Jim Lobe: Neo-cons try to rally, bully Republicans

[babylonsister]

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkid=38401

Neo-cons try to rally, bully Republicans
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - In the face of a critical Senate debate on future US strategy in Iraq, neo-conservatives and other hawks are trying to rally increasingly skeptical - and worried - Republicans behind continued support for President George W Bush's five-month-old "surge" strategy.

They are arguing that the "surge" - the deployment of an additional 30,000 US troops to try to pacify Baghdad to encourage political compromise among the major groups in Iraq - has not
been given sufficient time to work and that abandoning it now would amount to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

But the recent defection of several hitherto loyal, if privately critical, senior Republican senators has thrown the hawks - both inside and outside the administration - into something of a panic, if only because anti-war Democrats appear to be inching steadily toward the kind of majority that Bush can no longer simply ignore. Indeed, the New York Times on Monday reported that the administration is itself increasingly divided over what to do, with some officials, notably Defense Secretary Robert Gates, "quietly pressing" for beginning a gradual withdrawal of combat troops consistent with the recommendations last December of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), of which he was a member until his nomination to the defense post last November.

While the White House, through the personal diplomacy of Bush's National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, has been spending an extraordinary amount of time "listening" to the skeptics in hopes of keeping them from crossing the aisle on key war-related measures due to be voted on over the next two weeks, neo-conservatives allied outside the administration are taking a harsher tack.

"They are pre-9/11 Republicans," wrote William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, about Senators Richard Lugar, George Voinovich, Pete Dominici and John Warner, the four most senior Republicans who have called for a change of course in Iraq over the past week.

"They have been followers of conventional opinion , not leaders," he went on. "Now they are following conventional wisdom again, in their stately way, in turning against the Iraq war."

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[Klukie]

1. Will Kristol is an asshole.....

Doesn't the idiot recognize that conventional opinion is sometimes the best approach. You don't have to have radical views to be a leader....just look at where that has got us in the past 7 years.

[MasonJar]

2. Who would listen to the neo-con Kristol? Hopefully no one!