cyberscribbler

Happy Birthday Darwin

2009-02-12T15:38:00.004-05:00

Being as today is the Bicentennial of Darwin's birth, I thought it would be good to in on what influence he might still hold over people in the 'belt buckle of the bible belt'. Lo and Behold a roadside sign appears in Dover PA. That's right the area that God would smite if Pat Robertson had his way.

Darwin billboard in Dover brings back scientific debate

Joe the Plumber dot bomb.

2008-11-14T10:37:00.003-05:00

Joe the Plumber has a website. And for only $14.95, you can get a special "Freedom" membership.

He's also coming out with a book on American values entitled "Fight For The American Dream" replacing the working title "Fear and Clothing on the campaign trail 2008" (with apologies to Hunter S Thompson)

...The values Joe extols; lying, practicing without a license, soliciting strangers to send you money to pay your back taxes.

McCain & Obama roast each other at the Alfred E Smith memorial foundation dinner

2008-10-20T09:08:00.001-05:00

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/27231593#27231593

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/27231610#27231610

Rambling discourse on globalization & empire

2008-09-25T09:12:00.003-05:00

First of all, we as a country are richer because of globalization, true. Secondly the bulk of the new wealth generated was concentrated on the top 5%. The other 95% are worse off than we were 38 years ago.
In 1970, the bottom 95% held 78.2% of the national income. The top 5% held the remaining 27.8%.
In 2003 the bottom 95% held 63.1% of the nation's wealth. The top 5% held the remaining 38.9%.
That's 15.1% more for a very small portion of our society. Source Pikketty & Saez

We're approaching (or have passed) the peak of the benefit curve. Factor in the declining dollar, peak oil, resource wars, our economy's dependency on consumption and boom/bust cycles. The net out is we'll be on the decline for the foreseeable future if we don't adapt quickly to the next energy regime. The decline is real because we have a huge trade imbalance and don't generate enough revenue to sustain our government, therefore we're stuck relying on the rest of the world to finance our debt culture.

Great Britain was a world power until coal was replaced by oil. They didn't have the capital, energy resources & manpower to sustain the British Empire.

US oil production peaked in 1970. We're stuck in a car culture. We'll keep transferring wealth to the middle east & elsewhere until new energy source(s) relieve our dependence on gas.

Globalization has been a gravy train, if you own a company or are a major stockholder, for the rest of us it's deepening the divide to a near breaking point.

Memorial day 2008

2008-05-27T08:08:00.001-05:00

We camped at Caledonia State Park . The weather was great, kids went swimming, hiked, cooked over fire, roasted marshmallows, the normal camping regimen.
We all needed a weekend away. Went with Tonya's ex Doug & their daughter Natascha, 14 and smart as a whip.
You'd enjoy Doug's writings, leftists, like us, but more noire writers (donald goins, Iceberg Slim) style.

speaking of epiphanies, like that "stop bitching, start a revolution", have you read John Perkin's "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" or "The Secret History of the American Empire"

Both books are enough to outrage anyone. It clearly illustrates why we're in Iraq for the oil, and how it's not the first time it's happened. Just done out in the open, unapologetically.

On social issues; I took a spiritual test called "belief-o-matic" , which led me to join the Unitarian Universalist church here in Lancaster. Was getting fed up with the anti-gay/iranian/immigrant rhetoric coming from the right-wingnuts. Last week they showed "For the Bible tells me so"
after the 11 o'clock service.

Here's some examples of my usual work

World War II - dislocations

2008-01-10T14:34:00.000-05:00

Postwar - A History of Europe Since 1945 - Tony Judt pp 24-25
Penguin Books US - 2005

What was taking place in 1945, and had been underway for at least a year, was thus an unprecedented exercise in ethnic cleansing and population transfer. In part this was the outcome of "voluntary" ethnic separation: Jewish survivors leaving a Poland where they were unsafe and unwanted, for example, or Italians departing the Istrian peninsula rather than live under Yugoslav rule. Many ethnic minorities who had collaborated with occupying forces (Italians in Yugoslavia, Hungarians in Hungarian-occupied northern Transylvania now returned to Romanian rule, Ukrainians in the western Soviet Union, etc) fled with the retreating Wehrmacht to avoid retribution from the local majority of the advancing Red Army, and never returned. Their departure may not have been legally mandated or enforced by local authorities, but they had little option.
Elsewhere, however, official policy was at work well before the war ended. The Germans of course began this, with the removal and genocide of the Jews, and mass expulsions of Poles and other Slav nations. Under German aegis between 1939 & 1943 Romanians and Hungarians shunted back and forth across new frontier lines in disputed Transylvania. The Soviet authorities in their turn engineered a series of forced population exchanges between Ukraine and Poland; one million Poles fled or were expelled from their homes in what was now western Ukraine, while half a million Ukrainians left Poland fore the Soviet Union between October 1944 and June 1946. In the course of a few months what had once been an intermixed region of different faiths, languages and communities became two distinct, mono-ethnic territories.
Bulgaria transferred 160,000 Turks to Turkey; Czechoslovakia, under a February 1946 agreement with Hungary, exchanged the 120,000 Slovaks living in Hungary for an equivalent number of Hungarians from communities north of the Danube, in Slovakia. Other Transfers of this kind took place between Poland and Lithuania and between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union; 400,000 people from southern Yugoslavia were moved to land in the north to take the place of 600m,000 departed Germans and Italians. Here as elsewhere, the populations concerned were not consulted. But the largest affected group was the Germans.

The Germans of eastern Europe would probably have fled west in any case: by 1945 they were not wanted in the countries where their families had been settled for many hundreds of years. Between a genuine popular desire to punish local Germans for the ravages of war and occupation, and the exploitation of this mood by post-war governments, the German-speaking communities of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic region and the western Soviet Union were doomed and they knew it.

A discourse on US economic & military hegemony sin 1945

2007-12-11T15:25:00.000-05:00

A economic history lesson
After WWII, the US stood alone as the sole economic powerhouse , not decimated by the war. Germany, France, Japan and to some extent England, all had to rebuild their economies pretty much from scratch. It was particularly troublesome for France - because of the Allied invasion & Germany because of the Allied bombing runs and occupation.

Meanwhile in 1945 the US accounted for half the world's manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses and virtually all international financial reserves. By the time Japan surrendered the American fleet was larger than all other fleets in the world combined. Postwar - A History of Europe Since 1945 pg 105

By the end of the 1960s towards the early 70, three crucial events coalesced to question the tenets of Kensian economic theory (Tax/Spend policy geared towards smoothing out lows & highs in cycles. 1) Marshall Plan aid was being paid off from the European & Japanese. 2) these same countries went thru turbulent overhauling both economically and geographically, by means of occupation and ethnic relocation. The central reason being so the mistakes of post WWI would not be repeated. 3) OPEC formed to exercise authority of the world's growing dependence on fossil fuels.

By the end of the 1970, religious zealots and neoconservative war hawks, scapegoated the economic woes of the country on a one term president - Jimmy Carter.

Their agenda was two-fold, 1) blame the decline on the lower classes - by using rhetoric like welfare queens driving Cadillacs, and a recent overthrow of a CIA operative, the Shah of Iran 2) Try to justify simultaneous tax breaks and record deficit spending - which 1988 presidential candidate Michael Dukakis characterized as "A blank check of prosperity"
This scheme worked because it laid claim to the country's sense of patriotism & religious devotion.

This same scheme was based on supply side economic theory which led to the stock market crash of 1929 & ensuing great depression. More recently it was the single biggest factor involved in the housing & credit boom/bust.

Fortunately the blog & online community have become a significant grass-roots, backyard fence community, to bring like minded people together, in hopes of combating the emotional tools used by those in bed with the military industrial complex.

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

2007-11-12T16:11:00.000-05:00

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

The University of Chicago's Robert Pape studied every suicide attack committed world-wide from 315 suicide terrorism campaigns around the world from 1980 through 2003 and 462 individual suicide terrorists.: The data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world's religions. In fact, the leading instigators of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion…

Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.

Pape's volume has been widely noticed by press, public, and policymakers alike, and has earned praise from Michael Scheuer (author of Imperial Hubris - Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
In a 60 Minutes interview by Steve Kroft, originally aired 11/14/04, Scheuer displayed his in-depth understanding of what motivates Bin Laden and his followers as such:

Right or wrong, he says Muslims are beginning to view the United States as a colonial power with Israel as its surrogate, and with a military presence in three of the holiest places in Islam: the Arabian peninsula, Iraq, and Jerusalem. And he says it is time to review and debate American policy in the region, even our relationship with Israel.

"No one wants to abandon the Israelis. But I think the perception is, and I think it's probably an accurate perception, that the tail is leading the dog - that we are giving the Israelis carte blanche ability to exercise whatever they want to do in their area," says Scheuer. "And if that's what the American people want, then that's what the policy should be, of course. But the idea that anything in the United States is too sensitive to discuss or too dangerous to discuss is really, I think, absurd."

Is he talking about appeasement?

"I'm not talking about appeasement. There's no way out of this war at the moment," says Scheuer. "It's not a choice between war and peace. It's a choice between war and endless war. It's not appeasement. I think it's better even to call it American self-interest."

Scheuer believes that al Qaeda is no longer just a terrorist organization that can be defeated by killing or capturing its leaders. Now, he says it's a global insurgency that's spreading revolutionary fervor throughout the Muslim world.

"Most dramatically, and perhaps least noticed, is the violence inside Saudi Arabia itself. Saudi Arabia was, until just a few years ago, probably one of the most safe countries on earth. And now the paper is daily full of activities and shootouts between Islamists who supported Osama bin Laden and the government there."

But if bin Laden is much stronger than he was, why haven't there been more attacks on the United States?

"One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community, and especially the counterterrorism community, is to assume if someone hasn't attacked us, it's because he can't or because we've defeated him," says Scheuer. "Bin Laden has consistently shown himself to be immune to outside pressure. When he wants to do something, he does it on his own schedule."

"You've written no one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States," says Kroft. "You believe that's going to happen?"

"I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable," says Scheuer.

A nuclear weapon? "A nuclear weapon of some dimension, whether it's actually a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb, or some kind of radiological device," says Scheuer. "Yes, I think it's probably a near thing."

What evidence is there that bin Laden's actually working to do this? "He's told us it. Bin Laden is remarkably eager for Americans to know why he doesn't like us, what he intends to do about it and then following up and doing something about it in terms of military actions," says Scheuer. "He's told us that, 'We are going to acquire a weapon of mass destruction, and if we acquire it, we will use it.'"

The end-game may require is reigning in the Israeli - Palestinian situation and declaring an end to our involovement in Iraq. Anything short of this, will be viewed as a justification for more suicide attacks by fanatics.
Sabre-rattling towards Iran is not helping. But that's a subject for another day.

Iraq Oil Bonanza for Hunt

2007-09-10T14:55:00.000-05:00

Iraq Oil Bonanza for Hunt; Advice for General Petraeus

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment. Posted September 10, 2007.

Former State Department diplomat John Brown has some advice for General Petraeus: which is that the US is occupying Iraq, and therefore will never really have the allegiance of the people, just as the Soviets could not actually convince the Czechs about that universal workers' solidarity thing.

My Texas oil theory of the Cheney wing's decision to go to war against Iraq got some (admittedly ex post facto) support on Sunday when it was announced that Hunt Oil is doing a deal for petroleum development in Iraqi Kurdistan. (Such Kurdistan deals are not typically being put through the federal government in Baghdad, and Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani is threatening to cancel them out if they are not approved centrally.)

Guns and Brains

2007-07-25T12:16:00.000-05:00

Guns and Brains go their separate ways, to the detriment of both

Earlier this week, I received an invitation to a September conference on land and air power in counterinsurgency—routine enough, except that it is to be co-hosted by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which is part of Harvard’s Kennedy School. The day I received the invitation, I was at another conference, where I spoke on a panel about social scientists working with the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. These events suggest one unlikely and hopeful outcome of the sad wars we’re living with.

I grew up during the Vietnam era and belong to a generation of educated liberals who came of age with a visceral dislike of the military. In the seventies and eighties, it was almost a reflex on Ivy League university campuses, where officer training was sometimes banned, to regard anyone in uniform as funny, if not sinister. At the same time, on military bases, anti-intellectualism became a badge of honor, a subscription to The New Yorker the mark of an oddball, and the words “liberal” and “academic” terms of abuse.

Here’s a crude generalization: after the sixties, intellect and patriotism went separate ways, to the detriment of both. This mutual hostility made intellectuals less responsible and soldiers less thoughtful. We’ve come to think of this antagonism as natural and inevitable, as it is between cats and dogs, but in fact it was a product of recent political and cultural changes in American life. The estrangement was compounded by professionalization on both sides and the adoption of inward-looking and jargon-ridden specializations: the all-volunteer military and the social-theory crowd became equally isolated American subcultures.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have begun to close the divide. I think the reasons are these: first, September 11th made military service more attractive to the kind of college students who used to find it unthinkable. It’s no longer unusual to have a friend whose son recently went from studying photography at the Pratt Institute to searching for weapons caches south of Baghdad. Second, the nature of these wars demands a soldier who is more than an artilleryman with an engineering degree. After the military’s failure in Vietnam, it tried to turn war into a matter of firepower and technology—which is why, when the Sunni insurgency began to take off in the summer of 2003, American forces had no idea how to react and made matters far worse. By 2004, battalion commanders in Salahuddin were begging the Pentagon for information about the nature of Iraqi society. This year, the Army is actually deploying teams of social scientists with units in Baghdad and Afghanistan. The soldiers whose reputations have been made and not destroyed in Iraq—General David Petraeus, Colonel H. R. McMaster, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl—have doctorates in the humanities. The best soldiers I met in Iraq were eager to share critical views with professors and journalists. This past spring, when McMaster led a group of officials and private citizens to Iraq to assess progress there, he picked as one member an anti-war British political-science professor who happens to know a great deal about the country. Desperate times breed desperate measures.

I have no illusion that this rapprochement between guns and brains is widespread or guaranteed to last. Plenty of people on both sides undoubtedly find it appalling. Some soldiers will return from Iraq convinced that they’ve been stabbed in the back on college campuses and in the liberal media. Some intellectuals find the war and the Administration so objectionable that they regard associating with the military as a kind of crime. (An anthropologist headed to Afghanistan told me that she’s been “shunned at cocktail parties.”) But a superpower can hardly afford to have its thinkers and its warriors despise and avoid one another.

Permalink

The Richest Year in History

2007-03-15T14:55:00.000-05:00

The Richest Year in History
According to Forbes, this is the richest year in human history ... for those people who are already mind-bogglingly rich. But what about the rest of us?
By Tula Connell, TomPaine.com. Posted March 15, 2007.

Billionaires have it made.So what's new? What's new is that there are lots more of them and they're a lot richer. The number of billionaires around the world grew by 19 percent since last year, up to 946, with a total net worth increasing by 35 percent to $3.5 trillion, according to a report released by Forbes magazine. That's trillion with a "T."

Says Forbes Chief Executive Steve Forbes: “This is the richest year ever in human history. Never in history has there been such a notable advance.”

Of course this historic advance is largely confined to those who were already mind-bogglingly rich to begin with. For working people as a whole, there’s at best a holding action and at worst a retreat. Let’s look at the figures without Steve Forbes’ rose-colored glasses.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

From 2003 to 2004, the average incomes of the bottom 99 percent of households grew by less than 3 percent, after adjusting for inflation. In contrast, the average incomes of the top one percent of households experienced a jump of more than 18 percent, after adjusting for inflation.

In fact, it’s worse than that. The CBPP explained that the enormous gains at the top of the income pyramid caused a rise of income as a whole. But median income dropped between 2003 and 2004, and has not risen appreciably since then. In short, while the rich get richer, the middle class is shrinking, as economist Paul Krugman has pointed out.

Other economic indicators also show a less rosy scenario for working, such as the drop in construction jobs, which fell by 62,000 in February, after posting a net gain of 28,000 in January, according to recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. As The Bonddad Blog notes,

The housing slowdown is starting to hit employment numbers. I would expect this number to continually worsen over the next year as the housing slowdown starts to bleed into the rest of the economy.

Manufacturing jobs took another hit in January as well, dropping by 14,000. Overall, private-sector jobs showed only a net gain of 58,000, its lowest monthly gain since November 2004. Public-sector job increases kept January’s job numbers from tanking, by adding 39,000 jobs, for a total increase of 97,000 jobs.

As the Economic Policy Institute notes, the job market remains tight and wage growth solid. (After nearly four years of stagnant wage growth, wages recently have shown some signs of life.) But the nonprofit group also says recent data show troublesome signs, such as slowing growth in the number of hours worked and a 1.7 percent spike in long-term unemployment. Plus real gross domestic product growth, with only a 2.2 percent fourth quarter increase, did not rise nearly as fast as in previous quarters.

As noted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research , even if the decline in hours worked was weather-related, it is worthy of note that this is the largest one-month decline since June 2004.

Even workers who own homes are losing. Exotic and subprime mortgagees are getting hit with new monthly payments they can’t afford. Some 20 percent of subprime loans at the biggest U.S. mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial, are more than 60 days late and late payments are increasing in the non-subprime mortgage markets.

So what does it all mean? Even if Bush wasn’t in Brazil peddling alternative fuels for South America while we pay higher and higher prices for fuel oil, the economy looks a lot better from the top.

Mahdi Army sitting back while we do the hard work

2007-01-15T13:56:00.000-05:00

Paraphrased from a Fareed Zakaria Newsweek article.

Having more troops and a new mission to secure whole neighborhoods is a good idea, but the crucial question is, will military progress lead to political progress?
American forces have won every battle they have fought in Iraq. Having more troops and a new mission to secure whole neighborhoods is a good idea.
NEWSWEEK's Michael Hastings, embedded with an American advisory team that took part in the fighting against Sunni insurgents in and around Baghdad's Haifa Street last week, reports that no more than 24 hours after the battle began on Jan. 6, the brigade's Sunni commander, Gen. Razzak Hamza, was relieved of his command. Directly from the office of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki - a Shiite.
Lt. Col. Steven Duke, commander of a U.S. advisory team working with the Iraqis describes Hamza as "a true patriot [who] would go after the bad guys on either side." Hamza was replaced by a Shiite. Groups like Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army don't generally start fire fights with the Americans or attack Iraqi forces.
Maj. Mark Brady, confirms reports that the Mahdi Army has been continuing to systematically take over Sunni neighborhoods, killing, terrorizing and forcing people out of their homes. "They're slowly moving across the river," he told Hastings, from predominantly Shiite eastern Baghdad into the predominantly Sunni west. If the 20,000 additional American troops being sent to the Iraqi capital focus primarily on Sunni insurgents, there's a chance the Shiite militias might get bolder.
So what will happen if Bush's new plan "succeeds" militarily over the next six months? Sunnis will become more insecure as their militias are dismantled. Shiite militias will lower their profile on the streets and remain as they are now, ensconced within the Iraqi Army and police. That will surely make Sunnis less likely to support the new Iraq. Shiite political leaders, on the other hand, will be emboldened. Remain uncompromising, as they traditionally have been.

The Maliki government, and the Shiite leadership more generally, understand that they must crack down on militias and compromise with the Sunnis. Why? In the words of one anonymous senior U.S. official because Shiite political leaders understand they no longer have "unquestioning American support anymore, especially from Capitol Hill." This suggests that the administration finally understands that Bush's blank-check policy for the Iraqi government has proved totally counterproductive. The one action that might be forcing the Iraqi leadership to make some compromises has been the threat that Congress would force a withdrawal of American support.
the dominant flaw in the Bush administration's handling of Iraq is that it has, both intentionally and inadvertently, driven the country's several communities apart. Every seemingly neutral action—holding elections, firing Baathists from the bureaucracy, building up an Iraqi military and police force—has had seismic sectarian consequences. The greatest danger of Bush's new strategy, then, isn't that it won't work but that it will—and thereby push the country one step further along the road to all-out civil war. Only a sustained strategy of pressure on the Maliki government has any chance of averting this outcome.
Otherwise Al-Queda will gain Sunni support, US ideals will be tarnished. The US will be aiding in ethnic cleansing.

Vinod Khosla on Microcredit

2006-12-11T16:09:00.000-05:00

making tiny loans, a process called micro-lending or micro-credit, can make a tremendous difference to the lives of people in developing countries.

Fascinating interview on PBS show NOW - with David Branciacco. worth a view

More on this tomorrow.

cyber

The Reverse K Street Project

2006-12-08T16:02:00.001-05:00

Democrats should forget K Street and answer to the people that put them in power -- the voters.

Or so By Mark Schmitt at the American Prospect proposes. That would be a great proposition in theory for he writes that
"The Democrats elected this November have a rare opportunity, if they can appreciate it, to rewrite this story. They have the opportunity to put the lobbyists back in their proper place: as claimants on government, with a right to be heard, but no longer embedded in government or setting its limits."
Hopefully, they resist the urge of all entrenched bureaucrats to dip from the corporate till. The
only thing standing in the way is their own sense of duty. Which after a 12 year lashing following the Congressional banking scandal, among other things, drove them out of the leadership positions in 1994.

We can only hope the direction comes from the newly elected whips and not the left over left. The blogging community senses a greater tie to the new house dems, after all we had as much influence in changing the tide, if not more, than the MSM.
Didn't we?

A Tragedy of Errors

2006-12-01T15:58:00.000-05:00

by MICHAEL LIND

[from the February 23, 2004 issue of The Nation magazine]

About a decade ago, I invented a game with a colleague of mine who, like me, had once worked for Irving Kristol. We called it neoconservative bingo. The idea was that the clichés of neoconservative discourse would be arranged in various combinations on bingo cards: "The World's Only Superpower"; "The New Class"; "The China Threat"; "Decadent Europe"; "Against the UN"; "The Adversary Culture"; "The Global Democratic Revolution"; "Down With the Appeasers!"; "Be Firm Like Churchill." The free space in the center of the bingo card would be "The Palestinian People Do Not Exist" (nowadays it would be "No Palestinian State" or "All Palestinians Are Terrorists"). As you read an essay or a book by a neoconservative, you would check off each slogan on the card in the order in which it appeared.

We never printed our neocon bingo cards. But the neoconservative manifesto by David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil, which is more a collection of talking points than a coherent argument, can serve just as well. The United Nations "has traduced and betrayed" the dream of world peace. The China Threat: "Eventual Korean unification will reinforce the power of the world's democracies against an aggressive and undemocratic China, should China so evolve." There are the Neville Chamberlain appeasers and the Decadent Europe theme: "To Americans, [Europe's doubts about the invasion of Iraq] looked like appeasement. But it would be a great mistake to attribute European appeasement to cowardice--or to cowardice alone." There are the obligatory Churchill references--a chapter is titled "End of the Beginning"--and there is this: "We will never cease to hope for the civilized world's support. But if it is lacking, as it may be, then we have to say, like the gallant lonely British soldier in David Low's famous cartoon of 1940: 'Very well, alone.'"

Bingo.

Paradoxically, Perle and Frum happened to publish their manifesto of neoconservative grand strategy at the very moment many of their colleagues were insisting in print that neoconservatism does not exist, and that the neocons have no influence on US foreign policy. Up until the summer of 2003, neo-conservatives proudly championed their movement against adversaries on the left and against factions on the right (realist, paleoconservative and libertarian) that questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq. That summer, however, the invasion of Iraq--planned for a decade and carried out chiefly by leading neoconservative foreign policy experts like the Bush Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith--went terribly wrong. As of this writing, more US soldiers have died in the unnecessary second war in Iraq than have been killed in any other US military venture since Vietnam, and several thousand Iraqis have died, with many more maimed (the Bush Pentagon does not bother to count Iraqi casualties). As the enormity of the debacle became apparent, neoconservatives abruptly began avowing their own nonexistence. Not since Stalin ordered the US Communist Party to go underground has an American political faction pretended to dissolve itself in public like this.

David Brooks recently claimed in the New York Times that only "full-mooners" believe that neoconservative institutions like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) have any influence on Bush Administration policy because PNAC "has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy." But PNAC disseminates the views not of its paid staffers, receptionists and interns, but of powerful Administration insiders like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, in the same way that the Committee on the Present Danger used to broadcast the views of Paul Nitze and Gene Rostow, who as government officials were guarded in their own public comments.

Brooks continued: "In truth, the people labeled neocons... travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another." In truth--to use Brooks's phrase--among those who have signed PNAC letters are Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and Robert Kagan. PNAC is run by William Kristol, who edits The Weekly Standard, for which Brooks writes, and is the son of Irving Kristol, founder of The Public Interest and former publisher of The National Interest, who wrote a book called Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, and is married to the neoconservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, William's mother. Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, is the father of John Podhoretz, a neoconservative editor and columnist who has worked for the Reverend Moon's Washington Times and the New York Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns The Weekly Standard and Fox Television. Norman is the father-in-law of Elliott Abrams, the former Iran/contra figure and former head of the neocon Ethics and Public Policy Center and the director of Near Eastern affairs at the National Security Council. Elliott's mother-in-law and Norman's wife, Midge Decter, like many older neocons a veteran of the old Committee on the Present Danger, was recently given a National Humanities Medal after publishing a fawning biography of Rumsfeld, whose number-two and number-three deputies at the Pentagon, respectively, are Wolfowitz and Feith, veterans of the Committee on the Present Danger and Team B, the intelligence advisory group that grossly exaggerated Soviet military power in the 1970s and '80s. Perle, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (and its former head), is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and sits on the board of Hollinger International, a right-wing media conglomerate (including the Jerusalem Post and the Daily Telegraph) controlled by Conrad Black, the chairman of the editorial board of The National Interest, which Black partly subsidizes through the Nixon Center. Perle and Feith--both PNAC allies--helped write a 1996 paper called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," on behalf of Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Perle, Feith and the other US and Israeli authors called on Israel to abandon the Oslo process and to restore martial law in the Palestinian territories long before the second intifada began. Co-authorship is common among the neocons: Brooks and Kristol, Kristol and Kagan, Frum and Perle.

These are people who, according to David Brooks, "don't actually have much contact with one another."

According to Brooks, "To hear these people [the alleged conspiracy theorists] describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles." He writes that "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish.'" With this vicious slur, Brooks has now joined Jonah Goldberg, Joshua Muravchik, Joel Mowbray, Robert J. Lieber and other neoconservative writers in accusing all critics of Israel's Likud government and its neoconservative supporters of treating "neoconservative" as a synonym for "Jew." Among those smeared by neocons in this way in the past year are Chris Matthews, William Pfaff, Eric Alterman, Joshua Micah Marshall, Gen. Anthony Zinni and yours truly. When I, the descendant, in part, of Jewish immigrants, exposed Pat Robertson's anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in 1995, Norman Podhoretz denounced me, not Robertson, reasoning that while Robertson was objectively anti-Semitic he could be forgiven because of his Christian Zionist support for Israel, on the analogy of the rabbinical rule of batel beshishim, which governs impurities in kosher bread. The most loathsome libel in this loathsome campaign was written by Mowbray: "Discussing the Iraq war with the Washington Post last week, former General Anthony Zinni took the path chosen by so many anti-Semites: he blamed it on the Jews.... Technically, the former head of the Central Command in the Middle East didn't say 'Jews.' He instead used a term that has become a new favorite for anti-Semites: 'neoconservatives.'" In An End to Evil, Perle and Frum--spontaneously, one can only suppose, as neocons "don't actually have much contact with one another"--repeat the new party line: "Most important, the neoconservative myth offers Europeans and liberals a useful euphemism for expressing their hostility to Israel."

It is true, and unfortunate, that some journalists tend to use "neoconservative" to refer only to Jewish neoconservatives, a practice that forces them to invent categories like "nationalist conservative" or "Western conservative" for Rumsfeld and Cheney. But neoconservatism is an ideology, like paleoconservatism and libertarianism, and Rumsfeld and Dick and Lynne Cheney are full-fledged neocons, as distinct from paleocons or libertarians, even though they are not Jewish and were never liberals or leftists. What is more, Jewish neocons do not speak for the majority of American Jews. According to the 2003 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion by the American Jewish Committee, 54 percent of American Jews surveyed disapproved of the war on Iraq, compared with only 43 percent who approved, and American Jews disapproved of the way Bush is handling the campaign against terrorism by a margin of 54-41.

Neoconservatism--the term was Michael Harrington's--originated in the 1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, many of whom preferred to call themselves "paleoliberals." While there was a pro-Israel wing, the movement's focus was on confrontation with the Soviet bloc abroad and on the defense of New Deal liberalism and color-blind liberal integrationism against rivals on the left at home. With the end of the cold war and the ascendancy of the Democratic Leadership Council, many "paleoliberals" drifted back to the Democratic center. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once spoken of as a possible neoconservative presidential candidate, broke with the movement in the 1980s over its growing contempt for international law and its exaggeration of the Soviet threat. Today's neocons are a shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition.

Nevertheless, the origins of their ideology on the left are still apparent. The fact that most of the younger neocons were never on the left is irrelevant; they are the intellectual (and, in the case of William Kristol and John Podhoretz, the literal) heirs of older ex-leftists. The idea that the United States and similar societies are dominated by a decadent, postbourgeois "new class" was developed by thinkers in the Trotskyist tradition like James Burnham and Max Schachtman, who influenced an older generation of neocons. The concept of the "global democratic revolution" has its origins in the Trotskyist Fourth International's vision of permanent revolution. The economic determinist idea that liberal democracy is an epiphenomenon of capitalism, promoted by neocons like Michael Novak, is simply Marxism with entrepreneurs substituted for proletarians as the heroic subjects of history.

The organization as well as the ideology of the neoconservative movement has left-liberal origins. PNAC is modeled on the Committee on the Present Danger, which in turn was modeled on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded network of the anti-Communist center-left that sought to counter Stalin's international cultural front groups between the 1940s and the 1960s. Many of the older neocons are veterans of the CCF, including Irving Kristol, who with Stephen Spender co-edited Encounter, the CIA-bankrolled magazine of the movement. European social democratic models inspired the quintessential neocon institution, the National Endowment for Democracy.

Along with other traditions that have emerged from the anti-Stalinist left, neoconservatism has appealed to many Jewish intellectuals and activists, but it is not, for that reason, a Jewish movement. Like other schools on the left, neoconservatism recruited from diverse "farm teams," including liberal Catholics (William Bennett and Michael Novak began on the Catholic left) and populists, socialists and New Deal liberals in the South and Southwest (the pool from which Jeane Kirkpatrick, James Woolsey and I were drawn). There were, and are, very few Northeastern WASP mandarins in the neoconservative movement, for the same reason that there were few on the older American left, which tended to mirror the New Deal coalition of ethnic and regional outsiders.

With the exception of its Middle East strategy--a subject to which I will return--there is nothing particularly "Jewish" about neoconservative views on foreign policy. While the example of Israel has inspired American neocons to embrace tactics like preventive war and "targeted assassination," the global strategy of today's neocons is shaped chiefly by the heritage of cold war anti-Communism. Neocon hostility to the UN, too often explained solely in terms of UN condemnations of Israel, is a relic of the 1970s and '80s, when the General Assembly was dominated by an anti-American alliance of the Soviet bloc and Third World autocracies. The claim that we are waging "World War IV"--made by Elliot Cohen, James Woolsey and Norman Podhoretz--is a reflex of superannuated cold warriors, as are parallels between militant Islam and secular totalitarianism and the attempt to inflate China or post-Communist Russia into threats comparable to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Not only America's cold war history but the British experience in the twentieth century has shaped neocon perceptions. This is not as strange as it seems. Britain was the leading world power until a few generations ago; many neoconservatives are adult immigrants from the British Commonwealth, like the former Canadian subjects of Her Majesty Charles Krauthammer and David Frum; and many neocon thinkers follow Lionel Trilling (whom Irving Kristol has cited, along with Leo Strauss, as one of the greatest influences on his thought) in looking to British culture to explicate American society. The first modern industrial society, Britain reached its peak, neocons believe, as a result of the combination of imperial ruthlessness, bourgeois (not managerial) capitalism and Victorian virtue. Tragically, however, British strength was sapped from within by the postbourgeois elitists of Bloomsbury, who mocked Victorian values even as the work ethic was eroded by the welfare state. As a result, Britain was morally and materially unprepared to fight fascist totalitarianism. The greatest man of the twentieth century, to judge from the number of times he is cited by neocons, was not Franklin Roosevelt but Winston Churchill, the upholder of Victorian values.

In neocon ideology, the United States is reliving the experience of Britain three-quarters of a century ago. Osama bin Laden (or Saddam or the Chinese leadership or Yasir Arafat) is the new Hitler. Bush is the new Churchill, as Reagan was earlier. Moderate Republicans and conservative realists, as well as liberal Democrats, are the new Neville Chamberlains. The working-class Protestant fundamentalists of the rural and suburban American South are equated with the bourgeois dissenting Protestants of Victorian England. The American university is the new Bloomsbury, full of decadent liberals and leftists sapping the morale of young Americans, who many neoconservatives think should be drafted and sent to fight a series of wars abroad to promote democracy. Four years ago, Donald Kagan and Frederick Kagan (Robert Kagan's father and brother, respectively) published a book called While America Sleeps, comparing the United States to Britain in the late 1930s. For the neocons, America is the Britain of Churchill and Chamberlain, and it is always 1939.

Something like what Vivian De Sola Pinto wrote of Kipling in Crisis in English Poetry (1968) could be said today of Kipling's admirer Max Boot and most of today's neoconservative imperialists: "There was no Irish or South African problem, only rebels and traitors; there was no aesthetic problem, only wasters and rotters like Sir Anthony Gloster's son who was educated at 'Harrer an' Trinity College' and 'muddled with books and pictures,' and Tomlinson whose sins were entirely literary; there was no problem of war and peace, only foolish liberals and sentimental or knavish pacifists. All the world needed was more discipline, obedience and loyalty, and above all a paternal British Empire with its unselfish and efficient administrators and admirable army licked into shape by perfect N.C.O.s."

Despite its eccentricities, like its un-American nostalgia for British imperialism, neoconservatism, as paleocons and libertarians never tire of insisting, is a movement that shares some of the same values as the center-left. When Richard Perle calls for women's rights in Muslim countries, when David Brooks writes in support of gay marriage, and when The Weekly Standard denounces neo-Confederate racism, there is no reason to question their sincerity. Nor is Irving Kristol being disingenuous when he says that the welfare state is here to stay. Straussian elitism does not disqualify the leftist credentials of the neocons. Many liberal and democratic movements have had doubts about the ability of the majority to govern themselves, and have put their hopes in some sort of enlightened elite--Jefferson's natural aristocracy, the technocrats favored by American Progressives, the vanguard intelligentsia of the Marxist-Leninists. Imperialism, too, has been compatible with a certain liberal messianism. Until the rise of Third World national liberation movements, some of empire's staunchest advocates were liberals, among them British Fabians and American Progressives. Even Marx was willing to acknowledge that underdeveloped countries like India could benefit from imperial tutelage.

The influence of Marxism is particularly evident in neoconservative conceptions of patriotism. In The Weekly Standard of last August 25, Kristol published an essay titled "The Neoconservative Persuasion" (evidently someone had neglected to inform Kristol, "the godfather of neoconservatism," about the new party line that neoconservatism does not exist). Among what Kristol calls "the following 'theses' (as a Marxist would say)" is his claim that "large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal." Therefore the United States should "defend Israel today...no complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary" (an odd sentiment from the former publisher of a magazine called The National Interest, of which I was executive editor from 1991 to 1994). Let us set the question of Israel aside for now, and note that very few Americans think of their country as a version of the USSR with liberal democracy instead of Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology--probably as few as think of American foreign policy in terms of "'theses' (as a Marxist would say)."

A few years earlier in the Wall Street Journal, Irving's son William and David Brooks co-authored a similar call for a "national greatness conservatism" in which American patriotism is emptied of all content except for military crusades on behalf of democracy abroad. As far as empire is concerned, William Kristol and Max Boot embrace the "e-word" while Frum and Perle disavow it. But if the nation has value only as the host or carrier of a potentially universal ideology, which must be spread abroad by force of arms and subversion, then the distinction between "national greatness" and "imperialism" disappears--in the case of American neoconservatism no less than in the comparable cases of Soviet Communism and Napoleonic liberalism. This kind of crusading secular messianism has nothing at all to do with conventional patriotism and nationalism, even in their liberal forms. Many Americans have thought of our country as a model for other liberal democracies, but hardly any view our nation as a mere staging platform for a "global democratic revolution," to be promoted by invading foreign countries and arming foreign insurrections where no "calculations of national interest are necessary."

The distant influence of the Trotskyist Fourth International is apparent, even though the neocons ransack American history in order to provide their movement with a usable past. Max Boot calls himself a "hard Wilsonian," but in his celebration of Kipling-style imperialism it's hard to see much of Wilson, who viewed international law and international organization as the alternative to the militarization of American society that he dreaded, and who is forever identified with national self-determination of the kind claimed by the Palestinians. William Kristol and David Brooks invoke the name of Theodore Roosevelt. But unlike TR's imperial Progressivism, which supported conservation and prolabor reforms, the domestic side of "national greatness conservatism" is vacuous, consisting chiefly of the suggestion by Brooks and Kristol that the United States build more war memorials, perhaps in response to the body count they anticipate from their wars of democracy promotion.

Like Paul Berman, the maître penseur of the liberal hawks, many neocons try to enlist Lincoln for their cause. But Lincoln opposed the Mexican War and rejected the idea that the United States had a duty to spread democracy by force. In 1859 Lincoln ridiculed "Young America," who "is a great friend of humanity; and his desire for land is not selfish, but merely an impulse to extend the area of freedom. He is very anxious to fight for the liberation of enslaved nations and colonies, provided, always, they have land, and have not any liking for his interference."

The redefinition of American patriotism as zealotry on behalf of a crusading, messianic ideology is compatible with a disrespect for actual American institutions, which, if it were expressed by leftists or liberals, would be denounced as un-American by neocon arbiters of American patriotism like Frum, a Canadian who bothered to become a US citizen only after he'd served in the Bush White House. Most of the career professionals in the national security agencies--the military, the intelligence community and the Foreign Service--oppose the grand strategy of Bush and his neocon political appointees. Logically, therefore, Perle and Frum want to replace lifelong public servants with presidential spoilsmen. Of the intelligence community they write, "It may be time to bring all of these secret warriors into a single paramilitary structure ultimately answerable to the secretary of defense"--not to mention Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense Feith. If the intelligence agencies had already been subordinated to civilians in the Pentagon, then Wolfowitz and Feith would not have needed to do an end run around the CIA and the State Department by creating a new intelligence agency, the Office of Special Plans, which tortured data until it supported the policies advocated by the neocons. While neocon appointees in the Pentagon bring the intelligence community to heel, others will colonize the diplomatic service. Perle and Frum, two former political appointees, write, "Next, we should increase sharply the number of political appointees in the State Department and expand their role."

The ideological Gleichschaltung will extend to the US military. The neocons, few of whom ever served in the military, can scarcely conceal their contempt for America's soldiers; Frum and Perle write of "the dead hand of military tradition." (Lieut. Gen. William Boykin, a Christian fundamentalist like so many of Ariel Sharon's American supporters, is acceptable, and has been brought into the Office of the Secretary of Defense to work with civilian appointees Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith.) The career military, so often an obstacle to grandiose neocon schemes, must be transformed into an instrument of preventive wars, argue Perle and Frum: "Will we need to go after a terrorist camp in some remote village in Indonesia? Or raid Syria to retrieve or destroy weapons of mass destruction that may have been sent there by Saddam Hussein for safekeeping? Or strike a decisive blow against a North Korean facility about to produce nuclear weapons for a terrorist customer?"--actions justified, we have reason to fear, on the basis of data doctored by neocon political appointees in the US intelligence community.

The new American armed forces will be busy, if Perle and Frum get their way. In the course of An End to Evil they call for deposing the governments of Iran and Syria, treating Saudi Arabia as an enemy, blockading North Korea--oh, and let's not forget, France is an adversary, along with "France's pilot fish, Belgium."Down with Belgium, France's Pilot Fish!--this is a new addition to the litany of neoconservatism.

If Frum and Perle are to be believed, a great number of US invasions and US-supported revolutions will be necessary to bring democracy to countries that now lack it: "Kofi Annan complained in July 2003 that democracy cannot be imposed by force. Really?" Annan is a better historian than Perle and Frum. The record is clear--most of the democratic transitions that have taken place in the world in the past two centuries have had nothing to do with foreign military intervention or military pressure, while most US military interventions abroad have left dictatorship, not democracy, in their wake. The two cases that neocons constantly return to, Germany and Japan, are among the few cases where democracy has been restored (not created ex nihilo) as the result of a US invasion. The Soviet bloc democratized itself from within in the 1990s, even though the United States did not bomb Moscow, impose a martial-law governor on the Poles or imprison former Hungarian Communist officials without charges in barbed-wire camps. In Latin America, Mexico became a multiparty democracy instead of a one-party dictatorship without US Marines posing for photos in the presidential mansion in Mexico City, and it was not necessary for American soldiers to kill tens of thousands of Argentines, Chileans and Brazilians for democracy to take root in those countries.

One must hope that American soldiers leave behind a functioning democracy in Iraq--rather than the dysfunctional autocracies and kleptocracies that were the legacy of US military occupations in the Philippines, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Mexico. But it is likely that, if and when liberal democracy comes to the Muslim world in general and to the Arab world in particular, the gradual, largely bloodless transition will resemble those in Soviet Europe and Latin America and will not be the result of US military action or intimidation. The neocons--and the humanitarian hawks on the left--are simply wrong about how best to spread democracy.

The global strategy of the neocons, then, is not ethnic but ideological, a crusade in the name of democracy. But the neoconservatives who support Israel's illiberal Likud Party, and Likud's American allies, the Protestant Christian Zionists of the Southern religious right, contradict their own professed principles.

In theory, neoconservative ideology is more compatible with Israeli post-Zionism than with either the Labour Zionist or Revisionist Zionist forms of Israeli ethnic nationalism. The neocons are always denouncing American "paleoconservatives" for claiming that US nationality must be founded on race (Caucasian) or religion (Christianity)--and yet they defend Israeli politicians and thinkers whose blood-and-soil nationalism is even less liberal than the "Buchananism" the neocons denounce in the US context.

In the pages of The Weekly Standard, David Brooks made the astonishing argument that the United States, a Lockean liberal democracy, must defend Israel, another Lockean liberal democracy, against illiberal Palestinian nationalism. The idea that Israeli identity has nothing to do with blood-and-soil nationalism might hearten post-Zionist proponents of Israel as "a state of all its citizens" (not to mention Israel's 1 million Palestinian citizens) but will come as news to Labour Zionists as well as to the Likud, National Religious and Shas parties in Sharon's governing coalition.

Unlike Brooks, Douglas Feith does not lie about the nature of Israeli nationalism. In an address he delivered in Jerusalem in 1997 titled "Reflections on Liberalism, Democracy and Zionism," written before he became the third-most-powerful official in the Pentagon, Feith denounced "those Israelis" who "contend that Israel like America should not be an ethnic state--a Jewish state--but rather a 'state of its citizens.'" Feith argued that "there is a place in the world for non-ethnic nations and there is a place for ethnic nations." Feith's theory, unlike that of Brooks, permits pro-Likud neocons to preach postethnic universalism for the United States and blood-and-soil nationalism for Israel. While solving one problem for the neoconservative movement, Feith creates others. He legitimizes identity politics, which the neocons despise--how can one justify Israel-centered Jewish ethnoracial nationalism while denouncing Afrocentrism or the sinister neo-Nazi idea of an "Aryan-German" or "Nordic" diaspora in the United States? Even worse, Feith's theory seems to endorse the false claim of anti-Semites that Jews are essentially foreigners in the nations in which they are born or reside. Indeed, according to the Jabotinskyite ideology shared by Sharon, Netanyahu and many (not all) of their neocon allies, there are only two kinds of Jews in the world: Israelis and potential Israelis. For generations, many if not most Jewish Americans have rejected this illiberal conception.

A related contradiction is the ever-deepening alliance of the neocons with the Likud's major supporters in the American electorate, the Protestant ayatollahs of the Bible Belt, which inspired Irving Kristol, William Kristol and Norman Podhoretz to open their magazines to religious-right tirades against abortion rights, gay rights, gun control and--my personal favorite--"Darwinism." This apertura to Southern Christian fundamentalism--the opposite of everything that neoconservatism defined as "paleoliberalism" once stood for--led to my departure and that of several other former neoconservatives. We thought we had joined an antitotalitarian liberal movement, not an alliance of American Likudniks and born-again Baptist creationists brought together to support the colonization of "Samaria" and "Judea" by right-wing Jewish settlers.

Neoconservatism--that is, hawkish paleoliberalism--was hijacked by elite American supporters of the Likud, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and their Christian allies, long before the neocons, temporarily, perhaps, hijacked US foreign policy under the second Bush. I can attest that there are neoconservatives, including Jewish neoconservatives, who don't share a love affair with the Likud, but if they said so in public their careers in the movement would end.

The warping of an ideological movement by the ethnic, religious or regional biases of its leaders is not uncommon. For example, there was nothing innately Catholic or even Christian about William F. Buckley Jr.'s "movement conservatism," which attracted many Protestants, Jews and secularists. Nevertheless, the Buckley circle was heavily Catholic and included his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, an American follower of Spanish Carlism (the Carlists were the Catholic answer to the American Likudniks). In the same way that criticizing the Likud Party is a bad career move if you are a contemporary Jewish or non-Jewish neoconservative who doesn't see why Israel shouldn't be a "state of all its citizens" like the United States, so it was not a good idea in the 1950s and '60s to criticize General Franco's Spain if you were a National Review conservative.

The cynical way in which the Bush Administration lied to Congress and the American people to justify an invasion of Iraq planned years before September 11, 2001, by Wolfowitz and many of his PNAC allies came as no surprise to me, a former neocon. In an anthology titled The Fettered Presidency published by the American Enterprise Institute in 1989, Irving Kristol wrote that "if the president goes to the American people and wraps himself in the American flag and lets Congress wrap itself in the white flag of surrender, the president will win.... The American people had never heard of Grenada. There was no reason why they should have. The reason we gave for the intervention--the risk to American medical students there--was phony but the reaction of the American people was absolutely and overwhelmingly favorable. They had no idea what was going on, but they backed the president. They always will."

But too much can be made of the mendacity of the neocons. The influence of Leo Strauss's teachings about the need for the "philosophers" to conceal the truth from the masses can be exaggerated. The conviction on the part of neocons of their own rectitude may be sufficient, in their minds, to justify deception of the public in matters like Iraq's nonexistent threat to the United States. After all, they are waging World War IV against--well, against whomever--a revived Russia this year, China the next, and the next year a vague "Islamist" threat that somehow contains anti-Islamist Baathists and secular Palestinians along with Osama bin Laden. In their own minds, the neocons are Churchillian figures, a heroic minority who, as they battle a generic "totalitarianism" of which radical Islam is the latest manifestation, are handicapped by cowardly establishment "appeasers" and purveyors of a decadent "adversary culture" among the "new class" in the academy and the media. I don't doubt that many leading neocons sincerely wanted to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the Iraqi masses would embrace Ahmad Chalabi as their de Gaulle, that there would be a democratic domino effect in the Middle East, bringing pro-Israel and pro-American secularists to power. Now that they have been proven wrong, at enormous cost in American and Iraqi life, they are disoriented. Instead of acknowledging and taking responsibility for their catastrophic failure, they are desperately trying to avoid blame.

Unfortunately for them, a political ideology can fail in the real world only so many times before being completely discredited. For at least two decades, in foreign policy the neocons have been wrong about everything. When the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the hawks of Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger declared that it was on the verge of world domination. In the 1990s they exaggerated the power and threat of China, once again putting ideology ahead of the sober analysis of career military and intelligence experts. The neocons were so obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat that they missed the growing threat of Al Qaeda. After 9/11 they pushed the irrelevant panaceas of preventive war and missile defense as solutions to the problems of hijackers and suicide bombers.

They said Saddam had WMDs. He didn't. They said he was in league with Osama bin Laden. He wasn't. They predicted that no major postwar insurgency in Iraq would occur. It did. They said there would be a wave of pro-Americanism in the Middle East and the world if the United States acted boldly and unilaterally. Instead, there was a regional and global wave of anti-Americanism.

David Brooks and his colleagues in the neocon press are half right. There is no neocon network of scheming masterminds--only a network of scheming blunderers. As a result of their own amateurism and incompetence, the neoconservatives have humiliated themselves. If they now claim that they never existed--well, you can hardly blame them, can you?

Anatomy of a Civil War

2006-11-30T13:43:00.000-05:00

Iraq’s descent into chaos by Nir Rosen
“We did not have a country under Saddam, and now that Saddam is gone, why can we not have a country? . . . Even though we and our neighbors have one religion and one fate, the United States has succeeded in making us enemies. Instead of reconstructing the shrine of the two imams in Samarra”‚ an important Shia shrine whose bombing in February 2006 fed the civil war—‚ the occupation is building prisons.” Muqtada switched to Iraqi dialect again to quip, “preparing them for the Iraqi people.”

We're still more worried about building prisons in Iraq than enabling the peace. Sounds like conditions here in the us

Last big push before the big exit

2006-11-21T13:39:00.000-05:00

The longer we stay in Iraq, the worse things will get.
Popular support is waning both at home and in Iraq.
Susan Nossel at democracy arsenal points out that

If we don't begin a planned exit, there's a good chance we'll find ourselves in an unplanned one — It's surprising that by now we haven't experienced the Iraqi equivalent of the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the dragging of a corpse of an American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu a decade later. But it seems likely that that day will come.

Whether it comes in the form of a Beruit bombing moment or a Mogadishu episode, repulsive enough to galvanize opposition, it may come sooner than expected.

In a recent PIPA poll, Iraqi attitudes toward the U.S. occupation, 74% of Shiites and 91% of Sunnis want us to leave within a year. Sunnis & Shiites agree that U.S. forces are provoking more violence than they're preventing, and that day-to-day security would improve if we left.

Support for attacks on U.S. forces is majority supported by both Shiites and Sunnis. And none of this is because of successful al-Qaeda propaganda: 94% of Iraqis continue to disapprove of al-Qaeda.
The report summary is here. The full report is here.

The last big push has commenced. Watch for the contractors leaving in droves prior to troop withdraws.