[Vision2020] Neocons Slither Back

[Art Deco]

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September 15, 2012
Neocons Slither Back By MAUREEN
DOWD<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html>

WASHINGTON

PAUL RYAN has not sautéed in foreign policy in his years on Capitol Hill.
The 42-year-old congressman is no Middle East savant; till now, his idea of
a border dispute has more likely involved Wisconsin and Illinois.

Yet Ryan got up at the Values Voter Summit here on Friday and skewered the
Obama administration as it struggled to manage the Middle East mess left by
clumsily mixed American signals toward the Arab Spring and the disastrous
legacy of war-obsessed Republicans.

Ryan bemoaned “the slaughter of brave dissidents in Syria. Mobs storming
American embassies and consulates. Iran four years closer to gaining a
nuclear weapon. Israel, our best ally in the region, treated with
indifference bordering on contempt by the Obama administration.” American
foreign policy, he said, “needs moral clarity and firmness of purpose.”

Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan
Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running
mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte.

A moral, muscular foreign policy; a disdain for weakness and diplomacy; a
duty to invade and bomb Israel’s neighbors; a divine right to pre-emption —
it’s all ominously familiar.

You can draw a direct line from the hyperpower manifesto of the Project for
the New American Century, which the neocons, abetted by Dick Cheney and
Donald Rumsfeld, used to prod an insecure and uninformed president into
invading Iraq — a wildly misguided attempt to intimidate Arabs through the
shock of overwhelming force. How’s that going for us?

After 9/11, the neocons captured one Republican president who was naïve
about the world. Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th
anniversary of 9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican
president and vice president, both jejeune about the world.

Senor is emblematic of how much trouble America blundered into in the
Middle East — trillions wasted, so many lives and limbs lost — because of
how little we fathom the culture and sectarian politics. We’re still
stumbling in the dark. We not only don’t know who our allies and enemies
are, we don’t know who our allies’ and enemies’ allies and enemies are.

As the spokesman for Paul Bremer during the Iraq occupation, Senor helped
perpetrate one of the biggest foreign policy bungles in American history.
The clueless desert viceroys summarily disbanded the Iraqi Army, forced
de-Baathification, stood frozen in denial as thugs looted ministries and
museums, deluded themselves about the growing insurgency, and misled
reporters with their Panglossian scenarios of progress.

“Off the record, Paris is burning,” Senor told a group of reporters a year
into the war. “On the record, security and stability are returning to
Iraq.”

Before he played ventriloquist to Ryan, Senor did the same for Romney,
ratcheting up the candidate’s irresponsible bellicosity on the Middle East.
Senor was the key adviser on Romney’s disastrous trip to Israel in July,
when Mittens infuriated the Palestinians by making a chuckleheaded claim
about their culture.

Senor got out over his skis before Romney’s speech in Jerusalem, telling
reporters that Mitt would say he respected Israel’s right to make a
pre-emptive, unilateral attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

While the Muslim world burned on Friday, Mitt was in New York with Kelly
Ripa and Michael Strahan confessing that he wears “as little as possible”
to bed. With no global vision or historical perspective — he didn’t even
remember during his Tampa convention to mention our troops or the years of
war his party reigned over — Romney is simply kowtowing to the right again.

Paul Wolfowitz, an Iraq war architect, weighed in on Fox News, slimily
asserting that President Obama should not be allowed to “slither through”
without a clear position on Libya.

Republicans are bananas on this one. They blame Obama for casting Hosni
Mubarak overboard and contradict themselves by blaming him for not
supporting the Arab Spring. One minute Romney parrots Bibi Netanyahu’s
position on Iran, the next Obama’s.

Romney’s cynical braying about Obama appeasement in the midst of the attack
on the American diplomatic post in Libya and the murder of the brave
ambassador, Christopher Stevens, was shameful. Richard Williamson, a Romney
adviser, had the gall to tell The Washington Post, “There’s a pretty
compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a
different situation.”

He’s right — a scarier situation. If President Romney acceded to
Netanyahu’s outrageous demand for clear red lines on Iran, this global
confrontation would be a tiny foretaste of the conflagration to come.

Cheney, described by Romney as a “person of wisdom and judgment,” is
lurking. On Monday, he churlishly tried to deny President Obama credit for
putting Osama in the cross hairs, cattily referring to a report that Obama
had not gone to all his intelligence briefings.

Well, yes. W. got briefings, like the one that warned him on Aug. 6, 2001:
“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” That didn’t work so well either,
did it?


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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