Zonie63
Posts: 2826
Joined: 4/25/2011
From: The Old Pueblo
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
No matter how many times I encounter it, I will never get used to the sheer ugliness of neo-con belligerence. It's beyond sad and sickening. It's beyond words. The only nice thing I can say about your perspective on things is that you don't try to sanitise the ugliness or brutality of your policy bankruptcy.
To some extent, I agree with you, although I wouldn't single out neo-cons exclusively regarding America's favoritism towards Israel and our overall Middle Eastern policies, since those policies were originally formulated by Democrats and only copied by Republicans for reasons of political expediency. Republican-supported isolationism prior to WW2 was no longer politically viable, as it had lost out to Democratic-supported interventionism. Both parties ended up with the same foreign policy goals and geopolitical aspirations, although they differed on how to achieve those goals. The Republicans may have felt that, since they couldn't go back to their isolationist ways, they could offer a political alternative of becoming even more aggressive and belligerent in pursuing America's foreign policy goals, while painting the Democrats as "too soft" and letting our enemies walk all over us.
Simply put, the Democrats originally declared who the "enemy" was, while the Republicans responded with "Okay, if they're the enemy, then this is how we must deal with them." The main trouble was that neither party had much of an understanding of the outside world and tended to portray it as some mythic struggle of "good vs. evil." That's the key thing in understanding the kind of belligerence you're addressing, since if one is dealing with "pure evil" through and through, then belligerence would be justified and understandable.
This perception of America's "enemies" has been fostered and propagated by both main political factions in America, as well as both the news and entertainment media. Likewise, America's self-image as "defenders of freedom and all that is good and righteous" has been similarly propagated by both parties. The belligerence is the result of these perceptions involving multiple sacred cows in the American political consciousness, embraced by both liberals and conservatives alike.
Liberals tend to be vulnerable on this issue because they can't ever directly challenge the perceptions of the outside world, since they're partly responsible for formulating those perceptions.
quote:
Fortunately the neocon approach to foreign affairs is so thoroughly discredited inside the USA that is has been consigned to the dustbin of history and will never be revived. Unfortunately this realisation is yet to occur to the Netanyahoos and other belligerents of the Israeli Right. One of the more pleasing aspects of detente with Iran will be a commensurate reduction in the ability of war mongering Zionists to dictate and influence events.
All of which will make the world a safer place, much to their publicly stated disgust.
I wouldn't consign that approach to the dustbin just yet. It's not so much the neo-con approach as much as it is the perception that leads to that approach. Both parties seem to agree wholeheartedly that America has a leading role in the world and that it's our job to "do something" whenever there's some crisis out there to deal with. They only differ on what "we" should actually do. They may differ over how to do the job of being the "leader of the free world," but they don't question that we have the job or how we got it, and that's where both major parties have erred. It's easy to condemn the "bad cop" and his approach, but strictly speaking, the "good cop" ain't much to crow about either. They both have the same goals and objectives, and it's those goals and objectives which need to be questioned.
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RE: Iran - 
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