10th Anniversary Confessional

The things I stumble over. My goodness.

Over the last week, I’ve noticed a few of the better known neocons creeping out of the woodwork and that always sets my neocon antennae to waggling. They don’t just show up for the fun of being in front of a camera. They’re up to something. I don’t have the foggiest idea what, though. I might have said that they arrived on the scene to bury Iraq so they could plow up Iran this spring, but I’m not so sure about that now that I’ve read a recent article in The American Conservative magazine.

On November 21, 2005, the magazine ran an article honoring the 10th anniversary of the neoconservative magazine, The Weekly Standard. It is entitled, “The Weekly Standard’s War” and it is a veritable ode to William Kristol and his Iraq War. Yep, it’s Bill Kristol’s war all made possible by The Weekly Standard. (You’ll notice a bit of hubris popping up throughout the article.)

Clearly, Mr. Kristol had a lot of input in this article and it comes across as an intimate confessional. Holee cow. Neocons have always been forthright about their beliefs, goals, and tactics if you go looking for them. But this essay is a veritable gusher all on one page.

For example:

One day a novel must be written that conveys the sense of purpose and energy that surged through the Standard’s offices—and that of the whole Washington neoconservative network—in the days after September 11, 2001. No more esoteric musings about Gilligan and the Skipper [reference to a David Brooks cover story for the Standard in the pre-9/11 issue]. The Project for a New American Century—a Bill Kristol-founded pressure group that specialized in gathering the signatures of the obscure and moderately famous in support of a more militarized foreign policy—would be ignored no longer. At long last, there would be an audience.

Inside the administration were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their staffs, heavy with signatories of the original 1998 PNAC Saddam-must-be-removed letter. They set out to neutralize the skeptical CIA and Colin Powell’s more cautious State Department and rush the White House into a war in Iraq. Their story has been told in several book-length accounts and administration memoirs. Outside, with the vital task of shaping public opinion, the Standard emerged as the nerve center, a focal point to concentrate and diffuse the message of the Beltway neocons. For these bookish men, it was a Churchillian moment, an occasion to use words to rally a nation and shape history.

Their job was to divert America’s wrath away from those who perpetrated the attack and turn it against those who did not. It was, on the face of it, quite a stretch. The day before 9/11, the idea of a ground invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was as “unthinkable” as it had been when Kristol and Kagan had first broached it four years earlier. But the country was confused—in shock and primed for vengeance....

[...]

In the first issue the magazine published after 9/11, Gary Schmitt and Tom Donnelly, two employees of Kristol’s PNAC, clarified what ought to be the country’s war aims. Their rhetoric—which laid down a line from which the magazine would not waver over the next 18 months—was to link Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in virtually every paragraph, to join them at the hip in the minds of readers, and then to lay out a strategy that actually gave attacking Saddam priority over eliminating al-Qaeda....

Stretch or not, looks like they handily pulled it off. But sometimes that streak of luck doesn’t last.

The essay goes on to say:

Bush and his team have since fallen out of favor in Standard land. The magazine has begun blaming the bungled prosecution of the war on Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and has called for his resignation. As Bush sinks in the polls, the journal will surely look to other politicians to carry out its aspirations. If David Brooks, now a New York Times columnist, is an indicator, that figure is likely to be a centrist or a “progressive” in the Joe Lieberman mode—conservatism as a vehicle for neoconservative foreign-policy goals having been pretty much run into the ground.

Heh. Parasites, aren’t they? Now they’re looking for more fertile fields. A Lieberman or McCain centrist presidency would work. Both men have been schmoozing with and lending their signatures to the neocon agenda for the last decade, so they’re trusted entities. You know, I don’t think the neocons particularly care whether this country’s social and domestic policies are conservative or centrist or even liberal as long as the foreign policy is hardline hawk. Better chance of that now with so-called centrist hawks like McCain and Lieberman. I’d point out to both fellows that hitching your wagon to the neocon agenda seems to lead to infamy. But they’re big boys.

So, as of November 21 that was the plan. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy toward McCain, let me tell you. Lieberman can likewise take a hike.

That still doesn’t answer the question of why Kristol trotted out on Sunday to drop his bombshell. I don’t imagine the interview was set up to simply be a bellyaching session. What are they up to?