{"id":63568,"date":"2015-09-14T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2015-09-14T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=63568"},"modified":"2015-09-11T14:42:31","modified_gmt":"2015-09-11T13:42:31","slug":"how-neocons-destabilized-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/09\/how-neocons-destabilized-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"How Neocons Destabilized Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"

7 Sep 2015 – The neocon prescription of endless \u201cregime change\u201d is spreading chaos across the Middle East and now into Europe, yet the neocons still control the mainstream U.S. narrative and thus have diagnosed the problem as not enough \u201cregime change.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Bush<\/a><\/p>\n

The refugee chaos that is now pushing\u00a0deep into Europe \u2013 dramatized by gut-wrenching photos of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey \u2013 started with the cavalier ambitions of American neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks who planned to remake the Middle East and other parts of the world through \u201cregime change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of the promised wonders of \u201cdemocracy promotion\u201d and \u201chuman rights,\u201d what these \u201canti-realists\u201d have accomplished is to spread death, destruction and destabilization across the Middle East and\u00a0parts of Africa and now into Ukraine and\u00a0the heart of Europe. Yet, since these neocon forces still control the Official Narrative, their\u00a0explanations get top billing \u2013 such as that there hasn\u2019t been enough \u201cregime change.\u201d<\/p>\n

For instance, The Washington Post\u2019s neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt on Monday blamed<\/a> \u201crealists\u201d for the cascading catastrophes. Hiatt\u00a0castigated them and President Barack Obama for not intervening more aggressively in Syria to depose President Bashar al-Assad, a longtime neocon target for \u201cregime change.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the truth is that this accelerating spread of human suffering can be traced back directly to the unchecked influence of the neocons and their liberal fellow-travelers who have\u00a0resisted political compromise and, in the case of Syria, blocked any realistic efforts to work out a power-sharing agreement between Assad and his political opponents,\u00a0those\u00a0who are not terrorists.<\/p>\n

In early 2014, the neocons\u00a0and liberal hawks sabotaged Syrian peace talks in Geneva by blocking Iran\u2019s participation\u00a0and turning the\u00a0peace conference into a one-sided shouting match where U.S.-funded opposition leaders yelled at Assad\u2019s representatives who then went home. All the while,\u00a0the Post\u2019s editors and their friends kept egging Obama to start bombing Assad\u2019s forces.<\/p>\n

The madness of this neocon approach grew more obvious in the summer of 2014 when the Islamic State, an Al Qaeda spinoff which had been slaughtering suspected pro-government people in Syria, expanded its bloody campaign of beheadings\u00a0back into Iraq where this hyper-brutal movement\u00a0first emerged\u00a0as \u201cAl Qaeda in Iraq\u201d in response to the 2003 U.S. invasion.<\/p>\n

It should have been clear by mid-2014 that if the neocons had gotten their way and Obama had conducted\u00a0a massive U.S. bombing campaign to devastate Assad\u2019s military, the black flag of Sunni terrorism might well be flying above the Syrian capital of Damascus while its streets would run red\u00a0with blood.<\/p>\n

But now a year later, the likes of Hiatt still have not absorbed that lesson \u2014 and\u00a0the spreading chaos from\u00a0neocon strategies is destabilizing\u00a0Europe. As shocking and disturbing as that is, none of it\u00a0should\u00a0have come as much of a surprise, since the neocons have always brought chaos and dislocations in their wake.<\/p>\n

When I first encountered the neocons in the 1980s, they had been given Central America to play with. President Ronald Reagan had credentialed many of them, bringing into the U.S. government neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan. But Reagan mostly kept them out of the big-power realms: the Mideast and Europe.<\/p>\n

Those strategic areas went to the \u201cadults,\u201d people like James Baker, George Shultz, Philip Habib and Brent Scowcroft. The poor Central Americans, as they tried to shed generations of repression and backwardness imposed\u00a0by brutal right-wing oligarchies, faced U.S. neocon ideologues who unleashed death squads and even genocide<\/a> against peasants, students and workers.<\/p>\n

The result \u2013 not surprisingly \u2013 was a flood of refugees, especially from El Salvador and Guatemala, northward to the United States. The neocon \u201csuccess\u201d in the 1980s, crushing progressive social movements and reinforcing the oligarchic controls, left most countries of Central America in the grip of corrupt regimes and crime syndicates, periodically driving more waves of what Reagan called \u201cfeet people\u201d through Mexico to the southern U.S. border.<\/p>\n

Messing Up the Mideast<\/strong><\/p>\n

But the neocons weren\u2019t satisfied sitting at the kids\u2019 table. Even during the Reagan administration, they tried to squeeze themselves among the \u201cadults\u201d at the grown-ups\u2019 table. For instance, neocons, such as Robert McFarlane and Paul Wolfowitz, pushed Israel-friendly policies toward Iran, which the Israelis then saw as a counterweight to Iraq. That\u00a0strategy\u00a0led eventually to the Iran-Contra Affair, the worst scandal of the Reagan administration. [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cWhen Israel \/Neocons Favored Iran.<\/a>\u201d]<\/p>\n

However, the right-wing and mainstream U.S. media never liked the complex Iran-Contra story and thus exposure of the many levels of the scandal\u2019s\u00a0criminality was avoided. Democrats also preferred compromise to confrontation. So, most of the key neocons survived the Iran-Contra fallout, leaving their ranks still firmly in place for the next phase of their rise to power.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, the neocons built up a well-funded infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets, benefiting from both the largesse of military contractors donating to think tanks and government-funded operations like the National Endowment for Democracy, headed by neocon Carl Gershman.<\/p>\n

The neocons gained more political momentum from\u00a0the U.S. military might displayed during\u00a0the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. Many Americans began to see war as fun, almost like a video game in which \u201cenemy\u201d forces get obliterated from afar. On TV news shows, tough-talking pundits were all the rage. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you couldn\u2019t go wrong taking the most macho position, what I sometimes call the \u201cer-er-er\u201d growling effect.<\/p>\n

Combined with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the notion that U.S. military supremacy was unmatched and unchallengeable gave rise to neocon theories about turning \u201cdiplomacy\u201d into nothing more than the delivery of U.S. ultimatums. In the Middle East, that was a view shared by Israeli hardliners, who had grown tired of negotiating with the Palestinians and other Arabs.<\/p>\n

Instead of talk, there would be \u201cregime change\u201d for any government that would not fall into line. This strategy was articulated in 1996 when a group of American neocons, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, went to work for Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s campaign in Israel and compiled a\u00a0strategy paper, called \u201cA Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.\u201d<\/p>\n

Iraq was first on the neocon hit list, but next came Syria and Iran. The overriding idea was that once the regimes assisting the Palestinians and Hezbollah were removed or neutralized, then Israel could dictate peace terms to the Palestinians who would have no choice but to accept what was on the table.<\/p>\n

In 1998, the neocon Project for the New American Century, founded by neocons Robert Kagan and William Kristol, called for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, but\u00a0President Bill Clinton balked at something that extreme. The situation changed, however,\u00a0when President George W. Bush took office and the 9\/11 attacks terrified and infuriated the American public.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, the neocons had\u00a0a Commander-in-Chief who agreed with the need to eliminate Iraq\u2019s Saddam Hussein \u2013 and Americans were easily persuaded although Iraq and Hussein had nothing to do with 9\/11. [See Consortiumnews.com\u2019s \u201cThe Mysterious Why of the Iraq War<\/a>.\u201d]<\/p>\n

The Death of \u2018Realism\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

The 2003 Iraq invasion sounded the death knell for foreign policy \u201crealism\u201d in Official Washington. Aging or dead, the old adult voices were silent or ignored. From Congress and the Executive Branch to the think tanks and the mainstream news media, almost all the \u201copinion leaders\u201d were neocons and many liberals fell into line behind Bush\u2019s case for war.<\/p>\n

And, even though the Iraq War \u201cgroup think\u201d was almost entirely wrong, both on the WMD justifications for war and the \u201ccakewalk\u201d expectations for remaking Iraq, almost no one who promoted the fiasco suffered punishment for either the illegality of the invasion or the absence of sanity in promoting such a harebrained scheme.<\/p>\n

Instead of negative repercussions, the Iraq War backers \u2013 the neocons and their liberal-hawk accomplices \u2013 essentially solidified their control over U.S. foreign policy and the major news media. From The New York Times and The Washington Post to the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, the \u201cregime change\u201d agenda continued to hold sway.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t even matter when the sectarian warfare unleashed in Iraq left hundreds of thousands dead, displaced millions and gave rise to Al Qaeda\u2019s ruthless Iraq affiliate. Not even the 2008 election of Barack Obama, an Iraq War opponent, changed this overall dynamic.<\/p>\n

Rather than standing up to this new foreign policy establishment, Obama bowed to it, retaining key players from President Bush\u2019s national security team, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General David Petraeus, and by hiring hawkish Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Clinton, who became Secretary of State, and Samantha Power at the National Security Council.<\/p>\n

Thus, the cult of \u201cregime change\u201d did not just survive the Iraq disaster; it thrived. Whenever a difficult foreign problem emerged, the go-to solution was still \u201cregime change,\u201d accompanied by the usual demonizing of a targeted leader, support for the \u201cdemocratic opposition\u201d and calls for military intervention. President Obama, arguably\u00a0a \u201ccloset realist,\u201d found himself as the foot-dragger-in-chief as he reluctantly was pulled along on one \u201cregime change\u201d crusade after another.<\/p>\n

In 2011, for instance, Secretary of State Clinton and National Security Council aide Power persuaded Obama to join with some hot-for-war European leaders to achieve \u201cregime change\u201d in Libya, where\u00a0Muammar Gaddafi had gone on the offensive against groups in eastern Libya that he identified as Islamic terrorists.<\/p>\n

But Clinton and Power saw the case as a test for their theories of \u201chumanitarian warfare\u201d \u2013 or \u201cregime change\u201d to remove a \u201cbad guy\u201d like Gaddafi from power. Obama soon signed on and, with the U.S. military providing crucial technological support, a\u00a0devastating bombing campaign\u00a0destroyed Gaddafi\u2019s army, drove him from Tripoli, and ultimately led to his torture-murder.<\/p>\n

\u2018We Came, We Saw, He Died\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Secretary Clinton scurried to secure credit for this \u201cregime change.\u201d According to one email chain in August 2011, her longtime friend and personal adviser Sidney Blumenthal praised the\u00a0bombing campaign to destroy Gaddafi\u2019s army and hailed the dictator\u2019s impending ouster.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst, brava! This is a historic moment and you will be credited for realizing it,\u201d Blumenthal wrote on Aug. 22, 2011. \u201cWhen Qaddafi himself is finally removed, you should of course make a public statement before the cameras wherever you are, even in the driveway of your vacation home. \u2026 You must go on camera. You must establish yourself in the historical record at this moment. \u2026 The most important phrase is: \u2018successful strategy.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Clinton forwarded Blumenthal\u2019s\u00a0advice to Jake Sullivan, a close State Department aide. \u201cPls read below,\u201d she wrote. \u201cSid makes a good case for what I should say, but it\u2019s premised on being said after Q[addafi] goes, which will make it more dramatic. That\u2019s my hesitancy, since I\u2019m not sure how many chances I\u2019ll get.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sullivan responded, saying \u201cit might make sense for you to do an op-ed to run right after he falls, making this point. \u2026 You can reinforce the op-ed in all your appearances, but it makes sense to lay down something definitive, almost like the Clinton Doctrine.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, when Gaddafi abandoned Tripoli\u00a0that day, President Obama\u00a0seized the moment to make a triumphant announcement. Clinton\u2019s opportunity to highlight her joy at the Libyan \u201cregime change\u201d had to wait until Oct. 20, 2011, when Gaddafi was captured, tortured and murdered.<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0TV interview, Clinton celebrated the news when it appeared on her cell phone and\u00a0paraphrased\u00a0Julius Caesar\u2019s famous line after Roman forces achieved a resounding victory in 46 B.C. and he declared, \u201cveni, vidi, vici\u201d \u2013 \u201cI came, I saw, I conquered.\u201d\u00a0Clinton\u2019s reprise of Caesar\u2019s boast went<\/a>: \u201cWe came; we saw; he died.\u201d She then laughed\u00a0and clapped her hands.<\/p>\n

Presumably, the \u201cClinton Doctrine\u201d would have been a policy of \u201cliberal interventionism\u201d to achieve \u201cregime change\u201d in countries where there is some crisis in which the leader seeks to put down an internal security threat and where the United States objects to the action.<\/p>\n

But the problem with Clinton\u2019s boasting about the \u201cClinton Doctrine\u201d was that the Libyan adventure quickly turned sour with the Islamic terrorists, whom Gaddafi had warned about, seizing wide swaths of territory and turning it into another Iraq-like badlands.<\/p>\n

On Sept. 11, 2012, this reality hit home when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was overrun and U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American diplomatic personnel were killed. It turned out that Gaddafi wasn\u2019t entirely wrong about the nature of his opposition.<\/p>\n

Eventually, the extremist violence in Libya grew so out of control that the United States and European countries abandoned their embassies in Tripoli. Since then, Islamic State terrorists have begun decapitating Coptic Christians on Libyan beaches and slaughtering other \u201cheretics.\u201d Amid the anarchy, Libya has become a route for desperate migrants seeking passage across the Mediterranean to Europe.<\/p>\n

A War on Assad<\/strong><\/p>\n

Parallel to the \u201cregime change\u201d in Libya was a similar enterprise in Syria in which the neocons and liberal interventionists pressed for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, whose government in 2011\u00a0cracked down on what had quickly become a violent rebellion<\/a> led by extremist elements, though the Western propaganda portrayed the opposition as \u201cmoderate\u201d and \u201cpeaceful.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the first years of the Syrian civil war, the pretense remained that these \u201cmoderate\u201d rebels were facing unjustified repression and the only answer was \u201cregime change\u201d in Damascus. Assad\u2019s claim that the opposition included many Islamic extremists was largely dismissed as were Gaddafi\u2019s alarms in Libya.<\/p>\n

On Aug. 21, 2013, a sarin gas attack outside Damascus killed hundreds of civilians and the U.S. State Department and the mainstream news media immediately blamed Assad\u2019s forces amid demands for military retaliation against the Syrian army.<\/p>\n

Despite doubts within the U.S. intelligence community about Assad\u2019s responsibility for the sarin attack, which some analysts saw instead as a provocation by anti-Assad terrorists, the clamor from Official Washington\u2019s neocons and liberal interventionists for war was intense and any doubts were brushed aside.<\/p>\n

But President Obama, aware of\u00a0the uncertainty within the U.S. intelligence community, held back from a military strike and eventually worked out a deal, brokered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which Assad agreed to surrender his entire chemical-weapons arsenal while still denying any role in the sarin attack.<\/p>\n

Though the case pinning the sarin attack on the Syrian government eventually fell apart <\/a>\u2013 with evidence pointing to a \u201cfalse flag\u201d operation by Sunni radicals to trick the United States into intervening on their side \u2013 Official Washington\u2019s \u201cgroup think\u201d refused to reconsider the initial rush to judgment. In Monday\u2019s column, Hiatt still references Assad\u2019s \u201csavagery of chemical weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Any suggestion that the only realistic option in Syria is a power-sharing compromise that would include Assad \u2013 who is viewed as the\u00a0protector of Syria\u2019s Christian, Shiite and Alawite minorities \u2013 is rejected out of hand with the slogan, \u201cAssad must go!\u201d<\/p>\n

The neocons have created\u00a0a conventional wisdom which holds that the Syrian crisis would have been prevented if only Obama had followed the neocons\u2019 2011 prescription of another\u00a0U.S.\u00a0intervention to force another \u201cregime change.\u201d Yet, the far more likely outcome would have been either another indefinite and bloody U.S. military occupation of Syria or the black flag of Islamic terrorism flying over Damascus.<\/p>\n

Get Putin<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another villain who emerged from the 2013 failure to bomb Syria was Russian President Putin, who infuriated the neocons by his work with Obama on Syria\u2019s surrender of its chemical weapons and who further annoyed the neocons by helping to get the Iranians to negotiate seriously on constraining their nuclear program. Despite the \u201cregime change\u201d disasters in Iraq and Libya, the neocons wanted to wave the \u201cregime change\u201d wand again over Syria and Iran.<\/p>\n

Putin got his comeuppance when U.S. neocons, including NED President Carl Gershman and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan\u2019s wife), helped orchestrate a \u201cregime change\u201d in Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2014, overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych and putting in a fiercely anti-Russian regime on Russia\u2019s border.<\/p>\n

As thrilled as the neocons were with their \u201cvictory\u201d in Kiev and their success in demonizing Putin in the mainstream U.S. news media, Ukraine followed the now-predictable post-regime-change descent into a vicious civil war. Western Ukrainians waged a brutal\u00a0\u201canti-terrorist operation\u201d against ethnic Russians in the east who resisted the U.S.-backed coup.<\/p>\n

Thousands of Ukrainians died and millions were displaced as Ukraine\u2019s national economy teetered toward\u00a0collapse. Yet, the neocons and their liberal-hawk friends again showed their propaganda skills by pinning the blame for everything on \u201cRussian aggression\u201d and Putin.<\/p>\n

Though Obama was apparently caught off-guard by the Ukrainian \u201cregime change,\u201d he soon joined in denouncing Putin and Russia. The European Union also got behind U.S.-demanded sanctions against Russia despite the harm those sanctions also inflicted on Europe\u2019s already shaky economy. Europe\u2019s stability is\u00a0now under additional\u00a0strain because of the\u00a0flows of refugees from the war zones of the Middle East.<\/p>\n

A Dozen Years of Chaos<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, we can now look at the consequences and costs of the past dozen years under the spell of neocon\/liberal-hawk \u201cregime change\u201d strategies. According to many estimates, the death toll in Iraq, Syria and Libya has exceeded one million with several million more refugees flooding into \u2013 and stretching the resources \u2013 of fragile Mideast countries.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of thousands of other refugees and migrants have fled to Europe, putting major strains on the Continent\u2019s social structures already stressed by the severe recession that followed the 2008 Wall Street crash. Even without the refugee crisis, Greece and other southern European countries would be struggling to meet their citizens\u2019 needs.<\/p>\n

Stepping back for a moment and assessing the full impact of neoconservative policies, you might be amazed at how widely they have spread chaos across a large swath of the globe. Who would have thought that the neocons would have succeeded in destabilizing not only the Mideast but Europe as well.<\/p>\n

And, as Europe struggles, the export markets of China are squeezed, spreading economic instability to that crucial economy and, with its market shocks, the reverberations rumbling back to the United States, too.<\/p>\n

We now see the human tragedies of neocon\/liberal-hawk ideologies captured in the suffering of the Syrians and other refugees flooding Europe and the death of children drowning as their desperate families flee the chaos created by \u201cregime change.\u201d But will the neocon\/liberal-hawk grip on Official Washington finally be broken? Will a debate even be allowed about the dangers of \u201cregime change\u201d prescriptions in the future?<\/p>\n

Not if the likes of The Washington Post\u2019s Fred Hiatt have anything to say about it. The truth is that Hiatt and other neocons retain their dominance of the mainstream U.S. news media, so all that one can expect from the various MSM outlets is more neocon propaganda, blaming the chaos not on their policy of \u201cregime change\u201d but on the failure to undertake even more \u201cregime change.\u201d<\/p>\n

The one hope is that many Americans will not be fooled this time and that a belated \u201crealism\u201d will finally return to U.S. geopolitical strategies that will look for obtainable compromises to restore some political order to places such as Syria, Libya and Ukraine. Rather than more and more tough-guy\/gal confrontations, maybe there will finally be some serious efforts at reconciliation.<\/p>\n

But the other reality is that the interventionist forces have rooted themselves deeply in Official Washington, inside NATO, within the mainstream news media and even in European institutions. It will not be easy to rid the world of the grave dangers created\u00a0by neocon policies.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for <\/em>The Associated Press and<\/em> Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, <\/em>America\u2019s Stolen Narrative,<\/em> either in\u00a0<\/em>print here<\/a>\u00a0or as an e-book (from Amazon<\/a> and barnesandnoble.com<\/a>). <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

7 Sep 2015 – The neocon prescription of endless \u201cregime change\u201d is spreading chaos across the Middle East and now into Europe, yet the neocons still control the mainstream U.S. narrative and thus have diagnosed the problem as not enough \u201cregime change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[197],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-special-feature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}