Leo Strauss and the Neocons
the roots and thinking of the Neocons and the radical Islamists
BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. The series is subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear.
The film consists of three 1-hour parts, which were first broadcast in the UK in late 2004. It compares the rise of the American Neo-Conservative movement and the radical Islamist movement, makes comparisons on their origins and suggests a strong connection between the two.
Both believe that Western Civilization has become too liberal and decadent. Both believe it is a fight to the death. Both believe in the necessity of violence and war. Both believe that dying for the Just Cause is honorable.
The first part of the series explains the origins of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism.
Power of Nightmares 2-6 part 1 Baby its Cold Outside
Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet. May 19, 2003.
Many neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz are disciples of a philosopher who believed that the elite should use deception, religious fervor and perpetual war to control the ignorant masses.
What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a war?
A follower of Leo Strauss may just hire the "right" kind of men to get the job done – people with the intellect, acuity, and, if necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not detect.
The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article entitled 'Selective Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of Special Plans (OSP) – an agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.
what if we were to look at al qaeda as a radical and violent cult rather than some sort omniscient omnipresent enemy that has the power to destroy whole nations
and:
Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq,
Are the ideas of the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss a shaping influence on the Bush administration’s world outlook? Danny Postel interviews Shadia Drury – a leading scholarly critic of Strauss – and asks her about the connection between Plato’s dialogues, secrets and lies, and the United States-led war in Iraq.
By Danny Postel
10/18/03: (openDemocracy) What was initially an anti-war argument is now a matter of public record. It is widely recognised that the Bush administration was not honest about the reasons it gave for invading Iraq.
Paul Wolfowitz, the influential United States deputy secretary of defense, has acknowledged that the evidence used to justify the war was “murky” and now says that weapons of mass destruction weren’t the crucial issue anyway (see the book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: the uses of propaganda in Bush’s war on Iraq (2003.)
By contrast, Shadia Drury, professor of political theory at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, argues that the use of deception and manipulation in current US policy flow directly from the doctrines of the political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). His disciples include Paul Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives who have driven much of the political agenda of the Bush administration.
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from ICH
Powell’s UN Fiasco: Fresh and Festering
By Ray McGovern
06/02/08 "ICH" -- - Yesterday was a difficult day for Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. It was hard to celebrate the fifth anniversary of our first corporate memorandum, a same-day critique of Colin Powell’s Feb. 5, 2002 UN address, when we could not escape the reality that this speech greased the skids for death and destruction in Iraq and brought unprecedented shame on our country. We found no solace in the realization that those who saw our analysis should have seen disaster coming.
A handful of former CIA intelligence officers joined me in forming the VIPS movement in Jan. 2002, after we concluded that our profession had been corrupted to “justify” what was, pure and simple, a war of aggression. Little did we know at the time that a month later Colin Powell, with then-CIA Director George Tenet plumped down conspicuously behind him, would provide the world with a textbook example of careerism and cowardice in cooking intelligence to the recipe of his master.
Powell’s Prior Practice
It was hardly Powell’s first display of such behavior.
Those able to look past the medals and ribbons have been able to trace a pattern of malleability back to Powell’s early days as a young Army officer in Vietnam, and then in the 1980s as an Iran-Contra accomplice together with his boss Casper Weinberger, then secretary of defense. Weinberger was indicted for perjury but escaped trial when pardoned by George H. W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992. [See Chapter 8 of Robert Parry’s new book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, for more on Powell’s proclivity to pander.]
A year before his UN speech Powell winked at the introduction of torture into the Army’s repertoire, rather than confront President George W. Bush personally on the pressure that Vice President Dick Cheney was exerting to conjure up legal wiggle-room for torture. Instead, Powell merely asked State Department lawyers to engage White House lawyers Alberto Gonzales and Cheney-favorite David Addington, in what Powell knew would be—absent his personal involvement— a quixotic effort.
Powell’s lawyers put in writing his concern that making an end-run around the Geneva protections for prisoners of war “could undermine U.S. military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries.” Well, he got that right.
But when Gonzales and Addington simply declared parts of Geneva “quaint” and “obsolete,” Powell caved, acquiescing in the corruption of the Army to which he owed so much. We know the next chapters of that story—Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Powell’s instincts were right, but he lacked the strength of his convictions. It turns out that this key instance of abject obeisance—important as it was in its own right—was just practice for the super bowl at the UN.
Take care,
GORD.
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