THE MYTH OF "NEOCON" SUPREMACY AND THE PHOBIA OF "AMERICAN IMPERIALISM" Sam Wells

I don't worry about the so-called neoconservatives too much. Here's
why I do not see the "neocons" to be the bogeyman that some have been
led to fear and loathe: First, the relatively small group of what
may be referred to as "neoconservatives" (including Wolfowitz) in the
Pentagon do not really have a lock on U.S. foreign policy, as some
websurfers may have been led to believe. They constitute only one of
several factions within the Bush Administration, and their influence
has gone up and down.

Second, those we may call "neocons" in the Pentagon have less
influence now than they once did anyway. This is because some of
them have at least some "egg" on their faces for (apparently) having
been taken in by the PR glitz of Ahmed Chalabi, who is now in
disrepute and no longer supported by the Pentagon as someone they'd
like running things in the new Iraqi government. He was one of the
main sources of intel concerning WMDs and he also made the overthrow
of Saddam sound fairly easy. Of course, the jury is still out on the
exact truth about Chalabi: Is he really a spy for Iranian
intelligence, as some claim? Or, was he "our man" pretending to work
with the Iranians? Or, is/was Chalabi a very sharp, smoothe-talking,
slick operator working both sides (the iranians and the Americans)
against each other while seeking more wealth and power for himself?
Probably the only person who knows the answers for sure is Chalabi
himself.

Third, and the most important reason I am not too concerned about any
alleged neocon plot to take over the planet and impose any Global
American Military Empire (GAME) is that such an ambitious goal is
simply impracticable. Even if it were desirable, which it is not, we
Americans do not have the soldiers, the wealth, or the will to embark
on any such imperialist burden. Maybe some over-zealous "neocon"
somewhere actually believes this would be a good thing -- I don't
know -- but the fact is, it ain't gonna happen. The Pentagon has
barely enough soldiers now to handle terrorists and insurgents in
Iraq and Afghanistan. The Iraqi operation was not the easy in-and-
out job some might have thought it would be. Nobody in their right
minds can really think the U.S. is capable of controlling the whole
world militarily. And those who ascribe that motive to all
neoconservatives (or even Wolfowitz alone) have pretty much just set
up a straw man.

The power-lusting Left wants desperately to have a "fascist
imperialist regime" they can hate and focus their venom on to sort
of "prove" to themselves they were always right in their anti-
capitalist, anti-American rhetoric. It's a propaganda game. They
want to make Bush into a "Far Right" ideologue (which is laughable --
I wish he was) and use him as their Hate Object against whom they can
rebel (as they continue to rebel against their parents
psychologically), overthrow, and come to power themselves. The truth
is that Bush is a man of very mixed premises making policy decisions
largely by the seat of his pants. He often ignores his advisors
altogether and goes his own way. That may be good or bad, but it
does indicate he is much more independent of the kind of old
globalist agenda than his NWO-oriented father. Problem with Bush 43
is that you never know what he is gonna do. But he is not a Demokrat;
so, he must be hated by the Left. He is not their guy.

The U.S. is not an imperialist bully under Bush, for the most part.
Americans have neither the soldiers, the resources, nor the will to
take over and run the world militarily (or otherwise). But that
doesn't mean that conservatives and even neoconservatives do not have
very valid directions to contribute to U.S. foreign policy. America
need not, and indeed cannot, rule the world -- but it better start
really beefing up its military defenses and high-tech weaponry and
building its human intelligence up again to prepare (and thus ward
off) the coming war with Beijing as well as the on-going war against
islamo-terrorism. The real forces of imperialism in the world today
are Chinese socialist imperialism and anti-Western Islamo-terrorism
(which seeks to conquer the entire world and force it to submit to
and for Allah). This is hardly the time for America to begin any
unilateral disarmament and adopt a policy of ostrich isolationism.
The damage done by the Frank Church Committee in the 1970s has come
home to roost, but America's intelligence problems are even mnore
fundamental and must be addressed instead of swept under the rug.

As libertarians and real conservatives, we have serious disagreements with the so-called "neoconservatives"  -- especially in domestic policy and general philosphical attitudes.  I will have more to write about that in the future.  But those who fear and loathe the "neoconservatives" and "global U.S. imperialism" more than the regular anti-American Left and Red Chinese imperialism have lost reasonable perspective, it seems to me.