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Daniel Pipes: Obama can ‘save’ his presidency by bombing Iran.
Neoconservative scholar-activist Daniel Pipes has a new article on the leading conservative website National Review Online, in which he suggests that President Obama can “save” his presidency…by bombing Iran.
These “Eurocons,” as they might be dubbed, share their U.S. counterparts’ devotion to military might and interventionist foreign policies. Although the unilateralism of U.S. neocons is tempered in Europe by a greater emphasis on the role of certain international alliances, the underlying vision is fundamentally the same. Eurocons see multinational institutions like NATO as vehicles for pushing the agenda of the United States and its European allies, and as instruments of global power, regime change, nation-building, and “democratization.” But they regard as illegitimate any attempt to check or curb Western power via the United Nations.
The label covers three broad ideological tendencies: establishment neoconservatism, the “decent left”, and the counter-jihad right.
The central organizing principle of these groups is that Europe and the United States today are engaged in a good-vs-evil struggle with ‘Islamic totalitarianism.’
Of course, the ’struggle’ is actually a trojan horse for a lot of other agendas.
Just as neoconservatism’s progenitors, the authoritarian political philosophers of the 1930s, blamed liberalism for the weakness of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis, so European liberalism—not Islamic extremism—is the real object of [Christopher] Caldwell’s contempt.
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Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs goes rogue and follows deansworld in reassessing their ties with the conservative right, especially in light of the “anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam…”
Pro-Israel blogger breaks with right wing
By Eric Fingerhut · December 2, 2009Longtime pro-Israel blogger Charles Johnson of the popular Little Green Footballs site has “parted ways with the Right” and writes that he can be called an independent. In a post on his blog earlier this week, Johnson, a critic of radical Islam, wrote that among his reasons was “anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide.” Other problems with the right, he said, was “support for anti-science bad craziness” and “hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source).”
Neoconservative pundits like Michael Goldfarb and Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic have launched a ‘dual loyalty’ smear campaign against Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). The charge is flat out absurb. NIAC was a consistently excellent source of information and opposition research and support during the recent uprising in Iran. I linked many blog posts from NIAC during the uprising.
Why, then, is he being attacked as a stooge for the Iranian regime? The answer is simple: while Parsi has harshly criticized the regime’s actions, he has joined Iran’s leading opposition figures in opposing the use of sanctions or military force against Iran, on the grounds that they would be likely simply to kill innocent Iranian civilians while strengthening the regime’s hold on power.
For the Iran hawks, this is a mortal sin. They will settle for nothing less than an Iranian Ahmed Chalabi — someone willing to tell them precisely what they want to hear, to claim that the Iranian people want to be bombed.
Arch-neoconservative Haim Saban is reportedly seeking a 50 percent ownership stake in Al Jazeera, according to Richard Silverstein. He writes, “Imagine the possibility of co-opting Al Jazeera’s Israel coverage. It’s an Aipac wet dream.”
Here’s Glenn Greenwald describing Saban in an article about one of the deeply compromised, warmongering foreign policy ‘experts’ he promotes through the “Saban Center for Middle East Studies,” a Washington thinktank.
The above-the-political-fray [ken] Pollack is employed by the “Saban Center for Middle East Studies” at Brookings — so named because it is funded with many millions of dollars by billionaire Haim Saban, an Israeli-American neoconservative who was a 2004 supporter of George Bush, was a close associate of Ariel Sharon, and spent the 1990s persuading Bill Clinton (with millions of dollars in donations to the Democratic Party) to be more supportive of Israel.
In a 2004 glowing profile, the NYT described Saban as “throwing his weight and money around Washington and, increasingly, the world, trying to influence all things Israeli,” and in that article, Saban told the NYT: “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.”
Richard writes, “If the emir of Qatar is seriously entertaining a Saban bid either he’s in financial difficulty or else he’s smokin’ some powerful weed.”
A writer at the New Republic, an organ of ‘liberal’ neoconservatism, (sometimes referred to as ‘liberal hawks) strongly suggests that Najibullah Zazi should be tortured.
Doesn’t this seem like something approaching the “ticking time bomb” scenario that constantly bedevils debates about interrogation techniques? How hard are the feds working Zazi for information about possible would-be terrorists inside the U.S. right now? How hard should they be working him? I keep leaning towards one conclusion–then imagining how I would feel about that conclusion if a bomb kills someone I know on the New York subway next week.
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in Texas, publishing standards are being set for that state’s textbooks. Since Texas is so huge relative to the rest of the US, its standards usually establish what will get said in the rest of the country’s textbooks. Here is a link to video of a Tx board of education meeting where a board member is objecting to the use of the words “imperialism” and “propaganda” to describe any action of the US government.
How are future US voters going to understand the world if they don’t have access to these concepts as they relate to America’s place in it?
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WSJ used to be conservative. Now it is becoming a real freak show. I guess that explains why the Financial sector is in the state it is in. It has completely given way to a certain specific sort of corruption. John Bolton covers it pretty well. Pure Freakin’ Crazy. You don’t even have to buy a ticket…
OPINION JULY 28, 2009, 9:40 P.M. ET.
By JOHN BOLTON
And don’t miss the comments. Dessert after the main course.
“We are all neocons now” — neocon
“We are all #Neda” — Iran
Who would Daniel Pipes vote for in the Iranian election?
“I’m sometimes asked who I would vote for if I were enfranchised in this election, and I think that, with due hesitance, I would vote for Ahmadinejad.”
Daniel Luban explains:
A more moderate president would threaten to puncture the hysterical and apocalyptic atmosphere in which discussion of the Iranian nuclear program is currently conducted.
And then there is this:
Also of related interest is the right’s angry reaction to the release of Roxana Saberi — on display, for example, in this James Kirchick monologue. From the hawks’ perspective, of course, the ideal outcome politically speaking would have been for Iran to execute Saberi, preferably in the most brutal and medieval fashion possible.
Typical neocons, expressing a fervent desire for everything to get worse. I just can’t trust these guys to run the country. If they knew of a pending terrorist attack, would they stop it, or let it happen because of all the opportunities it would create to advance their agenda?
But something bothered us yesterday: did Bumiller and her editors consider the possibility that a six-year stay Gitmo could actually create terrorists? That an innocent Afghan man embittered after being scooped up by the United States and unjustly imprisoned for years might actually become a terrorist?
….Bumiller and her editors seem to have realized the possibility that they might have gotten spun — though too late to change the front-page story in the print edition.
The paper has changed the lead and headline of the Web version of the story to reflect the uncertainty. The new headline reads: “Later Terror Link Cited for 1 in 7 Freed Detainees.” And the lead: “An unreleased Pentagon report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are engaged in terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.”
Compare that to the original version: “An unreleased Pentagon report provides new details concluding that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.”
A powerful and sharp critique of promoting democracy around the world using guns and bombs.
The end of neoconservatism (otherwise known as political quackery)?
Neoconservatism in foreign policy is best described as unilateral bellicosity cloaked in the utopian rhetoric of freedom and democracy.
– Joe Klein, in a column about John McCain (via Democracy Arsenal)
One definition of neoconservative foreign policy might be, that terrorists are assumed to be sane, and nation-states assumed to be mad as hatters.
The liberal foreign policy prescription would be to invert these assumptions and act accordingly.