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 It’s been replaced by the hauntingly listless meandering of individuals warily making acquaintance with the new new irrelevancy that characterizes what once was an incandescent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.
Joining these restless spirits are some of the philosophy’s key architects. Accompanying Wolfowitz (who many consider PNAC’s ideological primogenitor), Perle and Rumsfeld, are other prominent neo-cons including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalizad, Norman Podhoretz, Jeb Bush and Elliott Abrams (Bush's Mid-East democracy-spreading point man), all of whom, by the way, are signatories to a brash letter, dispatched to President Clinton by PNAC in 1998, which all but demanded that he essentially advance their neo-con agenda by embarking upon regime change in Iraq through military force.
Today however, Perle and Fukuyama, an influential professor of International Studies at Johns Hopkins, are among key movement figures who have turned against the PNAC/Bush Doctrine’s neo-con agenda. Late in 2006, for example, Fukuyama made his renouncement known in an article in which his support for the movement was categorically disavowed.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
