Neocons Never Die

by | Jun 20, 2019

They just keep writing for the New York Times.

Via Andrew Bacevich, check out the ever blood-thirsty Bret Stephens get over Iraq War II with hardly any effort at all. The fight against the Sunni insurgency in the Anbar Province might continue to rage in 2019, but to Stephens it’s all just ancient history:

“A Pew survey from last November found that only 31 percent of Americans believed that “promoting and defending human rights in other countries” should be a leading foreign policy priority.

“Promoting democracy? Seventeen percent.

“Much of this is the hangover from Iraq, just as a previous generation’s disenchantment with foreign-policy idealism was a hangover from Vietnam. Americans have always wrestled with the question of whether we have the means, wisdom or moral right to be anyone’s liberator. Rightly so: Heady idealism untempered by realism can be as destructive in its consequences as a cold realism unmoved by humane sympathies.

“But how long should the hangover last?

“Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin have resumed their offensive in Syria’s holdout province of Idlib with another gruesome campaign of indiscriminate bombing. The world no longer winces. Trump says he and Kim Jong-un, the world’s most sinister dictator, ‘fell in love’ over the latter’s ‘beautiful letters.’ Conservatives shrug. The socialist catastrophe in Venezuela takes an ever-greater toll in lives and misery. Progressives can hardly seem to form a coherent thought about it other than that America should stay out.”

You might as well love it. Why must Americans get over their Iraq “hangover”? Well, because someone has to save al Qaeda in Syria from the Syrian state; because Trump is trying to finally end the Korean War after 67 years; because someone has to invade and overthrow the government of Venezuela, and of course, because someone — the U.S. — needs to “sink Iran’s navy,” i.e.: start another massive regional war.

Carpet-bombing Iran, by dropping all the neoconservatives on them from B-52s at 40,000 feet, would be a good start. Think of it as one severe limited strike on the road to peace.

Scott Horton

Scott Horton

Scott Horton is director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles, California and podcasts the Scott Horton Show from ScottHorton.org. He is the author of four books. He has conducted more than 6,000 interviews since 2003. Scott lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Larisa Alexandrovna Horton.

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