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The Crisis-Mongers
Antiwar.com Original —
... on the public eventually inures it to this appeal. The passage of the PATRIOT Act and the march to war were propelled by the politics of fearmongering , with the sole argument being that if we don't do this, unimaginably horrible events will shortly follow. This view was pushed, in every possible way, by a small but well-connected and media-savvy group of intellectuals and policy wonks known as the neoconservatives . The neocons had an agenda , and a very specific goal , formulated well before 9/11 : war with Iraq , to be ...
Legacies
Whiskey Fire —
... PNAC. Let's face it, if the founders of PNAC -- and influential policy wonks for the Bush Administration -- had been named O'Malley and Chin and Juarez, the defense establishment would probably have kept their eyes on Afghanistan and Pakistan after 9/11. Instead they were named Kristol and Kagan and Wolfowitz and had some pre-existing obsessions when it came to defense priorities. ...
Legacies
Whiskey Fire —
... PNAC. Let's face it, if the founders of PNAC -- and influential policy wonks for the Bush Administration -- had been named O'Malley and Chin and Juarez, the defense establishment would probably have kept their eyes on Afghanistan and Pakistan after 9/11. Instead they were named Kristol and Kagan and Wolfowitz and had some pre-existing obsessions when it came to defense priorities. ...
Juan Cole: Top Ten Myths about Iraq, 2008
The Latest on Air America —
... for Bibi Netanyahu and again in their 1998 Project for a New American Century letter to Clinton, where they explicitly called for military action. The Neoconservatives are notorious liars and by the time they get through with rewriting history, they will be a combination of Gandhi and Mother Teresa and the Iraq War will be Bill Clinton's fault. The only thing is, I think people are wise to them by now. Being a liar can actually get you somewhere. Being a notorious liar is a disadvantage if what you want to is get people to listen to you and act on your advice. I say, Never ...
Gaza Is the Future
Antiwar.com Original —
... of having co-authored what the late Gen. William E. Odom ruefully referred to as the greatest military disaster in American history. While Perle is now wailing over at The National Interest that he had nothing to do with it, that it was all George W. Bush's fault, neither history nor the gods will absolve him. He and his fellow graduates of the Scoop Jackson Academy and Finishing School for Laptop Bombardiers are so on the record as being the earliest and most vociferous advocates of regime-change throughout the Middle East, and ...
Richard Perle: Still Crazy After All These Years
Antiwar.com Original —
... fealty to anything other than their own access to power. Out of power and wildly unpopular, Bush and his party are no longer useful. The neocons were Democrats originally , anyhow, and they won't have much trouble emigrating to greener pastures. Not that Perle is going to get a job in the Obama administration, but a reasonable approximation of his viewpoint is well-represented at the highest levels. Dennis Ross , who co-signed statements with Perle's neocon comrades at the Project for a New American Century on the eve of war with Iraq, ...
The 43 Appointees Who Helped Make Bush The Worst President Ever
Think Progress —
... Attorney General Ashcroft at his hospital bedside to sign off on Bush’s illegal wiretapping program; approving waterboarding and other torture techniques to be used against detainees; and leading the firing of U.S. Attorneys deemed not sufficiently loyal to Bush.
4. Donald Rumsfeld — After winning praise for leading the U.S. effort in ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001, the former Defense Secretary strongly advocated for the invasion of Iraq and then grossly misjudged and mishandled ...
American Caesar's Ghost
Antiwar.com Original —
... of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the neocon think-tank that first publicly called for an invasion of Iraq in early 1998 . Ricks makes a single passing mention of PNAC in The Gamble . That's a stunning omission when you consider that along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Scooter Libby, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, and many other PNACers also held key positions on the Bush administration's Iraq policy team. Eliot Cohen is a featured player in The Gamble , a key figure in the selling of the surge ...
Richard Perle: "Neo-conservatives don't exist"
Angry Bear —
... Sorry Dick that is a Neo-Conservative foreign policy and signed by what would be the top national security officials of the Bush White House and Pentagon. But where is Dick? Well his name shows up in another document, this one the Letter to President Clinton on Iraq ...
The Fog of Warmongering
At-Largely —
... Posted by Jeff Huber We’re a decade into the new American century , the neoconservatives are still leading the country on a march to the cliff, and most of the citizenry still hasn’t caught on to what’s happening. I’ve been bumping into a wandering soul at various stops along the information highway of late who claims to have “lost soldiers in war.” In one discussion thread, this ostensible leader of lost soldiers insists that the surge in Iraq was successful because “we had the lowest number of casualties ever last month, which sounds like a win to me.” I can’t tell if this ...
Hullabaloo — ... issued only 2 reports since the 1998 embassy bombing about the threat of terrorism until 9/11. The PNAC has been wringing their hands about Iraq and pushing for ...
Pro-Nuclear Pundits Debunked
Commondreams.org Views —
... to open up nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea." It is worth wondering if North Korea would be testing ballistic missiles in 2009 if Powell's efforts during President Bush's first term were given a little breathing room and some basic institutional support. Pro-War: Bolton helped bring us the war in Iraq, insisting that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction long after that assertion was effectively refuted. He started the drum beat early too, signing onto a 1998 letter to President Clinton drafted by the neo-conservative ...
Sarah Palin, the Neocons and Howard Dean Love the War in Afghanistan
Commondreams.org Views —
When Satire Becomes Reality
Antiwar.com Original —
... of dissent. The defection of a prominent conservative has them in a real tizzy, and they are spinning furiously to explain why no one should be paying attention to Will or, indeed, to anyone who deviates from the Washington consensus that perpetual war is our necessary fate. The rhetoric of the letter is basic neocon boilerplate, a rerun of the many letters issued by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which began pumping for an invasion of Iraq shortly after its founding in 1997. PNAC, under Bill Kristol’s guidance , transformed ...
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