Perhaps, history will show that considering the ambitiously grandiose length and breadth of the post-Cold War era, PNAC/Bush Doctrine’s designs for a new world order, as movements go, its hey-day was surprisingly ephemeral. Yet its death by contrast, has unfolded in a pathetic, agonizingly slow manner. As akin to a death by a thousand cuts – cuts inflicted through the Bush Administration’s stellar incompetence over a wide range of issues including the oddly suspicious Dubai ports deal; the eye-opening ineptitude that defined its handling of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath; its kid-with-daddy’s-credit-card-like mismanagement of the federal budget; its deceitful and scientifically imponderable politicization of the Terry Schiavo matter; it’s incessant and pervasive corruption including the base-eroding moral fallout from scandals like the Abu Ghraib and Mark Foley obloquies; and the outing of a CIA operative whose expertise was in, of all things, weapons of mass destruction!
More recently, widespread public exposure of the farcical care provided vets at Walter Reed Hospital, coupled with Bush Administration cuts in overall veterans affairs funding during a time of war, have revealed the pitiful disingenuousness of the “methinks thou doth protest to much” insistence by neo-cons that they alone both “support our troops” and are the protectors of American citizens and its interests at home and abroad.
Among these and many, many other self-inflicted wounds to the neo-con movement’s now near-lifeless body, Bush’s obtuse squandering of that movement’s strongest asset – national security – may likely be viewed as the fatal incision. Resulting from his hair-raising ineptitude in executing the advancement of neo-con goals in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush has Americans now living in a world in which they are despised. America’s premier enemy, specified by neo-cons as “Islamo-fascists,” have been emboldened and have multiplied in number as America’s military struggles to contend with declining recruitment levels. Reliable accounts that the wars have severely degraded America’s military have surfaced in the midst of reports that Iran and North Korea, two of the three PNAC/Bush Doctrine’s designated “axis of evil” nations, are either near or have gone nuclear.
Then there is that most prurient of post-Cold War neo-con fantasies, the democratization of the Middle East. Embarked upon by the “warrior nerds” after having convinced each other that the roots of anti-West resentment in the Middle-East stem from an absence of democracy in that region, the immediate results and long-term consequences of this decidedly non-neo-conservative attempt at hemispherical social engineering are, to be charitable, sobering. The scorecard on the outcome of democratic elections in key Middle Eastern countries reflects the hard reality that long-held attitudes don’t simply vanish into thin air at the mere sight of a voting booth.
To wit:
Last June, Iranians elected as their president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose fervent anti-Israel rhetoric and passionate nuke dreams have neo-cons positioning him as Saddam redux.
In November, while American’s were brooming the vast majority of this country’s Republican neo-con water carriers out of the House and Senate, over in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose credo, in part is: “God is our objective, the Quran is our Constitution,” made significant inroads in that country’s parliamentary elections.
During December amidst a crescendo of sanctimonious clamor from neo-cons about democracy being “on the march” Iraqis marched off to the polls and chose an Iranian-backed Shiite group to lead their country.
Finally, the Palestinian election which hoisted Hamas into the seat of power, and the Lebanese elections in 2005 that garnered Hezbollah, aka the “Party of God,” nearly 30 percent of that country’s parliamentary seats can hardly be considered insignificant.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, there have been consistent reports of a significant Taliban resurgence while the al Qaeda network, having endured intense and on-going U.S. efforts toward dismantlement, remains operational. Then there’s that not insignificant irony in the fact that while on March 10, Osama bin Laden celebrated his 50th birthday still out of reach of Coalition forces, major security concerns continue to require Afghani President Hamid Karzai and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to govern their US-liberated countries from inside heavily fortified “green zones.”
Within our own hemisphere, neo-conservatism appears to be having similar unintended consequences. The worrisome incorrigibility of oil-rich Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, has him poised to usurp aging neo-con nightmare Fidel Castro as America’s regional menace of the moment. Meanwhile, last November’s election of Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s own Comeback Kid, marked the return to the geo-political arena, of the Sandinista boogey-man from neo-conservatism’s Cold War past. If that doesn’t bring pause consider this: In May of last year, Brazil inaugurated its first uranium enrichment facility in Rio de Janeiro.
Clearly, the neo-con philosophy’s life support system is blinking red.
Shambles
It is also quite evident these days, that many of these neo-con movement’s most churlishly prehensile disciples, shocked by and in awe of the rapid and graphic unraveling of support for their movement, have become little more than moody, deeply chagrined poltergeists, engaged in an bewildering insurgency against their own dreams. It’s an insurgency that takes the form of former PNAC/Bush Doctrinaires either jumping ship on their own or, when asked, eagerly walking the plank. Whatever it takes to create distance from what has rapidly devolved into a failed philosophy.
At one time or another, as many as 16 PNAC members were established into key policy-making roles within the Bush Administration, including Vice President Cheney; Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton; the vice-President’s ex-Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby; Wolfowitz (formerly Assistant Secretary of Defense, now World Bank President) and of course, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Many are gone,while others these days, with the exception a few “dead-enders” like Cheney, exhibit little of their former swagger. It’s been replaced by the hauntingly listless meandering of individuals warily making acquaintance with the new new irrelevancy that characterizes what once was an incandescent movement -- a movement which now seems to have vaporized into pointlessness with the speed of a thousand points of light.
