Cheney: 'We will not allow Iran... a nuclear weapon'

So, how has this administration handled the issue before?

They gave the country $95,000,000.00 for their nuclear program. Of course.

Then rather that threatening that they were going to annihilate the country, it became one of the very few instances of negotiating. Using other countries to help negotiate the situation.

I guess bellicose words only depend if you have oil, or not.

North Korea versus Iran, my how things change.

"I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III . . ."
-
This idiot is going to start it in order to avoid it.
I'd say God help us, but it appears the repubs own him.

I know, let's start the preemptive strike by drafting every son and daughter of the Bush administration, plus every pro-Bush politician on Capitol Hill.

We'll, of course, supply them with the same high tech weaponry and substandard body armor our troops in Iraq have been given, and just to make things interesting, let's broadcast the entire thing on pay-per-view.

That's right. Mount helmet cams on each of their sons and daughters and broadcast it back home 24/7.

Wonder how long it would take those war mongers to change their viewpoint.

European Allies?????????????????

hahaha... good one Mark!

A gentlemens bet for anyone that can name a European nation that has claimed Iran is building nuclear weapons.

A "You are a Superstar Award" to anyone who can name any intelligence agency U.S. or European that says Iran could have a nuclear weapon within 10 years even if that is what they are doing.

next time it would be nice to have things put in a wee bit of perspective.

but I admit reporting has to be a lot more fun when you can use fear tactics.

White House spokesperson says Bush is not talking war but making a rhetorical point. I don't think George knows what a rhetorical point is. War he knows.
Dick should stay home and play with his grandchild. He has done enough damage.

Dick Cheney blah, blah, blah. Dumb old man!!!

The president would have made the announcement himself, but he can't pronounce it.

Cheney won't let the Iranians have Nukes?

I'd say that's about as dangerous as having Lil Dick running around loose with a double barreled shotgun in his hands:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR7CH9zvD6s

The GOoPer candidate for Prez in 08 is going to have a big problem on his "white guy" hands.
Does he let Prez 24% and Darth stump for him? or does he ignore them? either way is bad.

You watch and we'll decide, I'm Brit Hume.
Thankyou, goodnight, god bless and Sieg Heil 9/11.

This is the strategy of the neocons. They plant the seeds now, then they try to regain the White House then during the first year the new Republican President starts a new war. I guess the current war is getting old.

Rudys' new talking points..
9/11 Iran 9/11 Iran 9/11 Iran

Yet another person who doesn't know the meaning of the word, "neocon." Are there no dictionaries out there? And kudos to
VP Cheney. He's out of the Teddy Roosevelt school of American leadership.

He should have just cut the rhetoric and said "It's all about the oil and our immediate corporate profits, folks". He spices it up with talk of "spirit of freedom", terror, etc.

My favorite line?

"We offer a nobler alternative. We know from history that when people live in freedom, have their rights respected and have real hope for the future, they will not be drawn in by ideologies that stir up hatreds and incite violence."

He surely was joking. Tells how valuable our "freedom" is then turns around and takes those freedoms and the protection of them away. Of course the fearful little people lap it up.

This tool spewed the same (nonsense) before bombing Iraq. Who will fight this new war? Almost 4,000 US soldiers dead in Iraq. Somebody get this (guy) out of Washington!!

Taken from:
The Assaassins’ Gate America in Iraq
By George Packer
Chapter 1 pgs.15-38

(Selected as one of the best books of 2005 by The New York Times Book Review, Time, USA Today, The Washington Post Book World, the Economist, the boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, New York, and the San Francisco Chronicle)

The Iraq War will always be linked with the term "neoconservative." The connection is so tight that we've forgotten the history of the word. Neoconservatives have been around since the late sixties, when a small group of liberal intellectuals, many of them originating in the left-wing sects of the 1930's, watched an ear of Vietnam, black power, and student revolution unfold. They watched in horror, and while other liberals were turning dovish or radical, they moved sharply to the right. One of them defined a neoconservative as a liberal who's been mugged by reality. The great foreign policy concern of the first generation-Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Norman Podhertz, Irving Kristol, Daniel Moynihan-was the same concern of the Truman-Acheson generation of liberals : communism. The disaster in Vietnam did not teach them the lesson that America had tragically overreached and needed to learn the limits of power. They concluded instead that America had gone wobbly. Our unwillingness to fight, they argued, only encouraged the Soviet union to expand, until half the globe or more would fall under communist rule. As the seventies stumbled along-the SALT talks, detene, the fall of Saigon with the humiliating evacuation off the American embassy roof, the Iranian revolution, the hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the insurgencies in Central America-their alarm reached a dire pitch. In the pages of Commentary magazine, and in statements released by the group, the Committee on Present Danger, the neoconservatives warned that American power had grown provocatively weak. Accommodating the Soviet Empire was a sign of defeatism, not realism. The tone of the writings was righteous and apocalyptic, laced with anger at soft-headed liberals (many of them former friends and colleagues of the neoconservatives) who'd lost their nerve in the '60's. The tone was personal and, in a sense, natural; it owned something to the left-wing version of world historical struggle on which so many neoconservatives had nursed in their early years.

In their grim world view, there wasn’t much room for human rights outside the Soviet block-especially when President Carter put talk of human rights at the center of his foreign policy. Talk seemed to the neoconservatives truly dangerous, for it undermined friendly regimes ( Nicaragua, South Africa Iran) whose behavior we might not like (they were corrupt, they tortured and killed their own citizens) but whose survival was essential for the resistance of communism. In 1979, one of the neoconservatives, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Published an essay Commentary, “Dictatorships and Double Standards, ” arguing that the tendency of human-rights do-gooders to undermine America’s friends and leave the way open to our enemies turned both grand strategy and morality on their heads. Our friends might be nasty, but our enemies were worse; the difference between them was the difference between benign and malignant cancer. It was America’s mission to prevent authoritarian friends from becoming totalitarian enemies, which by their essence locked whole populations in eternal prisons that could never be opened from the inside. The essay caught Reagen’s eye and the following year won Kirkpatrik an appointment as UN ambassador under the newly elected president.

In Regan the neoconservatives found their champion. His election and his administration’s policies, which were partly inspired by the ideas of men like Podhoretz and Kristol, showed neoconservatives that ideas could lead to power, and that power required ideas. Their earlier lives in left wind sects in the 1930's and 40's had been studied in the political futility, all the more intense for their importance, carried on as if New York was St. Petersburg and Toledo Kieve, and America itself on the verge of its own dialectical orgasm of revolution. But, these fights at least taught the participants to take themselves and their ideas very seriously, to treat intellectual combat as an extension of the political and even the weaponized kind. In 1980, the long training of their younger years paid off.

To the neoconservatives’ ideas about American power Reagan added a quality of his own: a benign disposition. This wasn’t mere quirk of temperament. Reagan’s character, his comfort with the plain American idiom of optimism, gave the confrontational world view a smiling face that suggested something higher than grim combat. American power, Reagan said, was a force for good in the world - this at the time when a respectable opinion, in America and elsewhere, was still riveted by the memory of napalm igniting the jungles of South Vietnam. In 1976, Reagan won a fight at the Republican convention against the establishment forces of President Ford and his cold-blooded secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to put a “morality in foreign policy” plank in the party’s platform. To a large number of Americans, including Republicans, morality in foreign policy meant minding our own business. At best it meant speaking up for the dissents in the Soviet Union or Chile. Reagan meant something far grander; confronting and defeating communism all over the world. And though he lost the nomination battle to Ford in 1976, he won the war for the party’s soul.

In 1981, the first year of Reagan’s presidency, Elliott Abrams, who was Reagan’s aggressive assistant secretary of state for Latin America and later, human rights, wrote a memo arguing that the administration shouldn’t simply oppose communism; it should also promote democracy, in communist countries and noncommunist countries alike. The memo contradicted the harsher view expressed two years before by Jeane Kirkpatrick in the magazine edited by Abram’s father in law, Norman Podhoretz. Out of personal inclination as well as strategic calculation, Reagan in his rhetoric embraced the idea of promoting democracy. In 1982, speaking before the British parliament at Westminister, he presented a vision of democracy expanding across the globe. The words inspired a new generation of young officials orbiting around Reagan’s sun.

One of them was Robert Kagan. The son of Yale professor of Greek history, Kagan is about the same age as I, but we learned opposite lesson from the historical moment of our early years. After Vietnam, (I and everyone I knew) feared American overreach; Kagan (and the new generation of conservatives) feared American drift. “When I was in college in the late seventies, I remember all of us thinking that those hippie antiwar guys who came before us were a little ridiculous,” Kagan said when we met in Washington in the early 2004. “ That somehow wasn’t the way to be. I came of age really after Vietnam. The seventies, were my formative experience in the broadest sense, because then it was all-at least as far as I saw- American weakness, leading to these catastrophes: Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua. Just the weakness and the embarrassment of Jimmy Carter.”

So in his twenties Kagan became a soldier in the Reagan revolution. He first wrote speeches for Secretary of State George Shultz, then helped to develop Nicaragua policy under Elliott Abrams. But in the small proxy fights of the late Cold War, the choice between two kinds of armed ugliness. The Nicaraguan contras made an unconvincing founding fathers and when the Salvadoran military agreed to hold an election in 1983, the Regan emerged unscathed from the Iran-contra scandal that the tainted Abrams with a perjury conviction ( he was later pardoned by President Bush). In practice, morality in foreign policy looked less inspiring than the shining city on the hill. The Reagan administration’s policy on Iraq was no different from Henry Kissinger’s; to support the Baathist regime in the name of the national interest, even when the regime was committing genocide against the Kurds.

Still the idea and the language too hold in the minds of younger thinkers like Kagan; Anti-communism was only half a world view; the other half was democratic idealism, a faith in the transformational power of American values. At the end of the decade, after Regan left office, communism collapsed in Europe; the following year, in 1990, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas lost power in democratic election; and in 1991, Kagan watched the demise of the Soviet Union up close in Moscow, where his wife was stationed as a diplomat. All of this confirmed for the Reaganites that history was on their side. But the Cold War was over, an most of them no longer knew how to think about America and the world, and the neoconservatives started to drift.

A few years later, in the relative silence and obscurity of the Clinton ear, Kagan began to publish a series of articles that outlined a vision post-Cold War foreign policy. They appeared in the Commentary, the house organ of neoconservatives. But, by the mid-1990s the tone and some of the content had changed. Kagan, the ideological, son of Regan, was shaped by the experience in Nicaragua (which in his book A Twilight Struggle, he described as a great success for Reagan’s foreign policy) and the fall of communism- not by Vietnam. He was a man of the 80's, not the 60's, his tone was affirmation, not warning. In our conversation, Kagan brushed aside the term “neoconservative,” and when I asked whether he ever wondered if he was a liberal, he shot back, “ I am a liberal. In foreign policy I’m a liberal. The conservative tradition in foreign policy is the minimalist, realist tradition.” The liberal tradition, in Kagan’s genealogy, has upheld an activist foreign policy that reflects American ideal as well as interests, and it runs from Hamilton through John Quincy Adams, Lincoln (the Civil War was a pivotal case, as the Union embraced a liberal “foreign policy” toward slaver in the South), Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and ultimately Regan.

The real target of Kagan’s Commentary articles, published between 1994 and 1997, was the Republican Party. He regarded with dismay the party’s turn away from activism in foreign policy after the end of the Soviet Union. One by one, he watched his idealistic comrades from the Reagan years drop their former commitment to global democracy under the pressure of partisan politics or changed world circumstances or their own shifting views-until the only one left standing to support, for example, then invasion of Haiti on behalf of its elected government, was Robert Kagan. Everywhere he looked, both in the administration of the first Bush and in the congressional opposition to Bill Clinton, Republicans were in tired retreat. Intervention in messy little wars like Bosnia’s would lead to quagmire, warned such foreign policy titans as Senator John McCain, sounding like a liberal Democrat still recovering from the trauma of Vietnam (rather than the war hero for whom the trauma was not at all figurative). Without Reagan and the Soviet Union to focus its mind, the party had wandered back into cautious realism. Its wise men warned about “imperial overreach” and invoked that indispensable phrase from the Nixon Kissinger years, “vital national interest.” So much for morality in foreign policy. If the Yugoslavs and Rwandan were determined to slaughter one another, if Somalia was plunging into chaos while its people starved, these unhappy events were probably outside our powers to remedy and certainly outside our concern.

Against this timidity Kagan launched a powerful analytical attack. The end of the Cold War, he argued, was precisely the moment not to withdraw but to extend. America shouldn’t mourn the loss of balance of power but instead use its unrivaled power all around the world to pursue its interests and its values-which almost always go together. No corner of the earth is too distant or obscure to be allowed to fester dangerously or be depraved of the benevolent effects of American hegemony, namely democracy and a stable peace. Seeking to revive the spirit of Reagan, Kagan reached farther back to Theodore Roosevelt and the “idea that American people should take a hand in shaping mankind’s destiny, that playing such a role accords honor, and that right to such honor must be earned.” For Kagan, the extension of democracy around the world was as much about America’s national destiny as it was about doing good things for unhappy people in foreign countries. The values might be universal, but only one country could secure them. Kagan was expressing a kind of nationalism of Kipling’s whit man’s burden (without the racial baggage), the French mission civilisatrice (without the religious baggage) and the antique Paz0Romana (without an actual empire).

This strain of national messianism is alien to the hard-boiled realism of Nixon, Kissinger, and the first Bush as it is to the Wilsonian utopianism of liberals who believe in international law. Though they supported many of the same interventions in the nineties, Kagan dismissed these liberals as “ a shrinking camp of internationalists with nothing but ‘airy humanitarianism’ on their side.” Unlike them, he was a nationalist, and he had no faith that the Clinton administration would carry out the call to greatness. “The present generation of Democratic leaders simply does not have the stomach for world leadership.” Kagan wrote. The only hope lay in Republicans. His mission was to purge the party of realism and restore the higher aims of the great ex-president who was disappearing into the sunset of senescence out on the coast.

One of Kagan’s articles mentioned the original draft of the Defense Guidance Planning Guidance-“unfortunately rejected,” he lamented. The areas of convergence between the internal Pentagon memo and the journal articles was obvious: Top Republican officials and neoconservative foreign policy thinkers were sketching similarly large plans for the party. But there are differences, perhaps, not so obvious at the time, but ones that would prove critical a few years later, when the plans and ideas became foreign policy of the second President Bush and laid the groundwork for a second war with Iraq. Though the DPG acknowledged the Cold war was over, it was a document of the Cold Warriors-the hardliners of the 1970's who rejected accommodation with the Soviet Union. Paul Wolfowitz had been a member of the famous B Team, the group of outside experts that was appointed in 1976 by the CIA director George Bush to review intelligence on the soviet Union, and that came to far more dire conclusions about the Soviet capabilities and the intentions than the pro-detene officials of Nixon and Ford administrations. The DPG, written in 1992 under Wolfowitz’s guidance (though he claim not to have read the draft before it leaked), was very much a continuation of the neoconservative thinking that spawned the Committee on Present Danger. The skies were always ominous, threats always loomed on the horizon; even though the Soviet Union was no more, the sunlit vistas of the Reagan years had gone dark again. To the officials like Wolfowitz, it was always 1979. And what were the threats? They were everyone and everywhere: European allies, Arab dictatorships, Muslim terrorists, resurgent Russians, Chinese and North Korean communists, weapon proliferators. And what was the remedy? American power, everywhere-but not in the cause of democratic values. The DPG duly advocated “the spread of democratic forms of government and open economic systems,” but only as a gesture. When it came to the Middle East, “ our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil. We also seek to deter further aggression in the region, foster regional stability, protect US nationals and property, and safeguard our access to international air and seaways.” This is the language of realism and, not Reganism. It is the balance of power without balance. “With regard to Pakistan,” the document continued, “ a constructive US-Pakistan military relationship will be an important element in our strategy to promote stable security condition in Southwest Asia and Central Asia.” The possibility that the continued access to oil and good relations with Muslims dictators might ultimately be the cause of instability or worse didn’t occur to the DPG’s authors. The prospect of democracy in this dangerous region was never mentioned.

Here, Kagan and the Pentagon hard liners parted ways. Kagan saw no daylight between security, stability, and democracy. One of his Commentary articles too direct aim at the indulgence Jean Kirkpatrick had extended to right wing dictatorships in the same magazine a decade and a half earlier. What good was international order if it didn’t bring freedom?

There was another difference between Kagan and the Pentagon hardliners. They had not use for international alliances and institutions if these got in the way of America’s freedom to act. Kagan, though no lover of the UN, didn’t make a point of rejecting internationalism; at time sounding like a Truman-era Democrat, he even invoked it as an important source of American influence.

In 1996, Kagan and his friend William Kristol, by then editor of Rupert Murdoch’s new magazine The Weekly Standard, published an essay in Foreign Affairs called “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” It was a consolidation of the commentary articles into a stirring manifesto, with Kristol, Dan Quayle’s former chief of staff and shrewd Republican operative, adding the publicist’s touch to Kagan’s more analytical style. It’s hard to think of a less auspicious moment for a foreign-policy manifesto than the summer of 1996. The Internet and the stock market bubble were expanding fast. The presidential race was a snooze. The Republican candidate Robert Dole was trying to claim, as Kagan and Kristol wrote, “ that there really are differences in foreign policy between him and the president, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.” In 1996, as far as most Americans were concerned, the rest of the world disappeared.

Yet here were Kagan and Kristol summoning America to “ benevolent global hegemony.” They had the advantage over their neoconservative fathers of having already seen a small, determined quartet, writing combative articles in obscure journal, influence power in Washington. There was no reason to think it couldn’t happen again, with discipline and persistence and perhaps a bit of luck. The first goal was for their ideas to take over-or take back- the Republican Party. In a few years, the nation. After that, the world. This is the lesson that the American right has fully absorbed and put into practice ever since the 1960's: Ideas matter. The focused efforts of a handful of organized ideologies can win the political war when the opposition is confused and the country distracted. But they have to willing to fight, and often loose, obscure battles over years and even decades.

The next year, in 1997, Kagan and Kristol helped the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, a pressure group of leading foreign policy conservatives in the spirit of the Committee on the Present Danger. It included Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Abrams, Richard Perele, William Bennett, and James Woolsey; more than half the founding members would go on to assume high positions in the administration of George W Bush. On January 26, 1998, PNAC put itself on the map in the form of an open letter to President Clinton urging him to make a change of regime in Iraq the nation’s policy. “The current policy, which depends for its success upon the stead fatness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate,” the letter’s signers wrote, not hesitating to embarrass the president. After its publication, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, and one or two other signers went to the White House to discuss Iraq with Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser, and came away “appalled at the feebleness of the Clinton administration,” Perle said. The letter hadn’t specified exactly how Saddam and the Baath Party were to be overthrown; the signers disagreed about the means. But within a few months the Republican Congress overwhelmingly passed, and the Democratic president (besieged by the Monica Lewinsky affair) reluctantly signed, the Iraqi Liberation Act. Regime change in Iraq became official American policy.

Why did Iraq become the leading cause of the hawks? It had received no special attention in the defense Planning Guidance; it was barely mentioned in the writings of Kagan and Kristol. A year after the letter to Clinton, in 1999, Kosovo replaced Iraq as the overriding concern of PNAC. Still, by 1998 Saddam was beginning to slip out of the constrains imposed on him after the Gulf War and get away with it. Economic sanctions were breaking down, and some European countries, especially Iraq’s leading trading partners, France and Russia, were making noises about lifting them altogether. UN weapons inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq for security reasons after Saddam refused to continue cooperating with them; then he denied them reentry. Saddam was increasingly, in foreign policy jargon, “out of his box”-apparently to pursue unconventional weapons that had been his long-standing desire.

Perhaps the most important name on the PNAC letter was Paul Wolfowitz. Iraq had been Wolfowitz’s mind since the late 1970's, when he was a midlevel official in the Carter Pentagon and was instructed be Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to direct what would become a prophetic project, called the Limited Contingency Study. Wolfowitz set about to review threats to American interests outside Europe, and he ended up focusing on Persian Gulf oil- in particular, on the possibility of an invasion by Iraq to seize the oil fields of Kuwait or Saudia Arabia. Wolfowitz thinking took him well beyond conventional Cold War analysis, and it was received without enthusiasm at the Pentagon, where the study was shelved. The Iranian revolution in 1979, and the Iran-Iraq War that followed, turned American policy in the Gulf toward Iraq even as Saddam Hussein consolidated total power and exercised it with extraordinary brutality on his own population as well as on the Iranian enemy. There’s no reason to think that Wolfowitz, serving in several different capacities under Reagan and Bush in the 1980's, dissented from the tilt to Iraq. The concern of the limited Contingency Study had been strategic threats to Persian Gulf oil, not the nature of Arab totalitarianism.

But Wolfowitz was cut from finer cloth than Donald Rumsfeld, who on a diplomatic errand in 1983 famously school Saddam’s hand, or Dick Cheney, who spent the decade in Congress opposing human rights legislation, or George H.W. Bush, who looked the other way when the Chinese army crushed a popular movement in Tiananmen Square. Wolfowitz was raised on ideals in the house hold of Jack Wolfowitz, a Cornell mathematics professor whose family had fled anti-Semitism in Poland in 1920; several family members who had stayed behind eventually perished under the Nazis. Paul Wolfowitz grew up reading Orwell, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and his fathers library of books on war and the Holocaust. The atmosphere in the Wolfowitz home was morally serious, academically ambitious, and politically, devoted to the midcentury liberalism that worshiped the memory of Roosevelt and supported Truman’s anticommunism.

Talks of Wolfowitz @ Cornell “falling under the orbit of Professor bloom, for whom politics raised and answered the deepest questions about the purpose and value of human life...”

***

He organized a journey with friends to join the March on Washington in 19963, but when antiwar protests came to Cornell in Wolfowitz’s last semester in 1965m he and two others formed the committee for Critical Support of the US in Vietnam and held up signs at a tiny counter protest. (Wolfowitz, like nearly every other architect of the Iraq War, avoided military service in Vietnam, in his case through student deferments. Dick Cheney, who received five deferments, later explained, “ I had other priorities in the sixties than military service.” John Bolton, who like George W Bush, joined the National Guard, was more straightforward: “I confess I had no desire to dies in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.”)

***

Democracy and human rights might not have been the stuff of his moral education, but they didn’t play a central role in his early career in government. A sort of turning point might have come the last days of the Gulf War in 1991. The decision to end the war before the Iraqi Republican Guard divisions were destroyed, and to allow Saddam’s helicopters to fly after the cease-fire, led directly to the massacres of tens of thuosands of Shia and Kurds who had risen up against the regime. Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense for policy under Cheney, was appalled and argued strenuously that the United States should resume operations to stop the helicopter attacks. But Cheney, along with everyone else at the top of the administration, didn’t want to undermine General Norman Schwarzkopf’s field authority, and that had been the objective. According to James Mann’s excellent group biography Rise of the Vulcans, a Pentagon official told Cheney,” You know, we could change the government and put in a democracy.” Cheney answered that the Saudis would object. So the Iraqi intifada was allowed to be crushed.

Richard Perle told me that, at the end of the Gulf War, Wolfowitz”wanted to finish Saddam’s regime, and not only did he want to finish it, he believed that there was strong basis for doing so.”

***

In Wolfowitz’s case, he might have been angling for a job in the administration of the leading Republican presidential candidate, George W Bush, whom he served as a foreign policy adviser during the campaign and who made it clear that crusades to transform the world after America’s image were not going to be his thing. Bush’s guide to the world could be found in Foreign affairs article- not Kagan’s and Kristol’s from 1996 but an essay in January 2000 issue by the provost of Stanford University, Condoleezza Rice, which called for a return to the great-power realism of Nixon, Kissinger, and Bush’s father.

But after the disputed election, when younger Bush’s national security team began to take shape, one found sprinkled throughout the government the names of neoconservatives who knew one another from years in and out of power, and whose ideas for the post Cold War world had come into focus during the nineties: Wolfowitz, Feith, Wurmser, Shulsky, Stephen Cambone, and others at the Pentagon; Wolfowitz’s former aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, John Hannah, and William J. Luti in Vice President Cheney’s office; Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and Zalmay Khalizad on the National Security Council; John Bolton at the State; Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and R. James Woolsey on the advisory Defense Policy Board. Their patrons were Cheney and the new secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was a hard-edged Cold Warrior, and an aggressive nationalist. Cheney, Rumsfeld’s protege, colleague, and pal through several administrations, came from the same stock.

Many of these officials had served at the middle level under Reagan, embracing his hawkish idealism. The fall of communism and the emergence of the United States as the world’s only super power had given them a sense of historical victory. Then they had spent the nineties watching the first Bush administration return to narrow realism and the Clinton administration founder from crisis to crisis, squandering Reagan’s triumph. They had made their long march through the think tanks and policy journals, honing their ideas and perfecting their attacks. Now they were coming back to power as insurgents, scornful of the entrenched bureaucracy, the more cautious moderates in their own party (including the new secretary of state, Colin Powell), and the tired, defeated Democrats. They were supremely confident; all they needed was a mission.

I asked Robert Kagan how his ideas had traveled from the pages of Commentary to the foreign-policy apparatus of Bush administration. He waved me off. It didn’t work that way, he said. “September 11 is the turning point. Nothing else. This is not what bush was on September 10.”

The ideas of neoconservatism had nothing to do with it?

Kagan sighed. “Here’s what I’m willing to say. Did we keep alive a certain way of looking at American foreign policy at a time when it was pretty unpopular? Yes. I think probably you need to have people do that so that you have something to come back to. And, in a way, then you have a ready-made approach to the world.”

It is not a curse word. It is not as simple as just a liberal (Dem) who became a conservative (Rep). It is an ideology. I got tired retyping towards the end so I just skipped to the bottom line.

Let Dick and George fight this one. They sat out their war and have been fighting the current one vicariously through our children's lives. You go, big man; and take the other brave warrior with you.

I can only hope Irans' citizens have enough flowers to throw at us.

More pandering to AIPAC. Why don't the politicians (either party) speak to the fact that the only nuclear weapons threat in the M/East resides in Dimona, Israel; a country which, having made pre-emptive military attacks something of an art form, has terrorized its neigbors for years with its sophisticated weaponry furnished courtesy of the American taxpayer.

Time to re-educate:
Don't give me a chapter from a book as your post. I'd be interested in your take--synthesis--or the bottom line--way more interesting. Sorry--scanned--didn't read it all. Do you think we all need re-education?

Vivan,

You can post about the meaning and the origins to now of what neo-conservatism is until you are blue in the face on here. People have tried synthesis, people have tired Webster and Wikipeida, and still "yet another person who doesn't know the meaning of the word, 'neocon'" stays the lonely wolf cry. I was referring to Garbonzo. I figured I'd try a chapter in the book since obviously it traces it way better than I ever could. I'm glad you scanned and didn't read it at all- it wasn't aimed at you. It is up for whomever wants to take the time to read it- you know just like every other post on here it doesn't include a clause forcing you to read it. "Do you think we all need re-education?" Did I address anyone in particular. No, I don't want to re-educate anyone in particular or any group in total. Try not to take it all too personally.

NEOCON - uneducated, white redneck who votes against his own self-interests and for the Republican party because he hates minorities and he loves to go play "shootem'up" in some Arab country in the name of freedom.

JohnE, I'd add overeducated East coast pencil necks who want some other schmuck's kid to die for their lust for oil.

Sorry, but the definition of neoconservative as "a liberal espousing conservative values" is not even close to accurate. Their views are not "conservative," and most of them are not "former liberals." The original neocons from the 30's-40's generation may have been, but modern neocons like Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Fred Kaplan, William Kristol, Elliott Abrams, etc. were never liberals.

From Wikipedia:

Distinctions from other conservatives
Most people currently described as "neoconservatives" are members of the Republican Party, but while neoconservatives have generally been in electoral alignment with other conservatives, have served in the same Presidential Administrations, and have often ignored intra-conservative ideological differences in alliance against those to their left, there are notable differences between neoconservative and traditional or "paleoconservative" views. In particular, neoconservatives disagree with the nativist, protectionist, and non-interventionist foreign policy rooted in American history and once exemplified by the ex-Republican "paleoconservative" Pat Buchanan. As compared with traditional conservatism and libertarianism, which also sometimes exhibits a non-interventionist strain, neoconservatism is characterized by an increased emphasis on defense capability, a willingness to challenge regimes deemed hostile to the values and interests of the United States, pressing for free-market policies abroad. Neoconservatives are strong believers in democratic peace theory.

The support of neoconservatives for the civil rights movement also marked it off from traditional conservatism.[10][7]

Neoconservatives also differ with the traditional "pragmatic" approach to foreign policy often associated with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, which emphasized pragmatic accommodation with dictators; peace through negotiations, diplomacy, and arms control; détente and containment—rather than rollback—of the Soviet Union; and the initiation of the process that led to ties between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism

This was one of my favorite selections...

"Several years ago, when abuses were committed at Abu Ghraib -- a facility having nothing to do with the high-value detainee program -- when those abuses came to light, Americans were mortified and rightly outraged. The wrongdoers were arrested, prosecuted and punished, as justice demanded."

Outside of the military personnel who were convicted was anyone else even charged? Many of these "interogations" were conducted by CIA and defense contractors. Have a single one of them been brought to light?

Of course not. "We Don't Torture"... "Our contractors do..."

It is all about deniability.

Given this guys record for getting the story right in Irag (welcomed as liberators..., last throes..., the oil will pay for the war...) Why does anyone listen to him.

He only preaches to the choir because they are the only ones who will not question him. When was the last time Cheney addressed the public or answered questions in a REAL news conference?

Hallelujah!! Our Fearless Leader is ready to bring on World War III, which will lead to the Rapture! The non-believers will be smited, and the "righteous" will ascend to their rightful place as rulers of G-d's Kingdom.

What's everyone so worried about?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism

Posted by: Distrust and Verify | October 22, 2007 11:21 AM

Why do libs use Wikipedia as a source when ANYBODY can write anything, whether it's true or not, as a fact and post it there.

Of all the information on the internet, why use an unreliable source.

This is what Wiki now says about neocons:

Pejorative use

The term is frequently used pejoratively by self-described paleoconservatives, Democrats, and by libertarians of both left and right. But most Democrats do not understand the the term and use it incorrectly. Democrats throw the term around when they feel their patriotism is being questioned.

Posted by: Retards Trust Wikipedia | October 22, 2007 12:54 PM

Please note that Wikipedia's comments on perjorative use of the term "Neoconservative" end with "and by libertarians of both left and right." The "But most Democrats do not understand" part of Retards Trust Wikipedia's post is his opinion, not a quote.

Personally, when I think of "neocons" or "neoconservatism" I equate it more according to John Dean's reference to Right-Wing Authoritarians. But that's just me.

"Democrats throw the term around when they feel their patriotism is being questioned."

Sounds like its written by a neocon. Anywho, how about getting to the meat of the matter?

Are the views espoused by neoconservatives "conservative?" Is "a liberal espousing conservative values" a reasonable definition of "neoconservatives" when almost all the living neocons were never liberals and their views are not "conservative" as the word has been used for a hundred years?

"According to Irving Kristol, the founder and "god-father" of Neoconservatism, there are three basic pillars of Neoconservatism: a low tax, pro-growth and less risk-averse approach to economics; a less libertarian approach to domestic affairs than some other conservatives; and an idealist, expansive foreign policy.[15] Kristol also claims three distinctive aspects of neoconservatism from previous forms of conservatism: a forward-looking approach drawn from their liberal heritage, rather than the reactionary and dour approach of previous conservatives; a meliorative outlook, proposing alternate reforms rather than simply attacking social liberal reforms; taking philosophical or ideological ideas very seriously."

Even neocons think there philosophy is distinct from "paleoconservatives."
And I assure you, true conservatives (John W is our only resident "paleoconservative") do not appreciate being lumped in with the Utopian, neo-Wilsonian "neoconservatives."

"Sounds like its written by a neocon. Anywho, how about getting to the meat of the matter?"

I think using an unreliable source IS the meat of the matter.

There is no way you can take someone seriously that uses Wikipedia as their source.

It's the same as using a blog entry by an anonymous person as a source.

But if that's all you have.....

dear 'retard': I suspect you must be a neocon.

You are correct on one point however. Being called a neocon is indeed an insult.

"Retards Trust Wikipedia"

Are the views espoused by neoconservatives "conservative?" Is "a liberal espousing conservative values" a reasonable definition of "neoconservatives" when almost all the living neocons were never liberals and their views are not "conservative" as the word has been used for a hundred years?

Even if I'm retarded, you should still be able to answer these questions. And, as they originate from a retard, I would think that would make your job easier.

So, what is a "neoconservative?"

What are these "conservative" values that the "formerly liberals" are espousing?

Yet another person who doesn't know the meaning of the word, "neocon." Are there no dictionaries out there? And kudos to
VP Cheney. He's out of the Teddy Roosevelt school of American leadership.

Posted by: Garbonzo | October 21, 2007 4:32 PM

"Don't speak and swing the stick wildly until it's broken"?

I must've missed Teddy Roosevelt day in gradeschool.

"VP Cheney. He's out of the Teddy Roosevelt school of American leadership.

Posted by: Garbonzo | October 21, 2007 4:32 PM"

That's downright screwy.

“Please note that Wikipedia's comments on perjorative use of the term "Neoconservative" end with "and by libertarians of both left and right." The "But most Democrats do not understand" part of Retards Trust Wikipedia's post is his opinion, not a quote.”
Posted by: Anonymous | October 22, 2007 1:28 PM

Not true. Wiki’s comments end as I quoted them. I changed the page 12 hours ago and the comments are still there.

ANYONE at ANYTIME can edit Wiki and say ANYTHING, that is why it is an unreliable source.

Using Wiki as a source for any serious discussion is retarded. Anyone that defends someone using it as a source is just as retarded.

"Even if I'm retarded..."
Posted by: Distrust and Verify | October 22, 2007 3:26 PM

Way to gain credibility, quote Wiki and tell people you're a retard.

You are an eloquent spokesman for the left.

By the way this is from Wiki dictionary:

Noun Singular
retard

Plural
retards

retard (plural retards)

retardation; delay
(offensive slang) a person with mental retardation
(offensive slang) a stupid person, or one who is slow to learn, Someone that calls himself Distrust and Verify

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/retard#Noun