Bush Breaks Neocon Taboo (Joe Conason)

[laststeamtrain]

Bush Breaks Neocon Taboo
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070530_bush_breaks_neocon_taboo/
Posted on May 30, 2007

By Joe Conason

For most Americans, who now wish we had never invaded Iraq, the notion of expanding that extraordinarily lethal mistake into neighboring Iran and Syria must seem insane. Yet those same brilliant neoconservative strategists who brought us the war in Iraq and constantly urge its escalation exist in their own special reality. They speak of military hostilities against Iran and Syria with anticipation rather than apprehension.

As we should have learned over the past four years, their dreams often turn out to be our nightmares.

For four brief hours on Memorial Day, however, the neoconservative drive toward a wider conflagration in the Middle East stalled, when ambassadors from the United States and Iran met in Baghdad.

<snip>

Naturally, such signs of sanity were immediately met with furious denunciations that echoed the shrill attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who dared to visit the Syrian leadership in Damascus. When the Pelosi trip was followed by overtures from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to both the Syrians and the Iranians, it signaled that U.S. policy-makers were considering a sensible shift. Rice’s exploratory gestures provoked angry editorials in The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal, which accused the State Department of undermining the White House “strategy for victory” in the Middle East.

<snip>

Those facts won’t dissuade the neoconservatives from maligning any gestures toward realism. They continuously seek to stir hysteria about Iran and to discredit any diplomatic and political alternatives to military action.

We are still living with the terrible consequences of the last great neoconservative triumph—namely the war in Iraq—and the enhanced power that their errors have bestowed so ironically on Iran. In coping with that reality, it is long since time that we learned to ignore their bad advice.

<more>

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20070530_bush_breaks_neocon_taboo/

[Hardrada]

1. And try the neocon advisors and hang them too

from a sour apple tree!