AMY GOODMAN: You talk about—or John McCain talks about “rogue state rollback.” Explain.

ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, this is a theory that he developed way back in the 1990s, and he began speaking about it probably around ’96 or ’97, but it crystallized in 1999 in a famous speech that he gave, where he talked about the need to look around the world and figure out these states, and you can make up the list as easily as I. At that time, it would have been Iraq, Iran, Syria, Cuba, various countries in Asia and Africa that were under various kinds of rebellion, whether it was Somalia or perhaps Burma, perhaps Zimbabwe. I mean, a lot of countries were being put in the category of rogue states. Some of them were on the State Department list of countries that supported terrorism.

McCain looked around the world, and he said, OK, our job is basically to force regime change in all of these countries. And he signed on early to the issue of going into Iraq and forcing a regime change there, long before anybody really had any kind of concerns about al-Qaeda, long before Iraq’s connection to terrorism seemed important. It was simply a principle that any state that didn’t conform to an American view of democracy was liable to be rolled over or rolled back, in McCain’s view.

Many of his advisers, including Randy Scheunemann, who’s now running his foreign policy task force, were engaged in that. Randy was then a chief staffer for Trent Lott. He wrote the Iraq Liberation Act that the neoconservatives and Ahmed Chalabi championed and pushed through Congress. He, Scheunemann, founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002 with White House support. He was also a founder of the Project for a New American Century, which was the sort of ad hoc think tank that the neocons put together. All of this is a sign of—and the fact that McCain would name him as his chief adviser—that McCain, in a way that Bush never did, is a true neocon.

He is someone who in his soul believes in the use of American military power, and as he said in his rollback speech, not just to deal with emergent threats to the United States, but even to enforce the prevalence of what he called American values—that’s a codeword for democracy—so that countries whose internal functioning—let’s say Russia today, under Putin and Medvedev—that countries like Russia that don’t seem as democratic as we like would then become ostracized or sanctioned or subject to various kinds of hostile, both political and military, sanctions. So this is what I find extremely troubling about McCain.

And if you look at his broad policies that he’s outlined, he has suggested point blank that we’re in a long-term, almost unending struggle with al-Qaeda and various other forms of Islamism. And as a result, he wants to create a whole new set of institutions to deal with those. One of those institutions would be what he calls the League of Democracies, which is basically a way of short-circuiting the UN, where Russia and China, in particular, but also various non-aligned countries often stand up to the United States.

Also, he wants to create a new much more aggressive covert operations team. He says he wants to model it on the old Office of Strategic Services, the World War II era OSS, and to create this out of the CIA but include into it psychological warfare specialists, covert operations people, people who specialize in advertising and propaganda, and a whole bunch of other kind of—a wide range of these kind of covert operators, who would then form a new agency that would be designed to fight the war on terrorism overseas and to deal with rogue states and other troubling actors that we—or McCain decides he happens not to like at that moment.

The NeoCon Support System

In the video clip showing the real McCain “war-can’t-wait”-attitude, the man who reined in McCain’s false claims should be noted.

Joe Lieberman is the man who acted like a planted troll in the Al Gore campaign in 2000, pulling the rug out from underneath democracy and the Gore campaign by publicly announcing he did not support Gore in pushing further for a recount that would – if all eligible votes had been (re)counted - most probably have found Gore the winner.

Lieberman is also a man who promotes what is often called the Neo Conservative or NeoCon agenda.
One core of it is the spreading the American version of democracy and organizing the economy – both of which I would propose have not exactly proven themselves to be worth exporting by - around the world.

But rather than relying on other nations and people elsewhere adopting them out of their own free will and by their own actions, and accepting that some might not be so inclined, Neo Conservatives would like the US to take more offensive actions. US can send in diplomats, political and financial representatives, in a first attempt to “sell” the American Way. If that does not work, the next step would be to send in secret agents from the CIA or a Military Special Force Command to “work the ground. The US Military can be used as a last line of offense in this “militarized diplomacy of threat”[iii].

Naturally, no ideological agenda would survive the US “democracy” and gain political power, if it was not supported by Big Money. The NeoCon agenda, however, seem to often coincide with financial interests. Private sector players tend to benefit from the financial structures and agencies the NeoCons wants to export, which includes heavy deregulation of markets and increased privatization. Additionally, the NeoCon agenda would mean a continuation of the highly profitable “gift that keeps on giving” of an active and extensively used US Military.

In the ruins of military intervention, appropriate financial and political structures and agencies can then be erected.

The McCain investigator interviewed on Democracy Now describes the views of the people courting the man plotted to be the next US president:

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