The Politics of the Useful Threat
It Didn't Start with the Neo-Cons
By CARL G. ESTABROOK
"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
Michael Ledeen, rightist, neocon, and promoter of war with Iran, in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in the early 1990s, as quoted in National Review Online
It's generally known that the regime of war and torture that the Bush administration has visited upon the Middle East was planned and supported by a group of American intellectuals called collectively neoconservatives. The name is merely a label, not a description: there is nothing remotely conservative about this gang of statist reactionaries. But it is important to realize that their views are not different in kind from those entertained by the shapers of American foreign policy for generations. The neocon position was simply at an extreme end of the (rather narrow) spectrum of American policy options, all of which were animated by the same basic principles -- such as the necessity for the US to control Middle East energy resources.
Read more...
It Didn't Start with the Neo-Cons
By CARL G. ESTABROOK
"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
Michael Ledeen, rightist, neocon, and promoter of war with Iran, in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in the early 1990s, as quoted in National Review Online
It's generally known that the regime of war and torture that the Bush administration has visited upon the Middle East was planned and supported by a group of American intellectuals called collectively neoconservatives. The name is merely a label, not a description: there is nothing remotely conservative about this gang of statist reactionaries. But it is important to realize that their views are not different in kind from those entertained by the shapers of American foreign policy for generations. The neocon position was simply at an extreme end of the (rather narrow) spectrum of American policy options, all of which were animated by the same basic principles -- such as the necessity for the US to control Middle East energy resources.
Read more...
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