Neocons:
The ‘Anti-Realists’
America’s neocons, who wield great power
inside the U.S. government and media,
endanger the planet by concocting strategies
inside their heads that ignore real-world
consequences. Thus, their “regime changes”
have unleashed ancient hatreds and spread
chaos across the globe.
By Robert Parry
January 18, 2015 "ICH"
- "Consortium
News"
- Historically, one of the main
threads of U.S. foreign policy was called
“realism,” that is the measured application
of American power on behalf of definable
national interests, with U.S. principles
preached to others but not imposed.
This approach traced back to
the early days of the Republic when the
first presidents warned of foreign
“entangling alliances” – and President John
Quincy Adams, who was with his father at the
nation’s dawning,
explained in 1821 that while America
speaks on behalf of liberty, “she has
abstained from interference in the concerns
of others, even when conflict has been for
principles to which she clings, as to the
last vital drop that visits the heart. …
“Wherever the standard of
freedom and independence has been or shall
be unfurled, there will her heart, her
benedictions and her prayers be. But she
goes not abroad, in search of monsters to
destroy.”
However, in modern times,
foreign policy “realism” slid into an
association with a cold calculation of
power, no longer a defense of the Republic
and broader national interests but of
narrow, well-connected economic interests.
The language of freedom was woven into a
banner for greed and plunder. Liberty
justified the imposition of dictatorships on
troublesome populations. Instead of
searching for monsters to destroy, U.S.
policy often searched for monsters to
install.
In the wake of such
heartless actions – like imposing pliable
“pro-business” dictatorships on countries
such as Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Indonesia,
Chile and engaging in the bloodbath of
Vietnam – “realism” developed a deservedly
negative reputation as other supposedly more
idealistic foreign policy strategies gained
preeminence.
Some of those approaches
essentially turned John Quincy Adams’s
admonition on its head by asserting that it
is America’s duty to search out
foreign monsters to destroy. Whether called
“neoconservatism” or “liberal
interventionism,” this approach openly
advocated U.S. interference in the affairs
of other nations and took the sides of
people who at least presented themselves as
“pro-democracy.”
In recent years, as the
ranks of the “realists” – the likes of
George Kennan, Henry Kissinger and Brent
Scowcroft – have aged and thinned, the ranks
of the neocons and their junior partners,
the liberal interventionists, swelled.
Indeed, these “anti-realists” have now grown
dominant, touting themselves as morally
superior because they don’t just call for
human rights, they take out governments that
don’t measure up.
The primary distinction
between
the neocons and the liberal interventionists has
been the centrality of Israel in the
neocons’ thinking while their liberal
sidekicks put “humanitarianism” at the core
of their world view. But these differences
are insignificant, in practice, since the
liberal hawks are politically savvy enough
not to hold Israel accountable for its human
rights crimes and clever enough to join with
the neocons in easy-to-sell “regime change”
strategies toward targeted countries with
weak lobbies in Washington.
In those “regime change”
cases, there is also a consensus on how to
handle the targeted countries: start with
“soft power” – from anti-regime propaganda
to funding internal opposition groups to
economic sanctions to political
destabilization campaigns – and, then if
operationally necessary and politically
feasible, move to overt military
interventions, applying America’s
extraordinary military clout.
Moral Crusades
These interventions are
always dressed up as moral crusades – the
need to free some population from the
clutches of a U.S.-defined “monster.” There
usually is some “crisis” in which the
“monster” is threatening “innocent life” and
triggering a “responsibility to protect”
with the catchy acronym, “R2P.”
But the reality about
these “anti-realists” is that their actions,
in real life, almost always inflict severe
harm on the country being “rescued.” The
crusade kills many people – innocent and
guilty – and the resulting disorder can
spread far and wide, like some contagion
that cannot be contained. The neocons and
the liberal interventionists have become, in
effect, carriers of the deadly disease
called chaos.
And, it has become a very
lucrative chaos for the well-connected by
advancing the “dark side” of U.S. foreign
policy where lots of money can be made while
government secrecy prevents public scrutiny.
As author James Risen
describes in his new book, Pay Any Price,
a new caste of “oligarchs” has emerged from
the 9/11 “war on terror” — and the various
regional wars that it has unpacked — to
amass vast fortunes. He writes: “There is an
entire class of wealthy company owners,
corporate executives, and investors who have
gotten rich by enabling the American
government to turn to the dark side. … The
new quiet oligarchs just keep making money.
They are the beneficiaries of one of the
largest transfers of wealth from public to
private hands in American history.” [p. 56]
And the consolidation of
this wealth has further cemented the
political/media influence of the
“anti-realists,” as the new “oligarchs” kick
back portions of their taxpayer largesse
into think tanks, political campaigns and
media outlets. The neocons and their liberal
interventionist pals now fully dominate the
U.S. opinion centers, from the right-wing
media to the editorial pages (and the
foreign desks) of many establishment
publications, including the Washington Post
and the New York Times.
By contrast, the voices of
the remaining “realists” and their current
unlikely allies, the anti-war activists, are
rarely heard in the mainstream U.S. media
anymore. To the extent that these dissidents
do get to criticize U.S. meddling abroad,
they are dismissed as “apologists” for
whatever “monster” is currently in line for
the slaughter. And, to the extent they
criticize Israel, they are smeared as
“anti-Semitic” and thus banished from
respectable society.
Thus, being a “realist” in
today’s Official Washington requires hiding
one’s true feelings, much as was once the
case if you were a gay man and you had
little choice but to keep your sexual
orientation in the closet by behaving
publicly like a heterosexual and surrounding
yourself with straight friends.
In many ways, that’s what
President Barack Obama has done. Though
arguably
a “closet realist,” Obama staffed his
original administration with foreign policy
officials acceptable to the neocons and the
liberal interventionists, such as Robert
Gates at Defense, Hillary Clinton at State,
Gen. David Petraeus as a top commander in
the field.
Even in his second term,
the foreign-policy hawks have remained
dominant, with people like neocon Assistant
Secretary of State for European Affairs
Victoria Nuland enflaming the crisis in
Ukraine and UN Ambassador Samantha Power, an
R2Per, pushing U.S. military intervention in
Syria.
A Slow-Motion
Catastrophe
I have personally watched
today’s foreign-policy pattern evolve during
my 37 years in Washington — and it began
innocently enough. After the Vietnam War and
the disclosures about bloody CIA coups
around the globe, President Jimmy Carter
called for human rights to be put at the
center of U.S. foreign policy. His
successor, Ronald Reagan, then hijacked the
human rights rhetoric while adapting to it
to his anticommunist cause.
Because Reagan’s
usurpation of human rights language involved
support for brutal right-wing forces, such
as the Guatemalan military and the
Nicaraguan Contra rebels, the process
required an Orwellian change in what words
meant. “Pro-democracy” had to become
synonymous with the rights and profits of
business owners, not its traditional meaning
of making government work for the common
people.
But this perversion of
language was not as much meant to fool the
average Guatemalan or Nicaraguan, who was
more likely to grasp the reality behind the
word games since he or she saw the cruel
facts up close; it was mostly to control the
American people who, in the lexicon of
Reagan’s propagandists, needed to have their
perceptions managed. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The
Victory of Perception Management.“]
The goal of the young
neocons inside the Reagan administration –
the likes of Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan
(now Victoria Nuland’s husband) – was to
line up the American public behind Reagan’s
aggressive foreign policy, or as the phrase
of that time went, to “kick the Vietnam
Syndrome,” meaning to end the popular
post-Vietnam resistance to more foreign
wars.
President George H.W. Bush
pronounced this mission accomplished in 1991
after the end of the well-sold Persian Gulf
War, declaring “we’ve kicked the Vietnam
Syndrome once and for all.”
By then, the propaganda
process had fallen into a predictable
pattern. You pick out a target country; you
demonize its leadership; you develop some
“themes” that are sure to push American hot
buttons, maybe fictional stories about
“throwing babies out of incubators” or the
terrifying prospect of “a mushroom cloud”;
and it’s always smart to highlight a
leader’s personal corruption, maybe his
“designer glasses” or “a sauna in his
palace.”
The point is not that the
targeted leader may not be an unsavory
character. Frankly, most political leaders
are. Many Western leaders and their Third
World allies – both historically and
currently – have much more blood on their
hands than some of the designated “monsters”
that the U.S. government has detected around
the world. The key is the image-making.
What makes the process
work is the application and amplification of
double standards through the propaganda
organs available to the U.S. government. The
compliant mainstream American media can be
counted on to look harshly at the behavior
of some U.S. “enemy” in Venezuela, Iran,
Russia or eastern Ukraine, but to take a
much more kindly view of a U.S.-favored
leader from Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Georgia
or western Ukraine.
While it’s easy – and safe
career-wise – for a mainstream journalist to
accuse a Chavez, an Ahmadinejad, a Putin or
a Yanukovych of pretty much anything, the
levels of proof get ratcheted up when it’s a
Uribe, a Saudi King Abdullah, a Saakashvili
or a Yatsenyuk – not to mention a Netanyahu.
The True Dark Side
But here is the dark truth
about this “humanitarian” interventionism:
it is spinning the world into an endless
cycle of violence. Rather than improving the
prospects for human rights and democracy, it
is destroying those goals. While the
interventionist strategies have made huge
fortunes for well-connected government
contractors and well-placed speculators who
profit off chaos, the neocons and their
“human rights” buddies are creating a hell
on earth for billions of others, spreading
death and destitution.
Take, for example, the
beginnings of the Afghan War in the 1980s –
after the Soviet Union invaded to protect a
communist-led regime that had sought to pull
Afghanistan out of the middle ages,
including granting equal rights to women.
The United States responded by encouraging
Islamic fundamentalism and arming the
barbaric mujahedeen.
At the time, that was
considered the smart play because Islamic
fundamentalism was seen as a force that
could counter atheistic communism. So,
starting with the Carter administration but
getting dramatically ramped up by the Reagan
administration, the United States threw in
its lot with the extremist Wahhabis of Saudi
Arabia to invest billions of dollars in
supporting these Islamist militants who
included one wealthy Saudi named Osama bin
Laden.
At the time, with Great
Communicator Ronald Reagan leading the way,
virtually the entire U.S. mainstream media
and nearly every national politician hailed
the mujahedeen as noble “freedom fighters”
but the reality was always much different.
[See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com’s “How
US Hubris Baited Afghan Trap.”]
By the end of the 1980s,
the U.S.-Saudi “covert operation” had
“succeeded” in driving the Soviet army out
of Afghanistan with Kabul’s communist regime
ultimately overthrown and replaced by the
fundamentalist Taliban, who stripped women
of their rights and covered up their bodies.
The Taliban also provided safe haven for bin
Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist band, which
– by the 1990s – had shifted its sights from
Moscow to Washington and New York.
Even though the Saudis
officially broke with bin Laden after he
declared his intentions to attack the United
States, some wealthy Saudis and other
Persian Gulf multi-millionaires, who shared
bin Laden’s violent form of Islamic
fundamentalism, continued to fund him and
his terrorists right up to – and beyond –
al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11.
Then, America’s fear and
fury over 9/11 opened the path for the
neocons to activate one of their
longstanding plans, to invade and occupy
Iraq, though it had nothing to do with 9/11.
The propaganda machinery was cranked up and
again all the “smart” people fell in line.
Dissenters were dismissed as “Saddam
apologists” or called “traitors.” [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The
Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.“]
By fall 2002, the idea of
invading Iraq – and removing “monster”
Saddam Hussein – was not just a neocon goal,
it was embraced by nearly ever prominent
“liberal interventionist” in the United
States, including editors and columnists of
the New Yorker, the New York Times and
virtually every major news outlet.
At this point, the
“realists” were in near total eclipse, left
to grumble futilely or grasp onto some
remaining “relevance” by joining the pack,
as Henry Kissinger did. The illegal U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq also brushed aside the
“legal internationalists” who believed that
global agreements, especially prohibitions
on aggressive war, were vital to building a
less violent planet.
An Expanding
Bloodbath
In the rush to war in
Iraq, the neocons and the liberal
interventionists won hands down in 2002-2003
but ended up causing a bloodbath for the
people of Iraq, with estimates of those
killed ranging from hundreds of thousands to
more than a million. But the U.S. invaders
did more than that. They destabilized the
entire Middle East by disturbing the fragile
fault lines between Sunni and Shiite.
With Sunni dictator Saddam
Hussein ousted and hanged, Iraq’s vengeful
Shiite politicians established their own
authoritarian state under the military wing
of the U.S. and British armies. Neocon
hubris made matters worse when many former
Sunni officials and officers were cashiered
and marginalized, creating fertile ground
for al-Qaeda to put down roots among Iraqi
Sunnis, planting a particularly brutal
strain nourished by Jordanian terrorist Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi.
Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda in Iraq
attracted thousands of foreign Sunni
jihadists eager to fight both the Westerners
and the Shiites. Others went to Yemen to
join Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Trained in the brutal methods of these Iraqi
and Yemeni insurgencies, hardened jihadists
returned to their homes in Libya, Syria,
Europe and elsewhere.
Though the disaster in
Iraq should have been a powerful cautionary
tale, the neocons and the liberal
interventionists proved to be much more
adept at playing the political-propaganda
games of Washington than in prevailing in
the complex societies of the Middle East.
Instead of being purge en
masse, the Iraq War instigators faced
minimal career accountability. They managed
to spin the Iraq “surge” as “victory at
last” and maintained their influence over
Washington even under President Obama, who
may have been a “closet realist” but who
kept neocons in key posts and surrounded
himself with liberal interventionists. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The
Surge Myth’s Deadly Result.”]
Thus, Obama grudgingly was
enlisted into the next
neocon-liberal-interventionist crusades in
2011: the military intervention to overthrow
Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and the covert
operation to remove Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
In both cases, the propaganda was ramped up
again, presenting the opposition groups as
“pro-democracy moderates” who were
peacefully facing down brutal dictators.
In reality, the
oppositions were more a mixed bag of some
actual moderates and Islamist extremists.
When Gaddafi and Assad – emphasizing the
presence of terrorists – struck back
brutally, the “R2P” crowd demanded U.S.
military intervention, either directly in
Libya or indirectly in Syria. With the U.S.
mainstream media onboard, nearly every
occurrence was put through the propaganda
filter that made the regimes all dark and
the oppositions bathed in a rosy glow.
After the U.S.-led air war
destroyed Gaddafi’s military and opened the
way for an opposition victory, Gaddafi was
captured and brutally murdered. Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, who might be called a
“neocon-lite,” joked: “We came, we saw, he
died.”
But the chaos that
followed Gaddafi’s death was not so funny,
contributing to the killing of U.S.
Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three
other American diplomatic personnel in
Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, and to the
spreading of terrorism and violence across
northern Africa. By July 2014, the U.S. and
other Western nations had abandoned their
embassies in Tripoli as all political order
broke down.
Syrian Madness
In Syria, which had long
been near the top of the neocon/Israeli hit
list for “regime change,” U.S., Western and
Sunni support for another “moderate
opposition” led to a civil war. Soon, what
“moderates” there were blended into the
ranks of Islamic extremists, either the
Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affiliate, or the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or simply
the Islamic State, which evolved from
Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda in Iraq, continuing
Zarqawi’s hyper-brutality even after his
death.
Though the mainstream U.S.
media blamed almost everything on Syrian
President Assad, many Syrians recognized
that the Sunni extremists who emerged as the
power behind the opposition were a grave
threat to other Syrian religious groups,
including the Shiites, Alawites and
Christians — and that Assad’s authoritarian
but secular regime represented their best
hope for survival. [See Consortiumnews.com’s
“Syrian
Rebels Embrace al-Qaeda.“]
But instead of looking for
a realistic political solution, the neocons
and the liberal interventionists insisted on
a U.S. military intervention, either
covertly by arming the opposition or overtly
by mounting a Libyan-style bombing campaign
to destroy Assad’s armed forces and open the
gates of Damascus to the rebels. Under
pressure from the likes of Ambassador Power
and Secretary of State Clinton, Obama bowed
to the demand to ship weapons to the rebels,
although the CIA later discovered that many
U.S. weapons ended up in extremist hands.
Still, with Obama dragging
his feet on a larger-scale commitment, the
neocon/liberal-interventionist coalition saw
a great chance to push Obama into a bombing
campaign after a Sarin gas attack outside
Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013. The war hawks and
the U.S. media immediately blamed Assad
despite doubts among some U.S. intelligence
analysts who suspected a provocation by the
rebels.
Those
doubts and Obama’s fear of an extremist
victory led him to call off the planned
bombing at the last minute, and he accepted
a deal brokered by Russian President
Vladimir Putin to arrange for Assad to
surrender all Syria’s chemical weapons,
while Assad continued to deny any role in
the Sarin attack. The neocons and liberal
interventionists were furious at both Obama
and Putin.
Alarmed about this
“realist” Obama-Putin collaboration, the
“anti-realists” turned to demonizing the
Russian president and driving a wedge
between him and Obama. The place to splinter
that relationship turned out to be Ukraine,
where neocon Assistant Secretary of State
Nuland was perfectly positioned to push for
the ouster of elected pro-Russian President
Viktor Yanukovych.
As Nuland noted in one
speech, the U.S. government had invested $5
billion in the “European aspirations” of the
western Ukrainians, including funding for
political activists, journalists and various
business groups. The time to collect on that
investment came in February 2014 when
violent demonstrations in Kiev, with
well-organized neo-Nazi militias supplying
the muscle, drove Yanukovych from
power. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons’
Ukraine-Syria-Iran Gambit.“]
The Ukraine coup played
out along another historic fault line,
between European-oriented western Ukraine,
where Adolf Hitler’s SS had gained
significant support during World War II, and
eastern Ukraine with its ethnic Russian
population and close business ties to
Russia.
After the U.S. State
Department rushed to embrace the coup regime
as “legitimate” and as the U.S. media dished
out anti-Yanukvych propaganda, such as
citing a sauna in his home , Obama tagged
along, falling into the neocon trap, again.
U.S.-Russian relations spiraled into a
hostility not seen since the Cold War. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama’s
True Foreign Policy Weakness.”]
Shattering Ukraine
Yet, while the neocons and
their liberal allies
had “won” again, what did that winning
mean for the people of Ukraine? Their
country, already teetering on the status of
failed state, slid into deeper economic
chaos and civil war. With neo-Nazis and
other extremists appointed to key national
security positions, the new regime began
lashing out at ethnic Russians who were
resisting Yanukovych’s ouster.
Crimea voted
overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and
rejoin Russia, a move that Western
government’s denounced as an illegal
“annexation” and the major U.S. media termed
an “invasion,” although the Russian troops
involved were already stationed in Crimea
under an agreement to maintain the Russian
naval base at Sevastopol.
Ukraine’s eastern
provinces also sought secession, prompting
military clashes that inflicted some of the
worst bloodshed seen on the European
continent in decades. Thousands died and
millions fled.
Of course, the standard
line in the U.S. media was that it was all
Putin’s fault, even as the Kiev regime
shelled eastern cities and
unleashed brutal neo-Nazi militias to
engage in street fighting, the first time
storm troopers emblazoned with Nazi
insignias had been deployed in Europe since
World War II. Yet, buoyed by how easily the
anti-Putin propaganda had prevailed, some
neocons even began fantasizing about “regime
change” in Moscow.
Yet, if you were to step
back for a minute and look at the history of
the past 35 years – from the Afghan covert
op through the Iraq War and the U.S.
interventions in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and
elsewhere – what you would see is the
neocons and their liberal sidekicks behaving
like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, stirring up
troubles that soon spun out of control.
Just look at the chaos
that has been unleashed by these reckless
neocon and liberal interventionist policies
– from encouraging the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism and facilitating the
formation of al-Qaeda via the covert war in
Afghanistan, from creating a hotbed for
attracting and training jihadists during the
Iraq War, from undermining regimes in Libya
and Syria that – for all their faults – were
trying to contain this spread of terrorism,
and from provoking a new Cold War in Ukraine
that risks bringing nuclear weapons into
play in a showdown with Russia.
The latest outgrowth of
all this trouble was the terror attack in
Paris this month, with some European
hotheads now calling for another neocon
favorite idea, “a war of civilizations,”
pitting Christian societies against Islam in
some modern version of the actual Crusades.
Yes, I know we’re not
supposed to talk about root causes of this
chaos “at a time like this,” and we are
surely not supposed to blame the neocons and
their liberal interventionist chums.
Instead, we’re supposed to escalate the
conflicts and the chaos.
We’re supposed to continue
the neocon “tough-guy-ism” — by repressing
Muslims in the West, by ousting Assad in
Syria, by crushing the ethnic Russian
resistance in Ukraine, by destabilizing
Russia, and by forsaking negotiations with
Iran over its nuclear facilities in favor of
more sanctions and maybe more bombing. All
somehow in the name of “democracy” and
“human rights” and “security.”
As we gaze out upon this
mad house built by the neocons, we are
witnessing on a grand scale the old adage
about the inmates running the asylum, except
that this asylum possesses the world’s most
sophisticated weapons including a massive
nuclear arsenal.
What the neocons have
constructed through their skilled propaganda
is a grim wonderland where no one foresees
the dangers of encouraging Islamist
fundamentalism as a geopolitical ploy, where
no one takes heed of the historic hatreds of
Sunni and Shiite, where no one suspects that
the U.S. military slaughtering thousands
upon thousands of Muslims might provoke a
backlash, where no one thinks about the
consequences of overthrowing regimes in
unstable regions, where no one bothers to
study the bitter history of a place like
Ukraine, and where no one worries about
spreading turmoil to nuclear-armed Russia.
Yet, this neocon madness –
this “anti-realism” – has been playing out
in the real world on a grand scale,
destroying real lives and endangering the
real future of the planet.
Investigative reporter Robert
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the
1980s. You can buy his latest book,
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Stolen Narrative,
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