[Peace-discuss] Neocons rule Republicans and Democrats

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...when it comes to foreign policy, the Democrats and Republicans can 
be fairly described as two wings of a single party – the War Party. 
Yes, there are exceptions to this dictum – for example, Dennis Kucinich 
in the Democratic camp, and Ron Paul in the GOP – and yet the odds 
against one or another insurgent antiwar candidate breaking out into the 
so-called mainstream are so great that the War Party can continue to 
operate even in the face of overwhelming antiwar sentiment on the part 
of voters..."


	Antiwar.com 	
	August 13, 2007
	The Democrats Are Selling Out the Peace Movement
	And much of the peace movement is selling out to the Democrats…
	by Justin Raimondo

I love going over to DailyKos.com – a site for very partisan Democrats – 
and reading the passionate antiwar screeds, the outrage at the 
escalation of the Iraq conflict in the face of rising opposition, the 
often timely and interesting analysis of our disastrous foreign policy 
posted by Kossacks with monikers like "antiwarrior" and "Cheneysucks," 
but I have to wonder: how in the name of all that's holy can these 
people support any of the Democratic "majors" in the race for the White 
House? After all, the leading Democratic candidates for president 
support keeping our troops in Iraq – for years, as the New York Times 
reports:

"Even as they call for an end to the war and pledge to bring the troops 
home, the Democratic presidential candidates are setting out positions 
that could leave the United States engaged in Iraq for years.

"John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, would keep troops in 
the region to intervene in an Iraqi genocide and be prepared for 
military action if violence spills into other countries. Senator Hillary 
Rodham Clinton of New York would leave residual forces to fight 
terrorism and to stabilize the Kurdish region in the north. And Senator 
Barack Obama of Illinois would leave a military presence of as-yet 
unspecified size in Iraq to provide security for American personnel, 
fight terrorism and train Iraqis."

So who does that leave us with? Bill Richardson? Dennis Kucinich? Mike 
Gravel? There's just one problem with these guys: none of them will get 
the Democratic presidential nomination. Which leaves us with the 
Janus-faced candidacies of the Axis of Ambiguity.

Well, but isn't this a case of making the perfect the enemy of the good? 
After all, Hillary-Obama-Edwards routinely pledge to get our troops out 
of Iraq – aren't their hearts in the right places, even if their 
programs are lacking in reassuring details?

To begin with, we can't know what's in someone's heart. We can only 
evaluate what they say and what they do. Second, the whole point of 
leaving Iraq – aside from stopping the killing, the senseless American 
sacrifices, and the billions draining out of the Treasury – is to ensure 
that we don't get sucked into a conflict beyond that country's borders. 
Every day brings new and more alarming claims of Iranian aid to Iraqi 
insurgents and militia groups, as well as accusations from the 
administration that our troops are being killed with weapons supplied by 
Tehran. (Of course, the influx of weapons to the Iraqi insurgents has 
nothing to do with those 190,000 weapons we lost track of in Iraq.)

Dick Cheney has been insistently lobbying the president for air strikes 
at Quds bases in Iran, and Lord knows Dubya's hardly averse to the idea. 
First, however, the administration has to engage in the elaborate kabuki 
dance of going the diplomatic route and pulling the rug out from under 
the Iranian peace party whenever it looks like negotiations might prove 
fruitful. Then they step on the accelerator and get their war propaganda 
campaign in high gear, overemphasizing the power and influence of 
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – who really doesn't run Iran's foreign 
policy – and conjuring the nightmare of nuclear terrorist attacks on the 
U.S. sponsored by Tehran.

When the rhetoric really begins to smoke, they'll spark a shooting war 
by overblowing some border incident and framing the war question in 
terms of regaining America's "honor." Will we "cut and run"? Or stand 
and fight? It's an argument the War Party always wins – until it comes 
out that the incident in question was either completely manufactured (as 
in the Gulf of Tonkin incident [.pdf] during the Vietnam War era), 
provoked by the Americans, or wildly exaggerated.

Unfortunately, at that late date, it's hard if not impossible to do 
anything about it: the war has already begun, the orgy of "patriotic" 
mindlessness is unleashed, and cries of "we're here, we have to make the 
best of it" drown out all else. Stripped of partisan hoo-hah, rhetorical 
pandering to the base, and outright demagogy, that is the basic 
Democratic position on the war, and the core of Hillary Rodham Clinton's 
stance.

The front-running Hillary is the darling of the neocons these days, 
partly because of her spat with Obama over what Fred Barnes calls the 
"would-you-meet-with-despots" question. Our future commander in chief 
answered "firmly and coolly," says the man who coined the phrase "big 
government conservatism." "She excels," raves National Review editor 
Rich Lowry, who says Clinton "has done more than any other Democrat to 
show she's ready to be president." Neocon bellwether David Brooks' paean 
to Hillary, the Warrior Goddess, heralds her as "the perfect combination 
of experience and change." Even Charles Krauthammer, the neocons' 
resident Cato (the Elder), hailed "the grizzled veteran" Hillary in her 
alleged victory over "the clueless rookie" Obama in the 
talk-with-tyrants spat.

I long ago predicted that the neoconservatives would switch sides in the 
partisan divide: having drained the GOP of its vital juices and left it 
a dry husk, they are readying themselves for the era of "Bush lite."

Sucking up to Hillary and her court won't be too difficult: the neocons 
already have an inside line in her camp in the person of Marshall 
Wittmann, the former 
Trotskyist-turned-Christian-Coalition-director-turned-McCainiac who is 
now Hillary's Rasputin. This ideological chameleon, whose advice to go 
hawkish and prove her credentials as a potential commander-in-chief she 
appears to be taking, is the archetypal neocon, which is not so much a 
doctrine as it is a history. Wittmann's political odyssey from the fever 
swamps of Spartacism to the storied heights of Washington's 
neoconservative network is an exaggerated version of Hillary's own 
hegira, from the far Left of the Democratic Party to the 
DLC-Lieberman-Scoop Jackson far Right.

This presents a dilemma for self-styled "progressive" activists involved 
in the antiwar movement. On the one hand, many of these otherwise 
sincere and quite dedicated opponents of our interventionist foreign 
policy are working to end the war, and their efforts are admirable. On 
the other hand, they have a partisan bond – and, of course, a domestic 
agenda – that often works at cross purposes with their ostensibly 
antiwar views. The Huffington Post's resident progressive-in-chief, 
David Sirota, has defended the spinelessness of the Democrats – not very 
convincingly – on the grounds that "purists" don't understand the 
alleged "realities" of Washington politics. However, the more radical 
lefties have no strong partisan loyalties – except maybe to the 
Communist Party, USA – at least in theory, but in practice these 
"radicals" are just interested in building a left satellite of the DNC. 
Yet they do have their limits, and these appear to have been reached 
with the Democrats' recent rollover on the war funding bill.

The ugly truth of the matter is that the Democrats' capitulation on the 
Iraq war funding issue was rationalized by the pork ladled out to 
compliant "antiwar" lefties in Congress. Bribery, in short, in the form 
of tax dollars handed out to favored interest groups, enabled the party 
leadership to whip the "antiwar" faction into line. Pork trumps 
principle, every time: that's life in the Imperial City, and it's part 
of the reason why this war is dragging on in spite of the fact that it's 
wildly unpopular. But there's more to this sad story…

When "blue dog Democrats" who consistently vote for the president's war 
funding consistently give the War Party the margin of victory in 
Congress, it is laughable that the big question, these days, in antiwar 
circles is not how but whether to respond to this blatant betrayal. The 
Hillreports:

"Congress's failure to secure a timetable for withdrawing American 
troops from Iraq has split antiwar activists on the tactical question of 
whether to attack Democrats, who now control Capitol Hill. The split has 
also underlined accusations among some activists that MoveOn has 
abandoned its credentials as an issue-based advocacy group and now 
instead provides cover for Democratic Party leaders."

The issue of MoveOn.org, the left-liberal online voter-mobilization 
machine conceived as an adjunct to the Democratic Party's Clintonian 
wing and its generally counterproductive role in the antiwar movement, 
has been dealt with here, here, and here, so I won't go into elaborate 
detail. Suffice to say that, along with some of their allies in the 
labor movement, notable the SEIU, they have created a front group known 
as Americans Against Escalation, which has been targeting Republican 
members of Congress on the war, running television ads in their 
districts and carrying out protest actions at their offices.

The anti-escalators wouldn't dream of targeting pro-war Democrats, 
however, since that would get in the way of their domestic political 
agenda, which is ultimately more important – to them – than the 
slaughter of a bunch of foreigners. It would also get in the way of 
their sucking up to the Democratic establishment, create obstacles in 
their upwardly mobile path to lucrative careers as political appointees, 
and pull down their stock on the D.C. cocktail party circuit.

The Hill goes on to note that "some activist groups" accuse MoveOn of 
letting Democratic leaders off very lightly, "but MoveOn argues that 
burning bridges with Democrats is not an effective strategy. Much 
better, the influential organization says, is to work with them to peel 
away Republican support for the war and thus force President Bush's hand."

This argument makes zero sense. The problem with congressional efforts 
to rein in our war-crazed chief executive is that the Democrats haven't 
been able to keep their own troops in line. Is it too much to ask of the 
Democratic "leadership" that they use the whip on their recalcitrant 
pro-war caucus members? Are the Democrats really depending on the 
Republicans to end the war?

"Ultimately, the war ends because there is this cataclysmic showdown 
between the Republicans who are getting pinched by the public and the 
White House," babbles Tom Matzzie, Washington director for MoveOn. Yet 
the partisan attacks launched by the MoveOn-SEUI lash-up are delaying 
that showdown by making the war a partisan issue – and setting a new 
world record for hypocrisy by giving pro-war Democrats a pass.

Anyone who believes the Democratic party leadership is committed to 
getting us out of Iraq, and out of the business of world-saving, 
democracy-exporting, neo-colonialist base-building, is living in a dream 
world. The party Establishment is in cahoots with the War Party, and not 
only on the Iraq issue. The neocons, for their part, are just as 
comfortable supporting Democrats as they are Republicans – and, as their 
newfound admiration for Hillary demonstrates, this partisan 
ambidexterity isn't limited to such special cases as Joe Lieberman.

President Hillary Clinton will inherit a war that she intends to fight 
and win, no matter what she says to the Democratic base. And her 
"antiwar" cheerleaders at MoveOn and the SEIU will still be "building 
bridges" to cushy jobs, choice cuts of pork, and their fair share of 
political perks. Then, with sudden swiftness, we'll be hearing about the 
progress of labor unions in American-occupied Iraq, and why it's much 
better and more "humane" to continue a "residual" presence that will, 
like all such presences, grow of its own accord.

The criticisms of the Bush policy by such Democratic foreign policy 
mavens as Joe Biden and Ivo Daalder have been based around the argument 
that the Iraq war was wrong in its execution, not its conception. There 
was insufficient planning, the decision to disband the Iraqi army was a 
disaster, etc., etc., all assuming that the Democrats could have done a 
better job – and even deserve a chance to "succeed" where the 
Republicans failed.

This has been the major charge by the warbots in the GOP, who are now 
saying that the "surge" is saving the day and who blame the "defeatist" 
Democrats for obstructing the war effort: Republican neocons claim 
congressional Democrats, and, indeed, all war critics, don't want 
America to succeed in Iraq. The Democrats hasten to disagree, but never 
think to ask: what is it that we are supposed to be succeeding at?

The neocon project is all about creating a reliable ally in the region, 
a base from which to wage new wars of "liberation" – and ensure American 
control over much of the world's dwindling oil supply. What the 
Democrats are promising, therefore, is to be more successful at being 
imperialists than their incompetent Republican rivals. This is a 
distinction without a difference, one that is certainly not worth either 
voting for or even passively cheering on in the name of "change." After 
all, it could well be a change for the worse.

I know that's hard to imagine, at present, but, then again, it always 
is. It is not all that inconceivable that the Democrats will take up 
where the Republicans left off. With Iran looming in the background as 
the next theater in our perpetual "war on terrorism," all the major 
Democratic candidates are outdoing each other in appeasing the Israel 
lobby and pledging to confront Tehran.

As the political process becomes more restricted, with draconian limits 
on single-issue groups and the primary season front-loaded, the big 
contributors, many of them in defense-related fields, and the foreign 
lobbyists have a stranglehold over the electoral machinery of both 
parties. With the two-party monopoly ensconced in law and custom, when 
it comes to foreign policy, the Democrats and Republicans can be fairly 
described as two wings of a single party – the War Party.

Yes, there are exceptions to this dictum – for example, Dennis Kucinich 
in the Democratic camp, and Ron Paul in the GOP – and yet the odds 
against one or another insurgent antiwar candidate breaking out into the 
so-called mainstream are so great that the War Party can continue to 
operate even in the face of overwhelming antiwar sentiment on the part 
of voters. After all, when two pro-war candidates are vying for the role 
of commander in chief, are we really giving peace a chance?


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