Writes antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo:

“So who’s up for major appointments? A number of names have been floated, some of them Republicans, for key positions like secretary of defense and secretary of state, notably the idea of keeping Robert Gates, the current defense chief, and bringing in Richard Lugar for secretary of state. Both possibilities underscore the essential continuity of our misguided and increasingly dangerous foreign policy of global intervention.

The most troubling possibility here is Dennis Ross, a career foreign policy bureaucrat who was instrumental in shaping America’s Israel-centric policy in the Middle East under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He is a longtime associate of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the scholarly adjunct of AIPAC, Israel’s powerful lobbying organization in the U.S., which he co-founded.

The beginning of Ross’ career as a civil servant is a good indicator of what we might expect from him, and from the Obama administration when it comes to setting Middle Eastern policy. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, he brought in Paul Wolfowitz to run the policy planning at the State Department, and Wolfie brought in his neocon buddies: I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, James Roche, Stephen Sestanovich, Alan Keyes (yes, that Alan Keyes!), and Ross. In short, Ross has always been a reliable member in good standing of the neocon foreign policy cabal, the very same group that lied us into war with Iraq – and is now intent on doing the same with Iran. Although the neocons who came to Washington were mostly ex-Democrats, Ross stayed with his old party, although partisan allegiances seem not to mean much to him. He has served under three secretaries of state: James Baker, Warren Christopher, and Madeleine Albright.

You wondered why, during the debates, Obama was so belligerent on the Georgian question. Obama and McCain both hew to the War Party’s Orwellian view, which grotesquely inverts the truth, decrying “Russian aggression” when it was the Georgians who started that war. One would normally expect this of McCain, whose chief foreign policy adviser was, until very recently, a paid lobbyist for the Georgians, but Obama, too, refuses to acknowledge Tbilisi’s aggression against a “breakaway province.” Ossetia has been de facto independent for more than a decade, and the supposedly smart Obama is no doubt aware of this – never mind the hundreds killed in the siege of Tskhinvali, the Ossetian capital city mercilessly assaulted by Georgian troops.

Obama has long stressed he would immediately begin escalating the Afghan campaign, and perhaps open up a new front in Pakistan. Certainly the Bush administration has laid the groundwork for this eastward shift of U.S. military resources – and so the stage is set.

When Rachel Maddow asked Obama the other day why our intervention in Afghanistan wouldn’t end up like the Iraq war, or more so, he emphatically rejected the comparison, yet he never addressed her underlying concern. She just smiled, rather wanly, and went on to the next question.

Whether or not Ross gets the national security post, the fact remains that the War Party, far from being banished from Washington, will have an inside track in the new administration. What’s different about Obama, however, is that the other side also has a seat at the table – or, at the very least, isn’t completely locked out of the deliberations. I was astonished to learn that none other than Gen. Anthony Zinni, retired Marine commander and trenchant critic of the neocon influence on the making of American foreign policy, is up for the job. A 2003 Washington Post profile of Zinni reports:

“The more he listened to [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz and other administration officials talk about Iraq, the more Zinni became convinced that interventionist ‘neoconservative’ ideologues were plunging the nation into a war in a part of the world they didn’t understand. ‘The more I saw, the more I thought that this was the product of the neocons who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground.’ …

“The goal of transforming the Middle East by imposing democracy by force reminds him of the ‘domino theory’ in the 1960s that the United States had to win in Vietnam to prevent the rest of Southeast Asia from falling into communist hands. And that brings him back to Wolfowitz and his neoconservative allies as the root of the problem. ‘I don’t know where the neocons came from – that wasn’t the platform they ran on,’ he says. ‘Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president.’”

I wouldn’t bet the farm on Zinni getting it, but the fact that he’s in the running at all is astonishing. If that’s the amount of change you want in American foreign policy, then you’ll be happy with the Obama administration – even as they escalate the conflict in Afghanistan, spread it to Pakistan, and prepare for war with Iran.”

Read the entire column

“A Southern icon, by way of Minnesota; a national treasure, who became such practicing a trade that gets little respect; and a personal hero, in ways he’ll never know. Diamonds are forever – so are life-shaping memories – and so is Ric Flair.”

Beck’s guest, colonel-turned-commentator Oliver North, said that Wright’s fiery language was helping recruit young men into Al-Qaida. I’m not kidding. North really said this, and Beck agreed with him. “Just how stupid are we going to get with this controversy?” I thought to myself.

North and Beck are not alone. Take a quick listen to Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Mark Levin, and the entire Republican talk radio echo chamber, and you will find all-Obama attacks, all day, every day, as hosts offer the most tortured, guilt-by-association arguments imaginable. These hacks aren’t simply beating a dead horse at this point — they’ve buried the horse, dug it back up, and are now obsessing over the carcass.

Each host insists that they are doing voters an invaluable service and believe it’s fair game to judge Obama by the company he keeps. Fine. But why not apply the same logic to John McCain?”

Read the entire column

Nevertheless, this video is a great expose of the damage caused to the United States, and the world, by the mainstream American Right:

The man crowned by Tommy Franks as “the dumbest [expletive] guy on the planet” just made the dumbest [expletive] speech on the planet.

Doug Feith, the former Rummy gofer who drove the neocon plan to get us into Iraq, and then dawdled without a plan as Iraq crashed into chaos, was the headliner at a reunion meeting of the wooly-headed hawks Monday night at the American Enterprise Institute.

The room was packed as the former No. 3 at the Pentagon, previewing his upcoming book, “War and Decision,” conceded that the case could be made that “mistakes were made.” His former boss, Paul Wolfowitz, and the former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle sat supportively in the front row.

But he wasn’t self-flagellating. He was simply trying to put an egghead gloss on his Humpty Dumpty mishegoss.

“At the end of the day, here we are, and as of now there’s a reasonable chance that the country is going to remain united,” he said. Not quite the original boast of democracy cascading through the Middle East.

Feith also inanely noted that his personal view was that his de-Baathification policy — which created a huge, angry pool of unemployed men that fueled the insurgency — “was not basically a big error. It’s been criticized very severely. I think there actually was a lot of good thought that went into the de-Baathification policy.” It just spiralled out of hand, he said. Mistakes were made.

He thinks everything would have been fine if America had not lingered so long in Iraq. If only Paul Bremer and the generals had just turned Iraq over to the slippery con man Feith wanted to put in charge, Ahmad Chalabi.

Asked about getting tough with Iran and Syria, Feith offered this incandescent insight: “As we all know, the president said he’s The Decider. That actually is quite a profound point. The president is The Decider and the main thing he decides about is risk.”

He noted that in battles through American history, “the military fights better over time.” This from a guy who sent our military into Iraq without the right armor, the right force numbers or the right counterinsurgency training.

“A strategic alliance of the ousted Baathists and foreign jihadists was something that our intelligence community did not anticipate,” he said, continuing to spread the blame.

But the intelligence community didn’t miss it. The neocons tried to scrub out that sort of analysis, knowing it would make the war harder to sell.

Classified reports prepared for President Bush in January 2003 by the National Intelligence Council warned that rogue elements of Saddam’s government could hook up with existing terrorist groups to wage guerrilla warfare.

In “Fiasco,” Tom Ricks wrote that Feith’s Pentagon office was dubbed the “black hole” of policy by generals watching him drop the ball.

“People working for Feith complained that he would spend hours tweaking their memos, carefully mulling minor points of grammar,” Ricks wrote. “A Joint Staff officer recalled angrily that at one point troops sat on a runway for hours, waiting to leave the United States on a mission, while he quibbled about commas in the deployment order.”

Jay Garner, America’s first viceroy in Iraq, deemed him “incredibly dangerous” and said his “electrons aren’t connected.”

Feith’s disdain for diplomacy and his credo that weakness invites aggression were shaped, Ricks reported, by personal history: “Like Wolfowitz, Feith came from a family devastated by the Holocaust. His father lost both parents, three brothers, and four sisters to the Nazis.”

Feith told Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker that “My family got wiped out by Hitler, and … all this stuff about working things out — well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn’t make any sense to me. The kind of people who put bumper stickers on their car that declare that ‘War is not the answer,’ are they making a serious comment? What’s the answer to Pearl Harbor? What’s the answer to the Holocaust?”

What’s the answer to bin Laden? According to Feith, it was an attack on an unrelated dictator. He oversaw the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, whose mission was to amp up links between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

It defies reason, but there are still some who think the chuckleheads who orchestrated the Iraq misadventure have wisdom to impart.

The Pentagon neocons dumped Condi Rice out of the loop. Yet, according to Newsweek’s Mike Isikoff, Condi has now offered Wolfie a job. It wasn’t enough that he trashed Iraq and the World Bank. (He’s still larking around town with Shaha, the sweetheart he gave the sweetheart deal to.)

Condi wants Wolfie to advise her on nuclear proliferation and W.M.D. as part of a State Department panel that has access to highly classified intelligence.

Once you’ve helped distort W.M.D. intelligence to trick the country into war, shouldn’t you be banned for life from ever having another top-level government post concerning W.M.D.?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/opinion/12dowd.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print