IRAQ INVASION: A STRAUSSIAN MISTAKE?

Written by Kurt Nimmo
[Copyright (c) 2006 in the U.S.A. and
Internationally by Another Day in
the Empire (kurtnimmo.com),
and/or Kurt Nimmo.
All rights reserved.]

In Stuart Rosenberg’s classic film, Cool Hand Luke, Strother Martin, playing the Captain of Road Prison 36, tells Luke Jackson, played by Paul Newman: “What we have here is… failure to communicate.” As I read the news this morning, I am reminded of the film and this memorable line. Rupert Cornwell, writing for the Independent, tells us “the neo-conservatives who sold the United States on this disastrous war are starting to utter three small words. We were wrong.” Cornwell cites the examples of William Buckley, Andrew Sullivan (described as “an influential commentator and blogmeister”), the “patrician conservative columnist” George Will, Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and the disgusting William Kristol, all who apparently have second thoughts about the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Cornwell seems satisfied these neocon icons, actually little more than common criminals with expensive educations, have admitted they were “wrong” and have accepted “realistic Wilsonianism,” in the words of Fukuyama, or as Cornwell pegs it, neo-realism. “And if that brings a smile to the face of a certain former US high priest of realism with a pronounced German accent, who can blame him?” Cornwell concludes, apparently making reference to the Leo Strauss, the late student of Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, the former exploited by the Nazis and the latter having collaborated with them directly.

Cornwell fails to communicate the essence of the depth and severity of the Straussian neocon plot and instead concentrates on the “failure” of Iraq—and thus, as the hackneyed old saying runs, Cornwell misses the forest for the trees. Regardless of anything Fukuyama has written as of late, the Straussian neocons will not now “temper the idealism of the neo-conservative doctrine with an acceptance that some things are not so easy to change,” viz., the United States cannot deliver democracy to benighted Arabs and Muslims, as we are told, ad nauseam, Bush wants to do, or wanted to do before reality hit him upside the head.

Zalmay Khalilzad warns that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has opened “a Pandora’s box,” spreading “conflict,” as Cornwell describes it, across the Middle East. In fact, this is precisely what the Straussian neocons want—chaos and “conflict” spreading like an uncontrollable wild fire, scorching Muslim and Arab culture, eating away at the very societal cohesion of the region, thus leaving it decimated and malleable to reorganization along the lines envisioned by the Straussian neocons and the original architects of the plan, the racist Jabotinskyites in Israel. Cornwell, lost in the forest of corporate media spin and lies, is unable to see the tree planted by these devious Machiavellian co-conspirators.

Mr. Cornwell does not bother to take into consideration the trouble brewing over Iran’s illusory nuclear weapons, simply another pretext for more violence and misery, as a few neocons may step forward and admit “mistakes” over the invasion and occupation of Iraq while their fellows prepare to repeat those “mistakes” in Iran.

As noted above, the actions of the Straussian neocons, following a well-established pattern, are anything but mistakes. Iran realizes this. “The United States may have the power to cause harm and pain but it is also susceptible to harm and pain,” Javad Vaeedi, head of Iran’s National Security Council, declared as the United Nation’s Security Council was manipulated into place, setting it up for a re-run. “So if the United States wishes to choose that path, let the ball roll.”

Vaeedi was responding to Dick Cheney’s threat of “meaningful consequences” (code words for mass murder and destruction) if Iran continues to refuse to go prostrate. Vaeedi “declined to spell out precisely how Tehran would respond to Security Council pressure but experts told London’s Daily Telegraph that Iran’s options included driving up oil prices, blocking the passage of tankers through the Gulf, stirring more chaos in Iraq, fomenting violence against Israel or promoting terrorist attacks against the West,” in short, exercising its only viable options, since there is absolutely no way Iran can match the military prowess of the United States. Of course, in the weeks ahead, Iran will be vilified for attempting to defend itself, as the Iraqis are now vilified (resistance is not only futile, it is the evil handiwork of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi and the ever useful “al-Qaeda”).

It should now be obvious the Straussian neocon plan not only includes an effort to destroy Arab, Persian, and Muslim culture, but American culture as well. “The real question is not whether the American military can topple Hussein’s regime, but whether the American public has the stomach for imperial involvement of a kind we have not known since the United States occupied Germany and Japan,” Lawrence F. Kaplan, the neocon sidekick of William Kristol, remarked as the invasion of Iraq unfolded. “The theory behind this, developed by Michael Doyle, professor of international affairs at Princeton University, is that democratic governments are reluctant to go to war because they must answer to their citizens. And the history of liberal democracies, though comparatively short in the grand scheme of history, tends to buttress his point,” explains Bruce Murphy, writing for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Leo Strauss, the grand daddy of today’s Straussian neocons, was opposed to classical liberalism, as defined as the sovereignty of the individual, the very foundation of the philosophy of John Locke and Adam Smith. As Michael Doliner writes in a review of Shadia B. Drury’s Leo Strauss and the American Right, Strauss’ “vision was of a hierarchical society based on natural inequalities and welded together with the fanatical devotion state religion engenders,” an idea planted in his head in part by the Nazi Jurist Carl Schmitt, a doctrine mixed together into a dismal hodgepodge with heaping portions of bellum omnium contra omnes—war of all against all—cynicism extracted from the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. “Strauss’s hatred of liberalism is so virulent that he sees the struggle against it as a war, and in war all is fair. For this reason Straussians will use every dirty trick they can think of in the democratic arena in order to defeat liberalism. While doing so they will corrupt democracy itself. But since democracy is only a tool with which to defeat liberalism in order to institute the true Straussian hierarchical society, this is of little import. In the end they will jettison democracy if to do so is expedient.”

In fact, Bush, the useful idiot sock puppet, unelected, court-appointed president of the Straussian neocons, is in the process of jettisoning democracy—or rather, the principles of our once proud constitutional republic—as the NSA “scandal” and repeated attacks against the Bill of Rights make painfully obvious. For the Straussian neocons, those of us alarmed and moved to action by the in-your-face onslaught against the Bill of Rights are considered the enemy. “Opponents of the ruling cabal, whatever their stripe, are ‘them.’ Indeed, since the cabal of philosophers is deceiving everyone else, even those who have joined the cause out of religious zeal are, in a real sense, ‘them.’ A small circle of initiates who repel the advances of everyone else is a feature of the Straussian State. These initiates are philosophers who rely on reason, and nihilistic reason tells them there are no rules, none, in this domestic battle,” Doliner continues.

In order to construct the Straussian hierarchical society required to wage total, unrelenting, generational war, those opposed to the plan must be systematically eliminated, a process well under way with the illegal use of the NSA’s massive high-tech snoop apparatus. Of course, this apparatus is not employed, as we are assured by a complicit corporate media, to ferret out “al-Qaeda” telephone calls and email messages, but rather to locate and compile electronic dossiers on critics of the Straussians, who will be dealt with in coordinated manner after the next “Pearl Harbor” event occurs—and no doubt the Iranians will endeavor to provide this event after their country is brutally invaded, as Javad Vaeedi promises.

It is foolish to consider all of this a “mistake,” an unintended result of the over-zealousness on the part of a few “neoconservatives” who are in fact neo-Jacobins, murderous radicals, as Professor Claes Ryn and Paul Craig Roberts note. “More dangerous an enemy of the US and its traditional values than Muslims, neo-Jacobins have seized control of the Bush presidency and US foreign policy. They will stop at nothing to achieve their goal of World War IV in the Middle East,” Roberts warns. “The neo-Jacobins are rushing to get America involved in a general Middle Eastern war before Americans have time to think. The terrorist scare which worked the first time is being employed again. Once we have attacked other sovereign Islamic countries, we will have to bring back the draft in order to raise the necessary armies or resort to nuclear weapons…. If the American public falls for the second round of neo-Jacobin propaganda [in the current context, against Iran], neither do they deserve, nor will they have, liberty and democracy.” In fact, we are well on our way to a Straussian hierarchical dictatorship in America. Once the opponents are dealt with, either rounded up and forced into Halliburton constructed concentration camps or slaughtered outright, the Straussians will construct their nihilistic paradise of pseudo-masculinity based on a chicken hawk war ethos, i.e., the bamboozled masses will be used as cannon fodder.

Not unlike Orwell’s dystopian world, the New America of Straussian fascism and total war will be unrecognizable to those of us who dream of resurrecting a constitutional republic based on a classical liberalism so reviled by the Straussian neocons, who we are told simply made “mistakes” and now wish to repent, or at least explain themselves. Of course, this fake and criminal contriteness is simply more deception, as one of the primary tenets of Straussian fascism is deception, a tactic used to great effect by Hitler and Nazis. Unfortunately, if we don’t get our act together and soon, America will suffer the same consequences of Nazi Germany, or more likely a consequence far worse.