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Originally Posted by captain
A little research showed me that he was originaly a leftist but has now swung to the right side of politics and the left refer to him as an extreme Neocon.
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He's still a leftist.
The Social Democrats were Welfare Liberals, but their foreign policy was always markedly 100% Conservative. They broke with the Conservatives by adding the platform of pre-emptive war to Conservative Doctrine in the early 1970s, I would say about 1974 if you go back and read their essays, "white papers" and other papers presented at conferences and symposiums or published in journals like
Foreign Affairs. Thus, the term Neo-Conservative was born around 1976 or so, at least that's about the first time you start seeing the term in heavy usage in print.
Based on your comments, I think your knowledge of Neo-Conservatism comes from media pundits, instead of directly from the mouths of Neo-Conservatives. It's not a criticism, just an observation.
It was Irving Kristol, the "god-father" of Neo-Conservatism who said, "Capitalism deserves two cheers, but not three." Should you be so inclined, you can read that in a book titled
Two Cheers for Capitalism,, Kristol, Irving, Basic Books,
1978.
Want to know more about Neo-Conservatives? Read the economic guru of Neo-Conservatism Daniel Bell's
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Basic Books,
1976.
So, yeah, contrary to the media pundits, Bush and Cheney did not invent Neo-Conservatism. It's been around for a long, long while. Can you identify the proto-Neo-Conservatives in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations? I bet you could do it if you thought about it long enough.
The point is that the majority of Americans are so caught up in "liberal" or "conservative" that they cannot see the forest through the trees. In terms of economics, I'm a flaming liberal, for social and domestic policy, I'm a staunch ultra-conservative, so far to the right I make Bush look like Eugene Debs, as a matter of foreign policy and geo-strategy, I am not a Conservative, nor am I a Liberal, nor am I a Neo-Conservative, nor am I a Neo-Liberal Institutionalist (like Bush and his daddy and both of the Clintoons), rather I'm a Constructivist (although I do believe that the Radicals can make a good showing with respect to unique situations and certain countries).
I just identified for you the six most commonly held foreign policy/geo-strategy belief systems. Career government bureaucrats, foreign policy/geo-strategy analysts, university professors, think-tankers and a select group of authors and journalists (who actually have a clue) will subscribe to one of those six belief systems, or perhaps "doctrines" is a better word to use.
Anyway, the Neo-Conservatives were born in Marxism and their philosophy and entire history is rooted in Marxism. Make no mistake about it: They are Marxists (or "leftists" as you prefer).
There's definitely pump priming here and Podhoretz has written an article that employs nearly every type of fallacious argument one could possibly use. If I didn't know better, I'd say Podhoretz must have hired a medium to have the spirit of Josef Göbbels guide him.
I'll just point out the fallacious arguments Podhoretz makes:
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The reason for this near-universal consensus was that Iran, with its vast reserves of oil and natural gas, had no need for nuclear energy, and that in any case, the very nature of its program contradicted the protestations.
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long before, be it noted, the radical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had replaced the putatively moderate Mohamed Khatami as president
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On a visit last month to Tehran, International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei announced he had discovered that Iran was constructing a facility to enrich uranium--a key component of advanced nuclear weapons--near Natanz.
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The sources say work on the plant is "extremely advanced" and involves "hundreds" of gas centrifuges ready to produce enriched uranium and "the parts for a thousand others ready to be assembled."
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So, too, the Federation of American Scientists about a year later:
It is generally believed that Iran's efforts are focused on uranium enrichment, though there are some indications of work on a parallel plutonium effort.
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Iran appears to have spread their nuclear activities around a number of sites to reduce the risk of detection or attack.
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To begin with, Iran was (as certified even by the doves of the State Department) the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world, and it was therefore reasonable to fear that it would transfer nuclear technology to terrorists who would be only too happy to use it against us.
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Moreover, since Iran evidently aspired to become the hegemon of the Middle East, its drive for a nuclear capability could result (as, according to the New York Times, no fewer than 21 governments in and around the region were warning) in "a grave and destructive nuclear-arms race."
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would give the mullahs to realize their evil dream of (in the words of Mr. Ahmadinejad) "wiping Israel off the map."
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Dedicated as the mullahs clearly were to furthering the transformation of Europe into a continent where Muslim law and practice would more and more prevail, they were bound to use nuclear intimidation and blackmail in pursuit of this goal as well.
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When these in turn failed, the United States, realizing that the Russians and the Chinese would veto stronger medicine, unilaterally imposed a new series of economic sanctions--which fared no better than the multilateral measures that had preceded them.
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To the surprise of many who had ceased thinking of France as an ally because of Jacques Chirac's relentless opposition to the policies of the Bush administration
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To start with the most spectacular recent instance, the CIA had failed to anticipate 9/11.
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The CIA was established in 1947 in large measure to avoid another surprise attack like the one the U.S. had suffered on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor.
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But only three years after its founding, the fledgling agency missed the outbreak of the Korean war.
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In September 1962, the CIA issued an NIE which stated that the "Soviets would not introduce offensive missiles in Cuba"; in short order, the USSR did precisely that.
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In 1968 it failed to foresee the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.
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It did not inform Jimmy Carter that the Soviet Union would invade Afghanistan in 1979.
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the fiasco, known as the Bay of Pigs, produced by the CIA's wildly misplaced confidence that an invasion of Cuba by the army of exiles it had assembled and trained would set off a popular uprising against the Castro regime.
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This startling 180-degree turn was arrived at from new intelligence, offered by the new NIE with "high confidence": namely, that "in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear-weapons program." The new NIE was also confident--though only moderately so--that "Tehran had not restarted its nuclear-weapons program as of mid-2007." And in the most sweeping of its new conclusions, it was even "moderately confident" that "the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear-weapons program."
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For the purposes of this Estimate, by "nuclear-weapons program" we mean Iran's nuclear-weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran's declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.
Since only an expert could grasp the significance of this cunning little masterpiece of incomprehensible jargon, the damage had been done by the time its dishonesty was exposed.
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Two other experts, Valerie Lincy, the editor of Iranwatch.org, and Gary Milhollin, the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control,
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In response, I argued that deterrence could not be relied upon with a regime ruled by Islamo-fascist revolutionaries who not only were ready to die for their beliefs but cared less about protecting their people than about the spread of their ideology and their power. If the mullahs got the bomb, I said, it was not they who would be deterred, but we.
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. For unless Iran could be stopped before acquiring a nuclear capability, the Israelis would be faced with only two choices: either strike first, or pray that the fear of retaliation would deter the Iranians from beating them to the punch.
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MAD, mutual assured destruction, [was effective] right through the cold war. Both sides had nuclear weapons. Neither side used them, because both sides knew the other would retaliate in kind. This will not work with a religious fanatic [like Mr. Ahmadinejad]. For him, mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already that [the mullahs ruling Iran] do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. We have seen it again and again.
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What would happen then? In a recently released study, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argues that Mr. Rafsanjani had it wrong. In the grisly scenario Mr. Cordesman draws, tens of millions would indeed die, but Israel--despite the decimation of its civilian population and the destruction of its major cities--would survive, even if just barely, as a functioning society.
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But this still does not answer the question of who should do the bombing. Tempting as it must be for George Bush to sit back and let the Israelis do the job, there are considerations that should give him pause. One is that no matter what he would say, the whole world would regard the Israelis as a surrogate for the United States, and we would become as much the target of the ensuing recriminations both at home and abroad as we would if we had done the job ourselves.
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In 1938, as Winston Churchill later said, Hitler could still have been stopped at a relatively low price and many millions of lives could have been saved if England and France had not deceived themselves about the realities of their situation.
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