[Peace-discuss] What's happening in the administration (?)

[Morton K.Brussel]

Another excerpt from the American Conservative by Scott mcConnell:

     http://www.amconmag.com/2004_12_20/feature.html

The author wishes to rebuff the thesis that "realists" are finally 
making inroads into the administration. mkb


" At this writing, the staffing of a new foreign-policy apparatus is 
not complete. But the broad strokes are plain. At CIA, there is a new 
emphasis on loyalty to the president over readiness to provide 
objective analysis; Porter Goss will ensure that the agency provides 
information that the White House wants to hear. At the cabinet level, 
the direction is clear. Colin Powell is leaving, exhausted by his 
losing tussles with the Pentagon, semi-humiliated by the president. His 
crime was that he was right about war in Iraq, right that we needed 
allies and more forces for the invasion, right that postwar Iraq would 
be chaos and quagmire. His caution about the use of force —the Pottery 
Barn rule—must have irked the president every time he saw him, so 
better to banish him. Promoted instead are those who were consistently 
wrong. Rumsfeld remains, though his neocon aides “stovepiped” phony 
intelligence about Iraq’s WMD capacity, he botched the post invasion, 
and was responsible for the Abu Ghraib torture. Stephen Hadley, who 
“forgot” to remove the false claims about Iraq’s yellowcake purchases 
from the president’s 2003 State of the Union speech, is the new 
National Security Adviser. Condi Rice, whose TV musings about “mushroom 
clouds” helped frighten a nation into an unnecessary war, becomes the 
nation’s top diplomat.

  What became of the realists? Like the neocons, they are only policy 
intellectuals and bureaucrats, dependent on the politicians who appoint 
them. Among educated Americans, they won the foreign-policy debate 
decisively. No one doubts it. There are scores of bright people from 
George Will to William F. Buckley to Kenneth Pollack who are born-again 
realists; no one has recently converted to neoconservatism. But the 
realists did not win the debate inside Bush’s brain—indeed, there is no 
sign at all that the president was aware that there was a 
foreign-policy debate going on. Instead a 51-48 percent victory, a 
pitiful margin for an incumbent during wartime, is treated as a 
landslide of Reaganesque proportions and a mandate for the president to 
promote those whose foreign-policy advice has proved egregiously wrong.

  How has the country changed? Two years ago, when National Review 
editor Rich Lowry said that an appropriate response to a WMD attack on 
the United States might be to nuke Mecca, there was a fair amount of 
outrage. But Lowry, recall, was imagining how the United States might 
respond to a massive terrorist attack. Now the American airwaves and 
blogosphere are rife calls to nuke those whom military invasion 
couldn’t turn into democrats. “Could it happen here?” the old question 
goes. In one sense it already has."
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