'Bad advice for Obama from US imperialist' blog.topic  

Bad advice for Obama from US imperialist

Leslie H. Gelb is one of those creepy Washington insiders who thinks the Vietnam War was a good thing, is a great fan of  Nixon and Kissinger as and cannot see why anyone should object to the USA exerting its influence in every country on Earth through being world's  number one military power.

He has just taken Machiavelli as his model and wrtten "Advice to the Prince" to set Obama on the right track.

To understand a little of what goes on behind closed doors in Washington read David Bromwich's immensely instructional. NYRB review linking Gelb's book to the very different approach suggested by Obama's Cairo speech.

This review is complemented by one of Bromwich's  earlier essays  in the NYRB , "The Co-president at Work", a review of several books on Cheney and his circle. In particular these paras in the Cheney piece gave much food for thought:

    (The Project for the New American Century's) Rebuilding America's Defenses, ... was marked by an overriding ambition for global mastery, for the possession of irresistible military forces, for an expanded arsenal of nuclear weapons, and for large new investments in missile defense. These publications of 1993 and 2000 now seem a pair of symbolic brackets around the neoconservative exile that was the Clinton administration. All along, this was the normal thinking around the AEI and the Cheney circle. Yet when placed alongside the norms of the containment policy during the years 1946–1989, the new dogma betrayed a shift so tremendous that it could not have been ratified without a layer of well-instructed opinion makers to prepare and soften its acceptance.  (my emphasis)

    Never before, in the history of the United States, has there been an ideological camp so fully formed and equipped to extend itself as neoconservatism in the year 1999. It was, and remains, a sect that has some of the properties of a party. There are mentors now in the generation of the fathers as well as the grandfathers, summer internships for young enthusiasts, semiofficial platforms of programmed reactions to breaking news. But to grasp their collective character, one must think of a party that does not run for office at election time. They can therefore evade responsibility for botched policies and the leaders who promote those policies. Donald Rumsfeld had his first and warmest partisans among the neoconservatives, but they were also the first, with the solitary apparent exception of Cheney, to identify him as a scapegoat for the Iraq war and to call for his firing when the insurgency tore the country apart in 2006.

    With the peculiar tightness of its loyalties and the convenience of its immunities, neoconservatism in the United States now has something of the consistency of an alternative culture. Its success in penetrating the mainstream culture is evident in the pundit shows on most of the networks and cable TV, and in the columns of The Washington Post and The New York Times. In the years between 1983 and 1986, and again, more potently, in 2001–2006, the neoconservatives went far to dislocate the boundaries of respectable opinion in America. The idea that wars are to be avoided except in cases of self-defense suffered an eclipse from which it has not yet returned, largely owing to the persistence of respected opinion makers in urging the spread of freedom and markets by force of arms. More particularly, and to confine ourselves to recent events, the nomination of Samuel Alito and the drafting and legitimation of the "surge" strategy by Retired General Jack Keane and Frederick Kagan of the AEI could not have succeeded as they did without the early and organized advocacy of the neoconservative camp.

 

The more we know about what goes on in Washington, the better equipped we are to work out how to dissolve the power-nexus that threatens the future of the whole human family and much of Gaia too

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