Neoconservative pundit William Kristol. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

By Robert Parry: The decisive defeat of Mitt Romney in the presidential race and the forced resignation of ex-Gen. David Petraeus as CIA director have marginalized America’s neoconservatives more than at any time in the past several decades, confining them mostly to Washington think tanks and media opinion circles.

The neocons bet heavily on a Romney victory as they envisioned a return to power, like what they enjoyed under President George W. Bush when they paved the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and dreamed of forcing “regime change” in Iran and Syria. During the campaign, Romney largely delegated his foreign policy to a cast of neocon retreads from the Bush era.

Yet, amid the wreckage of the past week – with Romney blamed for a disastrous campaign and Petraeus embarrassed by a tawdry extramarital affair – the neocons now find themselves without a strong ally anywhere inside the Executive Branch. And with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who sometimes sided with them, expected to leave shortly, the neocons could be even more isolated in the weeks ahead.

This reversal of fortune has led some key neocons to send out what amount to peace feelers to the Obama administration. The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Washington Post columnist (and Brookings Institution senior fellow) Robert Kagan have joined in urging Republicans to show more flexibility regarding their opposition to tax hikes on the wealthy.

Kristol made his views known on weekend talk shows, declaring on Fox News: “It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires.” Kagan penned an op-ed column for the Washington Post that stated: “It seems pretty obvious that a compromise will require both tax reform, including if necessary some tax increases, and entitlement reform, since those programs are the biggest driver of the fiscal crisis.”

Some on the Left have cited the tax flexibility of Kristol, in particular, as an indication of Republican willingness to compromise seriously with President Obama in a second term. However, the truth is that neocons have never been economic conservatives. Instead, they have favored lavishing money on military programs and financing warfare to implement their imperial strategy of imposing political change by force. The budget has never been a high priority.

A Split on the Right

Over the past three-plus decades, the neocons have joined with cultural and economic conservatives more as a marriage of convenience than as a sign of true affection and shared values. Now, as the Religious Right and the Ayn Rand ideologues face harder times politically, the neocons are pondering a trial separation, if not an outright divorce.

The signs of a split among conservatives may be welcome news for President Obama who has been contemplating a number of controversial foreign policy moves in the post-election environment, including reaching an accommodation with Iran over its nuclear program. Harsh economic sanctions on Iran appear to have made Iranian leaders more serious about striking a deal and Obama is expected to seek a resolution in the weeks ahead.

However, the neocons have remained hostile to any concessions toward Iran. If Mitt Romney had won the presidency, the neocons likely would have hijacked the sanctions from their stated goal of achieving Iranian concessions on nuclear issues and transformed them into an economic club to bludgeon “regime change.” That could have set the stage for another Middle East war.

The significance of Petraeus’s resignation as CIA director is that the ex-four-star general was one of the neocons’ last insiders who could be counted on to frustrate Obama’s negotiations with Iran. Last year, Petraeus complicated U.S.-Iranian ties by pushing a dubious story about Iran planning a terrorist attack in Washington.

The White House and the Justice Department doubted that Iranian leaders were implicated in the harebrained scheme to assassinate the Saudi ambassador by blowing up a Washington restaurant. But Petraeus’s CIA embraced the suspicions and won over the Washington press corps, which largely swallowed the story whole.

It has since turned out that the central figure in the plot, an Iranian-American car dealer Mansour Arbabsiar, was diagnosed by doctors from his own defense team as suffering a bipolar disorder. In other words, his lawyers say he has a severe psychiatric ailment that affected his grasp of reality.

Nevertheless, the blaring news of the terror plot – echoing across U.S. front pages and American TV screens – strained the delicate negotiations between the Obama administration and the Iranian leadership. So, Obama’s inner circle saw a silver lining in Petraeus’s sudden departure: this neocon ally will not be around to sabotage talks again.

The Accommodating Obama

After winning the presidency in 2008, Obama extended an olive branch to the Republicans, the neocons and much of the Washington Establishment by retaining President George W. Bush’s last Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Bush’s military high command, including Petraeus who was then head of Central Command and thus overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Amid media applause for this “team of rivals,” Obama also picked Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State. As a New York senator, Clinton had developed close ties to the neocons and generally supported their hawkish positions on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama’s generosity, which included a decision not to seek any accountability for war crimes committed by the Bush administration, won him little reciprocity, however. Secretary Gates and Gen. Petraeus, with the tacit support of Secretary Clinton, blocked Obama’s interest in hearing less aggressive options on Afghanistan. They essentially steered him into support of a major troop “surge.”

Behind the young President’s back, Gen. Petraeus even mounted a P.R. campaign in support of a larger and longer Afghan War. In 2009, when Obama was weighing what to do about Afghanistan, Petraeus personally arranged extraordinary access to U.S. field commanders for two of his influential neocon friends, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute.

“Fears of impending disaster are hard to sustain … if you actually spend some time in Afghanistan, as we did recently at the invitation of General David Petraeus, chief of U.S. Central Command,” they wrote upon their return when they penned a glowing report in about the prospects for success in Afghanistan – if only President Obama sent more troops and committed the United States to stay in the war for the long haul.

In mid-2011, Gates finally left the Pentagon, with Obama replacing him with CIA Director Leon Panetta, who had emerged as a trusted Obama adviser. To fill the CIA job, Obama named Petraeus partly to prevent the ambitious general from launching a political career as a Republican, including possibly becoming the GOP’s presidential standard-bearer in 2012.

Obama’s move was risky, in that Petraeus could use his position at the CIA to leak out information to his neocon allies that could undercut Obama’s foreign policies, a possibility that appears to have come to pass in the alleged Iranian assassination plot.

So, when the White House learned that Petraeus had entangled himself in a sex scandal, there was no rush to help the CIA chief extricate himself. Rather than sweeping the scandal under the rug and letting Petraeus stay on – as he apparently expected – or concocting a cover story for a graceful exit, the Obama administration let the story play out in all its messy details.

Decks Cleared

Between the outcome of the election and the departure of Petraeus, President Obama now has the chance to take full control of his foreign policy. The neocons also find themselves sitting on the outside looking in more so than at any time since the 1970s when they emerged as a group of hawkish ex-Democrats and embittered ex-Leftists who defected to Ronald Reagan.

Many neocons worked on Reagan’s presidential campaign in 1980 and were rewarded with prominent jobs on President Reagan’s foreign policy team, the likes of Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Frank Gaffney. Though their influence ebbed and flowed over the 12 years of Republican rule, the neocons established themselves as a potent force in Washington policymaking.

Even after President Bill Clinton took office, the neocons retained some measure of influence in his administration and became favorites on newspaper op-ed pages and at powerful think tanks, including some that were regarded as center and center-left, such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution.

The neocons reached the apex of their power under President George W. Bush when they persuaded the inexperienced Bush to respond to the 9/11 attacks by invading and occupying Iraq, which had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or 9/11.

Iraq had long been on the neocon target list as a threat to Israel. The neocons also envisioned using occupied Iraq as a base for forcing “regime change” in Iran and Syria, with the ultimate goal of allowing Israel to dictate peace terms to its near-in enemies, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestine’s Hamas.

The neocon hubris in Iraq contributed to the geopolitical disaster there as nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers died and hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted. Finally, neocon power began to recede. By the end of his administration, Bush was resisting pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and the neocons around him to bomb Iran.

Still, when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, the neocon influence remained strong enough in Official Washington that the new President left in place a number of key neocon allies, especially Gates and Petraeus, and named Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

Though Obama upset the neocons by completing the military withdrawal from Iraq, he accepted their plan for an expanded war in Afghanistan, and he continued much of Bush’s “war on terror,” albeit without the name.

Turning on Obama

Obama’s concessions garnered some favorable neocon commentaries in important news outlets, such as The Washington Post, but the neocons still rallied behind Mitt Romney’s campaign to oust Obama in 2012. Romney assembled a team of Bush retreads to write his foreign policy white paper, “An American Century.”

The title was an obvious homage to the neocon Project for the New American Century, which in the 1990s built the ideological framework for the disastrous Iraq War and other “regime change” strategies. Romney recruited Eliot Cohen, a founding member of the Project for the New American Century and a protégé of prominent neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, to write the foreword.

Romney’s white paper chastised Obama for pulling out the 30,000 “surge troops” from Afghanistan by mid-2012 and conducting a gradual withdrawal of the remaining 70,000 by the end of 2014. Instead, Romney’s white paper argued that Obama should have followed the advice of field commanders like then-Gen. David Petraeus and made withdrawals either more slowly or contingent on U.S. military success.

However, like Napoleon seeking to regain his former glory through an audacious challenge to his entrenched adversaries, the neocons encountered a Waterloo instead. Their strategic defeat began with Romney’s loss to Obama on Nov. 6 but it then grew worse with the humiliating resignation of Petraeus from the CIA. Now, the neocons are left with no major foothold within the Executive Branch.

But no need for tears. The neocons still retain their lucrative niches at prominent think tanks, as talking heads on TV and on influential op-ed pages.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From Huff Post:

WASHINGTON — Conservative commentator and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said Sunday the Republican Party should accept new ideas, including the much-criticized suggestion by Democrats that taxes be allowed to go up on the wealthy.

“It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It really won’t, I don’t think. I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer.”

“Really? The Republican Party is going to fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires, half of whom voted Democratic and half of whom live in Hollywood and are hostile?” he asked.

One of the biggest fights as Congress returns will be over taxes, as cuts put in place by former President George W. Bush are set to expire at the end of the year. Republicans want to extend those tax cuts for all income brackets, while Democrats want to raise revenue by allowing them to expire for wealthy Americans.

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By Paul R. Pillar: It has become almost a truism that foreign policy will not be a major determinant of the outcome of this year’s presidential election. Foreign policy has played a tiny role in the Republican campaign.

Because it takes two to tangle on any campaign issue, foreign affairs are unlikely to become prominent in the remaining eight weeks of the campaign despite any Democratic efforts to make them so, and despite one of the presidential debates in October being devoted to the subject.

Supporters of Mitt Romney spell out his last name. (Photo credit: mittromney.com)

One of the clearest measures of Republican preferences about foreign affairs as far as the campaign is concerned is how remarkably little attention Mitt Romney gave to the topic in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention. What little he did say cannot fairly be described as laying out policy but instead consisted of dispensing a few phrases about such things as throwing allies under buses.

The conventional interpretation of all this is surely correct: that the Romney campaign simply doesn’t see votes to be gained on foreign relations, in the face of what is generally seen as successful foreign policy by the incumbent and a difficulty by the challenger in identifying specific and significant things that he would do differently.

The Romney strategists evidently have concluded that any effort on their part to develop new and more substantive lines of attack on foreign affairs would only detract attention from their laser-like focus on blaming President Obama for everything untoward in the nation’s fiscal and economic affairs.

Daniel Drezner takes the conventional wisdom a step farther by arguing that insofar as Romney has appeared in his rhetoric to distance himself at all from Obama’s foreign policies, acting on that rhetoric would mean going against the current predominant preferences of the American people.

Citing findings in the recently released poll of American opinion on foreign policy conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Drezner observes that “most of America — and independents in particular — want pretty much the opposite of” what Romney says he wants regarding increased military spending and more hawkish policies toward Iran, Syria, Russia, China, North Korea and illegal immigration.

Drezner further notes that what is striking in the poll results is “how much the majority view on foreign policy jibes with what the Obama administration has been doing in the world: military retrenchment from the Greater Middle East, a reliance on diplomacy and sanctions to deal with rogue states, a refocusing on East Asia, and prudent cuts in defense spending.”

The Chicago Council’s poll, now conducted biannually, is one of the richest sources of data on American views on world affairs. This year’s survey provides additional food for thought regarding the role of foreign policy in the election by including a section that breaks down responses by self-identified Democrats, Republicans and Independents.

The Council’s own interpretation of results downplays the significance of partisan differences. The report states that “Democrats and Republicans are very similar in their views on foreign policy. Though they differ in proportion, only rarely do they outright disagree.”

That statement, however, understates the importance of the differences that do emerge. The report acknowledges significant differences on immigration and on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

For example, 58 percent of Republicans favor seeking United Nations authorization for a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, but only 41 percent of Democrats or Independents do. Without U.N. authorization, all groups oppose a unilateral U.S. strike, but this is markedly more true of Democrats (79 percent) and Independents (73 percent) than Republicans (57 percent).

One can ask this general question: If the challenger is not making foreign policy much of an issue, and if Republicans and Democrats have “very similar views” on most aspects of foreign policy, how much does the outcome of the election really matter as far as foreign policy is concerned? The answer is that it matters a lot, for at least three reasons.

One is that not all issues in foreign relations matter the same, and the few issues on which there is discernible daylight between partisans can turn out to matter a lot. That is certainly true of some of those Middle Eastern issues, with regard to basic questions of war and peace and the potential for getting the United States into big trouble.

A second reason is that leaders shape opinion in addition to being guided by it. One can see some of the effects of this in the partisan patterns reflected in opinion polls. There is no logical, or even demographic or sociological reason, why certain views about, say, health care ought to be correlated with certain views about Iran, but they are.

Many members of the public identify with a particular party and take their cues from leaders of that party as to what they ought to believe regarding foreign-policy issues on which they otherwise know little.

In this sense, leaders of both the governing and opposition parties have bully pulpits, but the most influential bully pulpit is that of the presidency. Especially if a president is most concerned about sustaining the support of his political base, inclinations disproportionately concentrated in the governing party may prevail over naturally arisen sentiments more broadly shared by the American public.

Third, an election determines not only who occupies the Oval Office but also what will be the ideological coloration of an army of political appointees who will have a great deal to say in making foreign policy. It is not always clear before an election who will win the appointment games that get played after an election, but one can at least see the possibilities and probabilities.

In this year’s contest, reelection of the incumbent would leave the overall coloration essentially unchanged, despite individual substitutions likely to occur in some key positions such as secretary of state. Election of the challenger would give a significant opening to neoconservatives who held sway in most of the previous administration, notwithstanding the non-neocons who also would be competing for positions and the presidential ear.

A recent and hugely costly and painful episode that illustrates all of these elements was the Iraq War. The outcome of the 2000 presidential election (and the 9/11 terrorist attack) made the war possible, even though the rhetoric of the 2000 campaign did not make it specifically predictable.

Neocons won enough of the appointment games so that they, in alliance with assertive nationalists in senior positions and an inexperienced president itching to get out from under his father’s foreign-policy shadow, were able to launch their Iraq project.

The mammoth effort to sell the war was so able to shape public opinion that a majority of Americans came to believe that the Iraqi regime and Saddam Hussein were involved in 9/11. The shaping was accomplished not through specific assertions by government officials but by a rhetorical drumbeat that continually linked Iraq and 9/11.

One can find a disturbing similarity in the Chicago Council’s survey results, even though Drezner is pleased to conclude that the poll suggests Americans “have become even more realpolitik” than they were a few years ago.

In one of the poll’s few tests of factual knowledge, respondents were asked what they believe is the current status of Iran’s nuclear program. Only 25 percent got it correct, based on the repeatedly and publicly stated judgment of the U.S. intelligence community: that “Iran is developing some of the technical ability to build nuclear weapons, but has not decided whether to produce them or not.”

Forty-eight percent thought that Iran has decided to produce nuclear weapons and is actively working to do so. Another 18 percent thought Iran already has nuclear weapons.

With politicians in both parties repeatedly beating the Iranian threat drum, this is another disappointing example of the power of rhetorical drumbeats over the minds even of Americans who have developed some views that otherwise look like realpolitik.

Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)

(Originally published on ConsortiumNews.com)

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By Bob Cesca: Holy hell, if we were only that lucky. Rush Limbaugh and his legion imitators in right-wing talk radio have lapsed into a collective freakout regarding the upshot of the dueling conventions and the polling numbers that point to the likely re-election of the president (if the election were held today). It’s not surprising given Mitt Romney’s pathetically awkward campaign against a much sharper and aggressive campaign from the president and the Democrats.

Rush Limbaugh led the charge with a rather fatalist comment about the future of the party, “If Obama wins, let me tell you what it’s the end of: The Republican Party. There’s gonna be a third party that’s gonna be oriented toward conservatism. I know Rand Paul thinks libertarianism. And I know if Obama wins, the Republican Party is gonna try to maneuver things so conservatives get blamed.”

Laura Ingraham joined in, “If you can’t beat Barack Obama with this record, then shut down the party. Shut it down, start new, with new people. Because this is a gimme election, or at least it should be.”

Interesting. It’s almost as if they compared notes considering how they said, you know, the exact same thing.

Others weren’t as hypertensive about the future of the party, but were just as concerned about the weakness of the Romney effort. Bill Kristol wrote, “It’s not enough to float like a butterfly. You have to sting like a bee. No sting, no victory.” And George Will said, “Mitt Romney does not have the feeling, the visceral, philosophically sound feeling for what’s wrong with the progressive movement in this country… But he doesn’t — what I’ve said before about him is conservatism is a second language for him. And he is still learning it. And it’s hard to learn this thing in the midst of a high-stakes presidential campaign.”

We all know where this will lead. Mitt Romney is predictable and impressionable. He might fire some his campaign staffers, sure. We can also expect much harder lines on abortion, tax cuts and austerity. But what we’re really going to get at this point is a campaign that will amplify its pandering to the far-right, and it can only mean a Romney campaign that’s leaning extra hard on the Southern Strategy far beyond its pre-convention flirtations with the racial dog-whistle approach. And that’s just the beginning.

Yet the problem with the Romney campaign all along isn’t that it’s been too centrist. In fact, it’s been way too interested in pandering to the Republican base and, in the process, it’s totally exposed Romney as a fumbly prevaricator who seems to have no idea where he stands on anything, and the addition of Paul Ryan to the ticket has effectively doubled the campaign’s inconsistencies, contradictions and befuddlement as Ryan has his own syllabus of equivocations, mostly based on his congressional voting record on the debt ceiling, abortion and other legislation that’s at odds with the Romney agenda. Additionally, Romney’s gawky and disingenuous attempt to seem “severely conservative” has not only heretofore fallen flat with the conservative base, but it’s also turned off many undecided moderate voters.

To repeat my familiar refrain: Keep going, Republicans! You’re doing great! If Romney decides to listen to the conservative talkers, this can only hurt the campaign.

Meanwhile, he could try to supercharge his energy level, but that’s contrary to his stiff, ungainly nature as an Uncanny Valley CG character. Can you imagine Romney getting crazy on the stump — Jennifer Granholm style? It’d be endlessly hilarious to watch him in his misshapen Costco Dad jeans and gingham shirts, shouting right-wing platitudes — his bulbous head barely moving upon its inflexible neck and upper body servo motors.

As far as the Republican Party disappearing after an Obama victory, Ingraham and Limbaugh are blaming the wrong guy for such an eventuality. In defense of Mitt Romney, the party was a big kerfuffled mess long before it elevated Romney to frontrunner status and the nomination. The fatal flaw of the party has been the abandonment of its principles in lieu of the unhinged Syphilitic tea party dementia infecting what’s left of its brain and forcing it to simply attack a fictitious caricature of President Obama, whether it means contradicting prior Republican ideas (cap and trade, individual mandate, etc.) or literally sabotaging the economy for political gain. Allowing a relatively small group of radicals to dictate the agenda of the party was a huge mistake. Instead of acknowledging the tea party with cursory lip-service, the Republicans impulsively jumped into bed (or was it a rickety lawn chair at a rally?) with the tea party and elevated it to a power status it should never have been allowed to attain. By consummating that union, the Republicans made it impossible to reach the middle for fear of a tea party backlash.

No, sadly, the Republican Party won’t disappear. It’ll just continue to stroke the far-right — marginalizing itself and augmenting its status as a dying faction of regional, white, angry, Christian troublemakers.

One final word of caution. This election isn’t over and, remarkably, it’s still frighteningly close. Romney can still win this thing and we should all assume that he will. And don’t rule out the Voter ID laws either — they were designed to help Romney and none of the polling outfits are taking them into consideration.

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I’m glad we have experts like Bill Kristol to tell us this stuff or else we would never know.

I’m curious: If Captain Milquetoast, lower-middle class get-along colorblind guys like me (remember, my life experience is largely the mean streets of suburban Florida and Maryland) react so poorly to this conservative swill, how do they think minorities who have experienced a hint of true racism feel?

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