Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: cinque stronzate sui neocons

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/05/AR2008020502852.html
As the Bush administration winds down, neoconservatism has become the
most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. The
neoconservatives have become the subject of numerous myths, mostly
spread by their numerous detractors. They're seen as dangerous
heretics by livid liberals as well as by traditional conservatives
such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Patrick Buchanan.
So "neocon" has become a handy term of condemnation, routinely
deployed to try to silence liberal hawks such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman
of Connecticut or right-wing interventionists such as former deputy
secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and the former Pentagon
official Richard N. Perle, who's been nicknamed the "Prince of
Darkness." That moniker aside, the neocons insist that there's nothing
sinister about them; they simply believed that after 9/11, the United
States should use its power to spread democracy throughout the Arab
world, just as it had done in Eastern Europe and Central America
during the Cold War. Their critics aren't so sure -- and the
misconceptions grow.
1 The neocons are chastened liberals who turned right.
This is the self-mythologizing version that the neocons themselves
like to spread. Don't believe a word of it. They weren't ever really
liberals.
The one thing the movement's founders carried away from the sectarian
ideological wars of the 1930s in New York was a prophetic temperament.
Back then, Irving Kristol and a host of other future neocons were
Trotskyist intellectuals who loathed their rivals, the vulgar
Stalinists. Kristol and his comrades believed in creating a worker's
paradise that would reject the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet
Union in favor of a true Marxist utopia. After World War II convinced
them that the United States wasn't an imperialist power but one
fighting for freedom, Kristol and his fellow travelers briefly
embraced liberalism in the late 1940s. But as the convulsions of the
1960s reenergized the radical left, the future neocons kept moving
right. All along, they retained the penchant for abusive invective and
zest for combat that they had first honed as Trotskyists, wielding
magazine articles and op-eds as weapons to discredit their foes and
champion their ideas.
2 The neocons are Israeli lackeys.
Bunk. The neocon saga couldn't be more American. It's a tempestuous
drama of Jewish assimilation, from immigrant obscurity on the Lower
East Side to the rise of a new foreign policy establishment that sees
the United States as the avatar of democracy and foe of genocide. What
truly animates the neocons is what they see as the lesson of the
Holocaust: that it could have been avoided if the Western democracies
had found the courage to stop Hitler in the late 1930s. This helps
explain Perle's and former undersecretary of defense Douglas J.
Feith's antipathy toward the State Department, which tried to stymie
U.S. recognition of Israel at its founding in 1948. Neocons such as
Norman Podhoretz scorn the State Department as filled with WASPs who
seek to cozy up to the Arab states instead of recognizing Israel's
strategic value and moral importance as a bastion of democracy in a
sea of tyranny.
What's more, the neocons are often to the right of Israel's
government. Feith and National Security Council aide Elliott Abrams
scoffed at the idea of land-for-peace talks with the Palestinians, for
instance, and Wolfowitz pushed for an invasion of Iraq for which even
Ariel Sharon demonstrated no particular enthusiasm. The neocons aren't
Israel's best advocates, either: The Iraq war has emboldened Iran,
fanned the flames of jihadism and made Israel less, not more, secure.
Contrary to Wolfowitz's arguments, the road to peace in Israel turned
out not to run through Baghdad.
3 The neocons had too much power and took over Bush's brain.
In fact, President Bush used the neocons for his own purposes and then
dumped many of them overboard. (Of course, many liberals think Bush
doesn't have a brain to take over in the first place, but leave that
aside.) On the campaign trail in 2000, Bush was a realist in the mold
of his father. But under the appalling pressure of the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks, Bush became the leading neocon in his own administration --
which is why he didn't need them around anymore once they had done
their job as lightning rods. What's more, he never gave any of them
Cabinet-level positions.
Neither Vice President Cheney nor former defense secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld -- the men who made the real decisions with Bush in the Oval
Office -- has ever been a neocon. They are Republican unilateralists
who believe in deploying U.S. power whenever and wherever the
executive branch sees fit, regardless of what U.S. allies want. Cheney
and Rumsfeld used Wolfowitz and other neocons to provide an
intellectual patina of justification for war against Iraq, much as
Cheney has been trying to do with Iran today. (One reason there was no
serious postwar plan for Iraq was that no one in Cheney's office could
ever decide whether the administration should have one.)
Lacking a real base in the Republican Party, the neocons got picked
off as soon as Bush's handling of the war seemed to falter. They
didn't have too much power; ultimately, they had too little to
implement their schemes. The result has been finger-pointing and self-
exculpatory memoirs from the likes of Feith. Meanwhile, the CIA (which
the neocons loathe) has outflanked them on Iran by declaring that it
isn't building nuclear weapons. And one of the most prominent
surviving neocons, the NSC's Abrams, has proved unable to stop
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's efforts to restart negotiations
between Israel and the Palestinians.
4 The neocons are bloodthirsty ideologues, trying to impose a militant
Wilsonianism on the United States that is alien to our foreign policy
traditions.
Militant? Sure. But alien? Baloney. In fact, the neocons' worldview
melds both of the major strands of traditional U.S. foreign policy
thinking -- realism and idealism -- in a highly opportunistic fashion.
This is why liberal hawks such as author Paul Berman, Washington Post
columnist Peter Beinart and the editors of the New Republic signed on
to the neocon crusade at the outset of the Iraq war, while the true
realists, such as former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft
and Zbigniew Brzezinski, blanched in horror.
5 The Iraq debacle has discredited the neocons.
This could be the biggest whopper of them all. Now that the "surge" in
Iraq has brought levels of violence down somewhat, the neocons are
already claiming vindication. As Iraq fades from the front pages, the
neocons' hero, Arizona Sen. John McCain, is poised to become the
Republican standard-bearer in 2008. (The neocons also would have
happily flocked around Rudolph W. Giuliani, who recruited Norman
"World War IV" Podhoretz as a senior adviser.)
The truth is that the neocons have been repeatedly declared dead
before -- and, to the chagrin of their enemies on the left and the
right, bounced back. At the end of the Cold War, the arch-realist
George H.W. Bush relegated them to the sidelines; then the
triangulating Bill Clinton seemed to deprive them of their biggest
foreign and domestic policy issues. If they came back from that, they
can come back from anything. Now that Robert Kagan, William Kristol
(who seems not to be discredited in the eyes of the New York Times,
which just made him a columnist) and a host of other neocons have
hitched their fortunes to McCain, the neocons are poised for a fresh
comeback. If they make a hash of foreign policy by 2011, perhaps the
familiar cycle of public scorn and rebirth might even start all over
again

 again.
#_Sta agli americani decidere cosa vogliono, in un campo molto ristretto di 
scelta pero`...
il militarismo degli USA e`molto difficile a debellare.
G. 

 had found the courage to stop Hitler in the late 1930s.
Forse dovrebbero anche chiedersi se non sia meglio evitare gli errori del
1919 e 1923 per non creare nuovi Hitler, e cmq per metą Europa la fine di
Hitler ha portato al dominio di Stalin