Wednesday, October 19, 2016

rousseau1214 — Neoconservatism


Backgrounder based on the recently published, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, by Andrew J. Bacevich.

Take away. "American leadership" implies US global hegemony that is based on power, which is in the final analysis military power.
AJB: On the Right they hoped to find the opportunity to create that alternative perception of reality necessary for fulfilling their radical aspirations. The essence of those aspirations was simplicity itself: to fuse American power to American principles, ensuring the survival of those principles and subsequently their propagation to the benefit of all humankind.
"Doing good" while also "doing well."

For those who may not understand American colloquialisms, "doing good" is synonymous with "do-gooder," which means "a well-meaning but unrealistic or interfering reformer." "Doing well" signifies achieving material success.

"Doing good" while also "doing well" is play on the current management maxim, "Doing well by doing good," meaning the management strategy of creating an image of a firm as one that helps people in order to increase the bottom line of the firm.

Gedanken zur Geschichte

Neoconservatism
rousseau1214

5 comments:

John said...

If war is the health of the state (something that can be read two ways), the US would be on the road to full recovery when someone like Bacevich is made secretary of defence. The likelihood of that is unfortunately zero, and Washington will take the country and the world down before good sense prevails.

Matt Franko said...

Trump got some good digs in on Iran at the end of the debate...

John said...

He did, but he was just pulling more shit out of his ass.

Every intelligence agency and independent analysts are reporting that the Iran deal gives the US everything it wants on Iran's civilian nuclear programme. The vast majority of a *legal* and *civilian* nuclear programme is going to be put out of action, and what remains will be under unprecedented IAEA inspections. Apparently, according to Trump and the neoconservatives, this means Iran will have nuclear weapons within five years, the same five years the Israelis and Israel lobby in the US have been warning about for thirty years.

Intelligence agencies know stuff. When they're not politically compromised, like they were with Iraq's WMD, they collect intelligence galore from every pocket of the world. If they say Iraq doesn't have WMD, you can be sure they don't - and they didn't. And if they ***ALL*** say Iran's *legal* and *civilian* nuclear programme has been scaled back to near non-existence, and that there is ***NO*** nuclear weapons programme, then there isn't one. If Trump and demented rightwingers like Tom Cotton wants to make shit up, Americans should be aware of it. Iran isn't a danger to anybody except its own population, who'll overthrow the Mullahs in time, not that that will make Iran any less of an enemy. Iran was an enemy when it was a parliamentary democracy moving towards a liberal society. That had to be overthrown and replaced with a Persian version of Saddam Hussein.

Tom Hickey said...

The second chief ally of the US in the Middle East after Israel is Saudi Arabia. Israel and Saudi Arabia are enemies of Iran, so go figure. It is not in the larger or longterm interest of the US to be an enemy of Iran but it is trapped by its alliances with Israel and SA.

Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran are all theocracies, although Israel and Iran are also democratic within limits, that is the leadership changes based on elections.

John said...

The US is the greatest economic, political and military power in the history of the world. Thankfully, its power is diminishing but it is still the global superpower, currently in a league of its own. It's not and cannot be trapped by tiny, bankrupt Israel forever begging for "loan guarantees", free military equipment and other "aid" and a Saudi Arabia run solely for the purposes of a kleptocratic royal family and salafi religious clerics who want to export a barbaric jihad and take the world back to the seventh century. These "countries" are nothing without Uncle Sam and would not exist as they currently are without American "aid".

As declassified papers from State and DoD attest, it's the other way round: the Saudi dictatorship needs the US to ensure that they're not overthrown by their own people; and Israel needs the US to illegally occupy other people's land and to guarantee a bankrupt state stays afloat. What's in it for the US is also made clear from the declassified papers: Israel is useful in keeping a lid on Arab nationalism, and Saudi Arabia sets the oil price according to the desires of the big man in the Oval Office for various geopolitical and economic reasons.

As I've said before, even conservative analysts like Andrew Bacevich and John Mearsheimer, as well as former cold warrior Chalmers Johnson spell this out in detail. They may be conservatives but they're also some of the more honest analysts: they're all about geopolitical and economic hard facts, not the garbage you usually come across about "our values" directed at the dummies who think America is the embodiment of Jesus Christ or apple pie liberalism.