Billmon on Andrew Sullivan and others complaining about being attacked from the right.
It’s very hard, after more than three years of anticipating, dreading and now watching
the catastrophe blossoming in Iraq, to tolerate the pathetic whimpering
of former hawks who’ve finally managed to drag themselves into the
searing light of reality — and feel ill used because they must suffer
the slings and arrows of the deluded goons who still refuse to leave
the cave of winds. Welcome to the camp, guys. Ivan over there will show you around.
Billmon also points to a depressing post by one, Gregory Djerejian, whom I’ve never read before. Mr. Djerejian used to say he felt more ideologically aligned with the American Enterprise Institute than with the Brookings Institute. I guess he never read the AEI’s stuff, because he doesn’t care for Phase Two: Syria. His pleas for sanity are welcomed. His plea for forgiveness probably requires a period of penitence and making amends. This post is a start:
Three years ago, I would have poo-pooed anyone using the word “radicals” to describe the neo-cons. No more. Any group that can so brazenly (and breezily) avoid a real reckoning with the continuing crisis in Iraq–which is descending into civil war as we speak–any movement that has the gall to suggest as some panacea that we mount significant military operations in Iran and Syria and god knows where else (with Israel in Lebanon to boot), well, their credibility is at a very low ebb indeed, and they very much need to be urgently reined in. Yes, it is scary when, in the pages of respectable papers like the FT, one hears more and more the intimations there is something of a bona fide radical-wing in Washington. Could it be, you know, true? Well, we’re getting there, it seems…To help stem the follies, it is time to call spades, spades. Is it not, for instance, and as George Will has pointed out, a grotesque misnomer to describe the neo-cons as resembling anything remotely conservative anymore, given that they appear blissfully unawares of the resource strains we are operating under given the hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and given how gungo-ho at the ready they are to pursue their neo-Trotskyite fantasies by moving into wars Nos. 3 and 4 in the ‘region’?
Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan continues his path on the road of contriteness:
Hugh Hewitt loses it today – against the treacherous bourgeois revisionists on the right. He urges that the Politburo have them in for a talking-to. He seems to believe that many conservatives’ dislike of massive spending, a huge increase in the welfare state, politicization of the Constitution, an untrammeled, often illegal executive branch, torture, and a spectacularly botched war is due to … being excluded from power-lunches!
It isn’t pleasant to face up to being wrong, so wrong. It’s also not easy to forgive those that questioned our patriotism or suggested whether we might become a fifth column in the war against al-Qaeda.
As events unravel in the middle east and Condi Rice and her cohorts cheer the violence on and send in emergency airlifts of 5000 lb. bombs for the Israelis to use on the Lebanese, a few right-wingers are finally starting to see the light. Maybe the problem isn’t with we blogofascists. Many Islamofascism isn’t the main problem eithre. Maybe the main problem is that the neo-cons want to do a little creative destruction. Maybe the neo-cons are really an outcrop of Italofascists.
If you want peace and security, stop whining about Hugh Hewitt and Michelle Malkin and help us railroad the warmongers out of the White House, Pentagon, and anywhere else they hold power.
From what I have heard out of the UK, we are loosing our friendship from them with our radicalism in our actions. Israel needs to be called on the carpet at the UN and really made to stop this mess!…yesterday! We are such a shame tot he world. isn’t this such a shame for us to have to bare. Our government has done this all in our name!
this is a loose-loose situation! in Iraq and in Lebanon.
also available in orange.
Not really fair. Sullivan has been focusing the bulk of his fire on the right and the Bush administration for about two years now. He’s also been one of the most persistent voices on the Bush torture policy, pushing the story hard both on his blog and in the MSM.
Djerejian has probably been the most interesting right wing blogger on foreign policy for a very long time (in blog terms) and he’s been almost exclusively attacking the Republicans for about a year now. FWIW he’s a lawyer doing corporate law, spent a while in the nineties as a war crimes investigator in Bosnia. Djerejian has always been on the borderline ideologically between neo-conservatism and traditional Republican internationalist realism. He’s also the son of Edward Djerejian, former ambassador to Syria and Israel under Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton and Asst. SecState under Clinton, longtime senior State Department Arabist, top ME advisor to Bush I and remains close to Bush I and James Baker.
FOCUS | John Dean: The Authoritarian Streak in the Conservative Movement
The Authoritarian Streak in the Conservative Movement
By John Dean, AlterNet
Posted on July 22, 2006, Printed on July 22, 2006
SNIP Rest: HERE
“[Greg Djerejian]’s also the son of Edward Djerejian, former ambassador to Syria and Israel under Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton and Asst. SecState under Clinton, longtime senior State Department Arabist, top ME advisor to Bush I and remains close to Bush I and James Baker.”
Gosh, with establishment credentials like that, how could I EVER have mistaken him for a clueless, war-mongering idiot? Well, if James Baker says he’s OK, then hey, he must be OK, right?
.
by Gregory Djerejian
The Belgravia Dispatch
January 30, 2005
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
For a look at how being too smart can get you in trouble read about the “premature anti-fascists” who realized what Franco’s civil war would lead to. This seems to be a good summary:
“http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3089
The thing with governments (not just right-wing) is that anyone who gets ahead of them is always suspect at best or a traitor at worst. Being right in the light of future events is also held against them.
Authoritarian tyranny is deeply related to the process of brutalization I wrote about here.
The brutality of the talk, the brutality of torture and bombing, of abrogating individual rights, is all part of the process of brutalization, which is a term used to describe the effects of World War I.
I make the case that inflating foreign threats and domestic threats, leading to proxy and now full out wars as well as a domestic move to defining justice as revenge, is how our present course of brutalization began in the 1980s. Just when the neocons were making allies of the rabid religious right.
Indeed.
A verbal contribution to this effort — hence one well-suited to blog-based action — is to refuse to call these radicals “conservative”. (Please excuse the bold.)
“Conservative” has many positive meanings. Think conservation and upholding traditions such as constitutional government. Many voters self-identify as conservative, and many of them would find that their values are better represented by progressives than by the dominant Republican faction. That is, many of them would find this if we stopped using “conservative” as a synonym for evil.
We are relatively conservative. That’s why we’re playing a defensive game on so many fronts — to conserve the best of what America has been and has become.
If we could destroy the radical right’s claim to be relatively conservative, their base would erode and their power would collapse. I urge that we shape our speech to that end.