elementropy: First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All The Neocons*

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All The Neocons*

Here's Christopher Hitchens, to whom I'm indebted for the very handy Shakespeare quote:

Among the extremists in Tehran, there have already been bellicose noises about Bahrain, for example: a monarchical Arab mini-state with a majority Shiite population that some claim to be rightfully Persian. Given the rapid progress that it has made toward nuclear capability, and the no-less-rapid way that it has alienated its own people, the temptation for the Ahmadinejad regime to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels" and to appeal to tribal and religious emotions is already fairly great.

Of course Hitchens is projecting. Once again, here's apostate neoconservative Francis Fukuyama telling the truth about Hitchens's friends and allies, devious and manipulative uber-neocons like Bill Kristol, et al., whose ultimate political aim has always been to busy giddy American minds ordinarily inclined to domestic progress and reform with distracting foreign quarrels exaggerated, inflamed, or manufactured out of whole cloth:

I think that for some neoconservatives… In a sense, they wanted to have an enemy. The end of the Cold War was a tough time because they didn’t know who the enemy ought to be. I think in the case of Bill Kristol and The Weekly Standard there was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because I think that they felt that the Republican Party didn’t do as well if foreign policy wasn’t a big issue.

The late 1990s was the, you know, the period of the stock market bubble and Monica Lewinsky and they didn’t really have an issue in all of that, I thought, that they thought was particularly important or had much traction with the voters and with the public. I think they initially picked on China as their target — and I always thought right from the beginning that was a big mistake because, first of all, foreign policy shouldn’t be driven by the needs of the Republican Party and domestic politics and secondly, I just don’t think that China is particularly useful to think of as an enemy comparable to the former Soviet Union. So in that sense, September the 11th was a big godsend because we were attacked and didn’t have to invent an enemy at that point. But I think that, just that general tendency to think of the world as extremely dangerous and full of big threats is something they try to carry forward.

The Soviet Union, the Vietnamese, the entire Arab world, the Chinese, terrorists and "terrorists," --- here's Bill Kristol recently complaining that Obama's prime time address should have been advocating MOAR war rather than health care reform -- the Iraqis, and, for a while now, the Iranians. They'll never stop.

* Cf. Shakespeare's Henry VI. What?