If the neoconservatives have their way again, U.S. ground troops will reoccupy Iraq, the U.S. military will take out Syria’s secular government (likely helping Al Qaeda and the Islamic State take over), and the U.S. Congress will not only kill the Iran nuclear deal but follow that with a massive increase in military spending.
Thanks for the disinfectant light on this topic. The stench of the neocons' conniving reeks through every filter I have tried.
I haven't seen a picture of Kagan in years. He's not only a lying, money grubbing, self-serving, right wing SOB, he's really become an exceedingly fat SOB. Has the Nuland become equally and hideously obese?
None of these hardly heroic jokers and countless others-- McCain, Trump, Morning Joe etc.,etc.-- are sufficiently anti-war, i.e., idealistic, to be taken seriously by anyone unless the topic is danger.
They are the danger.
She has the heft and the killer gaze that remind me of "Control", the character played by Camryn Mannheim in "Person of Interest", while Kagan has come to resemble Jeffrey Levitt, the S & L , at the time of his downfall, when he went to jail in Maryland in the mid-80s, and also Gov. Christie. Diet doesn't seem to be on this couple's radar and they seem to project their girth and size as an emblem of power and intimidation.
Many other "power couples" exist inside and outside the Beltway, but none with the bloody-mindedness, the brazenness and the endurance, over the decades, that these two have (aside from the Clintons, of course). Hard to find two more dangerous individuals (all the more dangerous because together they're more than just the sum of their parts).
Robert Kagan and his wife Victoria Nuland, like the rest of the so-called neocons, have a disruptive effect on the world order because they conflate US and Israeli interests - which are rarely identical. This puts neocons at odds with powerful business which have the simple goal of profit. Iran, for example, is not only an attractive market for trade but is also a huge source of natural gas for the Europeans who now have to depend on Russia. Iran is also a natural ally against ISIS - and although Israel may prefer to see the Middle East broken apart by such fanatics, the big energy and financial firms certainly prefer an orderly status quo. Obama tends to side with the larger interests and with stability in general - which has never been the goal of Kagan and his colleagues. This is the real reason why Obama is so reviled by people like Netanyahu and Kagan - not because he is an enemy of Israel but because he is a friend to the international business and diplomatic interests which are indifferent to Israel. For simple strategic reasons, Obama is best friends with the Egyptian and Saudi tyrants, but lukewarm on Israel. Sure, he gives them cash and weapons, as all US presidents do, but it is obvious in Tel Aviv that he is just placating them for domestic political reasons. In this and in so many other areas, he closely resembles the elder George Bush.
I would guess that the influence of the neocons will continue to decline, if only because they are so ideological on the subject of Israel, and are not driven by the logic of global business. However, they do provide good talking points for the rightwing yokels who inhabit the U.S. congress and senate, so they will stay in the limelight long after their day has passed.
Kagan and Nuland: Two Wall Street stooges. They are war mongers and fawning parasites for the economic elite. They are corrupt salespeople for the Amerikan war business!
The Kaganites trace their royal roots back to the 600s in the Ukraine area. The Crimea was a Jewish region, albeit not totally, inside the U.S.S.R. and Stalin bamboozled, exported and murdered them to gain some domestic political advantage. They're just using the U.S. MIC to get their historic lands back. Wherever they think they can. Whatever these folks have to do, they will, but they won't do it on their own dime. And, you can take that to the er.... . Anyway, so many agendas from these players and they are soulless wretches, to boot. The American religious tradition is ripe for the pickin', as they say. Here's another example, if we need more. The average church goer in the U.S. would follow a ventriloquist and his dog anywhere, if the dog just speaks the correct verses aloud. Hell, they'll follow him right up to the fire hydrant. Kagan and his bunch are just well paid, lying ventriloquists. " Oh, what fools these mortals be. "
I just finished drafting the following letter to my newspaper before reading this latest piece by Parry.
To The Editor:
The editorial “In Our Opinion” printed here last Sunday repeated the lie that it was faulty intelligence that led to the disastrous and illegal invasion of Iraq. To the contrary, the actual real intelligence squarely determined that Al Qaeda was an enemy of Sadam’s Iraq, that Iraq’s capacity and possession of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” had been dismantled and destroyed after the First Gulf War, that Iraq had little or no capacity to strike the US, and further that Iraq had no involvement in the attack on 9/11. More damning yet, sober and responsible experts on the Middle East warned that the invasion and destruction of Iraq would ignite a sectarian civil war that would probably spread beyond Iraq’s borders. This is exactly the present outcome we ourselves have created. The “faulty intelligence” were lies invented and promulgated by Dick Cheney, et al.
Dwight Eisenhower, that former Republican President, warned America of a “Military Industrial Complex (MIC)” which threatened to consume not only the government, but the heart and soul of America. And so it has come to pass with the neocons who, far from being out of power, still have a stranglehold on the blood and treasure of this nation, and seem eager to launch even wider catastrophic destruction and failure.
For over a decade US intelligence agencies, as well as those of Israel, have determined that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program and has not even made a decision whether it wants nuclear weapons. The Iranian Ayatollahs assert that nuclear weapons contradict Muslim teaching, and they aren’t generally known to misrepresent their religious beliefs. More pragmatically, I suspect they could have had a bomb long ago if they really wanted one, but have decided it’s a zero-sum game; their use of such a weapon would cause their own annihilation.
Iran’s real crime, which the blood-thirsty hawks of the US Military-Industrial-Security-Complex can never forgive, is freeing itself from the grasp of western colonialism, and not for being radical or sponsoring terrorism. After WWII a grass-roots nationalist movement arose there and won a majority in the secular democratic government. The 1953 coup engineered by the US/UK against Mosaddeq and the nationalists not only crushed that earlier independence movement, but also Iranian democracy, and we replaced it with the monarchy of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, our puppet ruler. US talk about democracy and freedom were empty lies, a fact which the entire Middle East witnessed, and the US aided the Shah in creating SAVAK, a brutal Iranian national police apparatus. The Iranians have just cause to fear and distrust America.
The anti-Iran hysteria of many in Washington which is dutifully sensationalized by the media, echoes the manufactured hysteria used to bully US citizens into supporting Bush’s debacle in Iraq. Polls continue to show popular US support for diplomacy over war, but the professional political class now only listens to the MIC. And there is hardly a more corrupt or larger sponsor of terrorism than our current ally, Saudi Arabia.
Sincerely,
Not enough word limit (500 max) to draw all the necessary conclusions that Parry does, but will directly challenge the local papers' jump onto the insane war-wagon.
It is terrible shame that in spite of overwhelming contrary evidence there are still people that believe the official fantasy story that Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda had an active part in the treasonous mass murder of 9-11. The only role of Al-Qaeda was as the intended patsies.
Because if they didn't put up with it they would 1) have to charge her with sedition, and 2) Slick Oily's and Hillary's sugar daddies would not be happy!
What I want to know is how we get that woman out of the State Department. I also would like any background material that actually points to State's involvement in Ukraine overthrow.
So true, isn't it disgusting that war is so profitable for a few very sick, but influential, individuals? Didn't war profiteering used to be illegal?
There are a few in Homeland Security saying our most urgent need is to harden our electric grid against electromagnetic pulse and weather related disasters, and that our second greatest need is to replace fossil fuel with renewable energy to slow down our problems with having to deal with hordes of climate refugees. I hope they succeed to getting some funding for both of these==much of it from diverting money from weapons they no longer want.
Funny isn't it how Ms. Nuland used an unsecure cell phone to speak openly with the US Ambassador to Ukraine about a coup that the US State Department was planning against the democratically elected government of Ukraine. The phone call was intercepted and made public, yet Ms. Nuland has suffered absolutely no consequences for her lack of concern for security. Really, is the Slick Oily administration that overconfident? That damn arrogant?
