After Neoconservatism

if you believe the bible Israel's borders will be extended

www.zioninprophecy.com/pages/land/land.html

 

a koranic memoir

The most authoritative Arab statement as to whom the Land belongs is found in the Islamic Koran.The Koran agrees with the Bible that God (Allah) made a covenant with the Sons of Israel and assigned the Holy Land to the Jews (See the Koran, Sura V, "The Table"). The Koran also describes the land given to the Jews as blessed and foresees a return of Israel to their land at the end of days.

what a thought who da thunk it


exerpt taken from zioninprophecy.com

 

it's not neoconism you need to worry about it's the battle between God the victor and satan the loser

 

Thanks, poncho. I believe you are correct. BTW, I did a little digging and will post my sources in a few minutes - you may already know about them. But poncho, I believe you are right on. We are all under a delusion and it is a planned delusion for the sheople.

 

Neoconservatives…

Want the US to be the world's unchallenged superpower. (Bush doesn't - he's enabling China to have that role by his free trade policies and the trade deficit with China)
Share unwavering support for Israel. (Bush doesn't - he's still sending money to Hamas)
Support American unilateral action. (Bush doesn't - he wants a coalition of UN/NATO forces)
Support preemptive strikes to remove perceived threats to US security. (Bush did)
Promote the development of an American empire. (Bush doesn't - he's all for Free World Trade)
Equate American power with the potential for world peace.)
Seek to democratize the Arab world. (Yep, that's the Bush unrealistic dream)
Push regime change in states deemed threats to the US or its allies. (Yes, Bush does that but many of his predecessors have done that to - like when we helped depose the Shah of Iran many years ago)

So Bush gets only three yes out of the list. Conclusion: Bush is not a Neocon.

 

George Bush isn't a neocon Ken. He just talks tough for the cameras and carries out the policies of the elite, helps to generate profits for his fathers friends in the military industrial complex and opens up countries like Iraq and Iran to the international bankers and their controlling private central banks and the multinational corporations so they can have a fresh batch of cheap labor.

Not to mention the global socialistic control of the United Nations. Hey they can't redistribute all the earth's resources if they don't first control all the countries on the planet.

What's the sense in having a one world government if you can't impose all your godless policies on some stubborn states that think they prefer to run their own affairs and worship their own gods?

 

Now that's what I'm talkin about LE!

 

1) The point about an unchallenged world leader is about military supremacy. It's not about free trade.

2) I can't believe you can possibly claim that Bush wants to cooperate with our allies and the UN after the (almost) unilateralist invasion of Iraq.

I would conclude that Bush is not a Neo-con. He's the figurehead for the Neo-cons, not a big difference except when evalusting the effectiveness (?) of his leadership.

 

Ken,

(Boldfaced items quoted from the article):

By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.

But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before.

Having troops on the ground anywhere turns them into magnets. It's a non-point. As to pre-emption, there are obviously different levels of success just as intelligence is not perfect. Going to war in Vietnam was the right thing to do but we obviously under-estimated the likely involvement of China and the USSR in arming the North, as well as the success of the subversive anti-war movement here. Then the critics took root in Congress and our troops were emasculated. Hmmm, seems some similarity there.

America's naïve Wilsonianism

The author's comparison with Wilsonianism is disingenuous. There are plenty of explanations as to the differences between the Bush response and Wilsonianism, Krauthammer wrote an excellent one. I don't have it handy, I'm sorry. There are others.

The administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June).

An excellent point, obviously, except the inference that Bush's policy led to Ahmadinejad's election, which is very unlikely. I also don't know that I would agree that the Muslim Brotherhood's electoral success can be laid at Bush's doorstep, but it certainly ran counter to other hopeful trends in the region. One thing that neo-cons, including myself (on foreign policy, only; I don't consider myself a neo-con generally), had not counted on was the electoral appeal of these Islamists.

But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

I would argue it is ridiculous to blame Hamas' victory on Bush. Terrorist animals are terrorist animals and when the electorate are animals they will choose their own kind.

Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.

So? That's an argument? Hmmm, it leaves a huge ground between the marginalized Pat Buchanan and Sachs (I don't know about him so won't comment) that just might be right.

Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.

Again, Fukuyama doesn't look at the middle but seems to delight in this one or the other approach. So far, it's not clear whether he is saying we should withdraw from Iraq (perhaps I missed something, though, or he'll address it later in his column) short of withdrawing from the world stage. By doing so, he is creating this tragedy in his mind by arguing a false choice. As to "American power and influence", that power is meaningless if the will to use it when necessary isn't there. There was a threat and we went after it. Yes, it was messier than anticipated, but you don't just walk out of the bathroom and leave it when the toilet overflows, you clean the crap up.

The problem with his argument of a contradiction between social engineering and the use of military power is that it is a false comparison, which ignores that social engineering is about seeking to remake human nature; military power is responding with the sword to the worst of human nature.

How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq?

I don't know if anyone said it would be painless. He also ignores, because he is certainly aware, that that was not the stated reason for going into Iraq, a fact lost sight of those by those who reflexively wail on about the wascawwy neo-cons in this war.

First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside.

Perhaps he should have highlighted "seems" because I don't believe that neo-cons have made this an element of their arguments. His quote of Kristol and Kagan, seemingly to support his position, says nothing about such regimes being brittle or hollow.

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform.

If it was a "default condition" then why did the U.S. painstakingly try to help them in crafting a constitution and facilitating elections? Speaking of hollow. His arguments are so hollow they echo. I agree with his point about underestimating the insurgency, though, but that is not a problem with democracy or one inherent in Iraq's condition but because we probably didn't secure the Syrian border as tightly as necessary as that is where the insurgents are primarily coming from as I understand. Okay, military planning wasn't flawless. They rarely are.

I'll just ignore his "Trotskyist-Straussian-Leninist" claptrap.

Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power."

Whether the rest of the world resists and whether they have less to fear are two separate questions, the difference being rooted in the psychology of "the rest of the world".

In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action.

Actually it was premised on both America's military power and, yes, her moral position. And, yes, Virginia, there is a world of difference between Russia and China's use of such power and ours. It's funny that Fukuyama didn't mention Israel in such examples, in that they certainly do have a moral right to respond to terrorism--they are right and they have the power, so they should use that power.

The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism.

Someone might want to show this guy the front page from September 12, 2001.

Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally.

I don't think Iraq's threat was incorrectly assessed, and the author seems to underestimate himself the proliferation and military threat that rogue states do in fact present. One is tempted to ask him Ken's earlier question, which, as I recall, was why we were going after Iraq rather than North Korea as they represent a greater threat.

We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.

Yeah, sounds like that "hearts and minds" campaign that Reagan used to bring down Communism. Also, by not classifying it as a war, he gets to ignore the security ramifications of the wiretapping issue.

The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation.

It sure doesn't lack for international organizations per se, though. Which might speak more to the ineffectiveness of international organizations generally. International organizations are the only means of conferring legitimacy. Longstanding international law does too.

The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a "multi-multilateral world" of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines.

Now there's a solution: a hodge-podge of international organizations. One isn't enough.

The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.

Here I concede he has a point, but it is by mis-stating the Iraq situation. The government in Iraq was defeated in war and the proper thing to do was to seek to facilitate their self-determination, just as WWII wasn't about imposing democracy on Germany or Japan, but their democratization was a required follow up to the overthrow of fascism.

 

Only an abject fool believes that Islam will leave Israel much less the west alone if we leave them alone.

Jihad is their word for evangelism. It can involve persuasion or force... but always results in domination by a totalitarian theocracy if left to run its course. Muslims like Christians believe it is their mission to spread their faith to the world. Unlike Christians, they believe a part of that is the suppression and subordination of all other religions/political philophosphies/ideals.

 

Even more reason to believe that trying to build a free Islamic state like we are doing in Iraq will only fail. Freedom and Islam can't co-exist.

 

On the same note and in the same tone Scott only an abject fool or someone looking for a argument would say this to someone that has never claimed otherwise and I have never claimed otherwise here on Baptist Board or anywhere else. I'm not looking for an argument only the truth.

Besides that,

I figure I need lessons on the Muslim religion much less than you need lessons in the history of how rulers have used terror and fake terrorists to make their own populations subservient to their plans and machinations. Our rulers are no different.

Case in point... the Northwoods Document.

Close your eyes tight shut spin till you drop kick your feet and call names all you want you can't make the truth go away.

 

Correction to my post:

International organizations are the only means of conferring legitimacy. Longstanding international law does too.

should read

International organizations are NOT the only means of conferring legitimacy. Longstanding international law does too.

 

Possibly correct. Of course this may be in the calculation. GWB et al may believe that if a free society can be established and people grow accustomed to having a say... that people will eventually turn from Islam.

The Kurds have a secular history. About 10% of Iraq is "Christian"... as in Assyrian Orthodox. A system that forces respect for those minority voices through democratic principles may provide a good basis for diminishing or at least moderating Islam in Iraq.

 

Bush's handlers believe a balkanized Iraq is a profitable Iraq profitable for them. We aren't there to spread democracy we're there to spread chaos and make money. Order out of chaos. Or as Michael Ledeen has called it..."creative chaos".

 

IMO, the best solution in Iraq would have been a confederacy that allowed local autonomy with a constitutional sharing of oil income and national defense. A parlimentary democracy will probably enable the majority to impose itself on the minority.