AN OPEN LETTER to PRESIDENT Donald J. Trump from (the Living Memory of) NANCY REAGAN, Ronald Reagan, JACKIE KENNEDY, John F. Kennedy, Paul Craig Roberts, Bruce Cameron... and yourself.
President Trump, "THEY" TRIED TO ASSASSINATE PRESIDENT REAGAN... JUST SEVEN WEEKS in to his presidency!
"THEY" were able to CREATE AN ENTIRELY 'FALSE NARRATIVE' about this attempted assassination of a sitting, newly elected U.S. president... a false narrative AS ABSURD as the one they spun around the President Kennedy assassination in Dallas in November of 1963!
You sir - respectfully - IF YOU DON'T KNOW AND UNDERSTAND YOUR ENEMIES, are at the SAME RISK that befell Presidents Reagan and Kennedy.
PLEASE do NOT EMBRACE the murderous, mass-murderous, insidious, and genocidal tactics, Strategies, goals and ALLIES of "loser" 'NEO-CON' William, BILL KRISTOL and his friends and collaborators, including the also Jewish Neo-Con war criminal Elliot Abrams and many, many others.
The NEO-CON or "neo-liberal" strategy has DRIVEN AMERICA to the brink of RUIN... and has already driven much of the world TO ABJECT RUINATION, including in Syria, Libya, Iraq, the Ukraine, and those parts of Europe already overwhelmed by refugees.
DAN RATHER - just one symptom, just one facet of the ENTIRE American corp. MEDIA LIES about "one lone gunman" in Dallas that dreadful day! In a CBS 'news' cast televised shortly after President Kennedy was assassinated, Mr. Rather claimed that President Kennedy's head was forcefully pushed forward and down by the impact of a bullet hitting President Kennedy's head.... but we today, viewing the same Zapruder film images of those awful moments, clearly see President Kennedy's head rock to the back, the back of his skull blasted off and his brains spattered all over the back of the Presidential limousine. First Lady Jackie Kennedy, courageously heedless of any risk to herself, JUMPED ON THE BACK OF the moving limo to RETRIEVE her husband's blasted head fragments, in an instantaneous but doomed, forlorn and hopeless drive to save her husband's life.
JUST BECAUSE the GOVERNMENT AND corporate MEDIA are ON THE SAME PAGE to create a FALSE NARRATIVE does NOT mean that their stories aren't COMPLETE LIES, complete FABRICATIONS; complete, wholesale, grotesque DISTORTIONS of truth & reality.
NANCY REAGAN - HATED the Bush family - she believed George H.W. (Sr.) was somehow involved in the attempted murder (Hinckley) assassination of her husband, President Ronald Reagan.
If Nancy Reagan were alive today, she would IMPLORE President Trump NOT to follow the dictates of the "EAST COAST ESTABLISHMENT" - including the CIA, the Corp. media, the Ivy League.. .and the JEWISH WAR LOBBY, centered in NY & DC - whom she felt was behind the assassination attempt on her husband's life.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts - respected former Assistant Treasury Secretary in the President Reagan administration - has in past few days warned that the "Federal Reserve" attempted to PUNISH President Reagan (and the American people) WITH HIGH INTEREST RATES for attempting to restore a degree of American sovereignty over our own national economy. But if a president DOES follow the Fed, Judeo bankers dictates - as President George W. Bush did when he finally (legally & lawfully, and not homicidally!) succeeded President Reagan in 1988 - THEY WILL DRIVE THE ECONOMY TO RUIN as well... TURNING AMERICAN CITIZENS IN TO DEBT SLAVES IS the goal and purpose of the PRIVATELY OWNED "Federal Reserve" - and you would have to be ignorant or intellectually cowardly not to realize and understand that "the Fed" is owned and controlled by billionaire Jews whose first loyalty is certainly not to these United States.
http://www.infowars.com/why-nancy-reagan-hated-the-bush-family/
President Kennedy would IMPLORE President Trump today, and in the next crucial weeks & months, not to fall victim to the VAST CONSPIRACIES of the CRIMINALLY MOTIVATED members and agents of the "SECRET SOCIETIES" that
saturate, infest, control, and overwhelm every single aspect of government, life, society and media (informatio) in Washington, D.C.... the nation's capitol.
President John F. Kennedy was ASSASSINATED by JEWS - the 1960s ISRAEL High Command and their American "SAYANIM" collaborators in judeo-supremacist High Crimes & Treason
the 'HIGH PRIESTS of WARS'
- for CONFRONTING their INSIDIOUS SABOTAGE TREASON war to take over and destroy AMERICA as an independent, sovereign nation dedicated to freedom, civil rights, and democracy, according to well researched author Michael Collins Piper. President Trump's vocal Jewish "NEO-CON" critic - William "Bill" Kristol - is 2nd from lower right on the cover of Mr. Piper's book "High Priests of War" - about how the same Jewish War Lobby that Assassinated President Kennedy over his opposition to Israel creating nuclear bombs
(by stealing U.S. nuclear weapons components and technology)
lied Americans and the American military in to invading Iraq & Afghanistan, and murdering people all across the Mideast, Central Asia, and North Africa according to Judeo (israli) "ODED YINON" and Netanyahu "Securing the Realm" genocidal expansionist plans.
Jewish fundamentalists believe they are authorized, nay, Commanded by God in the bible to MAKE SLAVES of the people of the nations around them (Leviticus 25:44) - this fundamentalist outlook or world-view is the diametrical opposite, diametrically opposed to the notion of civil rights, human rights, freedoms, and democracy.
=======================
"Wayne Madsen Reports was told by a longtime national security aide to then-President Ronald Reagan that First Lady Nancy Reagan told White House staff that “I never want to see the Bushes again.”
The comment came after Bush family friend John Hinckley attempted to assassinate Reagan on March 30, 1981, some seven weeks after the presidential inauguration. Mrs. Reagan apparently was convinced that Vice President George H W Bush and Second Lady Barbara Bush were somehow connected to the assassination attempt.
Hinckley, who was found not guilty due to reasons of insanity, was confined to St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington, DC."
IF you do the EASY THING: GO WITH THE FLOW" of the DICTATES that NEO-CON JEW BILLIONAIRES, millionaires, appartchiks, & officials who SURROUND you attempt to IMPOSE on you - not only will YOUR PRESIDENCY WILL BE an ABJECT FAILURE...
but you will become as reviled as George W. Bush and Barack Obama for bringing death, war, mass-murder, & ruin to millions of innocent people who will be the victims of your NEO-CON DICTATED policies.
That will INCLUDE MILLIONS of us Americans: even as you attempt to PROTECT US AMERICANS from WAVES of illegal IMMIGRANTS - among whom are criminals, murderers, psychopaths, professional killers, pimps, drug dealers, and human traffickers - your authoritarian instincts have not only enabled but ENCOURAGED criminal law enforcement officials to "SHAKE DOWN" innocent Americans, to deprive them of their property and savings (money) any time they are stopped by police or LEO officials! We fully understand that your intentions in supporting _____ are, from you point of view, solely aimed at enforcing legal and just laws: but therein lies one of the great potential tragedies of being a U.S. president; the ability to unfortunately HARM MILLIONS of law-abiding citizens by the stroke of a pen. Encouraging CORRUPT LEOs (law enforcement officials) to shake-down and terrorize Americans - no matter how well intended your motives - does not relieve your reputation from the consequences of Americans harmed by illegal confiscation of their property - with no judicial oversight or restrain, or legal, due process.
This is the great challenge of the U.S. presidency - to wield the sword of justice, and defense of our nation - without harming innocent citizens, or people overseas in other lands.
And of course the lessons of history and of all religions inform us that EVEN THE GODS - or "one true god" - CAN NOT DEFEND THE WEAK, the downtrodden, the innocent, the hapless at all times - not only does the bible portray the god of the Hebrews massacring, annihilating, and directing the genocides of whole groups of people; but "he" specifically takes credit for KILLING CHILDREN in the infamous "Passover" story - even though a real-life God, creator of the Universe would be so far more powerful than a mere Egyptian Pharaoh that the story appears grotesque and ludicrous; a god of that majesty and power attempting to show his power to all of humanity... but killing young men, little boys, babies, infants, and children?!
We shudder at the having to use this name, but Adolf Hitler genuinely believed he was saving the German people from a real threat - and we completely agree, the "RED TERROR" which had murdered over 10 million Ukrainians, alone, by massacres, mass-executions, mass deportations to slave-camp, death-camp gulags, and INTENTIONAL FAMINE by food confiscation and destruction of family farms (in just 2 or 3 years flat the Lazar Kaganovich directed Commissars reign of terror "Holodomor" 1930-33) - was making its way to Germany. While the COMMUNISTS in pre-WWII Germany today are portrayed as a marginalized, hapless, browbeaten gang of misfits; they were of course backed up by the entire state resources of the "Soviet Union" - and, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the moment they seized control of any government positions, big or small, the Communists intended to round up and dispose of their opponents - "liquidate their enemies" or "crush the enemies of the Revolution!" 2 of the more descriptive terms to explain how Germany could well have been taken over by parties equally as murderous as Hitler's pre-war Nazis.
Mr. Trump - YOUR Grandchildren are born and raised Jewish
Bill & Hillary Clinton's grandchild is born and raised Jewish
Some of Nancy Pelosi's grandchildren are born and raised jewish.
That their grandparents were nothing less than THE most powerful people in the United States government at one time or another will not for a moment prevent them from suffering the effects of radiation toxicity in the event of a nuclear war. Heck, according to some sources we've read - and we believe they are far more reliable than the "FAKE NEWS" of corporate "mainstream media" reporting... or official government reporting - merely swimming in the Fukushima toxic radioactive laced waters of the Hawaiian coast will result - for some percentage of swimmers - in life-threatening cancers and other illnesses. WE WERE TOLD after World War II that the massive the CIVILIANS in Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo DESERVED TO BE FIRE-BOMBED for giving their support - active or passive (tacit) - to their respective governments' war machine... that is a lesson arrogant Americans should heed,
rjn - JEWS OWN SUPREME COURT
======================
JUST AS Jewish historians and academics have all but succeeded in WHITEWASHING the TROTSKY, KAGANOVICH, DZERHINSKI, Yeshov, Yagoda and other JEW COMMISSARS role in the MASS-MURDERS of MILLIONS of victims OUT of the history books (and many Jews living in Israel - some even posing as "Holcaust victims" today - are descendants of those mass-murdering, remorseless Commissars)
so too today have the JEWISH MEDIA MOGULS created an ENTIRELY FALSE REALITY, and entirely LYING "FALSE NARRATIVE" about events the understanding of which are critical to America future and well being: including obscuring and covering-up the real perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks; LYING about "Iraq has WMDs!" and other lies-to-war",
LYING about the deadly ANTHRAX ATTACKS designed to TERRORIZE OUR SENATORS in to passing the horrific AMERICAN DICTATORSHIP so-called "P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act;
including telling us Americans that IF WE "DEREGULATED" the critical financial markets,
"EXPERT" Wall St. financiers would POLICE THEMSELVES - no regulations needed!
- including TELLING US that "NAFTA," GATT, and WTO would "strengthen the American economy,"
- including telling us that "ASSAD USED POISON GAS ON HIS OWN CIVILIANS" when it was ISRAEL, the CIA, the SAUDIS, & TURKEY who SUPPLIED THEIR HIRED proxy TERRORIST ARMIES with POISON GAS to kill Syrian civilians to BLAME the Syrian army & Assad government (which was overwhelmingly ELECTED in a GENUINE, POPULAR ELECTORAL VOTE in Syria - which results have been SCRUBBED from American corp. media coverage)
...leading up to all the more recent "FAKE NEWS" PIMPED & PUSHED OUT by these TREASONOUS anti-American LIARS, SABOTEURS and WAR PROFITEERS...
who, if MASSES of circumstantial evidence show any substance, are PROBABLY ACTIVELY & FORCEFULLY COVERING UP CHILD RAPE and MURDER "snuff" RINGS AS WE SPEAK!!
the CORP. MEDIA WHIPPED UP an ENTIRELY FALSE NARRATIVE -
took the FACTS... TWISTED, WARPED, smothered, and compromised them -
and CREATED A LIE, and entirely false narrative about the Kennedy assassination...
...it was even easier for them - MORE MEDIA CONSOLIDATION, a more polished & refined
CIA "mighty wurlitzer" "Operation Mockingbird" false-flag propaganda machine -
by the time the Reagan assassination FAILED to complete the job...
Bush Sr.. PARTNERS with EUGENE MEYERS -
AMERICA - THESE ARE YOUR ENEMIES!
BENT on YOUR DESTRUCTION - the DESTRUCTION of America by ANY and ALL vile, insidious, horrific, despicable MEANS POSSIBLE: ECONOMIC SABOTAGE, NATIONAL SECURITY SABOTAGE, POISONING of our air, land, water food... and even by DIRECT INJECTIONS of TOXIC POISONS in to our body by the corp./govt medical/big-phara complex (vaccines!) - AND OF COURSE by DIVIDE & CONQUER: PAYING one-half of the population to MURDER, extort, enslave, terrorize, and/or exterminate the Other half !!
(and, of course, if/when that doesn't do the job - of DESTROYING america & the clueless American populace- well, there's always nuclear annihilation, bio-war & computerized "seek & destroy" killer micro-nuke drones / wwIII)
WHO are the MOGULS who MANUFACTURE the LIES that are DESTROYING AMERICA?!
THEY'RE INSANE! AS THEY SCHEME & GLOAT amongst themselves to RULE & DESTROY America... they still have enough sanity to wear the THINNEST VEIL - PRETENDING not to be what they are - ALL of the SAME TRIBE, ALL judeo supremacists, ALL AMERICAN-HATING saboteurs !!
NEO-LIBERALISM - NOTHING 'liberal' bout it !! IN BED with RADICAL RIGHT-WING DICTATORS & mass-murder SADISTIC, satanic DESPOTS !!!
Not just AMERICA's NEO-CON JEWS IN BED with HEAD-CHOPPING SAUDIS...
but TONY BLAIR - IN BED with MASSACRES WHITEWASHING non-Arab DICTATOR
The CFR's AGENDA is NOT a big secret !!
HELP ISRAELIS KILL PALESTINIANS.. and KEEP GOING through SYRIA, EGYPT (libya's already a done-deal!) IRAQ, IRAN, on to AFGHANISTAN, PAKISTAN, KAZAKHSTAN... UKRAINE Georgia (done deal)... on to RUSSIA... EUROPE, and USA !!!
In an excellent editorial that we have been meaning to post and discuss for the past few years,
former official and writer Bruce P. Cameron discusses the BRILLIANCE of PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN saying "NO!" to the NEO-CONS... who wanted to PERPETUATE the "COLD WAR" against Russia, against the "Soviet Union" ETERNALLY - as a means of CONTROLLING the ENTIRE AMERICAN ECONOMY, directed towards WAR (military) spending.
PRESIDENT REAGAN HAD THE AMERICAN COMMON SENSE and GOOD GRACE - born of an optimistic American outlook - to immediately realize that the US-USSR military arsenals and nuclear ARMS RACE would (sooner rather than) or later LEAD TO NUCLEAR WAR - even during times of low-stress conflict, machine failures could drive both the U.S. & 'Soviet' missile systems to HAIR-TRIGGER LAUNCH status.
Quite the opposite of MEDIA PORTRAYALS of President Reagan as being almost senile and with the early onset Alzheimer's disease; PRESIDENT REAGAN FORCEFULLY SIDELINED his "NEO-CON" career war industry apparatchiks and "advisors" - and insisted on a massive NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT TREATY with Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Because the JEWISH BILLIONAIRES, the Jewish WAR LOBBY, and their many collaborators and complicity "goyim" gentile partners in crimes & war profiteering STILL FEED LIKE VAMPIRES on WARS today, President Reagan's contribution to ENDING THE COLD WAR and SAVING HUMANITY from nuclear war have been marginalized and all but dismissed by "the mainstream media" & academia, i.e. by "conventional wisdom."
But in ENDING THE COLD WAR - WITHOUT A SHOT FIRED IN ANGER - by NEGOTIATING PEACE & disarmament with Gorbachev, PRESIDENT REAGAN IS a genuine hero... and WE WHO ARE "liberal" believe that President Reagan did, indeed, save America & humanity from an inevitable "Cold-War" nuclear weapons conflict - which, we believe would certainly have happened had President Reagan been killed in that assassination attempt, and had FORMER CIA DIRECTOR (which is to say, Wars Profiteering & intel surveillance overlord) George H.W. Bush (Sr.) become president... there would have been NO disarmament treaty with Gorbachev, there would have been NO "peaceful end of Cold War" and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact would have been much, much bloodier.
=================================
Time to End the Neocon Con Game
By Bruce P. Cameron December 17, 2009
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/121709a.html
As Washington’s long debate on the Afghan war unfolded, one group had an unhealthy advantage though – based on its record – it should have had no influence at all.
These are the neoconservatives, and they have captured The Washington Post’s editorial pages along with other outlets of elite opinion.
ver the past three decades, the neocons have carved this important place for themselves in Washington by purporting to stand for liberal values, such as democracy and human rights, while using those worthy goals to justify the frequent use of military force.
For the neocons, war also is not just a last-resort option. Rather, it is how they have gained – and how they maintain – their prominence. When the United States is at peace – or without a war looming – the neocons are at a loss.
(Of course, one of the signature characteristics of the neocons is that few have served in the military next to the soldiers whose blood the neocons so reflexively are willing to spill as a “solution” to nearly any problem. As elite intellectuals, the neocons view soldiers from inner-city or small-town America as expendable for the grander cause.)
What the neocons do excel at is the internal Washington policy debate. They are well-schooled and self-assured; they are fierce debaters; they understand media; and they don’t hesitate to question the patriotism or toughness of anyone who disagrees with them.
On the Iraq War, the neocons were the ones who gave inspiration to two of their own, L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, head of the occupation, and Douglas Feith, Under Secretary for Policy in the Defense Department, who was responsible for day-to-day Pentagon operations in Iraq in 2003.
In eight days – after the U.S. invading force had ousted Saddam Hussein’s government – Bremer and Feith changed the whole tenor of the occupation from a quick get-in and get-out to a complex nation-building scheme that was designed to bring free-market “democracy” to Iraq.
Bremer and Feith did this by abolishing the Iraqi army and the civilian bureaucracy, thereby placing American solders in the middle of a Sunni insurgency that followed soon afterwards.
Neocons Abandoned Reagan
The neocons also have claimed as their chief credential, their participation in Ronald Reagan’s muscular foreign policy at the end of the Cold War. In reality, however, they abandoned Reagan from 1985 on, when he began the real work of ending the Cold War by negotiating with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
In his first term, Reagan was a neocon favorite, treating the Soviet Union in the black-and-white manner that the neocons prefer. He coined the phrase “evil empire”; promoted guerrilla warfare against leftist governments; and built up the U.S. military budget along with introducing the Star Wars missile defense.
Neocons played a major role in the intellectual architecture of these policies: Richard Perle on nuclear strategy, Elliott Abrams on the Nicaraguan contra rebels; Jeane Kirkpatrick on the immutability of leftist dictatorships.
However, as Reagan rethought the nuclear stalemate, the President became intellectually prepared, even eager, to embrace Gorbachev as a man who was sincere about changing the Soviet Union.
In Gorbachev, Reagan found a negotiating partner who would join in a game of give-and-take, and Gorbachev gave more than he took. Gorbachev was also capable of grand intellectual leaps.
At Reykjavik in October 1986, Gorbachev proposed eliminating all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. He renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine that had called for using force to keep Eastern Europe in the Soviet orbit.
Gorbachev and his commitment to perestroika – the restructuring of the Soviet system – confounded neocon ideology, which held that only force could roll back the Soviet empire and uproot its allied governments around the world.
The neocons had no intellectual framework for accepting the changes occurring under Gorbachev. The neocon view remained frozen: there would always be a Soviet Union; there would always be a Cold War; Gorbachev's reforms were a trick.
Perle kept insisting that the Soviets would revert to type and Reagan should make no substantial moves toward them. Kirkpatrick agreed, after all it was her doctrine that leftist dictatorships could not evolve toward democracy. Both eventually resigned.
To the neocons’ dismay, Reagan joined in the liberal give-and-take approach toward negotiations. Reagan “had an Emersonian sense of the becoming and unfolding of all things,” in the words of his biographer John Patrick Diggins. Reagan never saw the Soviet Union or nuclear weapons as permanent.
Reagan’s engagement with the Soviet Union in his second term could be viewed as a continuation of the gradual, fits-and-starts winding down of the Cold War that began with John F. Kennedy’s arms-control outreach to Nikita Khrushchev in the 1960s, through Richard Nixon’s Soviet détente in the early 1970s and Jimmy Carter’s emphasis on human rights which put the Soviets on the defensive in the late 1970s.
In that analysis, Reagan’s first term was more an anomaly than a turning point. But if that historical narrative were accepted, then the neocon war strategies would be viewed as unnecessarily brutal, inflicting widespread death and destruction in places like Central America, Angola and Afghanistan while accomplishing little.
So, in the years after Reagan engaged Gorbachev and Gorbachev’s perestroika sped the end of the Cold War, the neocons used their extraordinary influence in the opinion circles of Washington to reshape the history.
Rather than seeing the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as an outcome driven by Moscow’s own internal failings combined with a half century of Western containment policies – capped off by Reagan’s collaboration with Gorbachev – the neocons claimed that it was their application of force in the 1980s that did the trick.
The neocons, who had abandoned Reagan early in his second term, re-embraced him. They then whitewashed Reagan’s second-term emergence as Gorbachev’s peace partner and locked in the memory of Reagan’s “evil empire” phase.
For instance, neocon intellectual Joshua Muravchek called Reagan the arch-neocon, which is perhaps the greatest intellectual theft of the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first centuries.
Neocons Screw Up Iraq
Having reinvented themselves as “winners of the Cold War,” the neocons became fixtures at key Washington think tanks and at prominent policy magazines. They became talking heads on the Sunday talk shows and wrote influential foreign policy pieces for major newspapers like The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
So, by the time George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, the neocons were ready for phase two, with new plans for flexing American military muscle around the globe. Neocons filled key positions in Bush’s young administration, especially inside the Pentagon and the White House.
To replace the Soviet Union as the evil enemy, neocons targeted hard-line Arab states and looked forward to a “war of civilizations” with Islamic militants. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 opened the way for these ambitious neocon plans to remake the Middle East through violent regime change.
Within nine days of the 9/11 attacks, the neocon Project for the New American Century (PNAC) announced to the world:
“Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
The PNAC had been organized by William Kristol, editor of the neocon magazine The Weekly Standard, and Robert Kagan, a contributing editor. The signers of PNAC’s letters and policy prescriptions read like a who’s who of the neocon community.
Yet, in their drumbeat for invading Iraq, the neocons were wrong about many of the supposed “facts” used to rally a frightened American public behind the neocon agenda. They were wrong about Iraq’s WMD stockpiles, about Saddam Hussein’s links to al-Qaeda, and about how the U.S. military conquest of Iraq would terrify other U.S. adversaries – like Iran, Venezuela, Syria and Lebanon – into retreat.
But perhaps the most costly neocon error was the mismanagement of the Iraq occupation.
Originally, Gen. Jay Garner was put in charge. When he arrived in Iraq after the invasion, he hoped the occupation could be over in 90 days. His plan was to find and eliminate any weapons of mass destruction, get the Iraqi government working again, hold a quick election to select new Iraqi leaders, and leave.
Soon, however, Garner – with little staff and less money – found himself in an uphill bureaucratic battle with powerful neocons at the Pentagon. Toward the end of April 2003, he was fired.
In his place came the new head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Jerry Bremer, who made common cause with Doug Feith, the Pentagon’s Undersecretary for Policy. The pair made key decisions that effectively destroyed the Iraqi bureaucracy and military.
Bremer and Feith put more than 500,000 Iraqis on the streets in one week, including disgruntled soldiers who kept their guns and seasoned bureaucrats who knew how to build an organization. These people would become the backbone of an insurgency that would kill more than 4,300 American soldiers.
The violent disorder in Iraq also created fertile ground for al-Qaeda extremists to put down roots. Though Islamists had been kept in check by Saddam Hussein, they flourished for a time as the neocons organized a long-term U.S. occupation of Iraq. Extremist violence was soon ripping the country apart.
Neocon Crisis
The Iraq War disaster and the growing American public awareness of the neocons’ central role in the catastrophe created a new crisis for the neocons. But they still had an important card to play – their dominance of the opinion centers of Washington.
Much as the neocons rewrote the closing narrative of the Cold War – by whiting out Reagan’s second-term collaboration with Gorbachev – the neocons claimed that their courageous support for George W. Bush’s Iraq troop “surge” in early 2007 brought the violence under control and “won” the war.
Over the past two years, this story of the “successful surge” has essentially rehabilitated the neocons. Yet the surge was only one of many components that contributed to the lessening of the Iraqi bloodshed, and the surge was possibly one of the least significant.
In 2006, before the surge began, Sunni tribal leaders had turned against the excessive violence of al-Qaeda’s Iraq faction under the leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The U.S. military also had begun paying the Sunni leaders to turn their guns on al-Qaeda extremists, a process that became known as the Sunni Awakening.
In June 2006, Zarqawi’s location was betrayed and he was killed by a U.S. airstrike.
The sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite also began burning out as the two groups, which had once lived side by side in peace, retreated to their own enclaves, separated by concrete walls running through Iraqi cities. With the targets of sectarian violence harder to reach, the killing declined.
There were other important factors unrelated to the surge, like the decision of the anti-American Shi’a leader Muqtada al-Sadr to order his militias to demobilize. By 2008, it also became apparent to Iraqis that their government would succeed in forcing the Bush administration to accept a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal, thus calming down those insurgents motivated by nationalism and hatred of foreigners.
Yet in the neocon domain of Washington, the decline in Iraqi violence was simply explained as the “surge worked.” Despite the horrendous loss of life and the war’s cost of some $900 billion, the neocons were largely forgiven and kept their prized spots on the talk shows and op-ed pages.
Manichean World View
Another signature characteristic of the neocons is that they far better understand how to shape perceptions in Washington than to deal with realities in other countries. Indeed, despite their confidence in expounding about foreign policy, they really don’t know much about specific countries or regions.
After all, such detailed knowledge would disrupt their easy prescription of more war, since anyone who truly knows a country and its people would not so casually advocate violence or arrogantly dictate its domestic policies.
But what the neocons do know is what sells in Washington. So, they have consistently professed their love of “democracy” and put it at the center of what they do.
In my view, all the neocon hoopla about spreading freedom is a public relations device to put a patina of democratic nobility on right-wing, often repressive governments that the neocons view as desirable allies.
Too many times in the 1980s, I saw neocons rush to embrace governments that may have shown some democratic promise, but still had deep-seated human right problems.
However, by making “democracy” at least a rhetorical goal, the neocons were picking up on a favorite theme of Ronald Reagan, who prescribed “democracy” as a necessary cure for leftist dictatorships even as he made excuses for brutal right-wing regimes in countries such as Argentina and Guatemala.
Though Reagan deserves credit for recognizing the promise of Gorbachev’s initiatives to resolve the Cold War, Reagan viewed the Third World with a Manichean eye, seeing too much "good versus evil" and overlooking the complexities of any specific country, as the neocons did.
One of the most tragic examples of Reagan’s distorted Third World vision was El Salvador.
In the early 1980s, tens of thousands of Salvadorans – including Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, four American churchwomen and six civilian leaders of the political opposition – were butchered, but Reagan and the neocons insisted on viewing the violence through a Cold War lens. They deflected guilt away from the right-wing regime in order to justify increasing U.S. military aid.
After a series of elections put a Christian Democrat at the head of the government – even as the military continued its brutal counterinsurgency practices in the field – El Salvador faded as an issue of controversy in U.S. political circles. (The civil war was resolved only after the Reagan administration ended and more pragmatic leaders, including Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Connecticut, and Salvadoran exile Leonel Gomez, stepped forward with new approaches.)
The Contra War
By the mid-1980s, El Salvador had been replaced at the top of the neocons’ Central American agenda by Nicaragua, which emerged as a test of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s theory that a Soviet client state could only be dislodged by force – that reform was impossible.
In December of 1985, I found myself, a liberal, supporting the contras in their war with Nicaragua’s leftist government. In this heresy, I had been joined by three other Democrats: Bob Leiken, the late Penn Kemble, and Bernie Aronson.
One night we gathered at Kemble’s house to receive a visit from Elliott Abrams, the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, who was accompanied by Robert Kagan, Abrams’s personal assistant, and a State Department officer.
Abrams had been in his job for only three months, but he had been well briefed on who the Sandinistas were and what they had done.
He spent some time describing the contents of a weapons-bearing truck that had been blown up in Honduras, transiting from Nicaragua to its destination, a leftist rebel camp in El Salvador. He knew the contents, and the backgrounds of the people who had been driving it. He knew a lot about the Sandinistas.
But Abrams knew next to nothing about the contras, especially the rifts between the civilian and military leadership.
When Abrams and Kagan finally left, the four of us sat stunned, speaking not a word. Although each of us had our neocon friends, we were not ourselves neocons. To us, it was important who the contras were and what they were fighting for.
With this unwillingness to master details about the excessive violence and troubling corruption within the contra movement, the Reagan administration’s neocons could not fashion a sensible policy that would inspire widespread support inside Nicaragua.
The neocons could not understand the dreams for Nicaragua of the two moderate leaders – Arturo Cruz and Alfonso Robelo – whom they had convinced to join the contras. Each battle that Cruz and Robelo had with the old contra leadership started out on a very idealistic plane and wound up as a fight for jobs and money.
Cruz and his associates had big ideas about middle-class recruitment, but in the end his aides only struggled for a stipend for Cruz and for someone to fill the human rights slot in the contra leadership. Finally, after 2 ½ years of futility trying to secure reforms, Cruz resigned for good.
That following Monday, Robert Kagan went to the morning State Department staff meeting with a paper bag on his head, to announce to his colleagues that he was a dunce for supporting Cruz for so long. In my view, he should have brought dunce caps for his colleagues who had resisted Cruz’s initiatives.
Kagan knew very well that Cruz had finally resigned because of a message brought to him by someone from Elliot Abrams’s office. Cruz was told that he would not be allowed to challenge Enrique Bermudez, the notoriously corrupt head of the contra army, over the issue of civilian control of the contra military forces.
In tearing up a contra unity document that had accepted civilian control, Bermudez had said, “I have signed hundreds of agreements and have never complied with any of them.”
Cruz was told he could not hold Bermudez accountable for what Cruz had been hired and rehired by the Reagan administration to do – lead. After Cruz resigned, the administration never won another major vote on aid to the contras.
Nicaragua II
By July 1987, the Nicaraguan conflict was in a standoff, both in the field and in Washington where Reagan and his team wanted to overthrow the Sandinistas and the Democrats in Congress did not.
At that point, House Speaker Jim Wright agreed to a joint statement with Reagan regarding a peace plan for Nicaragua. Its formula was simple: in exchange for the Sandinistas allowing free elections there would be no more contra aid and the contras would be demobilized.
This plan was issued on a Monday; by Friday night it was one of two peace plans being considered by five Central American Presidents. At the end of Saturday night, there was tentative agreement on the plan by Costa Rica’s Oscar Arias, which was essentially the same as the Wright-Reagan plan: elections in exchange for an end to the contras.
Hesitation by Honduras, which had become the major staging base for contra military operations, was overcome by the indirect intervention of Wright and the plan became binding on all Central Americans by Sunday morning.
The Arias Accords were not self-executing, however. Arias, Wright and other members of the Democratic leadership of the House had to intervene forcefully with the Sandinistas and occasionally with the opposition.
Reagan also balked. Even as he opened up to Gorbachev on the world stage, he continued to empower the neocon hardliners on Central America. Reagan refused to let Secretary of State George Shultz send his negotiator to strengthen provisions of the Arias Accords.
Instead, Reagan backed Abrams in his hostility to the Arias plan. Reagan and Abrams staked everything on a Feb. 3, 1988, vote on providing more aid to the contras, which they lost 219-212.
By failing to show flexibility, Reagan didn’t share in the success in Nicaragua that was achieved with the Arias Accords by opening up the political system. In February 1990, abiding by the accords, the Sandinistas held an election and lost 55 pe