Michael Hoffman's Introduction: Robert Parry's essay (below) offers good
insight into the degree to which Willard "Mitt" Romney is a creature of the
blood-drenched, neo-con butchers who brought us the disastrous Iraq and
Afghan wars. Foreign wars lead to trillion dollar US deficits and
nation-building overseas, while US infrastructure crumbles. If he is
elected, Romney will very likely invade Iran, creating a worldwide economic
depression and gas prices at $6 or $7 a gallon in the US, while killing
hundreds or thousands of American soldiers, sailors and Marines and tens of
thousands of Iranian civilians (including pregnant Iranian women -- are you
paying attention, anti-abortion activists?). The slaughter of innocent men,
women and children in needless foreign wars fought to make the world safe
for Zionist oppression of indigenous people, is just as evil as homosexual
marriage and abortion. War is a form of infanticide, since countless
children, born and unborn, die as a result of it.
In addition to his allegiance to the neo-con butchers, Mr. Romney is the
agent of predatory capitalism. He will strip every protection and every
safety net from American workers that he can get away with. The poorest and
most vulnerable in our society will suffer as a result, and abortions will
increase. His vice-presidential running mate is an open advocate of the
greed-is-good atheist economist Ayn Rand, for whom selfishness and the
mortal sin of usury were high virtues.
Neither Obama nor Romney represent any kind of candidate that Christians can
support, but Romney will indeed get the so-called "Christian" vote on
November 6 thanks to the blindness of priests and ministers, from
traditional Catholics to
Billy Graham, who are helping to fulfill the Mormon ambition of putting
a spiritual descendant of Joseph Smith into the White House. What is called
Christianity today is a mockery of the holy name of Christ.
“Moderate Mitt”
-- Neocon Trojan Horse
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
24 October 2012
Mitt Romney's peculiar sense of geography - thinking Iran was some
landlocked country that needed Syria as a "route to the sea" - may have
raised some eyebrows over Romney's lack of basic knowledge, but another part
of the same answer, referring to the civil war in Syria as "an opportunity,"
should have raised more alarm.
Though Romney's goal in Monday's foreign policy debate was to downplay his
warlike neoconservative stand, his reference to the Syrian chaos as "an
opportunity" suggests that his more moderate rhetoric is just another ploy
to deceive voters and win the election, not a real abandonment of neocon
strategies.
In that sense, the new "moderate Mitt" is less a sign of a neocon retreat
from his earlier bellicosity than a Trojan Horse to be wheeled onto the
White House grounds on Jan. 20, 2013, so the neocons can pour forth from its
hollowed-out belly and regain full control of U.S. foreign policy.
The neocons don't really mind that Romney has suddenly abandoned many of
their cherished positions, such as extending the Afghan War beyond 2014 and
returning U.S. troops to Iraq. The neocons understand the political need for
Romney to calm independent voters who fear that he may be another George W.
Bush.
In Monday's debate, Romney said, "Syria's an opportunity for us because
Syria plays an important role in the Middle East, particularly right now.
Syria is Iran's only ally in the Arab world. It's their route to the sea.
It's the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of
course, our ally Israel. And so seeing Syria remove Assad is a very high
priority for us. Number two, seeing a — a replacement government being
responsible people is critical for us.”
The "route to the sea" comment - with its faint echo of a distant time in
geopolitics - represented proof that Romney lacks even a rudimentary
knowledge of world geography, since much of Iran's southern territory fronts
on the Persian Gulf and Iran could only reach Syria by transiting Iraq.
Syria and Iran have no common border.
But more significantly, Romney was revealing the crucial connection between
the neocon desire for "regime change" in Syria and the neocon determination
to strangle Israel's close-in enemies, such as Lebanon's Hezbollah.
Romney's demand for a new Syrian government of "responsible people" further
suggests that the Republican presidential nominee shares the core neocon
fantasy that the United States can simply remove one unsavory Middle East
dictator and install a pro-Western, Israel-friendly leader who will then
shut off aid to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
That was the central fallacy in the Iraq War, the notion that United States
with its unparalleled military might could shift the Mideast's political
dynamics to Israel's advantage through coercive "regime change." In Iraq,
the U.S. military eliminated Saddam Hussein but then saw a new Iraqi
government ally itself with Iran.
The new Iraq may be less of a military threat, but it has not reached out
and embraced Israel as some neocons had hoped. Indeed, by removing Hussein's
Sunni-controlled regime - and ending up with a Shiite-dominated one - Bush's
Iraq War essentially eliminated a major bulwark against the regional
influence of Iran's Shiite regime.
Yet, despite the bloody and costly catastrophe in Iraq, the heart of the
neocon dream is still beating - and Romney's comment indicates that he
shares its illusions. Dating back at least to the mid-1990s, the neocon idea
has been to use violent or coercive "regime change" in Muslim countries to
secure Israel's security.
The neocons' first target may have been Iraq, but that was never the
endgame. The strategy was to make Iraq into a military base for overthrowing
the governments of Iran and Syria. Back in the heady days of 2002-2003, a
neocon joke posed the question of what to do after ousting Saddam Hussein in
Iraq - whether to next go east to Iran or west to Syria. The punch-line was:
"Real men go to Tehran."
According to the neocon grand plan, once pro-Israeli governments were
established in Iran, Iraq and Syria, Israel's hostile neighbors, Hezbollah
in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, would lose their benefactors and shrivel up,
without money or weapons. Then, Israel could dictate its terms for "peace"
and "security.”
This neocon strategy emerged after the lopsided U.S. victory in Kuwait, in
which President George H.W. Bush demonstrated the leaps-and-bounds advantage
of the high-tech U.S. military over the Iraqi army whose soldiers were
literally blown to bits by U.S. missiles and "smart bombs" while American
casualties were kept to a minimum.
After that 1991 victory, it became conventional wisdom in Washington that no
army on earth could withstand the sophisticated killing power of the U.S.
military. That belief - combined with frustration over Israel's stalemated
conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah - led American neocons to begin thinking
about a new approach, "regime change" across the Middle East.
The early outlines of this aggressive concept for remaking the Middle East
emerged in 1996 when a group of neocons, including
Richard Perle and Douglas
Feith, went to work for Israel's Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu during his
campaign for prime minister.
The neocon strategy paper, called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for
Securing the Realm," advanced the idea that only regime change in hostile
Muslim countries could achieve the necessary "clean break" from the
diplomatic standoffs that had followed inconclusive Israeli-Palestinian
peace negotiations.
Under the "clean break," Israel would no longer seek peace through mutual
understanding and compromise, but rather through confrontation, including
the violent removal of leaders such as Iraq's Saddam Hussein who were
supportive of Israel's close-in enemies.
The plan called Hussein's ouster "an important Israeli strategic objective
in its own right," but also one that would destabilize the Assad dynasty in
Syria and thus topple the power dominoes into Lebanon, where Hezbollah might
soon find itself without its key Syrian ally. Iran also could find itself in
the cross-hairs of "regime change."
But what the "clean break" needed was the military might of the United
States, since some of the targets like Iraq were too far away and too
powerful to be defeated even by Israel's highly efficient military. The cost
in Israeli lives and to Israel's economy from such overreach would have been
staggering.
In 1998, the U.S. neocon brain trust pushed the "clean break" plan another
step forward with the creation of the Project for the New American Century,
which urged President Bill Clinton to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
However, Clinton would only go so far, maintaining a harsh embargo on Iraq
and enforcing a "no-fly zone" which involved U.S. aircraft conducting
periodic bombing raids. Still, with Clinton or his heir apparent, Al Gore,
in the White House, a full-scale invasion of Iraq appeared out of the
question.
The first key political obstacle was removed when the neocons helped
engineer George W. Bush's ascension to the presidency in Election 2000.
However, the path was not fully cleared until al-Qaeda terrorists attacked
New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001 (Editor's note: The US government
attacked the World Trade Center), leaving behind a political climate across
America for war and revenge.
Of course, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 had other motives besides
Israeli security - from Bush's personal animus toward Saddam Hussein to
controlling Iraq's oil resources - but a principal goal of the neocons was
the projection of American power deep into the Muslim world, to strike at
enemy states beyond Israel's military reach.
In those days of imperial hubris, the capabilities of the U.S. military were
viewed as strategic game-changers. However, the Iraqi resistance to the U.S.
conquest, relying on low-tech weapons such as "improvised explosive
devices," dashed the neocon dream - at least in the short run. The "real
men" had to postpone their trips to Tehran and Damascus.
But the dream hasn't died. It just had to wait out four years of Barack
Obama. In Campaign 2012, the neocons have returned to surround Mitt Romney,
who like George W. Bush a decade ago has only a vague understanding of the
world and is more than happy to cede the direction of U.S. foreign policy to
the smart, confident and well-connected neocons.
The neocons also understand the need to manipulate the American people. In
the 1980s, when I was reporting Ronald Reagan's Central American policies, I
dealt with the neocons often and came to view them as expert manipulators
whose view of democracy was that it was okay to trick the common folk into
doing what was deemed necessary. The neocons learned to exaggerate dangers
and exploit fears. They tested their skills out in Central America with
warnings about how peasant rebellions against corrupt oligarchs were part of
some grand Soviet scheme to conquer the United States through the soft
underbelly of Texas.
When the neocons returned to power under George W. Bush, they applied the
same techniques in hyping the threat from Iraq. They pushed baseless claims
about Saddam Hussein sharing non-existent weapons of mass destruction with
al-Qaeda, all the better to scare the American people.
The neocons faced some painful reversals when the Iraq War foundered from
late 2003 through 2006, but they salvaged some status in 2007 by pushing the
fiction of the "successful surge," which supposedly turned impending defeat
into victory, although the truth was that the "surge" only delayed the
inevitable failure of the U.S. enterprise.
After Bush's departure in 2009 and the arrival of Obama, the neocons
retreated, too, to Washington think tanks and the editorial pages of
national news outlets. However, they continued to influence the perception
of events in the Middle East, shifting the blame for the Iraq defeat - as
much as possible - onto Obama.
New developments in the region also created what the neocons viewed as new
openings. For instance, the Arab Spring of 2011 led to civil unrest in Syria
where the Assad dynasty - based in non-Sunni religious sects - was
challenged by a Sunni-led insurgency which included some democratic
reformers as well as some radical jihadists.
Meanwhile, in Iran, international resistance to its nuclear program prompted
harsh economic sanctions which have undermined the Islamic rule of the
Shiite mullahs. Though President Obama views the sanctions as leverage to
compel Iran to accept limits on its nuclear program, some neocons are
already salivating over how to hijack the sanctions on behalf of "regime
change."
At this pivotal moment, what the neocons need desperately is to maneuver
their way back into the White House behind Mitt Romney's election. And, if
that requires Romney to suddenly soften his hard-line neocon rhetoric for
the next two weeks, that is a small price to pay.
Which brings us back to Monday's foreign policy debate in which Romney
abandoned what had been his supposedly principled stands, such as denouncing
Obama's schedule to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of
2014. Though Romney had called that a major mistake - telling the Taliban
when the Americans were departing - he embraced the same timetable. The
voters could breathe a sigh of relief over "Moderate Mitt."
However, in Romney's comment about Syria, he showed his real intent, the
neocon desire to exploit the conflict in Syria to replace Bashar al-Assad
with a new leader who would accommodate Israel and shut down assistance
going to Lebanon's Hezbollah. It was in that context that Romney termed the
Syrian violence, which has claimed an estimated 30,000 lives, an
"opportunity."
But the real opportunity for the neocons would come if the American voters,
satisfied that Romney no longer appears to be the crazy war hawk of the
Republican primaries, elect him on Nov. 6 and then celebrate his arrival
next Jan. 20 by pushing a crude wooden horse through the gates of 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue.