The
Neocon Hunger for Universal Empire
Embracing the Dark Side for their
Galactic Ambitions
ANTIWAR.COM
When Bill Kristol watches Star Wars movies, he roots for the Galactic Empire. The
leading neocon recently caused a social media disturbance in
the Force when he tweeted this predilection for the Dark Side following the
debut of the final trailer forStar Wars: The Force Awakens.
Kristol sees
the Empire as basically a galaxy-wide extrapolation of what he has long wanted
the US to have over the Earth: what he has termed “benevolent global hegemony.”
Kristol, founder and editor of neocon flagship magazine The Weekly Standard,responded to
scandalized critics by linking to a 2002 essay from the Standard’s blog that
justifies even the worst of Darth Vader’s atrocities. In “The Case for the Empire,” Jonathan V. Last made a Kristolian
argument that you can’t make a “benevolent hegemony” omelet without breaking a
few eggs.
And what if
those broken eggs are civilians, like Luke Skywalker’s uncle and aunt who were
gunned down by Imperial Stormtroopers in their home on the Middle
Eastern-looking arid planet of Tatooine (filmed on location in Tunisia)? Well,
as Last sincerely argued, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru hid Luke and harbored the
fugitive droids R2D2 and C3P0; so they were “traitors” who were aiding the
rebellion and deserved to be field-executed.
A year after Kristol published Last’s essay, large numbers of
civilians were killed by American Imperial Stormtroopers in their actual Middle
Eastern arid homeland of Iraq, thanks largely in part to the direct influence of
neocons like Kristol and Last.
That war was similarly justified in part by the false allegation that
Iraq ruler Saddam Hussein was harboring and aiding terrorist enemies of the
empire like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The civilian-slaughtering siege of Fallujah, one of the most brutal episodes of the war, was also
specifically justified by the false allegation that the town was harboring
Zarqawi.
In reality Hussein had put a death warrant out on Zarqawi, who
was hiding from Iraq’s security forces under the protective aegis of the US Air
Force in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region. It was only after the Empire
precipitated the chaotic collapse of Iraq that Zarqawi’s outfit was able
to thrive and
evolve into Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). And after the Empire precipitated the
chaotic collapse of Syria, AQI further mutated into Syrian al-Qaeda (which has
conquered much of Syria) and ISIS (which has conquered much of Syria and Iraq).
And what if
the “benevolent hegemony” omelet requires the breaking of “eggs” the size of
whole worlds, like how high Imperial officer Wilhuff Tarkin used the Death Star
to obliterate the planet Alderaan? Well, as Last sincerely argued, even
Alderaan likely deserved its fate, since it may have been, “a front for Rebel
activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents…” Last contended
that Princess Leia was probably lying when she told the Death Star’s commander
that the planet had “no weapons.”
While Last
was writing his apologia for global genocide, his fellow neocons were
baselessly arguing that Saddam Hussein was similarly lying about Iraq not
having a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. Primarily on that basis,
the obliteration of an entire country began the following year.
And a year after that, President Bush performed a slapstick comedy act about his failure to find Iraqi WMDs
for a black-tie dinner for radio and television correspondents. The media hacks
in his audience, who had obsequiously helped the neocon-dominated Bush
administration lie the country into war, rocked with laughter as thousands of
corpses moldered in Iraq and Arlington. A more sickening display of imperial
decadence and degradation has not been seen perhaps since the gladiatorial
audiences of Imperial Rome. This is the hegemonic “benevolence” and “national
greatness” that Kristol pines for.
“Benevolent global hegemony” was coined by Kristol and fellow
neocon Robert Kaganand their 1996 Foreign Affairs article “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” In that essay, Kristol
and Kagan sought to inoculate both the conservative movement and US foreign
policy against the isolationism of Pat Buchanan.
The Soviet
menace had recently disappeared, and the Cold War along with it. The neocons
were terrified that the American public would therefore jump at the chance to
lay their imperial burdens down. Kristol and Kagan urged their readers to
resist that temptation, and to instead capitalize on America’s new peerless
preeminence by making it a big-spending, hyper-active, busybody globo-cop. The
newfound predominance must become dominance wherever and whenever possible.
That way, any future near-peer competitors would be nipped in the bud, and the
new “unipolar moment” would last forever.
What made this neocon dream seem within reach was the
indifference of post-Soviet Russia. The year after the Berlin Wall fell, the
Persian Gulf War against Iraq was the debut “police action” of unipolar “Team
America, World Police.” Paul Wolfowitz,
the neocon and Iraq War architect, considered it a successful trial run. As Wesley
Clark, former Nato Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, recalled:
“In 1991, [Wolfowitz] was the
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy — the number 3 position at the
Pentagon. And I had gone to see him when I was a 1-Star General commanding the
National Training Center. (…)
And I said, “Mr. Secretary, you must
be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm.”
And he said: “Yeah, but not really,
because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we didn’t
… But one thing we did learn is that we can use our military in the region — in the
Middle East — and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client
regimes — Syria, Iran, Iraq — before the next great superpower
comes on to challenge us.”
The 1996 “Neo-Reaganite” article was part of a surge of neocon
literary activity in the mid-90s. It was in 1995 that Kristol and John
Podhoretz founded The Weekly Standard with funding
from right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Also in 1996, David Wurmser wrote
a strategy document for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Titled, “A
Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” it was co-signed by
Wurmser’s fellow neocons and future Iraq War architectsRichard Perle and Douglas Feith. “A Clean Break” called for
regime change in Iraq as a “means” of “weakening, containing, and even
rolling back Syria.” Syria itself was a target because it “challenges Israel on
Lebanese soil.” It primarily does this by, along with Iran, supporting the
paramilitary group Hezbollah, which arose in the 80s out of the local resistance
to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and which continually foils Israel’s
ambitions in that country.
Later that
same year, Wurmser wrote another strategy document, this time for circulation
in American and European halls of power, titled “Coping with Crumbling States:
A Western and Israeli Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant.”
In “A Clean Break,” Wurmser had framed regime change in Iraq and
Syria in terms of Israeli regional ambitions. In “Coping,” Wurmser adjusted his message for its
broader Western audience by recasting the very same policies in a Cold War
framework.
Wurmser characterized regime change in Iraq and Syria (both
ruled by Baathist regimes) as “expediting the chaotic
collapse” of secular-Arab nationalism in general, and Baathism in
particular. He concurred with King Hussein of Jordan that, “the phenomenon of
Baathism,” was, from the very beginning, “an agent of foreign, namely Soviet
policy.” Of course King Hussein was a bit biased on the matter, since his own
Hashemite royal family once ruled both Iraq and Syria. Wurmser argued that:
“…the battle over Iraq represents a
desperate attempt by residual Soviet bloc allies in the Middle East to block
the extension into the Middle East of the impending collapse that the rest of
the Soviet bloc faced in 1989.”
Wurmser further derided Baathism in Iraq and Syria as an
ideology in a state of “crumbling descent and missing its Soviet patron” and “no more than a Cold War enemy
relic on probation.”
Wurmser
advised the West to put this anachronistic adversary out of its misery, and to
thus, in Kristolian fashion, press America’s Cold War victory on toward its
final culmination. Baathism should be supplanted by what he called the
“Hashemite option.” After their chaotic collapse, Iraq and Syria would be
Hashemite possessions once again. Both would be dominated by the royal house of
Jordan, which in turn, happens to be dominated by the US and Israel.
Wurmser
stressed that demolishing Baathism must be the foremost priority in the region.
Secular-Arab nationalism should be given no quarter, not even, he added, for
the sake of stemming the tide of Islamic fundamentalism.
Thus we see
one of the major reasons why the neocons were such avid anti-Soviets during the
Cold War. It is not just that, as post-Trotskyites, the neocons resented Joseph
Stalin for having Leon Trotsky assassinated in Mexico with an ice pick. The
Israel-first neocons’ main beef with the Soviets was that, in various disputes
and conflicts involving Israel, Russia sided with secular-Arab nationalist
regimes from 1953 onward.
The neocons
used to be Democrats in the big-government, Cold Warrior mold of Harry Truman
and Henry “Scoop” Jackson. After the Vietnam War and the rise of the anti-war
New Left, the Democratic Party’s commitment to the Cold War waned, so the
neocons switched to the Republicans in disgust.
According to
investigative reporter Jim Lobe, the neocons got their first taste of power
within the Reagan administration, in which positions were held by neocons such
as Wolfowitz, Perle, Elliot Abrams,
and Michael Ledeen. They were especially influential during
Reagan’s first term of saber-rattling, clandestine warfare, and profligate
defense spending, which Kristol and Kagan remembered so fondly in their
“Neo-Reaganite” manifesto.
It was then that the neocons helped establish the “Reagan
Doctrine.” According to neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer, who coined the term in 1985, the Reagan
Doctrine was characterized by support for anti-communist (in reality often
simply anti-leftist) forces around the whole world.
Since the
support was clandestine, the Reagan administration was able to bypass the
“Vietnam Syndrome” and project power in spite of the public’s continuing war
weariness. (It was left to Reagan’s successor, the first President Bush, to
announce following his “splendid little” Gulf War that, “by God, we’ve kicked
the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!”)
Operating
covertly, the Reaganites could also use any anti-communist group they found
useful, no matter how ruthless and ugly: from Contra death squads in Nicaragua
to the Islamic fundamentalist mujahideen in Afghanistan. Abrams and Ledeen were
both involved in the Iran-Contra affair, and Abrams was convicted (though later
pardoned) on related criminal charges.
Kristol’s “Neo-Reaganite” co-author Robert Kagan gave the
doctrine an even wider and more ambitious interpretation in his book A Twilight Struggle :
“The Reagan Doctrine has been widely
understood to mean only support for anticommunist guerrillas fighting
pro-Soviet regimes, but from the first the doctrine had a broader meaning.
Support for anticommunist guerrillas was the logical outgrowth, not the origin,
of a policy of supporting democratic reform or revolution everywhere, in
countries ruled by right-wing dictators as well as by communist parties.”
As this
description makes plain, neocon policy, from the 1980s to today, has been every
bit as fanatical, crusading, and world-revolutionary as Red Communism was in
the neocon propaganda of yesteryear, and that Islam is in the neocon propaganda
of today.
The neocons credit Reagan’s early belligerence with the eventual
dissolution of the Soviet Union. But in reality, war is the health of the
State, and Cold War was the health of Soviet State. The Soviets long used
the American menace to frighten the Russian people into rallying around the
State for protection.
After the
neocons lost clout within the Reagan administration to “realists” like George
Schultz, the later Reagan-Thatcher-Gorbachev detente began. It was only after
that detente lifted the Russian siege atmosphere and quieted existential
nuclear nightmares that the Russian people felt secure enough to demand a
changing of the guard.
In 1983, the same year that the first Star Wars trilogy ended, Reagan vilified Soviet Russia in
language that Star Wars fans could
understand by dubbing it “the Evil Empire.” Years later, having, in Kristol’s
words, “defeated the evil empire,” the neocons that Reagan first lifted to
power began clamoring for a “neo-Reaganite” global hegemony. And a few years after
that, those same neocons began pointing to the sci-fi Galactic Empire that
Reagan implicitly compared to the Soviets as a lovely model for America!
Fast-forward to return to the neocon literary flowering of the
mid-90s. In 1997, the year after writing “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign
Policy” together, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan co-founded The Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The 20th century is often
called “the American century,” largely due to it being a century of war and
American “victories” in those wars: the two World Wars and the Cold War. The
neocons sought to ensure that through the never-ending exercise of military
might, the American global hegemony achieved through those wars would last
another hundred years, and that the 21st century too would be “American.”
Although
PNAC called for interventions ranging from Serbia (to roll back Russian
influence in Europe) to Taiwan (to roll back Chinese influence in Asia), its
chief concern was to kick off the restructuring of the Middle East envisioned
in “A Clean Break” and “Coping” by advocating its first step: regime
change in Iraq.
The most high-profile parts of this effort were two “open letters”
published in 1998, one in January addressed to President Bill Clinton, and another in May addressed toleaders of Congress. As with its statement of principles,
PNAC was able to garner signatures for these letters from a wide range of
political luminaries, including neocons (like Perle), neocon allies (like John Bolton),
and other non-neocons (like James Woolsey and Robert Zoellick).
The open
letters characterized Iraq as “a threat in the Middle East more serious than
any we have known since the end of the Cold War,” and buttressed this
ridiculous claim with the now familiar allegations of Saddam building a WMD
program.
Thanks in
large part to PNAC’s pressure, regime change in Iraq became official US policy
in October when Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the Iraq
Liberation Act of 1998. (Notice the Clinton-friendly “humanitarian
interventionist” name in spite of the policy’s conservative fear-mongering
origins.)
After the
Supreme Court delivered George W. Bush the presidency, the neocons were back in
the imperial saddle again in 2001: just in time to make their projected “New
American Century” of “Neo-Reaganite Global Hegemony” a reality. The first order
of business, of course, was Iraq.
But some
pesky national security officials weren’t getting with the program and kept
trying to distract the administration with concerns about some Osama bin Laden
character and his Al Qaeda outfit. Apparently they were laboring under some
pedestrian notion that their job was to protect the American people and not to
conquer the world.
For example, when National Security Council counterterrorism
“czar” Richard Clarke was frantically sounding the alarm over an imminent
terrorist attack on America,Wolfowitz was uncomprehending. As Clarke recalled,
the then Deputy Defense Secretary objected:
“I just don’t understand why we are
beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden.”
Clarke
informed him that:
“We are talking about a network of
terrorist organizations called al-Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden,
and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an
immediate and serious threat to the United States.”
This simply
did not fit in the agenda-driven neocon worldview of Wolfowitz, who responded:
“Well, there are others that do as
well, at least as much. Iraqi terrorism for example.”
And as Peter Beinhart recently wrote:
“During that same time period [in 2001], the CIA was raising
alarms too. According to Kurt Eichenwald, a former New York Times reporter given access
to the Daily Briefs prepared by the intelligence agencies for President Bush in
the spring and summer of 2001, the CIA told the White
House by May 1 that ‘a group presently in the United States’ was planning a
terrorist attack. On June 22, the Daily Brief warned that
al-Qaeda strikes might be ‘imminent.’
But the same Defense Department officials who discounted
Clarke’s warnings pushed back against the CIA’s. According to Eichenwald’s sources, ‘the neoconservative leaders who had
recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the
C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely
pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam
Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat.’
By the time
Clarke and the CIA got the Bush administration’s attention, it was already too
late to follow any of the clear leads that might have been followed to prevent
the 9/11 attacks.
The
terrorist attacks by Sunni Islamic fundamentalists mostly from the Saudi
Kingdom hardly fit the neocon agenda of targeting the secular-Arab nationalist
regimes of Iraq and Syria and the Shiite Republic of Iran: especially since all
three of the latter were mortal enemies of bin Laden types.
But the attackers were, like Iraqis, some kind of Muslims from
the general area of the Middle East. And that was good enough for government
work in the American idiocracy. After a youth consumed with state-compelled
drudgery, most Americans are so stupid and incurious that such a meaningless
relationship, enhanced with some fabricated “intelligence,” was more than
enough to stampede the spooked
American herd into
supporting the Iraq War.
As Benjamin Netanyahu once said, “America is a thing you can move very easily.”
Whether
steering the country into war would be easy or not, it was all neocon hands on
deck. At the Pentagon there was Wolfowitz and Perle, with Perle-admirer
Rumsfeld as SecDef. Feith was also at Defense, where he set up two new offices
for the special purpose of spinning “intelligence” yarn to tie Saddam with
al-Qaeda and to weave fanciful pictures of secret Iraqi WMD programs.
Wurmser
himself labored in one of these offices, followed by stints at State aiding
neocon-ally Bolton and in the Vice President’s office aiding neocon-ally Cheney
along with Scooter Libby.
Iran-Contra
convict Abrams was at the National Security Council aiding Condoleezza Rice.
And Kristol and Kagan continued to lead the charge in the media and think tank
worlds.
And they
pulled it off. Wurmser finally got his “chaotic collapse” in Iraq. And Kristol
finally had his invincible, irresistible, hyper-active hegemony looming over
the world like a Death Star.
The
post-9/11 pretense-dropping American Empire even had Dick Cheney with his
Emperor Palpatine snarl preparing Americans to accept torture by saying:
“We also have to work, though, sort
of the dark side, if you will.”
The Iraq War
ended up backfiring on the neocons. It installed a new regime in Baghdad that
was no more favorable toward Israel and far more favorable toward Israel’s
enemies Iran and Syria. But the important thing was that Kristol’s Death
Star was launched and in orbit. As long as it was still in proactive mode,
there was nothing the neocons could not fix with its awful power.
This seemed
true even during the Obama presidency. On top of Iraq and Afghanistan, under
Obama the American Death Star has demolished Yemen and Somalia. It also
demolished both Syria and Libya, where it continues the Wurmsurite project of
precipitating the chaotic collapse of secular-Arab nationalism. Islamic terror
groups including al-Qaeda and ISIS are thriving in that chaos, but the American
Death Star to this day has adhered to Wurmser’s de-prioritization of the
Islamist threat.
As Yoda said, “Fear is the path to the Dark Side.” The neocons
have been able to use the fear generated by a massive Islamic fundamentalist
terror attack to pursue their blood-soaked vendetta against secular-Arab
nationalists, even to the benefit of the very Islamic fundamentalists who
attacked us, because even after 12 years Americans arestill too bigoted
and oblivious to distinguish between the two groups.
Furthermore,
Obama has gone beyond Wurmser’s regional ambitions and has fulfilled Kristol’s
busybody dreams of global hegemony to a much greater extent than Bush ever did.
To appease generals and arms merchants worried about his prospective pull-outs
from the Iraqi and Afghan theaters, Obama launched both an imperial “pivot” to
Asia and a stealth invasion of Africa. The pull-outs were aborted, but the
continental “pivots” remain. Thus Obama’s pretenses as a peace President helped
to make his regime the most ambitiously imperialistic and globe-spanning that
history has ever seen.
But the
neocons may have overdone it with their Death Star shooting spree, because
another great power now seems determined to put a stop to it. And who is
foiling the neocons’ Evil Empire? Why none other than the original “Evil
Empire”: the neocons’ old nemesis Russia.
In 2013, Russia’s Putin diplomatically frustrated the neocons’
attempt to deliver thecoup de grâce to the Syrian regime with a US air war. Shortly
afterward, Robert Kagan’s wife Victoria Nuland yanked Ukraine out of Russia’s
sphere of influence by engineering a bloody coup in Kiev. Putin countered by
bloodlessly annexing the Ukrainian province of Crimea. A proxy war followed
between the US-armed and Western-financed junta in Kiev and pro-Russian
separatists in the east of the country.
The US
continued to intervene in Syria, heavily sponsoring an insurgency dominated by
extremists including al-Qaeda and ISIS. But recently, Russia decided to
intervene militarily. Suddenly, Wolfowitz’s lesson from the Gulf War was up in
smoke. The neocons cannot militarily do whatever they want in the Middle East
and trust that Russia will stand idly by. Suddenly the arrogant
Wolfowitz/Wurmser dream of crumbling then cleaning up “old Soviet client
regimes” and “Cold War enemy relics” had gone poof. Putin decided that Syria
would be one “Cold War relic” turned terrorist playground too many.
Russia’s
entry into Syria has thrown all of the neocons’ schemes into disarray.
By actually
working to destroy Syrian al-Qaeda and ISIS instead of just pretending to, as
the US and its allies have, Russia threatens to eliminate the head-chopping
bogeymen whose Live Leak-broadcasted brutal antics continually renew in
Americans the war-fueling terror of 9/11. And after Putin had taken the US air strike
option off the table, al-Qaeda and ISIS were the neocons most powerful tools
for bringing down the Syrian regime. And now Russia is threatening to take
those toys away too.
If Hezbollah
and Iran, with Russia’s air cover, manage to help save what is left of Syria
from the Salafist psychos, they will be more prestigious in both Syria and
Lebanon than ever, and Israel may never be able to dominate its northern
neighbors.
The neocons
are livid. After the conflicts over Syria and Ukraine in 2013, they had already
started ramping up the vilification of Putin. Now the demonization has gone
into overdrive.
One offering in this milieu has been an article by Matthew
Continetti in the neocon web site he edits, The Washington Free Beacon. Titled “A Reagan Doctrine for the Twenty-First Century,” it obviously
aims to be a sequel to Kristol’s and Kagan’s “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign
Policy.” As it turns out, the Russian “Evil Empire” was not defeated after all:
only temporarily dormant. And so Continetti’s updated Reaganite manifesto is
subtitled, “How to confront Vladimir Putin.”
The US
military may be staggering around the planet like a drunken, bloated colossus.
Yet Continetti still dutifully trots out all the Kristolian tropes about the
need for military assertiveness (more drunken belligerence), massive defense
spending (more bloating), and “a new American century.” Reaganism is needed now
just as much as in 1996, he avers: in fact, doubly so, for Russia has reemerged
as:
“…the greatest military and
ideological threat to the United States and to the world order it has built
over decades as guarantor of international security.”
Right, just
look at all that security sprouting out of all those bomb craters the US has
planted throughout much of the world. Oh wait no, those are terrorists.
Baby-faced Continetti, a Weekly Standard contributor,
is quite the apprentice to Sith Lord Kristol, judging from his ardent faith in
the “Benevolent Global Hegemony” dogma. In fact, he even shares Lord Kristol’s
enthusiasm for “Benevolent Galactic Hegemony.” It was Continetti who kicked off
the recent Star Wars/foreign policy brouhaha when he tweeted:
“I’ve been rooting for the Empire
since 1983”
This
elicited a concurring response from Kristol, which is what set Twitter
atwitter. Of course the whole thing was likely staged and coordinated between
the two neocon operatives.
Unfortunately
for the neocons, demonizing Putin over Syria is not nearly as easy as
demonizing Putin over Ukraine. With Ukraine, there was a fairly
straight-forward (if false) narrative to build of big bully Russia and plucky
underdog Ukraine.
However,
it’s pretty hard to keep a lid on the fact that Russia is attacking al-Qaeda
and ISIS, along with any CIA-trained jihadist allies are nearby. And it’s
inescapably unseemly for the US foreign policy establishment to be so bent out
of shape about Russia bombing sworn enemies of the American people, even if it
does save some dictator most Americans don’t care about one way or the other.
And now that
wildly popular wild card Donald Trump is spouting unwelcome common sense to his
legions of followers about how standing back and letting Russia bomb
anti-American terrorists is better than starting World War III over it. And
this is on top of the fact that Trump is deflating Jeb Bush’s campaign by
throwing shade at his brother’s neocon legacy, from the failures over 9/11 to
the disastrous decision to regime change Iraq. And the neocon-owned Marco
Rubio, who actually adopted “A New American Century” as his campaign slogan, is
similarly making no headway against Trump.
And Russia’s
involvement in Syria just keeps getting worse for the neocons. Washington
threatened to withdraw support from the Iraqi government if it accepted help
from Russia against ISIS. Iraq accepted Russian help anyway. Baghdad has also
sent militias to fight under Russian air cover alongside Syrian, Iranian, and
Hezbollah forces.
Even Jordan,
that favorite proxy force in Israel’s dreams of regional dominance, has begun
coordinating with Russia, in spite of its billion dollars a year of annual aid
from Washington. Et tu Jordan?!
Apparently
there aren’t enough Federal Reserve notes in Janet Yellen’s imagination to pay
Iraq and Jordan to tolerate living amid a bin Ladenite maelstrom any longer.
And what is
Washington going to do about it if the whole region develops closer ties with
Russia? What are the American people going to let them get away with doing
about it? A palace coup in Jordan? Expend more blood and treasure to overthrow
the very same Iraqi government we already lost much blood and treasure in
installing? Start a suicidal hot war with nuclear Russia?
And the
neocon’s imperial dreams are coming apart at the seams outside of the war zones
too. The new Prime Minister of Canada just announced he will pull out of
America’s war in the Levant. Europe wants to compromise with Russia on both
Ukraine and Syria, and this willingness will grow as the refugee crisis it is
facing worsens. Obama made a nuclear deal with Iran and initiated detente with
Cuba. And worst of all for neocons, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is
being de-legitimized by the bourgeoning BDS movement and by images of its own
brutality propagating through social media, along with translations of its
hateful rhetoric.
The neocons
bit off more than they could chew, and their Galactic Empire is falling apart
before it could even fully conquer its first planet.
Nearly all
empires end due to over-extension. If brave people from Ottawa to Baghdad
simply say “enough” within a brief space of time, hopefully this empire can
dissolve relatively peacefully like the Soviet Empire did, leaving its host
civilization intact, instead of dragging that civilization into oblivion along
with it like the Roman Empire did.
But beware,
the imperial war party will not go quietly into the night, unless we in their
domestic tax base insist that there is no other way. If, in desperation, they start
calling for things like more boots on the ground, reinstating the draft,
or declaring World War III on Russia and its Middle Eastern allies, we must
stand up and say with firm voices something along the lines of the following:
No. You will
not have my son for your wars. And we will not surrender any more of
our liberty. We will no longer yield to a regime led by a neocon clique
that threatens to extinguish the human race. Your power fantasy of
universal empire is over. Just let it go. Or, as Anakin finally did
when the Emperor came for his son, we will hurl your tyranny into the
abyss.
