Some Neocons already pledged to vote for neocon lite Hillary Clinton … great stuff for Bernie Sanders to exploit. The Israel lobby group has flocked to Floridian Marco Rubio for now … just a short stopover looking at his failed campaign. Some billionaires like Adelson is still sitting on the fence … and his fortune to support a winning ticket and earn influence in Washington DC.
Donald Trump’s (So Far) Unstoppable Run Leaves Neoconservatives Out in the Cold | The Forward | by Nathan Guttman on March 10, 2016
One group of Republicans with something more than just concern about the fate of their party. For neoconservatives, a Trump nomination could mean an extension of their sentence in a political Siberia.
Some members of this hawkish cohort saw the 2016 election as an opportunity to find a way in from the cold, where they have been largely sidelined since playing a key role as boosters of the second Bush administration’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Trump made clear his own view of that war — at least now, 13 years later — at the Republican presidential debate in Greenville, South Carolina on February 13, when, to the shock of GOP traditionalists in the audience, he declared, “Obviously the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake.” Then, twisting the knife deeper, he added: “We should have never been in Iraq. They lied, they said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew that there were none.”
For neoconservatives, this, along with Trump’s comments about staying “neutral” in the standoff between Israel and the Palestinians so as to preserve his credibility as a mediator, told them all they needed to know. A Trump presidency, they believe, would be a death knell for restoring their vision of promoting democracy and American values through a stronger U.S. military role in the world and, in particular, in the Middle East.
Now, after first hitching their wagons to Jeb Bush’s failed candidacy, many neoconservatives are flocking to Marco Rubio’s camp. Even as the U.S. senator from Florida finds his hopes of winning the GOP presidential primary fading, neoconservatives see Rubio as perhaps their best chance of countering the isolationist policy they see emerging from a possible Trump presidency.
Rubio’s national security advisory council, announced on March 7, is chockablock with neoconservatives and former Bush administration defense officials, many of them Jewish, including Elliott Abrams, Eliot Cohen, Michael Mukasey and Dan Senor …
The group includes some former members of the team Jeb Bush team rolled out over a year ago, including former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, former Undersecretary of Defense Dov Zakheim, former State Department official Paula Dobriansky and Ambassador Kristen Silverberg. Former Senator Norm Coleman, who was with Lindsey Graham’s campaign, has signed on.
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The new Rubio advisory group also includes two of the three founders of the John Hay Initiative: former Bush administration officials Eliot Cohen and Eric Edelman. The Hay Initiative was meant to be a stable for foreign policy officials and experts that all the Republican candidates could use as a resource. They provided help to Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina before they dropped out.
The ‘John Hay Initiative’ has been working secretly for over a year to keep a large part of the Romney foreign-policy team together, and it’s ready to help top contenders–even Hillary.
Early in 2013, leaders of the foreign policy team that guided presidential candidate Mitt Romney regrouped under a new banner and began working to influence lawmakers and potential 2016 GOP presidential candidates, keeping their work secret.
Now the “John Hay Initiative,” a nonprofit organization named after the private secretary to Abraham Lincoln who eventually rose to be Teddy Roosevelt’s secretary of state, is planning its first public event, a national security speech by 2016 hopeful Sen. Marco Rubio on September 17 in Washington.
Cross-posted from my follow-up diary – War On The Rocks – McCain Surrogate/ PNAC/AIPAC .
In BooMan’s fp story – Neoconservatives Begin the Long March Back – not once was the magic word ISRAEL uttered … just unbelievable. Look at the crowd of the first 93 signatories: the worst of the worst of interventionists, warmongers, pro-Israel, anti-Iran crowd over the past decades. Most worrisome if they see the Democratic Party under leadership of Hillary Clinton as their vehicle to extend Pax Americana.