MetaFilter posts tagged with neocons

War Games

adamvasco — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 13:03:10 -0800

What Mahmoud Ahmadinejad needs to survive politically is possibly a War. However the possibility that plans for military action have been torpedoed have brought 'howls' from the neocons.

The man who knew too much

homunculus — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 15:00:09 -0800

The man who knew too much. "He was the CIA's expert on Pakistan's nuclear secrets, but Rich Barlow was thrown out and disgraced when he blew the whistle on a US cover-up. Now he's to have his day in court."

Considering a war with Iran

homunculus — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 15:30:56 -0800

"Considering a war with Iran: A discussion paper on WMD in the Middle East" (PDF). A new study by two British scholars claims that the United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch a massive assault on Iran. This comes just in time for the post Labor Day product rollout. [Via Informed Comment.]

"An evangelical vision of geopolitical redemption."

homunculus — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 00:26:34 -0800

Iraq: The War of the Imagination. "Anyone seeking to understand what has become the central conundrum of the Iraq war—how it is that so many highly accomplished, experienced, and intelligent officials came together to make such monumental, consequential, and, above all, obvious mistakes, mistakes that much of the government knew very well at the time were mistakes—must see beyond what seems to be a simple rhetoric of self-justification and follow it where it leads: toward the War of Imagination that senior officials decided to fight in the spring and summer of 2002 and to whose image they clung long after reality had taken a sharply separate turn." By Mark Danner. [Via Tomdispatch.]

Lies, and the lying liars...

jpburns — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 05:37:08 -0800

Whether it's mislabeling his affiliation, or starting conspiracy theories, the party of responsible government (and their right-wing media organizations) are doing all they can to downplay the Foley scandal.

Inexorable

homunculus — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 15:55:07 -0800

The End of The "Summer of Diplomacy": Assessing U.S. Military Options on Iran (PDF). "In a new report for The Century Foundation, Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner warns that powerful voices in the Bush administration are making the case for air strikes aimed not only at setting back Iran’s nuclear program, but also at toppling the country’s government. He says that these officials are undeterred by the concerns of military leaders about whether such attacks would be effective." [Via The Agonist and FDL.]

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...

jpburns — Wed, 24 May 2006 04:01:37 -0800

There's a move afoot to censure Jimmy Carter instead of, say, anyone actually responsible for making the world a more dangerous place. I call "attacking the messenger by proxy," or at least, some serious Rove-ian misdirection.

The long, slow death of public health care...

327.ca — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 12:00:10 -0800

Few things are more sacred to Canadians than the nation's medicare system. After years of health spending cutbacks by conservative politicians, debate rages over whether private providers should now be allowed to compete with the public system. In British Columbia, where the government is shovelling tax dollars into the 2010 Olympics, patients are being left to die in emergency rooms and long-term care facilities due to overcrowding and understaffing. Is it too late to save public health care? Should it be saved?

Even Larry Johnson is afraid of the I.C.O.T.I.G.

ericbop — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 12:27:59 -0800

Earth-friendly evangelicals have been in the news a lot lately. Are they related to the Crunchy Cons (or Green cons?!?)? Maybe they're all just afraid of the wrath of grandma...[first link requires nyt account, or a library card]

The Trouble with Neocons

caddis — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 22:43:23 -0800

A lapsed neocon speaks out: The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them.... After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power." ... We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.