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The Origins, Financing, and Impact of the Neoconservatives
[a work in progress 5/4/03; some of the links are not yet correct -- be patient, I will update them soon. Likewise, the material toward the end still needs much work, but I'll get to it. My intent is to at least make most of the links available.]
(1) Introduction (2) Pre-emptive strike doctrine, (3) Neoconservatives as Former Liberals; (4) As a Term, 'Neoconservative' has Earlier Roots; (5) Gurus of the Neocons, (6) In the 1950s, the emergence of the current meaning of Neoconservative; (7) Project of the New American Century: "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values" (8) The Alleged Impact of Books by Neoconservatives on Bush and Cheney; (9) The Foundations Finance the Neocons and How Neocon Think Tanks Are Financed [needs work]; (10) American Enterprise Institute as a Nexus for Neocon Relations (11) Neocons and Rightwing Media ; (12) Attempts by Left to Counter Neocon Media (13) US War Machine: Revving Up the Engine of WWII, (14) Developments Post 1990s, Early 2000, (15) Notes on Origins of Patriot Act (16) The Secret patriot Act II and Bill Moyers NOW February 7
(1) Introduction
The first two paragraphs of William Grieder's "Rolling Back the 20th Century", (in The Nation, May 12, 2003) disclosing what every left-leaning follower of political events in the US knows intuitively, project that, as currently lead by President George W. Bush's handlers, in the wake of the Post-Iraq war, the GOP's rightwing has a definite grip on the immediate future of American politics. As dark as this outlook may seem to the left, it should not come as a surprise. The roots of this situation trace back almost a quarter of a century, paralleling the emergence of what is called the neoconservative movement. According to Grieder,
George W. Bush, properly understood, represents the third and most powerful wave in the right's long-running assault on the governing order created by twentieth-century liberalism. The first wave was Ronald Reagan, whose election in 1980 allowed movement conservatives finally to attain governing power (their flame was first lit by Barry Goldwater back in 1964). Reagan unfurled many bold ideological banners for right-wing reform and established the political viability of enacting regressive tax cuts, but he accomplished very little reordering of government, much less shrinking of it. The second wave was Newt Gingrich, whose capture of the House majority in 1994 gave Republicans control of Congress for the first time in two generations. Despite some landmark victories like welfare reform, Gingrich flamed out quickly, a zealous revolutionary ineffective as legislative leader.
George Bush II may be as shallow as he appears, but his presidency represents a far more formidable challenge than either Reagan or Gingrich. His potential does not emanate from an amiable personality (Al Gore, remember, outpolled him in 2000) or even the sky-high ratings generated by 9/11 and war. Bush's governing strength is anchored in the long, hard-driving movement of the right that now owns all three branches of the federal government. Its unified ranks allow him to govern aggressively, despite slender GOP majorities in the House and Senate and the public's general indifference to the right's domestic program. ...
In the events leading up to the Iraq war, March-April, 2003, we watched with chagrin the ploy by the neoconservatives, or as they are also known, "Neocons", among the most ferocious hawks influencing Bush administration policy, to implement their longstanding Preemptive Strike doctrine. For example, read this 'abstract' of a recent article, written by Steven R. Weisman, in the NYT [Mar 23, 2003] (no longer available on the Internet) analyzing the impact of the Neocons "doctrine of Pre-emptive Strike" on the Bush administration:
Asked the other day if the Iraq war reflected a broader doctrine of preemptive attacks on enemies, Secretary of State, Colin Powell replied, ''No, no, no.'' He said Iraq was being attacked because it had violated its ''international obligations'' under its 1991 surrender agreement, which required the disclosure and disarmament of its dangerous weapons. Still, even some of Powell's colleagues in the State Department have been surprised by how quickly the doctrine of preemption has taken hold in the administration, transforming a once obscure idea that had been floating around conservative policy circles since at least the first George W. Bush administration, into a powerful policy strategy. In 1992, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's aides -- including Paul D. Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad, the administration's envoy on Iraq -- prepared a document known as the Defense Planning Guidance, which argued that the United States should be prepared to use force to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Officials recall that an aggressive policy toward Iraq had been high on the agenda of Mr. Bush's advisers since the earliest days of his administration. The weekend after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to officials, when Iraq was pressed by Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz as a high priority, Mr. Powell argued that it was important first to deal with Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
[No longer on the Internet, this article is available in such fulltext databases as Proquest, frequently available online by your library. I have a copy -- and copies of many other articles and files employed below, and will be happy to send copies to anyone requesting them.]
In January 1998, President Clinton received an "open" letter from a group of conservative policy advocates containing the warning that the ''containment'' of Iraq had failed, and that removing Saddam Hussein from power ''now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.''
Eighteen people had signed that letter, including Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage and Richard Perle, all former officials in Republican administrations. At the time, according to Steven Weisman, all were "affiliated with academic centers and policy institutes, with no particular expectation that they would, within five years, be in a position to turn their ideas into policy."
Ironically, then, as Weisman and many other analysts have noted,
the second Persian Gulf war represents far more than simply a triumph for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, or for Mr. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, and Mr. Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, not to mention their colleagues in the conservative news media. It also reflects, at least in the view of some, the ascendance under President Bush of the conservatives' idea that chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs of ''rogue states'' must be confronted with pre-emptive or even preventive action before an imminent threat materializes.
And, on April 7, a headline in the Washington Post heralds the occasion: For Wolfowitz, a Vision May Be Realized Deputy Defense Secretary's Views on Free Iraq Considered Radical in Ways Good and Bad:
To his supporters, Wolfowitz is a visionary thinker, a tough-minded intellectual with a streak of idealism. While emphasizing that he was not alone in calling for the United States to confront Hussein, they credit him with helping to devise a daring strategy for the Iraqi leader's overthrow that will reshape the politics of the Middle East in a way that will be hugely beneficial for the United States.
To his critics, the former international relations dean at Johns Hopkins University is an ambitious ideologue, whose theories about democracy-building in the Arab world are at once naive and dangerous. They fear that the end result of the Wolfowitz doctrine is more likely to be an upsurge of anti-Americanism around the world and a flood of recruits for Osama bin Laden.
My text below attempts to lay out some historical background about the neoconservative movement, demolish some myths about the origin of the term, and analyze the current iron grip the groups exerts on American foreign policy, especially as it relates to the flawed US policies in the Middle East: bringing 'democracy' to Iraq; the Israel - Palestine debacle, broken promises of support for Afghanistan, and so forth.
Adapted from All in the Neocon Family, Jim Lobe, AlterNet March 27, 2003, Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up. , and Eurolegal services: Guide to European Legal Resources for Business, as well as many other sources, noted below. Basically, in what follows, as a template, I have used Lobe's brief but excellent account of the neoconservative movement, enhanced it with hyperlinks, expanded some of Lobe's accounts, and added details that Lobe does not include, e.g., funding of rightwing thinks tanks.
Jim Lobe begins his article on the "neoconservative families" by asking, rhetorically, "What do William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, and Robert Kagan have in common?" They are, first, he claims, "diehard hawks", or, in the parlance of the day, "superhawks", who have, strangely, "gained control of U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks." But equally important, Lobe continues, "they are also part of one big neoconservative family: an extended clan of spouses, children, and friends who have known each other for generations."
For Michael Lind, writing in the UK's New Statesman,
[Neocons] are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history.
For Will Hutton, debating with Neocon, Robert Kagan on Frontline,
American neoconservatism is a very idiosyncratic creed. Its pitiless view of human nature, its refusal to countenance a social contract, its belief in the raw exercise of power -- "full spectrum dominance" -- its attachment to Christian fundamentalism, its attitudes towards abortion and capital punishment, and its deification of liberty of the individual are a mishmash of ideas that have no parallel anywhere. It is an outlier within the Western conservative tradition, and it has taken very special circumstances for it not to be more seriously challenged intellectually, culturally, and politically within America. Without the collapse of American liberalism, the openness of American democracy to the influence of corporate money, and the continuing resentments of the distinct civilisation below the Mason-Dixon line, this neoconservatism would never have come to have the influence it has. Even as it was, half a million more Americans did not vote conservative at the last Presidential election, let alone for the variant that has emerged over the last two years. I draw your attention to this because core attitudes ultimately surface. Indeed, the extravagant, almost comic efforts of the administration to portray what is in effect an Anglo-American coalition as instead an alliance of 30 countries (what role, pray, does Iceland have in Iraq?) shows a recognition of the heartbeat of American public opinion that you do not.
(2) Pre-emptive strike doctrine
In my view, and I have searched the Web for evidence, David Armstrong's "Dick Cheney's Song of America: Drafting a plan for global dominance" Harper's Magazine, October 2002, is one of the first articles to expose the cabal involving Dick Cheney and the Neocons. The article discusses the following still classified documents by setting them into a historical context. That they are still classified comes from a futile attempt to locate digitized copies on the Web.
Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994-1999 Fiscal Years (Draft), Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1992
Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994-1999 Fiscal Years (Revised Draft), Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1992
Defense Strategy for the 1990s, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1993
Defense Planning Guidance for the 2004-2009 Fiscal Years, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2002
National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 2002
The Brains Behind Bush's War Todd Purdum in the NYT:
" Any history of the Bush administration's march toward war with Iraq will have to take account of long years of determined advocacy by a circle of defense policy intellectuals whose view that Saddam Hussein can no longer be tolerated or contained is now ascendant.".. At the center of this group are longtime Iraq hawks, Republicans like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; Richard Perle, a former Reagan administration defense official who now heads the Defense Policy Board, the Pentagon's advisory panel; and William Kristol ...One difference in the current debate over Iraq is that intellectual consensus is not so widespread. Indeed, as Michael O'Hanlon, a defense policy expert at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, noted, "If you look at nongovernmental experts on Iraq or use of force, what is striking is that pure academics are almost uniformly against the war, but people who have been in government or Washington think tanks tend to be, on average, more supportive."
And today, their impact upon American foreign policies, especially the violent actions toward achieving regime change in Iraq, is taking a toll upon America's credibility, worldwide. According to Wash Post's Terry Neal, James Zogby, observes, for example [scroll down],"This war was designed by a group of neoconservatives who know nothing about Iraq, that kept its own counsel, and who only took advice from people who shared their racist view that overwhelming force -- shock and awe -- would not just defeat Baghdad but also lay waste to extremism in the region and cause moderates to bow down and come to their senses," said Zogby, whose book "What Arabs Think: Values, Beliefs and Concerns" was published a year ago.
He continued: "We're looked at today as the new hegomonic power, and this administration must answer for how they squandered any good will that existed [in the Middle East]. That's not the way to make us more safe. It's the way to make us a moving target, putting our lives at risk, our businesses at risk and our allies at risk--and most tragically of all, it's creating a symbol out of [Hussein's] deplorable regime."
From Commondreams comes this assessment:
... Even among neoconservatives who see an attack on Iraq as a first step toward transforming the Mideast, there are debates over how far-reaching and fast the change will be.
The more modest version sees an attack as sending a message to the rest of the region, making clear the US is prepared to unilaterally deploy its military power to achieve its goals, objectives, and values.
Among its most extreme versions was a view elaborated in a briefing in July by a Rand Corp. researcher to the Defense Policy Board - an advisory group to the Pentagon led by Richard Perle, a leading hawk.
That briefing urged the United States to deliver an ultimatum to the Saudi government to cut its ties to militant Islam or risk seizure of its oil fields and overseas assets. It called Iraq ''the tactical pivot'' and Saudi Arabia ''the strategic pivot.''
What/Who/Where are the Neocons' Intellectual Roots?
(3) Neoconservatives are former liberals
"Neoconservatives are former liberals (which explains the "neo" prefix) who advocate an aggressive unilateralist vision of U.S. global supremacy, which includes a close strategic alliance with Israel. "
Lobe doesn't give us much background on the origin of neoconservatism, which, in my view, is important if we wish to understand today's situation. President of the Arab American Institute, James Zogby gives us this account of the etymology of neoconservative:
"Neoconservatism is the secular political philosophy that defined the reaction of a group of former liberals to what they felt was the Democratic party's policy of appeasement toward the Soviet Union--most especially the USSR's treatment of its Jewish population and its relations with the Arab world. They were a small but influential group of writers, commentators and government officials."
(4) As a term, Neoconservative has earlier roots
However, as an explanation of neoconservatism, this description is incomplete. In the JSTOR database, i.e., fulltext scholarly journals, the first use of neoconservative traces back to 1932, in a history of philosophy study, authored by a German. (In the context, 'neoconservative' emerges as a translation of a concept orginally in German, so the coinage may have occurred as part of the translation. By the 1950s, the term was frequently used, especially in the sense of a revival of conservative thought. Take the article, "Democracy, the New Conservatism, and the Liberal Tradition in America", by Stuart Gerry Brown, Ethics, Volume 66, Issue 1, Part 1 (Oct., 1955), 1-9. In 1955, according to Brown,
if any sense can be made out of the intellectual confusion which has characterized America in the decade since the end of the Second World War, it would seem to be a gradually concerted movement backward -- a revival of conservatism, even at times of reaction. Liberalism has been pronounced officially dead, though most politicians seem still to feel a need to profess it' The fear of international Communist aggression has led to an obsession with security and a growing constriction of thought and action. There is a call for religious revival to provide aid and comfort in a world of anxiety and tension.' Political thinkers who, twenty years ago, might have been speaking their pieces as bits in the liberal ferment of the New Deal, are turning nowadays to the prescriptions of Burke -- and remaining largely aloof from the world of affairs. They urge upon us the ideas of eccentrics from the American tradition like Calhoun and John Randolph of Roanoke; they teach us to prefer Adams to Jefferson; they defend the Sedition Act; and they as sure us that the American Revolution was in fact no revolution at all. The talk is of conservatism and of distrust in equality and democracy.
Representative books of the 1950s conservative revival are
Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited (1950); Russell Kirk, Randolph of Roanoke (1951), The Conservative Mind (1953), and A Program for Conservatives (1954); John H. Hallowell, The Moral Foundation of Democracy (1954); and Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (1955). Other books which serve the neoconservative movement by revising Revolutionary and Constitutional history are W. W. Crosskey, Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States (1953); Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (1953); B. C. Rodick, American Constitutional Custom (1953); Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (1954); and Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) (Mr. Hartz uses "liberal" in the nineteenth-century sense). The thesis that an American revolution did in fact take place, bringing with it fundamental social and libertarian reforms, is maintained by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The Age of Jackson (1945) and The Vital Center (1949); Dumas Malone in Jefferson and the Rights of Man (1951); Irving Brant's volumes on the life of Madison, especially James Madison, Father of the Constitution (1950); and Stuart Gerry Brown in The First Republicans (1954). It's curious that books by Leo Strauss are not included in this list.
(5a) Leo Strauss's Geopolitical Ideas Inform Neocons
[this stuff needs checking] Leo Strauss (1899 - 1973), served for many years (1949-68)as a political philosopher at the University of Chicago. Born in Hesse, Germany, he fled the Nazis and came to the United States. He is known for his controversial interpretations of political philosophers, including Xenephon and Plato. In a critique of modern political philosophy, i.e., philosophy since Machiavelli, Strauss argued that it suffers from an inability to make value judgments about political regimes, even about obviously odious ones.
Seeking to create an model for how political philosophy should proceed, Strauss held up the work of the Ancients, i.e., Xenophon and Plato. [extremely questionable] He defended the anti-historicist position that it is possible for a person to grasp the thought of philosophers of different eras on their own terms, i.e., unencumbered by presuppositions inherent in his own historical context. Strauss's works include Natural Right and History (1952), Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), and The City and Man (1964). See Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1987). A central theme of Strauss' was the "crisis of the West." He argued that Western civilization had been built on two great pillars: "Athens and Jerusalem." These great cities represented the two forces-reason and revelation-that gave life to the West. But modern philosophy, Strauss observed, was dedicated to the overthrow of these pillars.
America has resisted the destructive force of modern philosophy because of the moral principles on which it was founded. But Strauss feared that America was losing its "unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism." In his most famous book, Natural Right and History, he asked: "Does this nation in it maturity still cherish the faith in which it was conceived and raised? Does it still hold [the Declaration's] 'truths to be self-evident'?" Strauss is a godfather of sorts to the Neocon movement. David McBryde (Cato Institute);
Strauss's students include Alan Bloom, supporters of the Project for the New American Century , like Fukuyama, Wolfowitz and William J. Bennett, a former Secretary of Education and also Drug Czar) -- along with other Neocons like Justice Clarence Thomas and Alan Keyes, the African-American perennial conservative presidential candidate) -- are followers of Strauss. There is much on the Web on Strauss, but here are links to some promising looking sites: (1) (2)
"Straussians," the conservative author Dinesh D'Souza has written, like to use the philosophy of "natural right" -- which for the ancients was a basis for differentiating between right and wrong -- "to defend liberal democracy and moral values against their adversaries both foreign and indigenous." MICHIKI KAKUTANI (This is a NYT article, 4/5/03, "Arts section", and only stays on the Web for a limited time. If the article isn't accessible when you try to link to it, go online, or in person to your library and access the article in a fulltext database such as Proquest, or, email me and I'll send an edited copy.) ]
(5b) Impact of Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind
Many of Strauss's ideas were popularized by Strauss's student, Alan Bloom, who was the author of the best seller The Closing of the American Mind and a mentor to both Fukuyama and Wolfowitz (Evidently Wolfowitz became the inspiration for a minor character in Ravelstein, Saul Bellow's 2000 novel about Bloom. See below.)
Both Strauss and Bloom reviled moral relativism, invoked the teaching of the classics and took an elitist view of education. As teachers in the Socratic tradition, they also ardently believed in mentors, a role that Mr. Kristol, an avowed Straussian, filled so energetically as Vice President Dan Quayle's chief of staff that he became known as "Dan Quayle's brain." [scan pp. 6, 18-19, of levine; 220, 315, hunter, numerous pp of watson's the modern mind] MICHIKI KAKUTANI (This is a NYT article, 4/5/03, "Arts section", and only stays on the Web for a limited time. If the article isn't accessible when you try to link to it, go online, or in person to your library and access the article in a fulltext database such as Proquest, or, email me and I'll send an edited copy.)
There's Even a Novel in This Neocon Chemistry: Saul Bellow's Ravelstein
In "Ravelstein," Mr. Bellow, described the Wolfowitz and Bloom characters talking about Desert Storm. "And it was essential to fit up-to-the-minute decisions in the gulf war -- made by obviously limited pols like Bush and Baker," he wrote, "into a true-as-possible picture of the forces at work -- into the political history of this civilization." In 1992 Mr. D'Souza put it this way: "Straussians have an intellectual rigor that is very attractive. They have extolled the idea of the statesman and the notion of advising the great, the prince, like Machiavelli or Aristotle. This is necessary because the prince is not always the smartest guy in the world." MICHIKO KAKUTANI (This is a NYT article, 4/5/03, "Arts section", and only stays on the Web for a limited time. If the article isn't accessible when you try to link to it, go online, or in person to your library and access the article in a fulltext database such as Proquest, or, email me and I'll send an edited copy.) Robert Fulford in the Toronto Globe and Mail writes that Bellow is erecting a literary monument to his friend, titled Ravelstein, and Dinitia Smith's article, "A Bellow Novel Eulogizes a Friendship."
(6) In the 1950s, the emergence of the current meaning of Neoconservative
Also in the 1950s, the current connotation of neoconservative emerged, i.e., a neoconservative is a former liberal for whom liberalism has changed, but left that person behind, because he was unable to embrace the new liberalism. In a 1956 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, (Volume 62, Issue 2, Sep., 1956), 244-245) in a review of Daniel Bell's The New American Right., Lewis A. Coser writes
Three sociologists -- David Riesman, Talcott Parsons, and Seymour M. Lipset -- two historians --Richard Hofstadter and Peter Viereck -- and two [sociologists] -- Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer -- here attempt to account for new rightist tendencies in American politics. They discuss the new social strata which entered the political arena after the New Deal and note that older strata with traditional claims seem largely to have lost their grip on political power.
This is a curious book: it contains sociological analysis of a high order but also a special kind of neo-conservative political pleading. It partakes of the characteristics of a tract for the times and of a contribution to political sociology. The editor's introductory essay argues rather heatedly for a politics of moderation. Daniel Bell, labor editor of Fortune, contends that "the tendency to convert issues into ideologies, to invest them with moral color and high emotional charge, invites conflict which can only damage society.... The saving glory of the United States is that politics has always been a pragmatic give-and-take rather than a series of wars-to-the-death. One ultimately comes to admire the `practical politics' of a Theodore Roosevelt and his scorn for the intransigents...... Neither Bell nor some other authors of the volume who echo him seem fully aware that their attempted de-ideologizing of politics is itself an ideological enterprise.
This 1950s milieu, the aftermath of WWI II, the height of the Cold War, then, helped give birth to the current, so-called "neo-conservative" movement. For an authoriative account of the origins of the movement, check out chapter 6 of Godfrey Hodgson, The World Turned Right Side Up. (The following paragraphs loosely distill Hodgson's account, and, for an "official", here is a link to the website maintained by the Neoconservatives.)
We get more evidence about the liberal roots of neoconservatives in the words of Harvard social scientist Nathan Glazer. In October, 1971, in an article in Commentary magazine called "On Being Deradicalized", Glazer asks,
How does a radical - a mild radical, it is true, but still someone who felt closer to radical than to liberal writers and politicians in the late 1950s, end up by early 1970 a conservative, a mild conservative, but still closer to those who now call themselves conservatives than to those who call themselves liberals? [This article seems to be on a website in France, but every time I have tried to access it, my computer has crashed, not a good sign.]
Rather than being a group organized as a political party, Hodgson notes, the men mentioned above "were a cross between a generation of New York intellectuals, a coterie, and a tendency." Together, they reflected a narrow alcove of American society: essentially, they are products of Ivy League graduate schools and "a corner of the New York literary world." Claims Hodgson,
Although many of them claimed to be "scholars" or "social scientists," their real gifts, in most cases, were for a particular style of what used to be called "the higher journalism," more French in many ways than American, in which they slashed away at the errors of those who disagreed with them in great and sometimes cloudy realms of high policy and national destiny. ...They definitely made the decisive breach in the defenses of the liberal orthodoxy, because they succeeded in stripping liberalism in the public mind of its monopoly of expertise....
Lessens drawn from the 1960s demonstrated that "Liberal experts often caused more harm than good." In response, for the neoconsrvatives, it seemed best to "rely less, not more, on government intervention." They were appalled at the "excesses of the peace movement, the civil rights movement, and the counterculture..."
(6a) Founding of The Public Interest
The group who founded The Public Interest represented the core of what later became the neoconservative movement. But, notes Hodgson, "there was no orthodoxy." Instead, some, e.g., "Moynihan, ceased to be neoconservative. Others, like Bell, had always stopped well short of identifying themselves as conservatives in the first place."
Nonetheless, beginning in the late 1960s this group did develop a cluster of ideas and attitudes that were characteristic of what evolved into an identifiable neoconservative movement. It was to have an immense effect on the form American conservatism took in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps the absolutely fundamental neoconservative idea was the need to reassert American nationalism or patriotism or "Americanism" or "American exceptionalism": the idea that American society, however flawed, is not only essentially good but somehow morally superior to other societies." This belief has been deeply ingrained in the United States since the Revolution. It was strong in the American colonies before the Revolution. It has origins in the puritanism of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, and it has religious overtones, in the idea that it is the destiny of the United States to "redeem" a sinful `- world, as well as nationalist ones. Indeed, it has sometimes been called a "secular religion." It is found in every corner of the country geographically and in Americans of every ethnic origin and social class, even among many black Americans.
One of the primary movers of the neoconservative movement, founder of the journal The Public Interest in 1965, Irving Kristol's background "includes waging culture wars for the CIA against the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War and calling for an American "imperial" role during the Vietnam War." Here's how Hodgson desribes Kristol's rise:
In 1968, Kristol begn to write a column called "Books & Ideas" for Fortune magazine. And in 1972 he joined the Board of Contributors of the Wall Street Journal. He soon began to use the wonerfully influential platform of its editroial page, read by almost every serious banker and corporate executive in America, to reach poerful people, not in th main, given to much theoretical speculation.
Credited with defining the major themes of neo-conservative thought, Kristol is married to Gertrude Himmelfarb, a neo-conservative powerhouse in her own right. Himmelfarb's studies of the Victorian era in Britain are said to inspire those who sold Bush on the idea of "compassionate conservatism." (On this topic, a meta search engine scan of the Web yields much rightwing laudatory hits e.g., Marvin Olasky, about Himmelfarb's connection with CC; evidently it is her Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians that is the inspiration. The argument is that "social engineering " sucks out the ---- of volunteer organizations. This New Republic article is not entirely critical, but doesn't fit into the "fluff-piece" genre either.) In paper form, ie, books, we get more on Himmelfarb's impact from Peter Watson, The Modern Mind, a tour-de-force in the intellectual history of the twentieth century, pp. 735-736, where Watson shows Himmelfarb's posture as basically a dismissal of all aspects of postmodernist scholarship. Also see pp. 463-464, 609-610; Levine, pp. 5-6, 12, 26, 28, 147; Hollinger, pp. 14, 18-19, 25; Munslow, pp. 87-88, 18, 40, 80, 166. I will expand this section in due time.
Their son, William Kristol, pivotal in the neo-conservative group founded and edits the Weekly Standard, owned by the rightwing newspaper and Fox-tv mogul, Rupert Murdoch. (The first link is an "official" biography. Temper its contents with the second, which isn't idolatory:) Kristol also founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), described as "a front group founded in 1997 that allied right-wing Republicans like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, Christian and Catholic Right leaders like Gary Bauer and William Bennett, and the neo-cons "behind a platform of global U.S. military dominance."
(7) Project for the New American Century: "challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values"
Among the signers of signed the 1997 statement of principles of the Project for the New American Century are Cheney, Rumsfeld,Wolfowitz, I. Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff) and Eliot A. Cohen. Also signing were Kagan's father, the Yale classics professor Donald Kagan and the political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, whose 1992 book, "The End of History and the Last Man," famously (and to some, absurdly) trumpeted the triumph of the West and the exhaustion of alternatives to liberal democracy. source: MICHIKO KAKUTANI (This is a NYT article, 4/5/03, "Arts section", and only stays on the Web for a limited time. If the article isn't accessible when you try to link to it, go online, or in person to your library and access the article in a fulltext database such as Proquest, or, email me and I'll send an edited copy.)
According to Lobe, "Irving Kristol's most prominent disciple is Richard Perle who doubles as Defense Policy Board chairman and as a "resident scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute, which is housed in the same building as PNAC. Perle himself married into neocon royalty when he wed the daughter of his professor at the University of Chicago, the late Alfred Wohlstetter: the man who helped both his son-in-law and his fellow student Paul Wolfowitz get their start in Washington more than 30 years ago."
Perle's own protege is Douglas Feith, who is now Wolfowitz's deputy for policy and is widely known for his right-wing Likud position. And why not? His father, Philadelphia businessman and philanthropist Dalck Feith, was once a follower of the great revisionist Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his native Poland back in the 1930s. The two Feiths were honored together in 1997 by the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).
(8) The Alleged Impact of Books by Neoconservatives on Bush and Cheney: (a) Supreme Command, by Eliot A. Cohen
Last summer President Bush -- whose favorite book had been Marquis James's 1929 biography of Sam Houston, who evolved from being the man the Cherokees called Big Drunk to the father of Texas -- made it known that he was reading Supreme Command by Eliot A. Cohen, a member of the Defense Policy Board (along with its former chairman, Richard N. Perle) and a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was once dean). The book was widely circulated at the Defense and State Departments and came emblazoned with a blurb from the editor of The Weekly Standard, William Kristol, saying it was the single volume he most wished Mr. Bush to read.
On March 21, as the war was beginning, Mr. Kristol said at the American Enterprise Institute that Mr. Bush "seems to understand, better than many presidents, I would say, the lesson of our friend Eliot Cohen's book of about a year ago, `Supreme Command,' that political strategy should drive military strategy." The ubiquitous Mr. Kristol is also the author, along with Lawrence F. Kaplan, of a new book called The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission, which applauds the administration's determination to "liberate" Iraq and tries to place the president's "robust approach to the international scene" in the tradition of Ronald Reagan and Harry S. Truman. MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Cohen: "war is too important to be left to the generals"
As for the Cohen book, its central thesis, in Clemenceau's famous words, is that "war is too important to be left to the generals." It exhorts civilian leaders to query, prod and give orders to their subordinates -- an interesting thesis given the allegations in the military that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld ignored the advice of senior officers and initially committed insufficient troops to Iraq.
Supreme Command charges that the president's father abdicated responsibility in favor of the military in the first Persian Gulf war, ending it too early and allowing Saddam Hussein to stay in power. In interviews Mr. Cohen has chided the American military, saying he is wary when it navely dabbles in geopolitics. One example he has cited concerns the military's worry that the Arab street might erupt in protest if the United States ousted President Hussein. And he has praised Mr. Rumsfeld for exercising the sort of civilian control over the Pentagon that he admires.
"The point is that Rumsfeld is really -- is on top," Mr. Cohen told Brit Hume of Fox News last year. "He's asking the tough, probing questions. Churchill once said, it's always right to probe, and I think that's the right motto for a civilian leader." Two of Mr. Rumsfeld's favorite books are reportedly William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion, and Roberta Wohlstetter's study of intelligence failure, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision. MICHIKO KAKUTANI (This is a NYT article, 4/5/03, "Arts section", and only stays on the Web for a limited time. If the article isn't accessible when you try to link to it, go online, or in person to your library and access the article in a fulltext database such as Proquest, or, email me and I'll send an edited copy.)
Cheney's Favorite Books
(b) An Autumn of War by Victor Davis Hanson
Several books and thinkers also appear to have helped form the thinking of Vice President Dick Cheney, whose position on Iraq became increasingly akin to that of neoconservatives like Mr. Kristol in the year after 9/11. Last fall he read An Autumn of War by Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, military historian and National Review contributor, whom he later invited to dinner. In that volume Mr. Hanson wrote approvingly of the ancient Greek view of war as "terrible but innate to civilization -- and not always unjust or amoral if it is waged for good causes to destroy evil and save the innocent."
He asserted that we were in an "outright bloody war against tyranny, intolerance and theocracy," and he called for going to war "hard, long, without guilt, apology or respite until our enemies are no more."
Newsweek said that "Cheney told his aides that Hanson's book reflected his philosophy." MICHIKO KAKUTANI (This is a NYT article, 4/5/03, "Arts section", and only stays on the Web for a limited time. If the article isn't accessible when you try to link to it, go online, or in person to your library and access the article in a fulltext database such as Proquest, or, email me and I'll send an edited copy.)
(c) Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
Newsweek also reported that after 9/11 Mr. Cheney spent much of his time in an undisclosed location reading books about weapons of mass destruction and consulting with scholars about the Middle East. Among them was Bernard Lewis, the Princeton historian who wrote the best-selling What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response and was a participant in a pre-Sept. 11 study of ancient empires, sponsored by Mr. Rumsfeld's office, to understand how they maintained their dominance. MICHIKO KAKUTANI (This is a NYT article, 4/5/03, "Arts section", and only stays on the Web for a limited time. If the article isn't accessible when you try to link to it, go online, or in person to your library and access the article in a fulltext database such as Proquest, or, email me and I'll send an edited copy.)
Cheney Amalgamates Concepts From Both Hanson and Lewis
Mr. Lewis reportedly told Mr. Cheney that the Arab world looked down on weakness and respected the exercise of force. After talks with him and other Middle East experts like the Johns Hopkins scholar Fouad Ajami, Time reported, Mr. Cheney "gradually abandoned his former skepticism about the potential for democracy in the Middle East," a development that became a tipping point in the tilt toward war.
Early this year Mr. Lewis wrote an article for Newsweek International in which he made a case for American intervention in Iraq and argued that "worries about Iraqi civilians -- fighting in the streets, popular resistance" were overblown. Now Mr. Lewis has written an article for The Wall Street Journal Europe in which he argues that Iraqis may be reluctant to welcome American soldiers because antiwar protests reinforce their worry that "the United States may flinch from finishing the job."
Mr. Hanson also predicted a quick war, three to four weeks, he told The Los Angeles Times, while Mr. Cohen told the House Armed Services Committee last October that establishing a moderate regime in Baghdad "would have beneficial consequences well beyond Iraq, including in our war against Islamic extremism." MICHIKO KAKUTANI (This is a NYT article, 4/5/03, "Arts section", and only stays on the Web for a limited time. If the article isn't accessible when you try to link to it, go online, or in person to your library and access the article in a fulltext database such as Proquest, or, email me and I'll send an edited copy.)
[this account, which needs more work, comes from Eurolegal services: Guide to European Legal Resources for Business]
Evidently the motivation for rightwing philantropists to fund neoconservative operations such as "think tanks" was first suggested by the so-called 1971 Powell Memorandum. The details of account is perhaps best laid out by Jerry M. Landay. Landay, a professor emeritus in journalism at the University of Illinois and a former CBS and ABC news correspondent, posted his account on August 20, 2002. (The following details about the impact of the Powell Memorandum owe much to Landay's account.)
Says Landay, "Few are aware of the critical role played in the political power shift rightward by a prominent Richmond attorney and community leader, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., at the very threshold of a distinguished career on the U.S. Supreme Court." A conservative southern Democrat and prominent corporation lawyer, who achieved national prominence as president of the American Bar Association, Powell found, according to Landay, "the social turmoil and anti-business mood of the country abhorrent and alarming." Powell was, continues Landay, "to be a leading catalyst in politicizing key sectors of the business establishment; and, he would make a major, if perhaps inadvertent, contribution to the strategy and tactics of the emerging new right." Here's how Landay describes it:
On September 13, 1971, a month before President Nixon was to nominate him to the Supreme Court to fill the seat vacated by Hugo Black, Powell wrote a letter to a law-school friend, Ross L. Malone, general counsel of the General Motors Corporation. Powell wanted Malone's help -- to alert "top management" of the company to the "contentious time in which we live" and the "plight of the [free] enterprise system." A massive propaganda campaign, he wrote, was being waged against business. "[M]anagement has been unwilling to make a massive effort to protect itself and the system it represents." Unless the business community acted, Powell warned, the capitalist system was "not likely to survive."
That 1971 letter, now stored in the Powell archives at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, carried two enclosures. One was a copy of a memorandum that Powell had written at the invitation of Eugene Sydnor, Jr., a Richmond friend and department store owner, as well as chairman of the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. Senior officials of the Chamber, including Arch Booth, its executive vice-president, decided to circulate it to privately to members. It was less a memo than a militant manifesto of political action, outlining in detail Powell's ideas on how business should go about responding to the assault against it. He urged the Chamber, which represented America's major businesses and trade associations, to take the lead in an aggressive "education" campaign in defense of free enterprise.
The following still needs much work:
The Powell memorandum remained confidential for more than a year after Powell composed it. It was not disclosed or referred to in the Senate hearings on his nomination.
Lee Edwards, professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, is the official historian of the Heritage Foundation, and reports an account of an interview with the late Joseph Coors, head of the largest brewery west of the Mississippi in which Coors stated that he had been "stirred up" after reading the Powell Memorandum.
Coors told Edwards that Powell's Memorandum had "convinced" him that American business was "ignoring a crisis". Coors was moved to act. He "invested" the first $250,000 to fund the 1971-72 operations of the Analysis and Research Association (ARA) in Washington, D.C., the original name of the Heritage Foundation. Other wealthy contributors followed Coors' lead. The Heritage Foundation became the trend-setting model for scores of other policy institutes and lobbying operations and has been a major beneficiary of the Coors' Castle Rock Foundation and other donors ever since.
Thus the proposals outlined in the Powell Memorandum were refined and implemented with funding provided by charitable foundations, including:-
The Castle Rock Foundation - established with the brewing assets of the Coors dynasty of Colorado
NOTES
It must be remembered that all these philanthropic organisations are charities under United States law and the gifts to the right wing campaigning organisations identifed are:-
(i) only a proportion of the charitable activities of the Foundations listed; and (ii) apparently permissable under US charities law.
The links in each case are to the page for that Foundation on the Media Transparency web site.
Where the Foundation itself has a web site, there will be a link on the Media Transparency page.
Some Foundations disclose much more about their grantmaking activities than do others.
Likewise, the recipient organisation provide varying degrees of information about their funding, management and activities.
A National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy Report found that the top 5 conservative multi-issue public policy groups in the study were operating in 1995 on US$77 millions of combined revenues as compared to US$18.6 millions for the eight political equivalents on the left.
The Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation - established with the manufacturing fortunes of Lynde and Harry Bradley of Milwaukee
The Earhart Foundation
The JM Foundation
The Claude R Lambe Charitable Foundation - The Charles D. Koch Charitable Foundation - The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation - all established with the energy revenues of the Koch family of Kansas
The Philip M. McKenna Foundation
The Scaife Foundations - established with the banking and oil money of the Mellon-Scaifes of Pittsburgh
The John M. Olin Foundation - the chemical and munitions profits of John M. Olin of New York
The Smith Richardson Foundation - coming from Vicks patent-medicine empire of the Smith Richardson family of Greensboro, N.C
The grants have supported paid for a veritable constellation of think tanks, pressure groups, special-interest foundations, litigation centers, scholarly research and funding endowments, publishing and TV production houses, media attack operations, political consultancies, polling organisations, and public-relations operations.
How the Neoconservative think tanks are financed
For years many on the left have been aware that most of the think tanks in DC are funded by the right, and are constantly churning out rightwing propaganda that is widely distributed, especially among newspapers, nationwide. Other evidence about the initial funding of right wing think tanks comes from Eurolegal services: Guide to European Legal Resources for Business, Manufacturing "Conventional Wisdom , Joe Hagan, Neocon Watch, and $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s
Principal Players
Rupert Murdoch, chairman and C.E.O. of News Corporation. Murdoch's News Corp. owns The Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol. Kristol is a board member at the right-wing think tank Manhattan Institute, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and a commentator on ABC News' This Week
Joe Hagan,: "For an explanation of the elder Mr. Kristol's movement from left-wing to conservative, try renting Arguing the World, the cogent 1998 documentary that charted the New York lefties' path rightward."
Roger Hertog, vice chairman of Alliance Capital Management. Hertog, according to Neocon Mark Gerson, is the "one man who has, far more than anyone else, financially enabled this movement to exist." A board member at the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, Hertog is a primary financial backer behind the Shalem Center, a think tank known as the A.E.I. of Israel, as well as co-funder of The New York Sun and The New Republic. (Until 19??, the New Republic was a leftwing weekly. Formerly a "muckraking" liberal voice, it became "conservative in 19??.)
Also an investor in The New York Sun and The New Republic, Bruce Kovner, is chairman of the Caxton Corporation. Also a noted Wall Street figure, Manhattan Institute board member, significantly, he chairs the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank that, according to Joe Hagan, " serves as the human-resources department for the Bush administration."
Conrad Black, Chairman and C.E.O. of Hollinger International Inc. Black, formerly a Canadian newspaper magnate, now a British subject, has an interest in The New York Sun .
John M. Olin Foundation, a philanthropic organization headed by James Piereson, has funded the American Enterprise Institute, along with neocon players Max Boot and the Manhattan Institute .
(10) American Enterprise Institute a major nexus for inter-familial relationships
The American Enterprise Institute has long been a major nexus for such inter-familial relationships. Richard Perle is resident scholar. A long-time collaborator with Perle, Michael Ledeen is married to Barbara Ledeen, a founder and director of the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum (IWF), who is currently a major player in the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill. Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and another neo-con power couple, David and Meyrav Wurmser, co-authored a 1996 memorandum for Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu outlining how to break the Oslo peace process and invade Iraq as the first step to transforming the Middle East.
At AEI, Feb. 26, 2003, President Bush, in a foreign-policy speech, declared the need to topple Saddam Hussein's regime. In his opening remarks, he declared the AEI the home of "some of the finest minds in our nation," which had done "such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds." (See also: Bruce Kovner; Roger Hertog, )
Though she doesn't focus much on foreign-policy issues, Lynne Cheney is a fellow (on board of directors) at AEI. Her husband, Vice President Dick Cheney, appointed Victoria Nuland as deputy national security adviser. Nuland is married to Robert Kagan, Kristol's comrade-in-arms and the co-founder of PNAC. Kagan's father, Donald Kagan, a Yale historian, converted from a liberal Democrat to a staunch neocon in the 1970s. On the eve of the 2000 presidential elections, Donald and his other son, Frederick, published "While America Sleeps," which argues for an increase defense spending. As Lobe notes, "Since then, the three Kagan men have written reams of columns warning that the currently ballooning Pentagon budget is simply not enough to fund the much-desired vision of U.S. global supremacy." Here is a sample of the senior Kagan's neoconservative thinking: In October, 2002, an op ed writer,for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Jay Bookman, wrote The President's Goal in Iraq. In turn, one of the authors, Yale professor, Donald Kagan, responded: Comparing America to ancient empires is 'ludicrous' And, in turn to Kagan's post, much email was generated: Here is a sample. This is the text of the report. Further, extaordinarily, except in theh era of the Internet, the report was the subject of an Op Ed in Lebanon's Daily Star.
Robert Kagan is currently the darling neocon for having published Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.
Michael Lind dismisses the thesis of the book as being "complete nonsense" (You have to scroll down a bit, can't make the link work.) Also see the review of the book by New York University's Tony Judt in the currrent issue of New York Review of Books. Judt is also equally dismissive of the book: "injudiciously overpraised by those who ought to know better"
Now the director of Near Eastern Affairs in Bush's National Security Council, Elliott Abrams worked closely with Robert Kagan back in the Reagan era. He is also the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, long-time editor of the influential conservative Jewish publication Commentary, and his wife, Midge Decter, a fearsome polemicist in her own right.
Podhoretz, like Kristol Sr., helped invent neo-conservatism, as it is known today, in the late 1960s. He and Decter created a formidable political team as leaders of the Committee on the Present Danger in 1980, when they worked with Donald Rumsfeld to pound the last nail into the coffin of detente and promote the rise of Ronald Reagan. In addition to being Abrams' father-in-law, Norman Podhoretz is also the father of John Podhoretz, a columnist for the Murdoch-owned New York Post and frequent guest on the Murdoch-owned Fox News channel.
As editor of Commentary, Norman offered writing space to rising stars of the neocon movement for more than 30 years. His proteges include former U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Pipes, who was Ronald Reagan's top advisor on the "Evil Empire," as the president liked to call the Soviet Union. His son, Daniel Pipes, has also made a career out of battling "evil," which in his case is Islam. And to tie it all up neatly, in 2002, Podhoretz received the highest honor bestowed by the AEI: the Irving Kristol award.
(11) Neocons and Rightwing Media
Here are passages from an editorial on the impact of rightwing media posted by Consortiumnews.com
The secret to the conservative media's success in reshaping America's political landscape is not the pervasive nastiness, though that's played a role. The key is that conservatives have created a 'media home' for tens of millions of like-minded viewers, listeners and readers across the country ....[but] [t]here is no liberal 'media home' remotely like what the conservatives have built. Indeed, the mainstream news outlets that conservatives incorrectly label the 'liberal media' studiously avoid tilting to the liberal side and increasingly compete for conservative viewers and readers.
At the center of any viable answer must be the construction of a counter-media that addresses the interests of those tens of millions of Americans who are now 'media homeless.' That does not mean that this new structure should be a liberal mirror image of today's conservative media. It should have a journalistic ethos, not an ideological one.
Yet to succeed in the market place, it must speak to those millions of Americans alienated by today's news media. In doing so, it would need a distinctive journalistic voice. In part, that could come from treating the Bush administration with a skepticism lacking at Fox News, CNN and most other news outlets. It could report on what Democratic leaders are saying, which might encourage them to sharpen their message.
It also could offer programming of interest to environmentalists, small investors, women, Hispanics, African-Americans and other groups that are underrepresented in the mainstream and conservative media.
There are a variety of strategies that could be followed to this end, but it is a discussion long overdue. The 2002 Election should have killed off any lingering hopes that this is a problem that will solve itself.
(12) Attempts by the Left to Counter the Neocon Media
No similar system exists on the left, although a 1995 National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy Report found that the top 5 conservative multi-issue public policy groups in the study were operating in 1995 on US$77 millions of combined revenues as compared to US$18.6 millions for the eight political equivalents on the left. Source: Eurolegal services: Guide to European Legal Resources for Business.
I had not, though, been aware of the article by Debra Toler, of the Institute for Public Accuracy until I ran across it the other day. I commend it to you as a solid documentation of the institutions, including some of its dirty linen about race. American Enterprise Institute finds profit in prejudice]
To some extent, NPR, PBS TV (e.g., Bill Moyers' 'NOW') and perhaps a handful of left-of-center non-profit fm stations, fulfill Debra Toler's argument for a greater voice to the left. (This editorial by Consortiumnews.com provides a similar lament.) It's not that the left lacks people with initiative and imagination; as evidence, checkout the numerous groups on this list that are engaged in voicing and/or promoting progessive programs. Basically, what the voice of the left lacks is, however, the deep pockets of the rightwing zealots, more than willing to pony up the dollars to finance a steady stream of anti-left opinion, as seen in the evidence of how DC-based think-tanks are financed. (After looking at the preceding link, you should also read the several other articles posted on this topic by the Institute for Public Accuracy .) Not that the Dems and left-liberals haven't thought about this glaring discrepancy.
(13) United States War Machine: Revving the engines of WW II
United States War Machine: Revving the engines of World War II, by Michael Chossudovsky, CovertAction Quarterly magazine, Fall 2002
POST-l999 MILITARY BUILDUP
... Meanwhile in Washington, a major buildup of America's military arsenal was in the making. The underlying objective was to achieve a position of global military hegemony: Defense spending in 2002 was hiked up to more than $320 billion, an amount equivalent to the entire Gross Domestic Product of the Russian Federation (approximately $325 billion). An even greater increase in U.S. military spending was set in motion in the wake of the October 2002 bombing of Afghanistan:
More than one-third of the $65 billion allocated for new weapons in the 2003 budget is for cold war type weapons. Several billion dollars are allocated for cluster bomb systems that have been condemned by human rights groups around the world. There is no rationale for this level of military spending other than a clear intent for the United States to be the New World Empire, dominating the globe economically and militarily including the militarization of space...
In the largest military buildup since the Vietnam War, the Bush administration plans to increase military spending by $120 billion over a five-year period, "bringing the 2007 military budget to an astounding $451 billion."
But, since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the arms industry has had to adjust to a radically new world order general peace. The largest defense contractors have merged into three megacompanies; the industry's work force has shrunk by qo percent; and, as Pentagon orders have dried up, arms contractors have had to seek out foreign clients.
William Greider Fortress America--part II Rolling Stone New York Nov 27, 1997 [need to change number of grieder to correspond with his rolling stone issues]
(14) Developments Post 1990's Early 2003
Until recently, the United States and countries like Israel occupied opposite ends of the security spectrum: one a confident and carefree superpower, seemingly untouchable, the other a tiny garrison state, surrounded by fortifications and barbed wire, fighting for its survival. But the security gap between the U.S. and places like Israel is narrowing. Fortress America By MATTHEW BRZEZINSKI NYT Magzine 02/23/03, pp. 38+
Scoop's account of PBS frontline program, "The War Behind Closed Doors"
War Report: Analyses, key documents, and select articles compiled by the Project on Defense Alternatives ( updated frequently )
[Scout Report annot: This helpful omnibus of links to timely research, editorials, papers, and other written material on the situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan is provided by the Project on Defense Alternatives. The Project was found in 1991, and part of its mission is to "adapt security policy to the challenges and opportunities of the post-Cold War era. Toward this end it promotes consideration of the broadest range of defense options." Their advisory board is made up of an impressive range of scholars, policymakers, and scientists. The War Report page itself contains numerous links to a wide array of sources, including special reports from the United Nations on the opium economy in Afghanistan and the latest reports on the status of nuclear inspections in Iraq. Equally valuable are numerous links to news coverage from around the world, including the Guardian, BBC News, Eurasian Insight, and Global Affairs Commentary. The site is updated frequently and will be quite beneficial to those persons interested in staying in touch with the most current news and reports dealing with these two countries.]
War with Iraq: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives [.pdf] http://www.amacad.org/publications/monographs/War_with_Iraq.pdf
Released as part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Committee on International Security Studies Occasional Papers series, this 93-page report from December 2002 examines the political, military, and economic consequences of war with Iraq. The report is divided into three self-contained chapters, with each one exploring a different facet that illustrates the potential costs of war for the United States. In the first chapter, Carl Kaysen, John D. Steinbruner, and Martin B. Malin engage in an extended appraisal of the national security strategy behind the move toward a preventive war against Iraq. The second chapter finds Steven E. Miller considering a number of potentially detrimental military and strategic outcomes of war for the United States. The third chapter, John Nordhaus offers his economic cost estimations of war with Iraq by looking at scenarios that are both favorable and unfavorable to the United States. All in all, this paper is a thought-provoking and scholarly examination of a pressing topic that often receives only superficial consideration by the mainstream media. [KMG]Why Today's Europeans Object to America's Worldview By ETHAN BRONNER "Americans, after all, have become good at fighting terrorists but not at fighting terrorism"
Impact of US Adoption of Pre-emptive Strike Doctrine on Other Nations
The Op Ed writer, Johann Hari, in The UK's Independent, comments on A frightening picture of American superiority, that even emerges from the fictional TV program, The West Wing
... The fact that even a sophisticated, liberal American audience can hear this without either gasping or bursting into laughter is a sign of how blinkered Americans still are about their foreign policy legacy. Bartlett is meant to be a Nobel-prize winning economist. He would know that the US intervened in Iran in 1953 to overthrow the democratically elected, popular and reformist leader Mohammed Mossadeq and install the undemocratic and unpopular Shah, Reza Pahlavi. This set in train events that led to the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. He would know that the US intervened in Chile in 1973 to overthrow the democratically elected Salvador Allende and install the fascist Augusto Pinochet. He would know about Vietnam, for God's sake. He would know that the US to this day gives free rein to Ariel Sharon to murder Palestinian civilians.
The mindset which unconsciously informs Bartlett's actions, just as much as the current administration's, is what Edward Said has identified as "American fundamentalism": the equation of what is good for America axiomatically with what is good for the world. It is captured in a line from the musical Miss Saigon, which is meant to be ironic but which I have heard applauded by US audiences post-11 September: "But I'm an American/ I can't do wrong." It is the implicit belief that the US – because its collective identity is based on universal values embodied in the Constitution, not any concept of race or inherent belonging – will always act morally in its external affairs.
The West Wing shows the worrying extent to which American imperialism is based not only on a genuine desire to help other countries (and, yes, many decent Americans do actually believe this, and they are sometimes right; they are not all isolationist hicks) but also on a sense of essential superiority.
In an episode called "A Proportional Response", Bartlett finds out that his personal physician, amongst others, has been murdered on a trip to the Middle East. His security chiefs recommend "a proportionate response" to the American deaths, but Bartlett shouts that he wants "a disproportionate response". He explains, "Under the Roman empire, a Roman citizen could go anywhere he wanted in the world, because all over the world people knew that if they touched a citizen of Rome, the wrath of the entire Empire would rain down upon them. That is how Americans should feel."
So he decides, basically, to bomb the hell out of the Middle East, until he is finally talked round. Remember: this mindset is prevalent even in the Democratic Party.
In fact, US politics is, as the brave Republican senator John McCain has argued for years, systematically corrupt. Bill Clinton complained in 1995, justly, that he had to spend so much time raising money for his next presidential bid that neither he nor Al Gore had any time to actually do any governing. McCain has just piloted reforms into US law that limit the power of big money; its role in determining the US policy agenda is still breathtaking. Nobody even seems surprised any more when their President tours the country and addresses not crowds of citizens but only fund-raising meetings with massive entrance fees. It is unsurprising that politicians who owe their position to millionaires and who speak almost exclusively to millionaires end up governing in the interests of millionaires.
Even rightwingers in think tanks have questions about creating a fortress america:
Making a fortress of America isn't the answer "The same training that makes U.S. soldiers outstanding warriors makes them extremely dangerous as cops." Authored by Gene Healy, a Cato Institute editor
(15) Notes on Origins of Patriot Act I
vivisimo search terms "viet dinh" patriot
Headline Legal New: How Our Rights Have Changed [Associated Press article]
The Bush-Ashcroft-Dinh global effect
... The scene is typical of Dinh and his remarkable ascent to power: Part law school professor, part political pit bull, Dinh has navigated seamlessly between the worlds of Ivory Tower academia and sharp-elbowed Washington politics to leave his imprint on a wide array of policy decisions....
Origin of patriot act, see http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15138
From alternet link above:
The Domestic Security Enhancement Act is the latest development in an 18-month trend in which the Bush Administration has sought expanded powers and responsibilities for law enforcement bodies to help counter the threat of terrorism.
The USA Patriot Act, signed into law by President Bush on Oct. 26, 2001, gave law enforcement officials broader authority to conduct electronic surveillance and wiretaps, and gives the president the authority, when the nation is under attack, to confiscate any property within U.S. jurisdiction of anyone believed to be engaging in such attacks. The measure also tightened oversight of financial activities to prevent money laundering and diminish bank secrecy in an effort to disrupt terrorist finances.
It also changed provisions of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was passed in 1978 during the Cold War. FISA established a different standard of government oversight and judicial review for "foreign intelligence" surveillance than that applied to traditional domestic law enforcement surveillance.
The USA Patriot Act allowed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share information gathered in terrorism investigations under the "foreign intelligence" standard with local law enforcement agencies, in essence nullifying the higher standard of oversight that applied to domestic investigations. The USA Patriot Act also amended FISA to permit surveillance under the less rigorous standard whenever "foreign intelligence" was a "significant purpose" rather than the "primary purpose" of an investigation.
The draft legislation goes further in that direction. "In the [USA Patriot Act] we have to break down the wall of foreign intelligence and law enforcement," Cole said. "Now they want to break down the wall between international terrorism and domestic terrorism."
In an Oct. 9, 2002, hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism, and Government Information, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher testified that Justice had been, "looking at potential proposals on following up on the PATRIOT Act for new tools and we have also been working with different agencies within the government and they are still studying that and hopefully we will continue to work with this committee in the future on new tools that we believe are necessary in the war on terrorism."
Asked by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) whether she could inform the committee of what specific areas Justice was looking at, Fisher replied, "At this point I can't, I'm sorry. They're studying a lot of different ideas and a lot of different tools that follow up on information sharing and other aspects."
Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy Viet Dinh, who was the principal author of the first Patriot Act, told Legal Times last October that there was "an ongoing process to continue evaluating and re-evaluating authorities we have with respect to counterterrorism," but declined to say whether a new bill was forthcoming.
Former FBI Director William Sessions, who urged caution while Congress considered the USA Patriot Act, did not want to enter the fray concerning a possible successor bill.
"I hate to jump into it, because it's a very delicate thing," Sessions told the Center, without acknowledging whether he knew of any proposed additions or revisions to the additional Patriot bill.
When the first bill was nearing passage in the Congress in late 2001, however, Sessions told Internet site NewsMax.Com that the balance between civil liberties and sufficient intelligence gathering was a difficult one. "First of all, the Attorney General has to justify fully what he's asking for," Sessions, who served presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush as FBI Director from 1987 until 1993, said at the time. "We need to be sure that we provide an effective means to deal with criminality." At the same time, he said, "we need to be sure that we are mindful of the Constitution, mindful of privacy considerations, but also meet the technological needs we have" to gather intelligence.
Cole found it disturbing that there have been no consultations with Congress on the draft legislation. "It raises a lot of serious concerns and is troubling as a generic matter that they have gotten this far along and tell people that there is nothing in the works. What that suggests is that they're waiting for a propitious time to introduce it, which might well be when a war is begun. At that time there would be less opportunity for discussion and they'll have a much stronger hand in saying that they need these right away."
(16) The secret Patriot Act II and bill moyers' NOW feb 7
Justice Dept. Drafts Sweeping Expansion of Anti-Terrorism Act Center for Public Integrity Publishes Secret Draft of "Patriot II" Legislation.
[This was posted 4/3/03] GET READY FOR PATRIOT II Matt Welch, AlterNet While war news dominates, Ashcroft is ready to batten down the homeland's hatches with a draconian list of curbs on civil liberties.
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The Iron Triangle: The new military build-up