Bibi and AIPAC suckereing USA into war with Iran.
Would Neocons Control Romney?
Mitt Romney has articulated few substantive differences between himself and President Obama on foreign policy, but a Romney victory could dramatically change the U.S. approach to the world because he, like George W. Bush, is surrounding himself with neocon advisers, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
Citing findings in the recently released poll of American opinion on foreign policy conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Drezner observes that “most of America — and independents in particular — want pretty much the opposite of” what Romney says he wants regarding increased military spending and more hawkish policies toward Iran, Syria, Russia, China, North Korea and illegal immigration.
A recent and hugely costly and painful episode that illustrates all of these elements was the Iraq War. The outcome of the 2000 presidential election (and the 9/11 terrorist attack) made the war possible, even though the rhetoric of the 2000 campaign did not make it specifically predictable.
Neocons won enough of the appointment games so that they, in alliance with assertive nationalists in senior positions and an inexperienced president itching to get out from under his father’s foreign-policy shadow, were able to launch their Iraq project.
The mammoth effort to sell the war was so able to shape public opinion that a majority of Americans came to believe that the Iraqi regime and Saddam Hussein were involved in 9/11. The shaping was accomplished not through specific assertions by government officials but by a rhetorical drumbeat that continually linked Iraq and 9/11.
One can find a disturbing similarity in the Chicago Council’s survey results, even though Drezner is pleased to conclude that the poll suggests Americans “have become even more realpolitik” than they were a few years ago.
In one of the poll’s few tests of factual knowledge, respondents were asked what they believe is the current status of Iran’s nuclear program. Only 25 percent got it correct, based on the repeatedly and publicly stated judgment of the U.S. intelligence community: that “Iran is developing some of the technical ability to build nuclear weapons, but has not decided whether to produce them or not.”
Forty-eight percent thought that Iran has decided to produce nuclear weapons and is actively working to do so. Another 18 percent thought Iran already has nuclear weapons.
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/09/12...ontrol-romney/
Neocons Slither Back
Ryan bemoaned "the slaughter of brave dissidents in Syria. Mobs storming American embassies and consulates. Iran four years closer to gaining a nuclear weapon. Israel, our best ally in the region, treated with indifference bordering on contempt by the Obama administration." American foreign policy, he said, "needs moral clarity and firmness of purpose."
Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte.
A moral, muscular foreign policy; a disdain for weakness and diplomacy; a duty to invade and bomb Israel's neighbors; a divine right to pre-emption - it's all ominously familiar.
You can draw a direct line from the hyperpower manifesto of the Project for the New American Century, which the neocons, abetted by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, used to prod an insecure and uninformed president into invading Iraq - a wildly misguided attempt to intimidate Arabs through the shock of overwhelming force. How's that going for us?
After 9/11, the neocons captured one Republican president who was naïve about the world. Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican president and vice president, both jejeune about the world.
Senor is emblematic of how much trouble America blundered into in the Middle East - trillions wasted, so many lives and limbs lost - because of how little we fathom the culture and sectarian politics. We're still stumbling in the dark. We not only don't know who our allies and enemies are, we don't know who our allies' and enemies' allies and enemies are.
As the spokesman for Paul Bremer during the Iraq occupation, Senor helped perpetrate one of the biggest foreign policy bungles in American history. The clueless desert viceroys summarily disbanded the Iraqi Army, forced de-Baathification, stood frozen in denial as thugs looted ministries and museums, deluded themselves about the growing insurgency, and misled reporters with their Panglossian scenarios of progress.
"Off the record, Paris is burning," Senor told a group of reporters a year into the war. "On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq."
Before he played ventriloquist to Ryan, Senor did the same for Romney, ratcheting up the candidate's irresponsible bellicosity on the Middle East. Senor was the key adviser on Romney's disastrous trip to Israel in July, when Mittens infuriated the Palestinians by making a chuckleheaded claim about their culture.
Senor got out over his skis before Romney's speech in Jerusalem, telling reporters that Mitt would say he respected Israel's right to make a pre-emptive, unilateral attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;js...=28&sub=Sunday
