Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War (molto interessante)

The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War
By Michael Lind
New Statesman - London
www.newstatesman.com
April 7, 2003
America's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is
going on in the United States? Who is making foreign
policy? And what are they trying to achieve? Quasi-
Marxist explanations involving big oil or American
capitalism are mistaken. Yes, American oil companies
and contractors will accept the spoils of the kill in
Iraq. But the oil business, with its Arabist bias, did
not push for this war any more than it supports the
Bush administration's close alliance with Ariel Sharon.
Further, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are
not genuine "Texas oil men" but career politicians who,
in between stints in public life, would have used their
connections to enrich themselves as figureheads in the
wheat business, if they had been residents of Kansas,
or in tech companies, had they been Californians.
Equally wrong is the theory that American and European
civilisation are evolving in opposite directions. The
thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative
propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans
pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans
voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were
it not for the over-representation of sparsely
populated, right-wing states in both the presidential
electoral college and the Senate, the White House and
the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats,
whose views and values, on everything from war to the
welfare state, are very close to those of western
Europeans.
Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-
cultures theory are reassuring: they assume that the
recent revolution in US foreign policy is the result of
obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world.
The truth is more alarming. As a result of several
bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies - such as the
selection rather than election of George W Bush, and 11
September - the foreign policy of the world's only
global power is being made by a small clique that is
unrepresentative of either the US population or the
mainstream foreign policy establishment.
The core group now in charge consists of
neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called
"neoconservatives" because many of them started off as
anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to
the far right). Inside the government, the chief
defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the
deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence
mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld
is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of
defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too
controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number
three at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a
Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John
R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State
Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott
Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy
at the National Security Council. On the outside are
James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried
repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in
the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has
just resigned from his unpaid defence department
advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these
"experts" never served in the military. But their
headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's
office, where these Republican political appointees are
despised and distrusted by the largely Republican
career soldiers.
Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their
roots on the left, not the right. They are products of
the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the
1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti- communist
liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into
a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no
precedents in American culture or political history.
Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics,
including preventive warfare such Israel's 1981 raid on
Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts
of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy". They call
their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after
President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's
theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the
far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American
Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people
such as the Palestinians.
The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in
or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a
metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby and the
religious right, plus conservative think- tanks,
foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for
Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide
homes for neo-con "in-and- outers" when they are out of
government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes
not so much from corporations as from decades-old
conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin
foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead
tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not
reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo-
cons are ideologues, not opportunists.
The major link between the conservative think-tanks and
the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-
supporting Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defence
experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out
the retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to
be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co-
signed a Jinsa letter that began: "We . . . believe
that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel
Defence Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in
the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the
leadership of [the] Palestinian Authority."
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and
Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to
the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has
relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush
administration's liaison to the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the
Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a "pro-
Israel activist". While out of power in the Clinton
years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for
Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli
government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the
territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government.
Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who
mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent
supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are
southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious
right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the
Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions
to subsidise Jewish settlements in the occupied
territories.
The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is
occupied by several right-wing media empires, with
roots - odd as it seems - in the Commonwealth and South
Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through
his Fox Television network. His magazine the Weekly
Standard, edited by William Kristol, the former chief
of staff of Dan Quayle (vice-president, 1989-93), acts
as a mouthpiece for defence intellectuals such as
Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for
Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I
was executive editor, 1991-94) is now funded by Conrad
Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger
empire in Britain and Canada.
Strangest of all is the media network centred on the
Washington Times - owned by the South Korean messiah
(and ex-convict) the Reverend Sun Myung Moon - which
owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John
O'Sullivan, the ghost-writer for Margaret Thatcher who
once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada.
Through such channels, the "Gotcha!" style of right-
wing British journalism, as well as its Europhobic
substance, have contaminated the US conservative
movement.
The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked
together in the 1990s by the Project for the New
American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the
Weekly Standard offices. Using a PR technique pioneered
by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neo-cons
published a series of public letters, whose signatories
often included Wolfowitz and other future members of
the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the US to
invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's
campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about
China were another favourite). During Clinton's two
terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign
policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they
are frantically being studied.
How did the neo-con defence intellectuals - a small
group at odds with most of the US foreign policy elite,
Republican as well as Democratic - manage to capture
the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the
presidential primaries. They feared that the second
Bush would be like the first - a wimp who had failed to
occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf war and who had
pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process - and that
his administration, again like his father's, would be
dominated by moderate Republican realists such as
Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported
the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear
that Bush would get the nomination.
Then they had a stroke of luck - Cheney was put in
charge of the presidential transition (the period
between the election in November and the accession to
office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to
stack the administration with his hardline allies.
Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign
policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell
found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network,
including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
The neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and
inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War
veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of
the CIA and vice-president, George W was a thinly
educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business
before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely
ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor
has more power). His father is essentially a north-
eastern, moderate Republican; George W, raised in west
Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of
machismo, anti- intellectualism and overt religiosity.
The son of upper-class Episcopalian parents, he
converted to southern fundamentalism in a midlife
crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an
admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes
coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American
intellectuals, is a feature of the southern culture.
The younger Bush was tilting away from Powell and
toward Wolfowitz ("Wolfie", as he calls him) even
before 9/11 gave him something he had lacked: a mission
in life other than following in his dad's footsteps.
There are signs of estrangement between the cautious
father and the crusading son: last year, veterans of
the first Bush administration, including Baker,
Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, warned publicly
against an invasion of Iraq without authorisation from
Congress and the UN.
It is not clear that George W fully understands the
grand strategy that Wolfowitz and other aides are
unfolding. He seems genuinely to believe that there was
an imminent threat to the US from Saddam Hussein's
"weapons of mass destruction", something the leading
neo- cons say in public but are far too intelligent to
believe themselves. The Project for the New American
Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the
Clinton years, for reasons that had nothing to do with
possible links between Saddam and Osama Bin Laden.
Public letters signed by Wolfowitz and others called on
the US to invade and occupy Iraq, to bomb Hezbollah
bases in Lebanon and to threaten states such as Syria
and Iran with US attacks if they continued to sponsor
terrorism. Claims that the purpose is not to protect
the American people but to make the Middle East safe
for Israel are dismissed by the neo-cons as vicious
anti-Semitism. Yet Syria, Iran and Iraq are bitter
enemies, with their weapons pointed at each other, and
the terrorists they sponsor target Israel rather than
the US. The neo- cons urge war with Iran next, though
by any rational measurement North Korea's new nuclear
arsenal is, for the US, a far greater problem.
So that is the bizarre story of how neoconservatives
took over Washington and steered the US into a Middle
Eastern war unrelated to any plausible threat to the US
and opposed by the public of every country in the world
except Israel. The frightening thing is the role of
happenstance and personality. After the al-Qaeda
attacks, any US president would likely have gone to war
to topple Bin Laden's Taliban protectors in
Afghanistan. But everything that the US has done since
then would have been different had America's 18th-
century electoral rules not given Bush the presidency
and had Cheney not used the transition period to turn
the foreign policy executive into a PNAC reunion.
For a British equivalent, one would have to imagine a
Tory government, with Downing Street and Whitehall
controlled by followers of Reverend Ian Paisley,
extreme Eurosceptics, empire loyalists and Blimpish
military types - all determined, for a variety of
strategic or religious reasons, to invade Egypt. Their
aim would be to regain the Suez Canal as the first step
in a campaign to restore the British empire. Yes, it
really is that weird.
Michael Lind, the Whitehead Fellow at the New America
Foundation in Washington, DC, is the author of Made in
Texas: George W Bush and the Southern Takeover of
American Politics.
"The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from
the grasp of executive power." -- Daniel Webster
(1782-1852)
http://www.newstatesman.com
--
UFV
Secretary
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Ilaria Alpi

 1930s and 1940s, 
        Questo e' esatto, il resto e' un po' fuori quadro.  L'influenza
predominante in gruppi come l'American Entreprise Insitute  e simili
credo sia quella di uno strano filosofo tedesco (non ricordo bene se
fosse di religione ebraica) fuoriuscito dalla Germania al tempo di
Hitler, Leo Strauss, e della sua scuola, basata sull'idea che esistano
dei diritti naturali dell'uomo, indipendenti da tutte le situazioni
storiche e culturali.  Tra questi c'e' la democrazia di tipo
occidentale.  
        Strauss ha lasciato una fiorente scuola culturale e politca,
basata prevalentemente sull'Università di Chicago, che ha lottato
fortemente in questi ultimi decenni contro tutte le tendenze
decostruttiviste, politically correct, e relativiste presenti
nell'accademia statunitense, per un ritorno a valori saldi e
indubitabili, da imporre anche con la forza.  Il piu' famoso polemista
del periodo e' stato un certo A. Bloom, che ha avuto un gran successo
con la sua riproposizione di un curriculum classico tradizionalista,
contro le tendenze terzomondiste, femministe etc.  Questa rezione,
salutare contro certi eccesssi, e' andata molto avanti, e ha contribuito
a costituire il nucleo ideologico del pensiero neoconservatore.  Esso e'
del tutto diverso dal conservatorismo americano anni '30, che era
neoisolazionista: e' un pensiero molto ideologico e interventista.  Ho
avuto occasione di incontrarne qualcuno in qualche convegno e ho notato
in essi una solida preparazione sui classici greci e latini, che amano
moltissmo, ma interpretano in modo del tutto particolare.
        In genere disprezzati dagli studiosi seri, questi intellettuali
si trovano bene in quella terra di mezzo che sono le pagine culutrali
delle riviste e il dibattito pubblico tlevisivo sui fini e i valori,
perche' portatori di una proposta apparentemente forte di
interpretazione del mondo.  Per lungo tempo li ho considerati, come
molti altri hanno fatto, un curioso elemento del panorama culturale
americano, ma ora si sono rivelati pericolosi.  Essendo la loro una
interpretazione del tutto ideologica della realta', non c'e' dubbio che
andranno incontro alle dure repliche della storia, e scopriranno quanto
siano semplici e inadeguate le loro categorie interpretative; ma, prima
di cio', potranno fare danni infiniti, e generare molti lutti e rovine.
        In Italia abbiamo tradotto molti scritti di Strauss e Bloom: di
Strauss, Diritto naturale e storia (Il Melangolo, 1990) Che cos'e' la
filosofia politica? (Argalia 1977); di A. Bloom, La chiusuira della
mente americana (Frassinelli 1988).
        Saluti
        EGL  

 mente americana (Frassinelli 1988).
Grazie Carlo, se hai altra bibliografia fornisci pure.

 di cio', potranno fare danni infiniti, e generare molti lutti e rovine.
Mai sottovalutare...
In Italia tutta l'attenzione è rivolta alla sinistra: gli intellettuali di
sinistra sanno discutere solo della crisi della sinistra; gli intellettuali
di destra vogliono solo discutere della crisi della sinistra. Il pensiero di
destra non interessa a nessuno: agli intellettuali di sinistra perchè non lo
considerano importante, agli intellettuali di destra perchè non sono
minimamente capaci di discutere i loro principi ideologici o la loro
applicazione alla realtà.
Così che quando appare un progetto rivoluzionario intenzionato a ridisegnare
la carta del mondo a qualsiasi prezzo, sembra cascato dalla luna.
Moritz Benedikt
'Life is too short'

 Grazie Carlo, se hai altra bibliografia fornisci pure.
        Ce n'e' tanta; il padre di tutti costoro e' un po' E. Voegelin:
il volume La filosofia politica di Platone (Il Mulino) ha aperto la
strada a tante altre ideologie.  Ma non e' solo le filosofia antica
quella che li ispira.
        Saluti
        EGL

 quella che li ispira.
Citerei anche i discepoli di Ayn Rand (
www.aynrand.org
), fra i cui
siti si trovano anche questi:
Capitalism Defense Project
Environmentalism: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
The Microsoft Defense Site
Multiculturalism and Diversity: The New Racism
(Torno IT con un colpo da maestro: "La fonte meravigliosa", King Vidor,
1949)
-- 
"Any time you've got both the pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, 
you're not long for the White House"
 -- Michael Moore

 applicazione alla realtà.
        C'e'

 wrote:

        Scusa: sono stato interrotto.  C'e' un gruppo di filosofi della
politica e di critici della cultura "di sisnistra" che hanno cercato di
utilizzare la critica reazionaria alla modernita'.  Hanno tentato di
rivalutare Schmitt, Voegelin, Strauss etc.  Credo che molti articoli si
trovano sulla rivista "Filosofia politca".  Altri autori molto noti,
come Cacciari, usano temi tradizionalisti e religiosi per la loro
critica alla contemporaneita'.  Il nemico e' la borghesia, e tutto va
bene purche' si opponga ad essa.
        Non metterei nello stesso mazzo la rivalutazione di Nietzsche e
Heidegger, che hanno un ben altro spessore torico, sebbene nettamente
"di destra".
        EGL 

 "di destra".
Intendi (di destra) la rivalutazione di Nietzsche *attraverso* Heidegger,
o la rivalutazione di N. tout court? 


 
        La critica nietzscheiana della morale e della modernita',
attraverso l'ideale della "bestia bionda" che vive sodisfacendo il suo
istinto non ha nulla a che fare con la 'sinistra', come e' stata intesa
tradzionalmente (illuminismo + razionalismo + marxismo etc.).  E' una
critica, a mio parere, molto illuminante, ma da un punto di vista
diverso da quello basato sui presupposti ugualitari che stanno alla base
della tradizione della sinistra.
        EGL 

 istinto non ha nulla a che fare con la 'sinistra'
Oddio, stiamo parlando di N. o di D'Annunzio? :-)


 Oddio, stiamo parlando di N. o di D'Annunzio? :-)
        No, sto parlando della fine della "Genealogia della morale".
D'Annunzio ha copiato.
        EGL

 D'Annunzio ha copiato.
Eh, questi italiani... :-)



Nietzsche ha avuto una vasta influenza politica nella prima metà del secolo,
ma in forme non tanto distorte quanto semplificate: era di moda, come capita
in genere a quanti disprezzano le 'masse' - non fossero state di moda non
avrebbero interessato D'Annunzio, per dire. Ma nella rielaborazione di
Cacciari o Vattimo (o Derrida) mi pare del tutto inutilizzabile
politicamente: i filosofi sono utili solo se si possono ridurre a slogan, e
la loro è una analisi troppo profonda (giusta o sbagliata che sia).
Heidegger, da questo punto di vista, è ancor meno utilizzabile. Vedi pure il
suo ingenuo tentativo di diventare il filosofo ufficiale del nazismo (per
quanto mi riguarda, se andava bene per Hanna Arendt, va bene anche per me,
anche se non provo nemmeno a dedicarmici, come invece ho fatto per
Nietzsche).
Strauss, Vogelin e altri di quel genere, per quanto autori ovviamente
rispettabili, mi paiono decisamente più utilizzabili per creare slogan,
parole d'ordine, schemini concettuali a misura di editoriale... Non vorrei
sembrare ironico: ma è un fatto che le 'idee' utili per la politica sono
idee semplici o semplificate.


 alla destra o alla sinistra sia un po' riduttivo.
        Non si tratta propriamente di singoli pezzi, ma dell'ispirazione
di base.  Comunque ammetto di avere un'idea un po' tradizionalista del
significato politico e culturale del termine "sinistra".  Vi sono
"sinistre" che non capisco affatto.
        EGL
        EGL

 idee semplici o semplificate.
        Per quanto riguarda le idee utili per gli slogan e la propaganda
hai perfettamente ragione.
        EGL