On March 3rd, 2014 Abby Martin decided to speak her mind and express her disappointment regarding the Crimea media coverage from all sides of the spectrum live on her television show, Breaking The Set. The story went viral on the mainstream media, only because her show airs on Russian backed RT, and Russia had just stepped into the conflict following the coup in Ukraine. Immediately following this action, a cadre of younger thirty-something neoconservatives in the heart of Washington DC tried to smear Abby after discovering her political views. In addition to the distorted take-down attempts against her, they tried to hijack her stand and manipulate it into anti-Russian / pro-US propaganda.
The most vitriolic among them, Jamie Kirchick was revealed as being a fellow of “PNAC 2.0″ also known as the Foreign Policy Initiative, a think tank which was founded by the same group of neoconservatives who founded The Project For a New American Century (PNAC). This revelation caused Abby and her brother Robbie Martin to delve deeper into the history of how these think tanks operate in Washington DC.
In this edition of Media Roots Radio, Robbie and Abby go all the way back to the 1950′s, when Bill Kristol’s father, Irving Kristol coined the term ‘neoconservative’. The discussion encompasses the history of neoconservatism and the symbiotic relationship between it and US government’s foreign policy, pointing to specific players like Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Jamie Kirchick, and how the ‘end game’ scenario for the people behind PNAC has always been Russia and China. The ‘War on Terror’ was merely the middle stage, and now we sit on a dangerous tipping point towards a new Cold War after only a 23 year break since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.
While today’s events continue to unfold and intensify involving the US, Russia and Ukraine, the perfect climate is being created for a lot of the old think-tank and neoconservative faces to come out of hiding to stir up the impending war fervor. While many of these old faces no longer have credibility among the informed American public, many of the new faces do because they haven’t been outed as neoconservatives and weren’t directly associated with any major scandals like the key players (Kristol, Perle) during the Iraq war.
Below is a full transcript of the show with links and additions
[song: Urban Tribe - Peacemakers (Carl Craig Remix)]
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Abby: Welcome to Media Roots Radio, this is your host Abby Martin.
Robbie: And this is your host Robbie Martin.
Abby: So, if anyone’s been following this story about what happened at RT, Check it out, there’s a couple articles that are published on Media Roots that kind of explains the backstory, but what we wanted to do here was just kind of dig deeper into the evolution of neoconservatism, and how it has morphed, and the kind of new players behind the game, and how this is all rooted back decades pretty much and the influence over policy that the Neocon clan has had, and pointing out the characters behind the game. So If anyone’s been following the RT story, you know that my anti-war message on RT essentially got hijacked by war mongers here in DC, from a think tank called the Foreign Policy Initiative, and ever since this happened, my brother’s been doing an inordinate amount of research about who these people are in the Foreign Policy Initiative, and how it all ties back to the Bush administration and beyond, far back before that, is there anything else you wanted to add, Robbie?
Robbie: Just that the Neoconservatives, just like any ruined brand name had to sort of reinvent themselves and repackage their message, and a lot of the core Neoconservatives and basically just foreign policy hawks, who aren’t in government, most of them aren’t in government currently, are still pulling the strings in DC to a large extent, and they’ve managed to do it by essentially distancing themselves from the Bush administration foreign policy, pretending like they had no influence over [the Bush administration] now, after they were really proud of it during the Bush administration, effectively rewriting history and now they’re back. A lot of them are even going out in the media like Bill Kristol, he’s on Crossfire all the time now, and even has a permanent gig on ABC, so a lot of these people are totally back in action, like nothing’s wrong.
A: And not only them, not only these giant players behind the game who were actual signatories of Project for a New American Century or really serious players back in these administrations, but there’s a new kind of young, hip clan of Neocon hack journalists here in DC that have inserted themselves in a bunch of different publications to promote these talking points from the Foreign Policy Initiative and beyond who are essentially just…
R: Are mouthpieces for this type of foreign policy perspective
A: Yeah, and they were all the ones vehemently trying to undermine my narrative and shape this narrative that was against RT, because they are vying for a new Cold War, it’s very interesting.
R: The Foreign Policy Initiative is a not very well-known Neoconservative think tank in Washington DC, that is essentially the re-branding of the Project for the New American Century think tank, which was arguably the most influential group of people in the United States foreign policy apparatus from the late 90′s, during the entire Bush administration, at least until the middle of the Bush administration, after all the major things were done. You know, you hear people- we’ve seen movies like Power of Nightmares, Fahrenheit 9/11, all the typical stuff that’s already out in the public consciousness about how Neoconservatives and Neoconservative thinkers shaped this foreign policy and then influenced the Bush administration, and also had key, pivotal members inside the Bush administration from their sort of cabal, this tightly knit group.
And we’ve all heard that stuff but I don’t think until I did a lot of research on the exact history of it, did i really understand exactly how that happened, because you have a vague idea of it, you could think Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, they had these ideas, they signed that letter to Clinton urging him to go into Iraq in 1996 [correction: 1998] and all this stuff. There’s connections there that are very easy to find on the surface, it’s like oh okay, Wolfowitz obviously had these motives before the Bush administration, going all the way back to the first Bush administration. The Foreign Policy Initiative has essentially somehow escaped the radar of people who had brought light to a mostly unknown group of Neoconservatives in the mainstream consciousness, I mean they’re very well known obviously in DC, but until they were brought to light, I don’t think most people really realized what was going on. And once they had been, they were so widely hated and despised amongst the American public, sort of immediately and directly associated with the failures and the horrors of the Iraq war, that they kind of went back into hiding and only 4 or 5 years later did they come back out, and re-assert themselves. And they’re doing the same thing that they were doing back then, they’re just taking it to the next level now.
A: Yeah. They’re trying to figure out how they can re-strategize, I mean we know that…
R: Like any good corporation or marketing team would advise someone to do. What do corporations do when they fuck up, I mean sometimes they even change their entire name.
A: Look at Blackwater.
R: Yeah, it’s a very typical tactic. And it’s not just a simple, “oh let’s re-brand ourselves to be a new name because people hated us so much under our old name”, it’s different now because they already accomplished in large part a lot of the goals laid out in the Project for the New American Century. So it’s almost like they’re taking it to the next stage now, essentially. Away from : where the war on terror, was almost merely a stepping stone to get us to what the next stage is now.
A: Almost like they pushed it as far as they could, as we know Wesley Clark was told from another general in the army right after 9/11, that they were going to invade 7 countries in 5 years, and when you look at the PNAC, rebuilding America’s defenses, that infamous document, they talk openly and very unabashedly, and this is before 9/11 mind you, that they did want to invade all these countries and re-assert themselves and western hegemony, imperialism, take over all these resources and re-assert their dominance in that area of the world, and I think that they just tried to do as much as they could. They tried to lay it all out, put all their cards on the table, push the envelope as far as they absolutely could. They pushed it pretty far, there’s only a couple states left that were in that initial “Axis of Evil” and then the greater “Axis of Evil” that haven’t been knocked down so far. But David Frum, Bush’s speechwriter, the “Axis of Evil” speechwriter, he was in the administration, he’s going to Ukraine with Kirchick. I mean he’s writing for the Daily Beast, he’s still re-asserting the fact that the “Axis of Evil” was right, he’s doubling down on the notion, and this is weeks ago. So these people are still- they’re back in full effect, now they’re working with this new brand of hipster Neocons in DC, they’re kind of like their allies, maybe not as openly in the forefront as they are but they’re still working with them really closely.
R: Yeah, absolutely. Even Jamie Kirchick is officially a fellow of the Foreign Policy Initiative, and he’s probably the most prominent public face who goes out there and speaks on behalf of them. Just like before, 9/11 gave all these people an opportunity to put their plans into action – the Crimean incursion has given them a new opportunity to put some of their similar plans into action which is to bring us further into a confrontation with Russia. Just like before, they’re just extremely opportunistic. It couldn’t be any more timely that this just happened where these people tried to hijack the narrative of you just making an off-script statement on your show on RT, because they just all sent a letter, a very similar letter to the one that was sent to president Clinton in 1998, advocating for the invasion of Iraq. They sent a letter to Obama, and when I say “they” I mean the Foreign Policy Initiative did, with Bill Kristol as a signatory, Jamie Kirchick as a signatory, pretty much all the people in the Foreign Policy Initiative plus some other ones, advocating for more military aggression towards Russia. It’s a little bit more vague than their Saddam Hussein Iraq letter, but of a very similar flavor. When they write letters like that, their plans are sort of in full swing, they’re putting people all over the media, so it’s happening still, right now. They’re getting as many media slots as they can possibly get, they’re not getting a huge amount of them but the little bit that they are getting is just injecting ever so sporadically these little bits of propaganda that take root and are sort of guiding what’s happening right now between Russia and the United States.
A: Right. Eli Lake was just on the news networks last week a couple times, Kristol, you know the more these people are on, the more these seeds are planted in peoples minds and the more the “rallying” is fostered, such as Bill Kristol articulated in his op-ed a couple months ago, explaining that a rallying is needed in order to get the American people behind a new military standoff with Russia, is basically how he spells it out. So do you want to go into how this all started, back before the Iraq war, back with the fathers of this ideology, Robbie?
R: Yeah. Let’s dive back into it. In reality it is a very small group of people who have been the primary influence to spread this ideology. We’ve all heard of Bill Kristol, not to be confused with Billy Crystal the actor, but Bill Kristol AKA William Kristol, the guy who started what is considered the Neocon bible, The Weekly Standard Magazine in the mid 90′s, and who also was the founder of Project for a New American Century.
[clip]
Stephen Colbert: Mr. Kristol thank you so much for joining me tonight, how you doing? You work at Fox News
Bill Kristol: I do, I think all of Fox News should join Bush’s cabinet.
SC: Absolutely
(edit)
SC: we think alike.
BK: Exactly.
SC: Speaking of thinking alike, you were, or you are a member of the Project for the New American Century, were or “am”?
BK: Were and am.
SC: Okay, hows that project coming along, how’s the new American century? Looks good to me, right?
BK: I’m… (laughs) I’m speechless.
SC: Really? Come on, it’s a fantastic new American century right? You, Rummy, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Perle, Feith, all you guys right?
BK: Well we fought back after 9/11 and I’m proud of what we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, yes.
SC: But this is pre-911, you guys had the project in the 90′s.
BK: And we thought we should have been fighting back war in the 90′s.
SC: Right, we should have invaded Iraq, you know, then, you said.
[end clip]
Robbie: His father, Irving Kristol, is actually the guy who coined the term Neoconservative, it was a term applied to Irving Kristol by a critic, so someone was criticizing Kristol for essentially being one of these new conservatives, who used to be a liberal activist, who really quickly converted to conservatism, because in Kristol’s own words he was “mugged by reality.” Neoconservative was originally a label to describe people who were once liberal who, based on some kind of real life experience, or some external experience, 9/11 is a good example of that- people who were liberal before 9/11 and 9/11 woke them up to being a conservative, that would be a literal translation of the term Neoconservative. Irving Kristol was originally a liberal, and he was a self-labeled what they call a Trotskyite, which was sort of the two different opposing views in Soviet Russia and there were two opposing factions: the Trotskyites and the Stalinists, so Trotskyites were people in Soviet Russia who believed they were carrying on a more true vision of Marxism. So you can actually in some way trace back the grandfather of Neoconservatism Irving Kristol to a part of the Soviet Union that if it actually would have taken over instead of Stalinism, might have been a much more interesting, less horrible place in retrospect. If the Trotsky ideals actually were what gained ground there and Russia was more intellectual, and it wasn’t as closed off a society to the rest of the world.
So, and I’m not giving him any credit, I’m just saying that that’s where his influence comes from. His ideology that he helped start was in folded leftist policies, such as lack of objection in welfare programs, international “revolution” through nation-building and militarily imposed democracy, Fabian socialism, Keynesianism, coupled with socially conservative viewpoints. And the most interesting part of that I thought was that the international revolution aspect of nation-building is almost a form of liberal activism, in a domestic sense. It’s almost like he’s using a lot of the same liberal activism + ideology to put us on this geopolitical stage. Through international revolution, knock down these other countries which are stifling democracy. That’s where the premise is linked to liberalism. And that’s what we’ve talked about for so long on Media Roots, this idea of how they get people sucked into a lot of these wars now by saying things like the Afghanistan war, part of the reason it’s “valid” is because they have such horrible rights for women and freedom of speech is illegal and all that kind of stuff. So it ties into that. And you can even trace Neoconservatism back even further, but it wasn’t labeled that back then. This guy Leo Strauss was a professor, very influential intellectual, who was the main guy who influenced Irving Kristol, into what is his modern political philosophy of Neoconservatism and really at the core of what Leo Strauss did is he was sort of mashing up two different forms of academic thought, modern political science, but transposing over it the philosophical writings of Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers like Machiavelli, on to modern 20th century politics. When you try to do that, you start seeing things in this different context obviously, and I think that’s what enabled a lot of Irving Kristol’s ideas to flourish, they were inside of this tiny, almost metaphysical box that was an abstraction from reality. The philosopher that seemed to have the most influence on the modern Neoconservatives is Machiavelli.
[clip]
Michael Ledeen: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia are the big four and then there’s Libya, there’s a North Korean problem too. I’m a student of Machiavelli, I wrote a book on Machiavelli and I know the struggle against evil is going to go on forever.
[end clip]
Robbie: That quote was from Michael Ledeen during an American Enterprise Institute think tank talk, and we’re going to talk a little later about how the American Enterprise Institute was a very important Neoconservative think tank that predated a lot of these other ones, and also Michael Ledeen sits on the board of another prominent Neoconservative think tank in DC called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and stay tuned later in the broadcast, we’ll go a lot more in-depth on both of those. Michael Ledeen used to be one of the most prominent Neoconservative thinkers and writers and speakers, but kind of like Richard Perle his rhetoric wasn’t as sophisticated as some of the other Neoconservatives. His rhetoric was a lot more harsh, a little more blunt, and just like he’s saying here, his rhetoric took on a little bit more of a transparent Machiavellian flavor. You’ve heard the term Machiavellianism, and the philosopher Machiavelli. Machiavellianism according to the Oxford English Dictionary is “the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct.”
Psychologists have described Machiavellianism as a mental disorder, so they have a new meaning for Machiavellianism, which is “a person’s tendency to be unemotional and therefore able to detach him or herself from conventional morality and hence to deceive and manipulate others.”
So I think that that at it’s core is actually what is most important to hold on to from a philosophy aspect. And then you can see that creeping into all these areas which effect the way statecraft is done today. For example, the classic liberal idea embedded in the founding fathers of the United States to Neoconservatives is not as important as the entire collective entity of the political culture of the United States as it exists today. When you show a normal person a lot of these writings of Neoconservatives they would think that it sounds similar to fascism, because [the Neoconservatives] would use terms like “the health of the nation” looking at a society as this entity in and of itself, what drives or fosters stability and “good” in a nation, nation-state mentality as a society, keeping this psychological system healthy by things like nationalism, patriotism, the idea that our ideals our so good that we need to spread them to other countries using leftist activist rallying techniques on the international geopolitical stage. Iraq or Bosnia, those wars were sold for the good of human rights. They weren’t posing a threat to us. To make us all feel like humanitarians…
Abby: Something that struck me as really strange too is this way that they speak about Russia, and the US, these people that have been writing out there- Jamie Kirchick always writes about Russia doing false flags, which is so interesting because it’s inconceivable to think of the US ever doing that to these people, and they mock it……
R: Guess who also does? David Frum and Richard Perle in the book that’s sitting right here in front of me they talk about how the Chechen apartment building bombings were false flag attacks.
[addition: David Frum and Richard Perle co-authored a book released in 2004 called An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror]
A: And that may or not be true, but also Jamie Kirchick has written multiple things like this other plane full of an opposition group in Russia that went down and he’s saying that was done by the Russian government, extreme assertions here that if we were to assert them remotely about the US government, we would be called “lunatic conspiracy theorists” who have zero credibility. So its curious the way that they’ve shaped the narrative and projected that anyone who voices that whatsoever about any non-ally country is somehow okay.
[addition: During a debate between Jamie Kirchick and Ray McGovern, Kirchick tries to label McGovern as a "9/11 conspiracy theorist" for mentioning the Reichstag fire. Without batting an eyelash Kirchick immediately transitions to accusing Edward Snowden of being a Russian intelligence operative. Espousing a blatant conspiracy theory of his own construction that "the whole thing" [referring to the leaks from Snowden given to Glenn Greenwald] was an “FSB operation from the very beginning”. Scroll to 8:00 . link]
R: And this is a funny side note but remember how I showed you some of those videos from Radio Free Europe and you were like “Whoa, that’s so weird they look likeWe Are Change Canon-D videos”, almost like they were filmed in this shaky-cam, man on the street documentarian style, and that shit’s effective. Its visceral when you watch something that looks like that, it adds more power to the message.
A: And you have to think for yourself, why is Radio Free Europe out in the streets of Russia trying to do activism during Sochi about the gay law. Why is a state-sponsored organization trying to rally people up in Russia during Sochi about the gay law, on a Canon HD grassroots, raw, weird documentary, it’s like what in the hell is going on? Brings it back to what you said which is that this is a state policy.
[addition: In a previous episode of Media Roots Radio we speculated on the idea that there was US state driven agitation propaganda which was hijacking gay rights to create a wedge between Russia and the United States. Until very recently we had no idea this official state policy had already been in effect for years. More surprising was that a blatant hawkish Neoconservative, Jamie Kirchick was actually spreading this type of agitation propaganda on the US government payroll during the first term of the Obama administration. Scroll to 48:00-1:04:00 in the broadcast]
[clip]
Radio Free Europe: It was a day of celebration for gay Americans and their allies. New York’s annual gay pride parade took place on June 30th, just days after the US Supreme Court made two rulings that support the cause of same-sex marriage. For Russian-Americans and others from the former Soviet Union, there was another reason for pride. It was the first time the Russian-speaking gay community had a float in the parade, showing off their roots.
Activist: “I hope KGB is not here to slash our tires at the last moment”
RFE: Other participants in the Russian delegation shared their excitement at being able to celebrate gay culture, something they can’t do openly at home. And that’s the video roundup from Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty
[end clip]
Robbie: I just want to mention this because this is something that I think is a very important key linkage between Neoconservative intellectuals and the US government. And it goes all the way back to the 1960s [correction: 1950s]. Irving Kristol, considered the grandfather of Neoconservatism, he wrote a regular publication called Encounter Magazine, and it was like a literary journal, it wasn’t even writings on politics, it was intellectual philosophy, more abstract writings, but coming from that perspective. This is the interesting part about this magazine, is that it was actually funded covertly by a CIAfront philanthropist group, that acted like they were these intellectual philanthropists but they were actually the CIA.
[clip]
CSPAN interviewer: Working for the CIA, whats that about?
Irving Kristol: Oh, back in the 1950s, I was in London co-editing Encounter Magazine with Stephen Spender, that it was revealed in fact, we thought we were being subsidized by an American foundation called the Fairfield foundation, and in fact that was a front for the CIA and it was CIA money.
CSPAN: How’d you find out?
IK: It was made public in the press. I don’t know how they found out, somebody leaked it obviously, but I didn’t inquire and I didn’t care really.
CSPAN: What was your reaction at the time?
IK: I was annoyed! I didn’t want to work for the CIA
CSPAN: Why would they want to fund the Encounter Magazine?
IK: That’s why there were rumors that there was some government money behind it, but the question occurred to me that just occurred to you, why on earth would they want to fund a magazine that Stephen Spender and I were editing?
[end clip]
[link]
Robbie: He claims he didn’t know. So the whole time he’s writing for this magazine, which he I believe co-founded, he was being funded entirely by the CIA. Which if you take it at face value, if you believe that he didn’t know about it, then it doesn’t really matter if he knew about it or not, because what you see happening there is a mutual beneficial relationship between the US government and the ideas of Neoconservatism
Abby: Of course he knew… come on….
R: But let’s just say in theory he didn’t know, that shows that the US government… because I think it oversimplifies things too much to think even if he didn’t know that they were paying for this to be launched in the public consciousness, I think that it just shows that there’s an extreme mutual benefit between the US government’s agenda, foreign policy agenda, and these influential ideas. They wanted to help theses ideas perpetuate and flourish because it helps them essentially.
A: Of course, it’s just so hypocritical for them to overreact so much about Russia and Crimea, and I’m not saying it’s not worth reacting, but when we find out that the USAID, as we’ve talked about multiple times that they invested openly 5 billion dollars in Ukraine over the last two decades for their “democratic future” and when you find out the USAID is basically acting like the CIA.
[clip]
Victoria Nuland: Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, The united states has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions.
(edit)
Victoria Nuland: We’ve invested over 5 billion dollars on the ground in these and other goals that will ensure a democratic and prosperous Ukraine
[end clip]
[link]
Abby: They had a fake twitter account in Cuba, they had a fake Cuban twitter did you hear about this?
Robbie: Yeah.
A: God knows what they’re doing everywhere else, if this is a so-called aid organization? The CIA of course we know what they’re doing, different overt organizations that are obviously actively trying to do regime change, and then you find out that USAID, which is supposed to be an aid organization helping children, is actually actively pursuing regime change. You see Edward Snowden’s slides about using social media for propaganda, to gain access to political information that you can use to influence the outcome of other countries. This is some scary shit here.
R: It is. And on the surface, a lot of these Neoconservative groups, with the exception of just a couple people, most of them seem pretty benign and boring, droll, and like they wouldn’t have any influence, you wouldn’t expect them to have this much influence, but in Washington DC there are hundreds of these think tanks. Irving Kristol became a senior fellow at this think tank that was founded in the 30′s, they’ve existed since the 30′s which is crazy to me, called the American Enterprise Institute. The American Enterprise Institute’s mission statement is “to defend the principles and to improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism”. This was widely considered to be the biggest most influential Neoconservative think tank before the next generation of Neoconservatives like the Bill Kristol’s and people like that. So Irving Kristol was a part of this think tank for many many years, and during this time after he stopped writing for Encounter Magazine.
[addition: Irving Kristol founded a new publication in 1965 called the Public Interest, which ran from 1965-2005 which had a great influence on political thinkers and journalists, best described as a proto Weekly Standard, the magazine founded by his son, William Kristol]
He wasn’t a very well known public figure at all, it was more he was just well known among intellectual thinkers and geo-strategic political thinkers, and government people. And in the 70′s, that’s when people like Rumsfeld and Cheney were rising through the ranks, through the Nixon and Ford administrations, and then eventually we go all the way to the George H. Bush administration , and that’s when people like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz got reunited [correction: Dick Cheney not Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld was in the private sector during the first Bush administration]. Who later went into the next Bush administration and were key architects in the Iraq war, and during the Clinton administration, right after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a group of new Neoconservatives comprised of William Kristol, another guy named Robert Kagan. They were two of the co-founders of what became the Project for the New American Century, as far as I’m concerned the most influential think tank or just the most influential group of people over the Bush administration.
A: Oh absolutely, yeah, do you want to talk about who was on the board of that so people understand?
R: Absolutely yeah. Just to cut more directly to it, there’s all these letters that they sent out to Clinton trying to urge him to invade Iraq in 1996 [correction: 1998], there’s the rebuilding America’s defenses document which talks about needing a new Pearl Harbor, so there’s all that shit. And there’s all these different signatories of those documents, and that in and of itself is definitely an interesting connection that people like Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, and all these people who weren’t in government at the time signed this document to send to President Clinton, or signed this document talking about how we needed a “new Pearl Harbor”, that’s interesting in and of itself, but I think what’s more interesting is that after the election of George W. Bush, some of, and not just some but over 20 of PNACs members and signatories were appointed to key positions in the Bush White House, literally.
And I can just really quickly read off this list, Elliott Abrams- special assistant to the president, Richard Armitage- Deputy Secretary of State, John Bolton- US Ambassador to the United Nations, Dick Cheney, Elliott Cohen- Defense Policy Advisory Board, Seth Kropsky- International Broadcasting Bureau, Paula Dobriansky- Under Secretary of State, Aaron Felberg, Francis Fukuyama- President’s council on Bioethics, I mean the list goes on and on of all these people who directly were involved in writing these extremely influential letters for the PNAC, landed directly into the Bush administration in key positions. Even Richard Perle did, he was on the Defense Policy Advisory Board Committee for Bush. But it’s not just PNAC that had an influence, it’s these people. It’s people like Richard Perle and William Kristol and Robert Kagan. In the letter that they wrote to Clinton where they urged Clinton to attack Iraq, do you remember hearing about that? Even before “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” they wrote a letter to Clinton…
A: No, when?
R: January 26, 1998, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan- they all signed this letter, and the letter is only six paragraphs long, it’s very short. And it starts out saying “Dear the Honorable William Jefferson Clinton…..” basically the most important part of it to take away is that it uses the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” FIVE times
A: What?
R: In a six paragraph letter
A: Woah woah wait
R: In relationship to Iraq.
A: This was in ’98?
R: Yeah, I shit you not. So this phrase “weapons of mass destruction”, five times its used in full, not even as an acronym at that point. I mean they spell the whole fucking phrase out. So that was happening before Bush got into office.
A: It’s so obvious why they wanted to re-brand themselves, I mean god they were trying this rhetoric back then and it got so played out and so mocked, of course they had to do a whole rebranding effort.
R: Yeah, and here’s another interesting thing. This is an excuse that Kristol and Kagan have used repeatedly, even Wolfowitz has used this excuse- they’ve said things like when asked “well weren’t you the signatory of this document? Obviously you worked with these people and helped devise this policy before you got into the administration”, and they’ll always say things like “well, you know, I’d like to think we had a lot of influence but nobody ever, we didn’t work with anybody, oh yeah I think we wrote that letter to Clinton, I think it was maybe me and so and so, but you know not that many people read it…”
A: Yeah they poo-poo their [own] influence
R: And then Wolfowitz will be like “Yeah I think I signed that thing but I didn’t really have anything to do with it” and all this shit.
[clip]
Audience member: Mr. Wolfowitz, as a key architect of the PNAC, you co-authored a document calling for a new American empire around the world that would use nuclear weapons, invade countries that never threatened the U.S., and keep down potential rivals to American economic and military power. Do you think your projects for empire are worth thousands of innocent Iraqi and American lives?
Paul Wolfowitz: I was not a key architect of that project, I was listed on some of their things…
(audience laughter)
Paul Wolfowitz: You know there’s an attempt to tie a whole lot of things that are going on now back to a document that was drafted by my staff when I was in the first Bush…..
[end clip]
[addition: Paul Wolfowitz drafted a policy doctrine during the early 90s that was leaked to the press, coined by the public as the 'Wolfowitz doctrine'. This document is pointed to by many critics of Neoconservatism as being a template for PNAC.]
Abby: Yeah that’s how they do it, remember was it Richard Perle arguing with Noam Chomsky?
Robbie: Yeah.
Abby: Noam Chomsky would point out all these things that were written specifically by Perle, and Perle’s argument every time was “oh okay you’re picking out one paragraph from dozens of documents, oh I’m sorry did I say that”, totally minimizing everything that Chomsky said that actually was implemented that they had written about, it was like these blueprints. And that’s their strategy, to just be like “oh okay, conspiracy theorists, you think we wrote this all out before we did it?” and it’s like yeah you did.
Robbie: And yeah you wrote it all out, but now you claim that you have this very loose connection and people are trying to draw this conspiracy around you guys, but the truth of it is, they can’t escape this. Yeah, you could argue “Wolfowitz signed it but maybe didn’t write it”, let’s accept that bullshit premise, but this doesn’t change the fact that Robert Kagan and William Kristol in the year 2000 wrote a book called Crisis and Opportunity: an American Foreign and Defense Policy [correction: The title for the bookis Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in America’s Foreign and Defense Policy].And in the book, it’s all these articles by Robert Kagan, by William Kristol, by Frederick Kagan, because pretty much the entire Kagan family are war historians, its really bizarre. But in the book, Paul Wolfowitz has an entire section of the book written by him…. whoops! So, okay there’s “no proof” that Wolfowitz was involved in Rebuilding America’s Defenses but here’s him co-authoring parts of a book where he’s making money, they had to divide up the money made from the book to Wolfowitz and pay him for his work in here. The relationship [between Wolfowitz and the founders of PNAC] clearly goes much deeper than just signing the letter is all I’m saying. It’s not really up for debate but they keep denying it, and that’s in and of itself telling, that’s part of the rebranding effort is to disassociate the Bush administration and its policies from these people.
A: Yeah and just smear, smear, smear anyone who even tries to point it out.
R: Yeah. You think of these people, oh they’re intellectuals, oh they’ll own it, they’re not embarrassed of it, they’re proud of what they did, but in reality they’re doing the exact same thing the republican party did to Bush. They’re trying to disassociate themselves from him because he’s kryptonite to having any influence after him.
A: And of course he fell on his own sword, not meaning that he was actually held accountable for anything but him and his public image. And so to them, even though they were behind him the whole way, they’re able to disassociate themselves from him because everyone just kind of remembers him, him and Cheney, Rumsfeld to a certain extent but there’s all these other players that still are there. But as you’re saying they’ve just kind of distanced themselves from those very kryptonite forefront people.
R: Oh, absolutely and it seems like they’ve actually been pretty effective at it to a certain extent. Some of the old faces like William Kristol and Kagan, they get hassled everywhere they go on the media about being Neocons or whatever and they just laugh it off.
A: Yeah but Bill Kristol’s on Crossfire twice a week and I’m just like “why is this person…”
R: I think this is their relaunching point, now is the time for them to come back out. I mean Dan Senor was Mitt Romney’s foreign policy advisor, but now you’re starting to see him on all these shows too, going out and talking about shit and he wasn’t a public figure for a long time. Around the time that this letter was sent to Clinton, telling him basically to go into Iraq, and just repeating weapons of mass destruction over and over again, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, who are two other co-signatories of this letter and the Rebuilding America’s Defenses document, they presented another document to the sitting [correction: incoming, not sitting] prime minister of Israel at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, this think tank, and the name escapes me right now, its a different think tank and it’s essentially a very small one-off little think tank that only wrote I think this one document, and the document is called the Clean Break Strategy.In reality, many people who’ve seen this document that they wrote for Benjamin Netanyahu, i believe in 1996, they were paid to write this strategy up, and it’s considered to be the blueprint for not just the invasion of Iraq, which they also happened to advocate in there. They advocate overthrowing Saddam Hussein, waging proxy warfare against Syria, Lebanon, and Iran in the document. But they also advocate for building more Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, they advocate for building more walls in Gaza, which they actually did. A lot of this clean break strategy was followed in Israel. It’s also a blueprint for the war on terror in the way that we treat terror suspects, because it was advocating a much harsher view, a much more preemptive way of defeating Hamas and Hezbollah.
A: So already kind of adopting the former Israeli defense minister [Ehud Barak] who said on the morning of 9/11 that this is a game changer, we need to start acting like Israel does with the war on terror, so it’s almost like they were already seeing how Israel treated Hamas and dealt really harshly with dissidents, and they were asserting that blueprint back then
R: Which obviously fundamentally creates a very big problem where you could be really simple about it and say “oh, well all these Neoconservatives are just Zionists and they love Israel and hate Arabs” but I think it’s more complicated than that. There was cross-influence between the Neoconservatives and the Israeli government policy at the time, these very prominent Neoconservative writers to write this “clean break” strategy, and that’s also another instance when Richard Perle is asked what his involvement was in that strategy he’ll say “Oh I think I put my name on that but I don’t even remember what it said.” He literally acts like he had nothing to do with it.
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Reporter: Richard, will you take us back to that memo that you, Doug Feith and others wrote in 1996 for the incoming Netanyahu administration at the time, because so much goes back to that original document being the cornerstone of a Neoconservative foreign policy.
Richard Perle: Right, well let me say a couple of things about the document first, it was not written for the incoming Israeli prime minister, who’s probably again going to be the incoming Israeli prime minister, Netanyahu. It was the product of the study group, in fact it was written essentially by one person without much regard to the study group, because I don’t think it met very often. I never met with the study group, my name was on this because I had signed up for the study group. So I didn’t approve it, I didn’t read it. Having said that, I don’t see any reason to disagree with its main points.
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Robbie: More bullshit. And they constantly do this, it’s very surreal actually how they do it so much.
Abby: Well that’s the problem, and it’s great how they’re able to deflect everything and call everyone anti-Semitic if you simply point out anything with their pro-Israel stuff but you’re right, it goes beyond nationalism for Israel, or the fact that they may be Jewish, or Israel, or believe in Israel’s right now exist, it goes beyond that and it’s strategically adopting what they’ve seen work in Israel.
R: Cold-blooded.
A: Yeah it’s strategizing beyond the superficial “oh its just about nationalism, this and that.” No, it goes beyond that. We’re talking about military strategy.
R: Yeah. I won’t really talk too much more about this, because it’s a honey trap that they’ve set up so that you get stuck in this argument of saying “oh well you must have dual loyalties” and all this shit, but that’s really what it is, what you’ve described. Francis Fukuyama is literally one of the only Neoconservatives that I’ve been able to find ever, that has spoken honestly about the subject, because all of them use that diversionary tactic, even Jamie Kirchick has used it at least three different times. He’s used it hundreds of times on twitter, we’ve seen his assholery on there, he’s constantly equating anti-Neoconservative writing or accusations to anti-Semitism, but he’s actually written full articles and done debates with people who’ve written critical writings on Neoconservatism, and tried to trap them in that trap.
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Jamie Kirchick: I think its very irresponsible to accuse Jews, especially in the government, of dual loyalties. You’re accusing them of treason, and that’s inappropriate, that’s beyond the line.
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Jamie Kirchick: Joe, you wrote that the Iraq war was because of Neocons plumping for war, you said that it raised the question of dual loyalties. That’s what you wrote.
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Jamie Kirchick: I think one of the greatest lies of this whole Israel debate is the claim that you hear by so many people, that you can’t criticize Israel without being called an anti-Semite. Which is so annoying, because I have never heard someone legitimately criticize Israel and be called an Anti-Semite for it. I’ve heard anti-Semites…. well it depends on what you said and it depends on who said it.
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Jamie Kirchick:…Very brave man for going after the Neocons, I mean come on, bullying? Who’s being bullied here? In particular, you accused Jewish Neoconservatives of plumping for war with Iran, so Jewish Neocons surrounding John McCain and his vessel Sarah Palin, polluting their minds, okay I think that’s….
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Jamie Kirchick: So did Don Rumsfeld, so did Dick Cheney. to my knowledge, they’re Gentiles. Why is it the Jewish Neoconservatives who are singled out, that’s what I want to know.
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Robbie: But, Francis Fukuyama was at a talk with William Kristol and a few other of the PNAC signatories, and someone from the audience asked that question, a lot of people asked this question when you see these Neoconservative Q+A sessions, which is what is the connection between Zionism and Neoconservatism, and why do you prefer Israel, how did this reputation even come about, and Francis Fukuyama just straight out said well I think It’s a shame that a lot of my fellow Neoconservatives have adopted what i see as an extremely far right Israeli Likud perspective on what the Muslim and Arab societies are actually like.
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Francis Fukuyama: Just on this question of Israel, I think that Israel is important to many Neoconservatives, the problem is not divided loyalties or putting Israel’s interests ahead of the United States’, what I said in my argument with Krauthammer, the problem is that many Neoconservatives have adopted the point of view, the strategic prism of many hardliners on the Israeli right, including their interpretation of Arab motives and behavior, this idea that the Arabs don’t understand any principles of legitimacy, its only force that they respect. This sort of thing which then dictates a whole way of dealing with that region as a whole and I just said I think that that was a big mistake, and I think that that continues to be a problem. Krauthammer said that’s Anti-Semitism, but I don’t believe that that’s really what’s motivating me.
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Robbie: And he didn’t use this exact language, but he was essentially saying, I can paraphrase him, that the Israeli right wing Likud view of the Arab world and Muslims is one of racism. And it stems from this idea of superiority, and painting Arab and Muslims and Palestinians as animals, as subhuman. To be able to, as a pretext for this extremely hawkish military viewpoint. You have to really think, where does that come from because people have always been racist in war and stuff but it’s really the racism in this specific case that greased the skids for the war on terror to be so effective.
Abby: Right, yeah, the foundation of Islamophobia.
R: It’s like rubbing Vaseline on a luge and flying down it. The Israelis had developed such a crude and offensive but also effective way of looking at Arab and Muslim societies, the United States just immediately adopted that viewpoint. And you won’t really hear Bush and Rumsfeld talking with that viewpoint and being racist on TV, but it was a climate that was created by a lot of these Neoconservative groups and by a lot of people like Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News which is sort of the dumbed-down Neoconservative rhetoric outlet, but he also <a style="font-weight: inherit; font-style