Neocon Worms
The call for President Bush’s defeat in a statement released Wednesday by a group of former diplomats and military officials highlighted the stark divide that has opened among foreign policy experts over the administration’s national security strategy.
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The statement suggests how much certain parts of Bush’s foreign policy do mark a break with the establishment,” said Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and a leading conservative theorist. “The simplest way to put it is that Bush thinks 9/11 was a fundamental break and we needed a new doctrine after that, and the foreign policy establishment doesn’t believe that.”
Bullshit. 9/11 had nothing to do with it and Kristol, of all people, knows that. His PNAC plans, adopted wholesale by Crusader Codpiece, were laid out long before 9/11 and should have been rendered irrelevant afterward. It was the neocons, not the foreign policy establishment who twisted the attacks to their own use without regard for the changed circumstances that 9/11 wrought. If you look at their record, they never considered terrorism a serious threat and 9/11 didn’t change that.
Just as the Bush administration argued for tax cuts for the rich, no matter the circumstances — surplus or deficit — so too have the neocons argued for unilateralisam, global military dominance and the invasion of Iraq. It made little sense before 9/11 and even less afterwards. The neocons adopting the “9/11 changed everything” mantra is chutzpah of the highest order. For them it changed absolutely nothing.
It’s not the ossified old foreign policy establishment that’s rigid and unyielding to new ideas, it’s the starry-eyed neocons and their ivory tower vision of a Pax Americana forced on the world at the end of a gun that’s out of step with the new reality.
The result of these tremors may be the most turbulence in the foreign policy landscape since the late 1970s, when a flight of hawkish Democratic thinkers known as neoconservatives migrated to the GOP in reaction to the dovish post-Vietnam foreign policy embraced by most Democratic politicians.
“I don’t know where it ends up, but clearly it is a very fluid moment like the late 1970s,” Kristol said.
Those signing the sharply worded statement included Arthur A. Hartman, ambassador to the Soviet Union for President Reagan; and Jack F. Matlock, who assumed that post toward the end of Reagan’s second term and held it under President George H.W. Bush. Others were William Harrop, the elder Bush’s ambassador to Israel; retired Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, the Air Force chief of staff during the Persian Gulf War; retired Adm. William J. Crowe, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman under Reagan; and Donald McHenry, the U.N. ambassador under President Carter.
It’s long past time for the real conservatives to speak up. Their children have gone out of control and they need to rein them in. If they can’t, then it’s time to join the other side and we’ll help put them in their place. We are dealing with serious stuff for serious people, now. It’s time for the real Republican grown-ups to take a stand.