her Jewish neighbours looked on. The police came, checked her visa and left, without, she said, offering help or sympathy."[27]
Also in May, some Israeli settlers set fire to a West Bank village and shot some unarmed Palestinians.[28] It was later discovered that during the incident, Israeli youth tied up and beat one Palestinian who was already wounded.[29]
On May 24, 2012, Amnesty International released a report, declaring that Israel "frequently uses excessive, sometimes lethal, force against demonstrators in the West Bank and civilians in Gaza…Israel has engaged in the demolition of Palestinian homes and other facilities in the West Bank, as well is inside Israel itself, where homes of Palestinian citizens are destroyed in 'unrecognized' villages in the Negev desert."[30]
None of those reports made it on the air on popular news networks in America. The only reason some of the reports saw the light of day was because they were making a stir throughout the Middle East. There were dozens of incidents in the spring of 2012 where Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians and the Israeli Defense Forces just stood there and watched.[31]
What, then, are the Zionists telling us here? Simple: when Palestinians are killed, attacked and brutally maimed, life goes on and the West does not really need to know. And if the West does know, nothing is to be done.
But when even one Israeli is killed, this must be reported throughout the Western world. Meetings must be conducted, and the Zionist media must beat the Western world over the head about the news.
Do the Zionists Really Care About the American People?
Now here is one of the most disgusting things ever. The Zionist machine spends billions of dollars spying on Americans for years. They said over and over that their covert enterprise has actually saved lives.
Yet recently, "Al Qaeda claimed responsibility on Tuesday for simultaneous raids on two Iraqi prisons and said more than 500 inmates had been set free in the operation"[32]
As a result of the incident, "20 members of the security forces were killed 40 wounded in the attacks."[33] The incident also created a fear that a civil war could break out.[34]
The NSA, the Israeli-run organization that can locate your cell phone even when it is off,[35] could not locate actual terrorism. Again, what does that tell us about the NSA's covert activity? As Mac Slavo rightly puts it, the NSA
"spent hundreds of billions of dollars to monitor the activities of every single American by turning their listening networks on purported domestic terrorists operating in the United States.
"They know your underwear size. They know where you drove your car today. They know what you put up on Facebook, texted to your wife and emailed to your friends. And they've done it all in the supposed interest of 'national security.'
"If, however, you were an Al Qaeda terrorist coordinating a large-scale prison break to free senior members of your mid-east terror organization, you would have been able to operate with impunity.
"While our government is supposedly preventing terrorism by searching grandma at airports, , arresting kids for making jokes on the internet, deploying thousands of drones over America's skies, and looking for lone wolves, they have failed at their absolute top priority: stopping actual terrorists from doing what terrorists do"[36]
Last May, the Assyrian International News Agency reported that the Syrian rebels/terrorists/jihadists
"attacked a village in Syria's Western province and slaughtered all its Christian residents on Monday. The armed rebels affiliated to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) raided the Christian-populated al-Duvair village in Reef (outskirts of) Homs near the border with Lebanon today and massacred all its civilian residents, including women and children."[37]
The only agency that intervened and killed those terrorists at the time was the Assad government.[38]
Where was the NSA then? Where was Obama? Where was the Zionist regime? They were nowhere to be found. They were too busy supporting the Syrian terrorists and tracking down Edward Snowden.[39]
After all, Congress has already signed off on army the Syrian terrorists,[40] despite the fact that Assad has been willing to engage in peace talk.[41] The only country that has loudly voiced his concerns about the United States arming Syrian terrorists is Russia.[42]
Once again, Zionism supports terrorism and pretends that it is fighting terrorism. Anyone who supports terrorist organizations or terrorist cells ought to go to jail. But in the Jewish Century, supporting the Syrian rebels/terrorists is not a crime because those terrorists are friends of Israel.
Moreover, in the Jewish Century, if the Zionist gangsters perceive that you are a neo-Nazi and have children, more than likely they will try to take your children away from you. Listen to this report by the Daily Mail:
"The children of German neo-Nazis could soon be removed from their families and taken into care – in a bid to beat a rise in the glorification of Hitler and the Third Reich.
"German authorities are becoming increasingly concerned with the number of summer camps and special schools brainwashing youngsters into worshipping a movement that killed six million Jews in the Holocaust.
"A recent raid on one camp turned up jigsaw puzzles showing Germany's pre-World War 2 borders and colouring books where children were encouraged to crayon in the moustache of Hitler."[43]
In a nutshell, Zionism does not care about the West's future. It only cares about dominating the world and taking good care of Israel. If 2,114 precious American soldiers die in Afghanistan,[44] that is a small price to pay if you are protecting Zionism.
If military intervention in Syria could cost the U.S. one billion dollars every month,[45] that again is a very small price to pay. If poverty has risen at an astronomical rate in nations like Greece and Italy because of the economic collapse,[46] we still need to move on with perpetual wars in the Middle East.
Chuck Hagel recently said that "Our people are strong and resilient after 12 years of war, but they are under stress - and so are the institutions that support them."[47]
Yes, perpetual wars are getting boring, and both the American people and our precious soldiers who are getting killed for Israel are exhausted. It is time for serious politicians to reexamine our unconditional support for Israel, America's greatest enemy.
I have been saying for months that Iran is not an enemy of the United States-our "allies" are. Just a few days ago, John Glaser of the Washington Times had this to say:
"Contrary to dominant thinking in Washington, Iran poses no immediate threat to the U.S. In fact, our Middle Eastern allies, eager to have America do their fighting for them, wildly inflate the supposed threat from Iran.
"The U.S. has built up various alliances in the Middle East since WWII in order to fulfill a larger strategy of controlling the flow of oil and preventing the emergence of another power in the region that would threaten U.S. dominance.
"In the course of building these alliances, Washington has signed security agreements with these countries, promising to subsidize their militaries and come to their defense. In essence, this makes their problems our problems.
"Our closest allies in the region, Israel and the Arab Gulf states, hate Iran for a variety of strategic, cultural, religious, and ideological reasons. As a result, they have hyped the threat of Iran and frightened Americans into thinking the Islamic Republic poses an existential threat to America.
"In an interview on CBS's Face the Nation this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned us that Iran is 'building ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) to reach the American mainland in a few years,' adding that, 'they're getting closer and closer to the bomb," and "they have to be stopped.'The problem here is that Netanyahu is exactly wrong. In reality, the current consensus in the U.S. intelligence community is that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program and has made no decision as to whether to pursue the bomb.
'Recent assessments by American spy agencies,' the New York Times reported last year, 'are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier' and this 'remains the consensus view of America's 16 intelligence agencies.'
"Nevertheless, Netanyahu and other Israeli officials continue to go on national television and contradict U.S. intelligence findings in order to scare Americans into seeing Iran as more of a threat than it is."[48]Hopefully the American people will unanimously come to the same conclusion before it is too late.
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www.slate.com
The debate took place at Cooper Union in New York City and was captured by ScribeMedia on behalf of the London Review of Books.
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published an article in the London Review of Books.
Entitled "The Israel Lobby: Does it Have too Much Influence on US Foreign Policy".
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February 16, 2010 | Second Vermont Republic
It has become increasingly obvious that the only difference between Barack Obama and George W. Bush is that the famous Bush smirk has been replaced by the Obama smile. The neoconservatism of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bill O'Reilly has given way to the neoliberalism of Bill Clinton, Timothy Geithner, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Matthews. The differences between neoliberalism and neoconservatism are similar to the differences between Coke and Pepsi, virtually nil.
Neoconservatism is best defined by its foreign policy agenda which includes full spectrum dominance, imperial overstretch, nuclear primacy, the right of pre-emptive strike, and unconditional support for the State of Israel. Although neoliberals are much less bellicose in their rhetoric than their neoconservative counterparts, they passively acquiesce to the neocon foreign policy paradigm. They do little or nothing to end the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the annihilation of Palestine carried out by our close ally Israel. Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo was little short of a global call to arms couched in the language of the doctrine of "just war." Although neocons make it abundantly clear that they are military hawks, most neoliberals are closet hawks as well.
Consider the case of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the darling of the Left, who pretends to be a socialist, which he is not. Not only does Sanders support all military appropriation bills and military aid to Israel, but he is currently promoting the opening of a satellite facility of the Sandia Corporation in Vermont. The Sandia Corporation, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Company, develops, creates, maintains, and evaluates nuclear weapons systems. Sandia's roots go back to the Manhattan Project in World War II. Just what peace loving Vermonters need, a nuclear weapons manufacturer located in their own backyard.
Both neolibs and neocons are apologists for globalization and are steeped in the ideology that bigger, faster, and more high-tech make better. In their heart of hearts neolibs and neocons know that only the federal government can solve all of our problems, failing to realize that the federal government is the problem. Both embrace corporate socialism, socialism for the rich, and the social welfare state while pretending to be opposed to publicly financed social welfare. It's all about people of the lie.
Neoliberals pretend to be concerned about inequities in the distribution of income and wealth. Neoconservatives make it abundantly clear that they couldn't care less.
Both neolibs and neocons are authoritarian statists each with their own definition of political correctness. Politically correct neolibs are expected to be pro-abortion, pro-gay-lesbian, pro-affirmative action, pro-Israel, pro-gun control, anti-clerical, pro-big government, and pro-American Empire. Anyone who does not conform to this litany or who associates with those who do not, is at risk of being attacked by a left wing truth squad such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and accused of the likes of homophobia, racism, anti-semitism, religious fundamentalism, or even hate crimes. Politically correct neocons are more likely to be pro-life, anti-gay-lesbian, anti-affirmative action, pro-Israel, anti-gun control, pro-clerical, pro-big government, and pro-Empire. Both are vehemently opposed to secession.
Above all, what neoliberals and neoconservatives have in common is that they are technofascists. Benito Mussolini defined fascism as "the merger of state and corporate power." Technofascism is the melding of corporate, state, military, and technological power by a handful of political elites which enables them to manipulate and control the population through the use of money, markets, media and the Internet.
Neoliberals and neoconservatives alike march to the beat of the same drummer – the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, most materialistic, most racist, most militaristic, most violent empire of all time.
Ultimately the differences between neoliberalism and neoconservatism are purely cosmetic. You may either have your technofascism with a smirk or you can have it with a smile.
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Last modified: August, 15, 2018
