While there is little that is new in the attached article by Philip Giraldi; it is nevertheless very important and well worth reading. Giraldi has produced an excellent summary of the truly poisonous influences on US foreign and defense policies, a group more accurately described by the collective modifier neo-conmen.
He describes how the influence of this movement’s current incarnation got its start inside the Scoop Jackson (aka the Senator from Boeing) mafia during the 1970s, how it grew and infiltrated establishment of Versailles on the Potomac in the 80s and 90s, and then metastasized into a truly destructive menace after 9-11, which to the neo-conmen, became a kind of manna from heaven. The trauma unleashed by that attack enabled them to cynically fan the fires of blind fear and convert a horrendous crime into an act of war. I was in the Pentagon between 1973 and 2003 and first became aware of their growing influence in 1977 or 1978, although I erroneously discounted them at the time as being nutty. But, by 1983 or so, my discounting began to disappear. From my mind’s eye, Giraldi’s retrospective is spot on,
Think about it: The neoconmen’s poison has been one of the (and in some cases “the,”) central causes of (1) the mistaken war in Iraq, (2) the failed war in Afghanistan, (3) the rise of a state of perpetual war that is morphing into an endless, as yet unacknowledged, and increasingly unfocused war against tribal Islam in the Middle East and Africa, (4) the hijacking of US foreign policy by our client state of Israel, (5) the never-ending crisis with Iran, (6) the continued addiction to high and economically counterproductive defense budgets, the growth of which are more tuned to the obsessions of the Cold War than the wars the neo-conmen started, (7) the reduction of civil liberties at home, and most importantly, (8) a web of growing grand-strategic mismatches among the (a) values America professes to uphold (what we say we are), (b) the actual values revealed to world by America’s actions (what we really are) and (c) the growing constraints of the world America has to deal with. This arrogant hypocrisy implicit in this grand-strategic web is becoming increasingly obnoxious to people living in the rest of the world.
Left uncorrected, this behaviour is a prescription for isolation. There can be no good end to the 21st Century grand-strategic pathway launched by the people described by Giraldi below. In saner times their destructive actions would have placed the neo-conmen in the dock of public opinion, if not the law.
Chuck Spinney
Read More At:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2013/05/chuck-spinney-philip-giraldi-the-poisonous-treasonous-influence-of-the-neo-cons-why-isnt-the-fbi-going-after-them/
