The War Party Returns
Repudiated at the polls, they're back – in a new
liberal guise
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
 Whatever
happened to the
neocons, those creatures
of legend whose
fulminations led
to the
worst strategic disaster in American history? Oh, don't worry,
they're still around and up to no good – out of power, but not out
of mischief-making schemes to drag us into yet another war, this
time on a scale much bigger than their previous "accomplishment."
The Weekly
Standard, Rupert Murdoch's gift
to the War Party, is no longer delivered in multiple
copies to the White House, but that doesn't mean editor Bill
Kristol is totally bereft of influence in Washington. Kristol
& Co., having disbanded
their Project
for a New American Century [.pdf] – which played a key
role in dragging us into Iraq – have come up with a new vehicle,
the Foreign Policy
Initiative, which recently co-sponsored a conference with
the head of the Center
for a New American Security (the Obamaites' favorite foreign
policy think-tank) and the Center
for American Progress, the Soros-funded
headquarters for progressives such as Matt
Yglesias. The subject was the "Af-Pak" front, and
the attendees, whatever their other political differences, were
in agreement that our new president is on the right track as he
escalates this latest surge in the "war on terror."
The reason
for this ideological harmonic convergence is simple enough to see:
in spite of Obama's alleged commitment to "change," so
far our foreign policy is Bushism without Bush – a policy of perpetual
war, albeit without the Bushian bells
and whistles.
Not that the
administration will ever admit to this essential continuity. In
a move that underscores the stylistic differences between the new
crowd and the old, the Pentagon recently issued a diktat
to its minions, notifying them that "this administration prefers
to avoid using the term ‘Long War' or ‘Global War on
Terror' [GWOT]. Please use ‘Overseas Contingency Operation.'”
 Appearances
are everything to this administration, whose top guns are understandably
sensitive to the charge, coming from the more principled element
of the Democratic Party base, that the revolution has been betrayed.
The president's defenders
note that none of this should come as any surprise to those who
listened to what Obama actually said on the campaign trail, and
they're
right about
that: he constantly
charged
that the Bushies had "neglected" the Afghan front and
that we were fighting "the wrong war." Once in office,
he would fix that, he
vowed – and that is precisely
what he is doing.
Yet one has
to note that the Bushian terminology at least had the virtue of
honesty.
This new crowd, which supposedly disdains all ideology and is devoted
to a streamlined, hard-as-nails "pragmatism," is slipperier
than a greased-up eel in a frying pan. "Overseas Contingency
Operation" indeed!
The euphemism
is comical, yet not totally meaningless. Within it lies a hint of
what the Obamaites intend, or, at least, what they say they
intend. Being sensitive barometers of the political zeitgeist, the
Obamaites are perfectly aware of the war-weariness
of the American people. Even if you call it an "overseas contingency
operation," a war in these hard times is likely to grate much
harder on people's nerves as they listen to the latest
news
from the Af-Pak front. Yet to call the current war a contingency
is to imply that there's going to be an end to it, and, not only
that, but that the end is in sight, if still a
decade or so off.
This, one assumes,
is progress of a sort, but one has to wonder: what is the administration's
current overseas operation contingent on? Or, in plain English,
what event, or series of events, would cause us to declare victory
and come home?
Read
the rest of the article
June
3, 2009
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2009 Antiwar.com
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