Neocons & Al Qaeda

Off Topic Politics and World Issues
1

What’s behind the Iron Curtain?

I just had to post this because it’s just WAY too damned funny.

The Iraq Myth article reminded me of another article Kagan had written last year which fit in REALLY WELL with some other special news that came out this week. Some people will appreciate the irony… the rest may need a few shots of vodka.

The New Bolsheviks: Understanding Al Qaeda
by Frederick W. Kagan
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Victory in war, and particularly in counterinsurgency wars, requires knowing one’s enemy. This simple truth, first stated by Sun Tsu more than two millennia ago, is no less important in the war on terrorism today. It has become almost common wisdom, however, that America today faces an enemy of a new kind, using unprecedented techniques and pursuing incomprehensible goals. But this enemy is not novel. Once the peculiar rhetoric is stripped away, the enemy America faces is a familiar one indeed. The revolutionary vision that undergirds al Qaeda’s ideology, the strategy it is pursuing, and the strategic debates occurring within that organization are similar to those of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism at various periods. What’s more, the methods that led to the defeat of that ideology can be adapted and successfully used against this religious revival of it.

Certain strands of Islamist ideology are so similar in structure to basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism that the comparison is unavoidable…

Now for the FUNNY part. So what does Francis Fukuyama, one of the chief architects of neoconservatism have to say this week…

Neocon architect says: ‘Pull it down’
The Scotsman
21 Feb 2006
NEOCONSERVATISM has failed the United States and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy agenda, according to one of its prime architects.

Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History and was a member of the neoconservative project, now says that, both as a political symbol and a body of thought, it has “evolved into something I can no longer support”. He says it should be discarded on to history’s pile of discredited ideologies.

In an extract from his forthcoming book, America at the Crossroads, Mr Fukuyama declares that the doctrine “is now in shambles” and that its failure has demonstrated “the danger of good intentions carried to extremes”.

In its narrowest form, neoconservatism advocates the use of military force, unilaterally if necessary, to replace autocratic regimes with democratic ones.

Mr Fukuyama once supported regime change in Iraq and was a signatory to a 1998 letter sent by the Project for a New American Century to the then president, Bill Clinton, urging the US to step up its efforts to remove Saddam Hussein from power. It was also signed by neoconservative intellectuals, such as Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, and political figures Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the current defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

However, Mr Fukuyama now thinks the war in Iraq is the wrong sort of war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

“The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism,” he argues.

Mr Fukuyama, one of the US’s most influential public intellectuals, concludes that “it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention [in Iraq] itself or the ideas animating it kindly”.

Going further, he says the movements’ advocates are Leninists who “believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practised by the United States”.

Leninists!’ Cries Neocon Nabob, Suing for Divorce
Even more provocatively, Fukuyama called the Standard’s editor, William Kristol, his ideological sidekick, Robert Kagan, and their neoconservative comrades who led the drive to war in Iraq “Leninist” in their conviction that liberal democracy can be achieved through “coercive regime change” or imposed by military means.

There you have it folks, straight from the horses’ mouth – neocons are commie pinkos… just like al Qaeda.

You think they’ll eventually join forces?

2

[quote]JustTheFacts wrote:
What’s behind the Iron Curtain?

I just had to post this because it’s just WAY too damned funny.

The Iraq Myth article reminded me of another article Kagan had written last year which fit in REALLY WELL with some other special news that came out this week. Some people will appreciate the irony… the rest may need a few shots of vodka.

The New Bolsheviks: Understanding Al Qaeda
by Frederick W. Kagan
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Victory in war, and particularly in counterinsurgency wars, requires knowing one’s enemy. This simple truth, first stated by Sun Tsu more than two millennia ago, is no less important in the war on terrorism today. It has become almost common wisdom, however, that America today faces an enemy of a new kind, using unprecedented techniques and pursuing incomprehensible goals. But this enemy is not novel. Once the peculiar rhetoric is stripped away, the enemy America faces is a familiar one indeed. The revolutionary vision that undergirds al Qaeda’s ideology, the strategy it is pursuing, and the strategic debates occurring within that organization are similar to those of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism at various periods. What’s more, the methods that led to the defeat of that ideology can be adapted and successfully used against this religious revival of it.

Certain strands of Islamist ideology are so similar in structure to basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism that the comparison is unavoidable…

Now for the FUNNY part. So what does Francis Fukuyama, one of the chief architects of neoconservatism have to say this week…

Neocon architect says: ‘Pull it down’
The Scotsman
21 Feb 2006
NEOCONSERVATISM has failed the United States and needs to be replaced by a more realistic foreign policy agenda, according to one of its prime architects.

Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History and was a member of the neoconservative project, now says that, both as a political symbol and a body of thought, it has “evolved into something I can no longer support”. He says it should be discarded on to history’s pile of discredited ideologies.

In an extract from his forthcoming book, America at the Crossroads, Mr Fukuyama declares that the doctrine “is now in shambles” and that its failure has demonstrated “the danger of good intentions carried to extremes”.

In its narrowest form, neoconservatism advocates the use of military force, unilaterally if necessary, to replace autocratic regimes with democratic ones.

Mr Fukuyama once supported regime change in Iraq and was a signatory to a 1998 letter sent by the Project for a New American Century to the then president, Bill Clinton, urging the US to step up its efforts to remove Saddam Hussein from power. It was also signed by neoconservative intellectuals, such as Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, and political figures Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the current defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

However, Mr Fukuyama now thinks the war in Iraq is the wrong sort of war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

“The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism,” he argues.

Mr Fukuyama, one of the US’s most influential public intellectuals, concludes that “it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention [in Iraq] itself or the ideas animating it kindly”.

Going further, he says the movements’ advocates are Leninists who “believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practised by the United States”.

Leninists!’ Cries Neocon Nabob, Suing for Divorce
Even more provocatively, Fukuyama called the Standard’s editor, William Kristol, his ideological sidekick, Robert Kagan, and their neoconservative comrades who led the drive to war in Iraq “Leninist” in their conviction that liberal democracy can be achieved through “coercive regime change” or imposed by military means.

There you have it folks, straight from the horses’ mouth – neocons are commie pinkos… just like al Qaeda.

You think they’ll eventually join forces?
[/quote]

Fukuyama says they’re Leninists in the sense that they believe humans can change the course of history, not in any sense of subscribing to communist ideology…I don’t know why I’m even bothering to reply to this.

3

[quote]GDollars37 wrote:
Fukuyama says they’re Leninists in the sense that they believe humans can change the course of history, not in any sense of subscribing to communist ideology…I don’t know why I’m even bothering to reply to this.[/quote]

“they believe humans can change the course of history”

And then they realized too late that Superman was just a comic book character…

So not really communists so much as stupid or delusional then.

[quote]
“The war’s supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform,” according to Fukuyama.

He noted that that expectation helps explain “the Bush administration’s incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq.”

The administration and its neoconservative backers also assumed, mistakenly, that the rest of the world would accept Washington’s unilateralism, including preemptive war, because, as a “benevolent hegemon,” Washington would be seen as both more virtuous and more competent than other countries.

These delusions have come at a very high cost, according to Fukuyama, who, notwithstanding the sweeping pro-democracy rhetoric in which both Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continue to indulge, “the neoconservative moment appears to have passed.”[/quote]

The primary revelation of this being that one of the primary founders of neoconservatism coming out and saying our foreign policy has been a failed experiment.

A statement that would have been used by the right to humiliate Howard Dean for weeks on end had HE said it.

Essentially this validates just about everything ever said about Cheney and the neocons being a cult that hijacked America’s foreign policy to pursue their own vision of the world – or as Colin Powell once called them, “fuckin’ crazies”.

4

I just read a bunch of articles/columns by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the #2 and #3 guys in the Defense Department. Both are Jewish and both of their neocon ideologies are shaped by the need to protect Israel, not by the need to do what is good for America.

If I knew nothing about these two and read their works I would think they were Israeli citizens living in Israel. Its like they both want to give blow-jobs to Ariel Sharon. I don’t understand, if they love Israel so much and their loyalties lie with Israel, as it seems from reading their positon briefs, why the hell they don’t move to Israel.

5

[quote]OKLAHOMA STATE wrote:
I just read a bunch of articles/columns by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the #2 and #3 guys in the Defense Department. Both are Jewish and both of their neocon ideologies are shaped by the need to protect Israel, not by the need to do what is good for America.

If I knew nothing about these two and read their works I would think they were Israeli citizens living in Israel. Its like they both want to give blow-jobs to Ariel Sharon. I don’t understand, if they love Israel so much and their loyalties lie with Israel, as it seems from reading their positon briefs, why the hell they don’t move to Israel.[/quote]

Actually I believe Feith may be living in Israel right now… kinda keeping a low profile if you know what I mean.

Pentagon investigation of Iraq war hawk stalling Senate inquiry into pre-war Iraq intelligence
More broadly, a RAW STORY investigation has found that Feith’s access to classified information and his alleged wrongdoing can likely be laid at the feet of more senior officials in the Bush Administration – namely Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – who would have had to have overruled Pentagon background checks to reissue Feith’s clearances after he was booted from the National Security Council for allegations of espionage in the mid 1980s.

Feith is out of the country and could not be reached for comment.
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Pentagon_investigation_stalls_Phase_II_of_0130.html

Here are two good opinions about Feith from Woodward’s book:

In Bob Woodward’s book, Plan of Attack, then Secretary of State Colin Powell called Feith’s operation at the Pentagon the “Gestapo” office because Powell believed it amounted to a separate, unchecked governing authority within the Pentagon.

According to Bob Woodward’s book, Plan of Attack, Feith was described by the military commander who led the Iraq invasion, Gen. Tommie Franks, as “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth,” referring to the bad intelligence fed to the military about Iraq and the extent of possible resistance to a U.S. invasion.

6

Basically, whenever you hear Colin Powell complaining, listen up. In five or ten years he will probably be proven right.

I don’t know if he’s been ruined by this or not, but he was a damned fine man.

7

Why can’t we have someone like Powell or Franks for President? I’m sick of half-assed compromisers and guys who wipe their peckers on intern’s dresses!

8

Colin Powell is too honest to be president. A generation ago he would’ve made a great president. Unfortunately, today you have to be a slimy, borderline crook to be president.