Sunday, October 04, 2015

Gary Bauer, Dick Cheney, Steve Forbes, Dan Quayle, Don Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, John Ellis "Jeb" Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, Fred Ikle, Ellen Bork, Mark Gerson, William Kristol. What have they in common?

Each is a war-mongering neocon set to put our nation deeper in debt to the Chinese in the course of miring the military into another non-winnable war. Because each is who each is, and none should be allowed anywhere near the Presidency where great harm would be possible due to collective bad - make that awful - judgment in line with past awful judgment during the time W. was messing things up with a two-front war on Islam, for oil.

This Wikipedia link on the Project for The New American Century. The Bush family's candidate this election cycle, do a word search on the page, on the boat when it sailed. Deporting into war mongering, with a set mind. Jeb!

We do not need more of the same. Failure before was failure enough.

Shades of Henry Kissinger, without the heavy German accent.

Ellen Bork. Daughter of the Beast. Like Jeb! S.O.B. for Son of the Beast.

Does LaRouche overstate a case?

This link.

Statement of so-called "Principles," here. What an awful negligent mistake, leaving Vin Weber off the headline, but he is clearly listed there.

CounterPunch and Politico paint the picture true to the facts.

The internationalist adventurer can dance around whether he'd have done as big brother did; he is a core, at the outset, signatory to that awful mistaken adventure into Iraq and a quagmire over its oil, and its leadership.

Vote your conscience, but please, look for a candidate with one.

____________UPDATE___________
The cited CounterPunch item clearly explains:

His brother’s Administration meant to invade Iraq from its first days in office, and Jeb Bush was prominent among those demanding it.

“Faulty intelligence” is a facade and a fraud. America was taken deliberately into war by a fanatic group obsessed with democratizing the world by force—the force of U.S. military supremacy. The group was called the Project for the New American Century. Dozens of PNAC members–Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for example—dominated the Administration of George W. Bush in setting foreign and defense policy, and leading the nation to war as a result.

Jeb Bush was a founding member of the Project for the New American Century.

The genesis of the Iraqi war—and the PNAC ideology—was a 1992 Defense Department document, Draft Defense Planning Guidance, written by Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, and Zalmay Khalilzad at the direction of Richard Cheney, then Secretary of Defense. It advocated the economic and military domination of the world by the United States, using pre-emptive war if necessary, and noted the strategic importance of Persian Gulf oil for achieving this. The objective was global dominion, unabashed imperialism, and Iraq was in the crosshairs.

Even in some quarters of the Administration however, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, and Khalilzad were seen as extremists; the President, Jeb Bush’s father, rejected their draft.

In 1997 neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan organized the Project for the New American Century, inviting the founding members to sign a Statement of Principles. It was essentially a condensed paraphrase of the discredited Draft Defense Planning Guidance, recasting and advocating the vision of global dominion through an invincible military.

Figure for yourself why Mainstream Media is giving a free pass on who he is being who he was, for the esteemed former Governor of Florida, John Ellis "Jeb!" Bush.

And that above quote, last paragraph, "invincible military." Do you remember "shock and awe?" After that was wtf, and "Mission Accomplished," and "Homeland Security," and the "never ending war on Terror."

When the dust settles, it will not be Trump carrying the Republican banner. It will be John Ellis "Jeb!" Bush.

Also - Not Ted Cruz. Not the eye doctor in Kentucky. Not the failed HP CEO. Instead, the one and only. Wait and see.

Oh, forgot. Not George Pataki. Not Gov. Bridgegate. Not Huck nor Rick.

____________UPDATE___________
HISTORY LESSON, UNNEEDED FOR MANY. For others who believe the never ending war on terror was an artifact crafted by cynical politicians after 9/11, it in fact is an artifact crafted before 9/11. It was crafted as another sole superpower analysis - by the Hart-Rudman Commission, going into the twenty-first century. Do you find this familiar but troubling gov-speak, dateline Sept 14, 2001?

Gary Hart: Great nations, like great individuals, are tested in ways that ordinary nations and ordinary people are not. Given what we’ve seen of the American character from the extraordinarily brave rescue workers in New York to the thousands and tens of thousands of Americans queued up in Denver and all across this country to donate blood, I would not want to be in the shoes of those who perpetrated this attack. But our purpose here today is not to discuss retribution or to look back. It is in fact to propose measures of prevention.

I think we must assume that the events of Tuesday were not the end. I am afraid they are just the beginning. They are in fact the introduction to a totally new century. We have seen the nature of warfare change from that of nation state against nation state, to that of urban conflict carried out by tribes, clans and gangs, against whom we find it very difficult to declare war. As Warren has said, on September 15, 1999, this Commission in its first report reached the following conclusion. And the title of that report by the way is “New World Coming.” That first conclusion reads as follows. “America will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland, and our military superiority will not entirely protect us. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.” That was two years ago almost to the day.

On January 31st of this year we delivered to the President and his Cabinet our proposals as to how to deal with this new world. And of course, as Warren has said, principal among those was to create something like what we called a National Homeland Security Agency to direct under one command, one civilian command, the 40 or more disparate agencies or elements of agencies that have to do with the protection of this country. When we proposed this we heard a lot of complaint from people in this city who said, “Well, the bureaucracy will not accept it.” I wish those people would step forward today and address the American people and explain why it is more important for one agency to keep one of its bureaus than it is to protect the people of this country.

[italics added] A CFR document:

http://www.cfr.org/homeland-security/national-security-21st-century-findings-hart-rudman-commission/p4049

FAS has the "New World Coming" Preface online here (dated Sept. 15, 1999). Please refer to it, read it, think about it as we move toward the 2016 election. It is linked w/o excerpt.


Statements of Hart and Rudman, again online via FAS, (w/o a headlined date but almost certainly 1999); Rudman stating at the time in report-transfer testimony to a congressional committee:

It is a great pleasure for us to be here today to discuss with you the work of the United States Commission on National Security/21st Century. As you all know, this Commission was chartered in 1997 under the Federal Advisory Commission Act, with the sponsorship of the Congressional leadership, the White House, and the Department of Defense, to be the most comprehensive reassessment of the structure and processes of the American national security system since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947. The fourteen Commissioners and the Commission staff have taken this mandate to heart. We have worked hard to make a difference, because we all believe firmly that, left to drift without a conscious and concerted effort at re-design, the U.S. national security system will end up dangerously out of synch with both the dangers and the opportunities that a changing world is even now generating.

The Commission’s work is designed as an integrated three-phase effort. The first phase, which we completed on September 15th after nearly a year’s labor, and which we are here today to discuss, is descriptive in nature. It has aimed to discern the shape of the new world coming between now and the year 2025.

The second phase is generally prescriptive. Due in April of next year, it calls for the development and elaboration of a U.S. national strategy appropriate to the world forecast in phase one.

The third phase is more specifically prescriptive. Due to be handed to the next President of the United States in the winter of 2001, its task is to carefully analyze the U.S. national security system, and propose changes to it as deemed necessary, so that it may effectively implement the strategy proposed in phase two.

We believe that this tripartite structure makes good sense. We believe that you have to start with the facts before engaging in strategy building, and that you have to know what you want before you can properly organize yourself to get it.

Establishing "facts" about the future, however, isn’t easy. [...]

Hart following with a statement:

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world has begun to change with dizzying speed. With the paralysis of the Cold War broken, captive nations have breathed anew the air of freedom. New states have been born, as well, sometimes in peace but sometimes, regrettably, in war. New patterns of innovation in science and technology have emerged. Wedded to increasingly integrated global economic processes, these patterns of innovation are rapidly transforming the international economy.

Taken together, the technological and economic changes before us are putting novel pressures on states. Some are adapting well, but many find themselves suspended between the habits of old ways and the promise of new ones. In the balance, world politics has become simultaneously more hopeful since the collapse of communism, but also more fragile as new forces have been unleashed upon the unwitting and the unprepared.

This Commission’s conclusions about the world we see emerging are not particularly comforting. We would not describe them as pessimistic, however. They simply are what they are. They are what we honestly see in the world’s future.

We believe that the United States will remain a principal economic, political, and cultural force in the world for at least the next 25 years. And we believe that the United States will be the preeminent global military power throughout this entire period.

But we also believe that there will be much resentment of American power and culture. We believe that the development of asymmetrical strategies to assault our interests and those of our allies will cause us real problems despite our military superiority. We believe that some new technologies, benign as they may be for the most part, could have a dramatic leveling effect, allowing an increasing array of states, and even small disaffected or fanatical groups, to inflict enormous damage on unsuspecting civilian populations—including our own.

We believe, as well, that the unprecedented integration of the international economy, while on balance a highly promising development, also bears many uncertainties and will generate novel vulnerabilities for those who become dependent on its underlying infrastructure. We believe that pressures on states, including some large states, could lead to collapsing governments and disintegrating countries in some cases, bringing major regional crises in their wake. We believe, therefore, that crises abroad issuing mainly from the internal instability of states will continue to crowd the American foreign policy agenda.

We believe, too, that developing effective ways to cope with such crises, along with allies and appropriate international agencies and organizations, will require a far more systematic effort than has been made thus far. But let us say no more about this for now, lest we intrude on the two study phases in our future.

The Commission has also concluded that, although the essence of war will not change, several aspects of conflict and combat will change. Space will become a more critical and competitive military environment. U.S. intelligence will face more challenging adversaries, and even excellent intelligence work on our part will not be able to prevent all surprises. Non-state actors will probably play a larger role in issues of war and peace than they have heretofore. We have also concluded that U.S. alliance structures are likely to become more fluid, that the forward-basing we have relied upon for many years may be more difficult to sustain, and that technological gaps may make it harder for us to cooperate effectively with allies and other partners in the field.

[italics added] The 1999 date is inferred from the link:

http://fas.org/man/congress/1999/99-10-05hart-rudman.htm

The index to the entire FAS body of preserved reporting,

http://fas.org/man/docs/nwc/index.html

As another example, the Phase III report is online apart from FAS archives, here, entitled/dated, "Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change --- The Phase III Report of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century --- The United States Commission on National Security/21st Century -- February 15, 2001."

Largely about a foreseen need to secure the homeland.

Prescient?

Aspen Institute, "ALARMS UNHEEDED" tells a narrative from the perspective of Feb 11, 2014.

A closing thought, some readers might disagree, the initially noted  PNAF "Project for a New American Future," might have also been abbreviated, BB-YFIFU, standing for Bibi's Blueprint, You Fight Iran For Us. But, there also is this, in terms of which US list Iran is put onto. Saddam, Qaddafi, not pricing oil in dollars. Not here to talk about it ...

If any reader familiar with the Iran agreement knows of online reporting of whether Iran will shift over, as part of the accord, to pricing its oil in dollars, please leave a comment/link.