Neocon Artist

You’d think that by now everyone would know better than to give anyone associated with Bill Kristol’s neoconservative cabal the time of day, but no.  Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our man in Afghanistan, has written a conveniently leaked assessment that demands we once again escalate our efforts in his theater of war, a demand that the dogs of war are howling for Obama to accede to.   

It turns out that one of the primary tank thinkers who helped McChrystal crank out his assessment was Fred Kagan, the neoconservative superstar who brought us the surge in Iraq.  Two years and change into its execution the Iraq surge is a strategic cesspool. As U.S. Army Colonel Timothy Reese recently observed, our years of effort at establishing a competent and reliable government and security apparatus in Iraq have come to naught.  The "ineffectiveness and corruption" of Iraq’s government, he wrote in a recent memorandum, "is the stuff of legend."  Of Iraq’s security forces, Reese wrote, "Corruption among officers is widespread."  Laziness is "endemic" and "lack of initiative is legion." Yet the surge is widely hailed as a major success, and Gen. Ray Odierno, the neocon-anointed darling in command of the Iraq theater, dismisses Reese’s concerns as "tactical issues."  By Odierno’s calculus, Hitler’s Wehrmacht and Japan’s Imperial Navy were mere tactical issues as well.    

That Kagan, and by extension the entire neocon cabal, still has such influence is not only alarming, it is dangerous.  Even worse is the manner in which the neocons have aligned themselves with the Pentagon in its power struggle with the Obama administration.   

Tadd Sholtis, a McChrystal spokesman and former military public affairs officer (i.e., bull feather merchant), claims that the McChrystal camp is not in "some kind of neocon thrall."  Perhaps "neocon stupor" is a more accurate description. 

The Iraq surge was in fact the neocon resurgence.  In late 2006 and early 2007, Kristol henchmen Jack Keane, Fred Kagan and others managed to deflect the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group that would have had us out of Iraq in 2008.  The surge strategy offered George W. Bush an opportunity to say that America didn’t lose the war in Iraq on his watch.  Even war mafia hagiographer Tom Ricks admits that Gen. David Petraeus never intended to bring the Iraq war to a conclusion, but merely wanted to convince Congress and the American public to let the war continue by artificially lowering violence levels in that country through bribery.  

At this point, the Pentagon and the neocons are in what journalist Kelly B. Vlahos describes as a "co-dependent relationship."  Promotions, medals, media bandwidth, and defense contracts for all my friends! 

A blind ox could see that the media blitz that showcased McChrystal’s report on Afghanistan was an orchestrated effort.  McChrystal’s infomercial on 60 Minutes was the kind of stunt Douglas MacArthur might have pulled on Harry Truman to keep the botched Korean War going forever if today’s information toll road had existed in the 1950s.   

As with the Korean and Vietnam wars, nothing justifies continued escalation of the Afghanistan conflict.  Al-Qaeda isn’t there anymore, and even if it were, it doesn’t amount to an anthill’s worth of threat to the United States or anyone else.  As former CIA officer Philip Giraldi notes, "Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda has likely been reduced to a core group of eight to ten terrorists who are on the run more often than not."   

What makes the neocons so difficult to eradicate is that nothing in what’s left of the sane segment of society can fill the intellectual and moral vacuum the warmongering right has created.  McChrystal’s report is a compendium of the same sort of gibberish that got us embroiled in the Iraq fiasco.  Eight years after we first fumbled our efforts in Afghanistan, the neocons lament, it may become a failed state if we don’t send more troops and money there now, now, now.  Afghanistan has been a failed state since Alexander the Great drove through it.  McChrystal says that "overwhelming firepower" is not the solution to the Afghanistan situation, yet he and Kagan are asking for more firepower.   

McChrystal’s report and the information operation that attended it have forced Obama’s war council to meet in order to re-combobulate its Afghanistan strategy, the bushel of road apples it promulgated in March that declared we would turn Afghanistan and Pakistan into real countries and talk the rest of the world into helping us do it, an that we would disrupt terror networks by occupying a country the terrorists aren’t in.   

The leading travesty of the 21st century is that the neocons’ clownish assertions trump or taint every other effort at foreign policy.  Take the non-issue issue over Iran’s uranium enrichment site at Qom for example.   

President Obama’s advisers talked him into running a buffer across his backside by making a federal case over the Qom facility for the sake of sounding tough enough to keep the hawks off his back. He accused the Iranians of keeping the site secret after they’d already revealed it to the International Atomic Energy Agency.  Then he demanded that Iran allow the IAEA to inspect the Qom site after Iran had already invited the IAEA to inspect it.  How much more front-backwards can diplomacy get? 

One wants to think our national madness will run its course in due time, that the fools and fanatics who goad us into ill-advised wars will eventually be speed-bumped into moderation by wiser heads.  But look at what happened with Iraq.  The mad factor strong-armed supposedly wiser-headed Colin Powell into shilling for them in front of the entire world when he went before the UN with "proof" of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program.  

We live in an age of paranoid hysteria that makes the asylum mentality of the McCarthy era seem tame.  Here’s praying that God granted sufficient sanity to the American experiment so that it can ward off the neoconservative influence until, like a tropical disturbance, it blows itself into oblivion.