A neocon vision to die for

Rarely does one find such a textbook example of impenetrable cluelessness as Nile Gardiner's, he of "the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation":

[Obama's West Point address] was delivered by a president seemingly obsessed with image and public perception, rather than the long-term strength of America's foreign and security policy.

Gardiner concludes with the neocon's characteristic, indeed obligatory tribute to the image-obsessed Reagan administration--"confident, assertive U.S. leadership" devoted to "building America's defenses, squaring up to America's foes, and standing with friends and allies"--but his lead evidence as to Obama's sagging leadership is this:

[H]is short-sighted decision to abandon Afghanistan in 2016, with the Taliban lurking in the wings to retake power, following in the footsteps of his withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011. Two-and-a-half years after the last American soldiers left Baghdad, the al Qaeda flag now flies over the city of Fallujah, a terrible precedent for developments in Afghanistan once the Stars and Stripes are lowered in Kabul.

Only one conclusion can be reasonably drawn from Gardiner's stirring cri de coeur: Because sectarian and tribal divides have violently bedeviled these regions for centuries, the United States must insert itself likely for centuries more. There, and elsewhere. That is the unwritten prescription of the Gardiner camp: an "assertive U.S. leadership" that would drain the United States into an exhausted crater of self-defeat.

And that, in turn, is the neocon's long-term vision of American foreign policy, which in practice would be a blindingly short one. That the devout McCain and impressionable Romney never got the reins of America's firepower is a blessing for which we can be eternally grateful.

 

Comments

[AnneJ]

Since when is it "shortsighted" to take an additional two years to extricate ourselves from our longest war? It is way past time to send all of these Obama-hating neocons, gun freaks, and Cliven Bundy fanboys off to the front lines. They want to play with guns and insert themselves into everyone else's business in the world, then let's give them and only them the opportunity. I for one, will be enjoying the Obama doctrine of non-intervention while it lasts, because who knows what the next president has in store for us.

[shsavage]

It is indeed a vision to die for...provided the neocons aren't doing any of the dying. They will have credibility only when their own children are on the firing line.

[Turgidson]

I so hope that in a few decades when historians are studying this era, they'll bang their heads against the desk as hard as I do when they discover that the same braindead frauds who started the Iraq war and botched the Afghanistan mission were still given a megaphone to pretend they had anything interesting to say about these topics in the years immediately after their breathtaking incompetence cost the nation and the world so much, and gained it so little...scratch that, gained it FUCKING NOTHING.

If we can't round up the neocons and send them to the Hague, can't we at least publicly shame them into seclusion so that we never have to hear their warmongering delusions again? Is that too much to ask?

[shsavage]

Or perhaps every time some neocon screams for war, POTUS could go to the Congress and ask for a declaration of war. That would shut the f&#kers up in a NYM.