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It's a dirty job, but someone's got
to do it: it's time to take up the cudgels for the poor neo-cons.
Day after day, these dedicated
public intellectuals and hardworking federal officials are calumnied
from coast to coast, accused of every crime under the sun. Who
misled us into the bloodsoaked mire of Iraq? Who's pulling strings
to foment a new war with Iran? Who's fanning the flames of Israel's
assault on Lebanon, hoping to turn the entire Middle East into
an arc of "creative destruction" that will transform
the region into a pacified, profitable oasis of American power?
Why, the neo-cons, of course, guilty on every count--or so we're
told.
It's certainly a pretty tale,
satisfyingly simple like most cartoons, well-suited for a stirring
film adaptation, a la "V for Vendetta." (Given the
religious heritage of many neo-cons, perhaps Mel Gibson could
be induced to take it on.) We'd watch the sinister Machiavels
plot in the shadows, pouring their leperous distilments into
the ears of government leaders who, zombified by this dark enchantment,
mindlessly drive the nation into ruin. Yet if these dastards
can be routed in the last act by some hero--a "straight-talking"
senator from Arizona, say, or a tough and savvy former First
Lady, or even a clean-limbed knight stepping forth from the mists
of the blogosphere--then all will be well with the Republic.
Well, as Brick Pollit told
Maggie the Cat: "Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?"
Unfortunately, the reality of our political and moral predicament
is not so neat and tidy, nor so easily resolved. If the neo-cons
all hopped a spaceship for the Hale-Bopp comet tomorrow--indeed,
if the cult had never arisen at all--we would still be right
where we are today: neck-deep in the Big Muddy.
That's not to say, of course,
that we weren't misled into Iraq, or that strings aren't being
pulled for a war on Iran, or that flames aren't being fanned
to widen the Middle East war--or that the gaggle of third-rate
thinkers and first-class troublemakers loosely grouped under
the rubric "neo-con" aren't intimately involved in
all of these affairs. They are, in spades. But to accuse them
of playing the central role in America's on-going Götterdämmerung
gives them an importance they don't deserve--and unduly mitigates
the guilt of the true culprits: the good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon
boardroom buccaneers of the American Establishment, bred for
generations to feast on war and rumors of war, and to regard
the hoi polloi as mere cannon fodder and cash cows to
be mulched and milked as needed.
For what's the underlying implication
of the "neo-cons über alles" meme? It's that hard-core,
down-and-dirty inside operators like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld--who
have spent their entire adult lives at the dark heart of the
government-corporate-warbiz-spygame power nexus--are actually
innocent lambkins led astray by the wicked blandishments of Richard
Perle. It's that the world-striding oil barons, Wall Street dynasts
and CIA scions of the Bush Faction are just wide-eyed rubes bamboozled
into acting against their own interests by the dazzling sophistry
of William Kristol and Michael Leeden. It's that no U.S. administration
would ever undertake the kind of rapacious policies we've seen
in the last five years--unless they'd been tricked into it by
wily Zionists and their ideological outriders. It is, in short,
our old friend "American exceptionalism," decked out
in dissident drag.
Shakespeare pegged the neo-cons'
true place in the scheme of things more than 400 years ago in
Julius Caesar. Listen to Marc Antony dismissing his fellow
triumvir Lepidus, and you will hear the authentic voice of Great
Gamesters like Cheney, Rumsfeld and James Baker, dicing for world
empire and using anything at hand--neo-cons, evangelicals, Caucasian
despots, Arab tyrants, Israeli proxies, British lapdogs, Shiite
death squads--to further their ambitions: "This is a slight
unmeritable man, meet to be sent on errandsand though we lay
these honours on this man, to ease ourselves of divers slanderous
loads, he shall but bear them as the ass bears gold, to groan
and sweat under the business, either led or driven as we point
the way. And having brought our treasure where we will, then
we take down his load and turn him off, like to the empty ass,
to shake his ears and graze in commons." Or at the World
Bank, as the case may be.
Again, this is not to deny
that neo-con fingerprints are all over the various shivs and
bludgeons that the Bush Regime has used in its whack jobs on
the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the
Magna Carta and the Ten Commandments. After all, the veritable
blueprint for the whole godawful shebang--the infamous "Rebuilding
America's Defenses" document of September 2000--was concocted
under the aegis of that quintessentially neo-con think tank,
the Project for the New American Century. It was all spelled
out there, long before 9/11: the invasion of Iraq (regardless
of whether Saddam Hussein was still in power); the vast explosion
in military spending; planting new U.S. bases in Central Asia
and the Middle East to secure dominance over world energy sources;
embracing aggressive war as national policy--and the openly stated
notion that only a "new Pearl Harbor" could "catalyze"
the American people into readily accepting the need for these
radical measures.
Damning stuff. But without
the presence of long-time Establishment power players like Cheney
and Rumsfeld on the PNAC board, the plan would have remained
the pipe dream of a few curdled academics and comb-licking policy
wonks. Indeed, it was the Great Gamesters themselves who set
the neo-cons to work on devising ways to extend the "unipolar
moment" of unchallenged American power that arose after
the collapse of the Soviet Union; the first version of the PNAC
plan was drawn up at Cheney's order by Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter
"Leaker" Libby in 1992, in the last months of the Bush
I administration.
Under Bush II, the neo-cons
were brought in as shock troops; their mindless zealotry was
a perfect tool for implementing the plans drawn up by the real
players in the new regime: Cheney's notorious "Energy Task
Force" and the much lesser-known "Joint Task Force
on Petroleum" formed by the Council on Foreign Relations
and--who else?--the James Baker Institute at Rice University.
It was here that the final solution for Iraq was hammered out:
regime change with the aim of locking up--not unleashing--Iraq's
massive oil reserves, to keep energy prices high and steady (Saddam
was mischievously bouncing them all over the place) and to preserve
the power of OPEC under the leadership of those time-honored
pals and business partners of the American Establishment, the
Saudi royals.
These are dark days, serious
times. The whiff of apocalypse is in the air. For it will be
virtually impossible for the Gamesters to carry off their next
immediate goal, subduing Iran--much less their long-range aim
of dominating the world throughout a "new American century"--without
the use of nuclear weapons. So let's be done with baby talk and
comic books, with the comforting fairy tale that the vast crimes
we are witnessing are the work of a few cranks who have somehow
hijacked the noble U.S. government and are using it for their
own purposes, or Israel's purposes, or whatever.
The reality is that Iraq was
invaded because a powerful faction of the old-line American Establishment
wanted to do it and the rest of the Establishment--the Democrats,
the media, the "respectable" intelligentsia--countenanced
the crime. The belligerence and oppression of the hardline Israeli
government in Lebanon and Palestine are receiving unquestioned--and
armed--support from the United States because this suits the
larger strategic purposes of the "global dominance"
faction of the Establishment, and the domestic political purposes
both of the Democrats, heavily reliant on Jewish-American backing,
and the Republicans, dependent on their rabidly pro-Israel evangelical
base.
It is the American elite--
pursuing, as always, the enhancement of its own power and privilege,
heedless of the consent of the governed or the genuine interests
of the American people (or the Palestinian people or the Israeli
people or the Lebanese people or the Iraqi people)--that bedevils
us. The emergence of the cretinous neo-conservative cult is just
a symptom of a deeper moral corruption coursing through the dominant
institutions and structures of American society. The body politic
is rotting from the head.
Chris Floyd is a regular contributor to CounterPunch.
He is the author of the book, Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and
Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and writer and co-founder of
a political blog of the same name (at www.chris-floyd.com). For
10 years, he wrote the "Global Eye" column for The
Moscow Times and St. Petersburg Times.
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