Tag: neocons

Nuclear Myths Continue To Fuel Neocon Fantasies

In a recent televised rant on the Fox News Channel, the neoconservative publicist Mark Levin made the eye-opening claim that the current US-Israeli War on Iran is “every bit as important as World War Two.” Still more, according to Levin, the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon (for which there is approximately zero evidence), requires us, as good citizens to rally around the President and the military. Not surprisingly, Levin also noted that President Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons against Japan saved “a million men” by forestalling a US invasion of the Japanese Home Islands (the inference being: Trump should do likewise). Truman’s decision to incinerate Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs remains a topic (among a number of others) with which we Americans largely deal in the counterfeit currency of myths.

Despite the conclusions of the US Bombing Survey, that “certainly prior to December 1, 1945, and in all probability prior to November 1, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated,” few myths are as entrenched in the psyche of America’a media and political elites as the claim that Truman’s decision (invariably valorized as “brave”) to incinerate a quarter of a million civilians – mainly women, children, and elderly – in Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war in the Pacific.

The claim that Truman’s decision saved countless American lives has grown to proportions that would have surprised, if not shocked, Truman’s own military high command. President George H.W. Bush, himself a veteran of the Pacific campaign, claimed that the atomic bombs saved the lives of half-a-million US servicemen.

The record, however, rebuts the myth.

Truman’s military advisers disagreed with Truman. Five-star Navy Admiral William Leahy, who served as Roosevelt and Truman’s chief of staff, felt that the bombs were “of no material assistance in our war against Japan.” The Japanese, said Leahy, “were already defeated and ready to surrender.” Leahy believed Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons had “adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” Likewise, Admiral William F. Halsey, Commander of the Pacific Fleet, noted that, “the Japs had put out a lot of peace feelers throughout Russia long before” Truman decided to drop the bombs. Two weeks after the nuclear attacks, General Curtis LeMay publicly criticized the decision, saying, “The war would have been over in two weeks. . . . The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

The myth that the bombs “saved” a million US servicemen who would have otherwise perished in the invasion of the Home Islands came from the pen and imagination of the man who would become among the most infamous strategists and apologists for the War in Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy.

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America Needs a Regime Change

The American people need the Iran war like a fish needs a bicycle. For our politicians and permanent bureaucrats, it’s a different story.

The political class, adrift after the Soviet Union fell, needed a new animating mythos. Neoconservatives taught them to experience preemptive war against tinpot tyrants as a civilizational crusade. The Middle East – where America’s “greatest ally” faced existential threats – offered the ideal stage for the clash between order and barbarism.

Here was the role of a lifetime: to call the shots on a world-historical mission that cast unilateral hard power as virtue. No wonder they cling to it, even after every failed​ regime-change war.

President Donald Trump’s vow that he would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon was one of the few moments to draw bipartisan applause during his recent State of the Union address. So what if the geopolitical center of gravity now lies in the Indo-Pacific? On February 28, our leaders reached for another bloody encore in the desert, another stab at playing Wyatt Earp.

Like every functioning addict, America’s ruling class has enablers. Defense contractors monetize its messiah complex, the media industry mythologizes it, and a pro-Israel advocacy network leverages it by converting Israeli geopolitical ambitions into U.S. military imperatives.

When Israel decided to attack Iran, it should have been a time for choosing. Instead, the Trump administration treated U.S. participation as inevitable. The only choice we had was the timing. We could either join Israel’s opening blow or wait until Iran retaliated against U.S. forces before initiating hostilities. America’s terms of entry into the Iran war demonstrate “alliance entrapment,” regardless of whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio conceded it or not.

The first rule of a war of choice is to sell it as a necessity. In the absence of a direct attack on the homeland, the White House has cycled through several rationales. These include preventing an “imminent” nuclear threat (of which no public evidence has been produced), destroying Iran’s missile arsenal, liberating Iranians from tyranny, protecting Israel, and demanding the Islamic regime’s “unconditional surrender.” Ultimately, it settled on an official justification that is nearly verbatim from a memo by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – a leading Iran-hawk think tank created to “enhance Israel’s image in North America.”

Since the war began, thirteen U.S. troops have been killed and 381 wounded, while the reported death toll across the Middle East is now in the thousands. If Trump opposed the 2003 Iraq War, why is he sacrificing blood and treasure in a strategically unwinnable regime-change operation? It appears that he objected to the outcome of that war and not the ideology that led to its failure. The “axis of evil” morality play always seduces those desperate to feel consequential.

The loudest case for Trump’s pursuit of glory in Iran was made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, dismantling the Shia theocracy and its proxy network would shift the regional balance of power in Israel’s favor. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch and “some conservative commentators” also reportedly pushed the President toward war. Given who the White House is now lionizing, it would be safe to infer that the latter includes big-name neocons Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro.

Contrary to what the Murdoch media entities and neocon cheerleaders claim, American tactical victories have not translated into functional success. Iranian missiles and drones still regularly strike U.S. bases, energy facilities, and civilian areas in our allied Gulf states. The Islamic regime remains intact and it has effectively closed off the Strait of Hormuz. Many of our Asian partners are reeling from the consequent oil and gas supply disruption.

Corroding Pax Americana is a small price for the ruling class to feel like history’s heroes. As the hostilities grind into a war of attrition, Taiwan and our other allies fear that the ongoing diversion of U.S. military forces from the Indo-Pacific will create an opening for Chinese adventurism.

But at home, defense industry-funded think tanks are marketing the conflict as if it closes that opening. Analysts from the Hudson Institute, for example, claim that the Iran war is the first act of a grand strategy to weaken China. They exaggerate China’s ties with Iran and overlook the U.S. military’s inability to conduct protracted wars in multiple theaters. This enabling narrative flips what is a strategic self-own into a 4D chess move.

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Trump Starts a Major Regime-Change War with Iran, Serving Neoconservatism and Israel

For decades, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American neoconservatives have dreamed of only one foreign policy goal: having the United States fight a regime-change war against Iran. With the Oval Office occupied by Donald Trump — who campaigned for a full decade on a vow to end regime-change wars and vanquish neoconservatism — their goal has finally been realized.

Early Saturday morning, the United States and Israel began a massive bombing campaign of Tehran and other Iranian cities. President Trump posted an eight-minute speech to social media purporting to justify his new war, dubbed “Operation Epic Fury.” Trump’ war cry was filled with the same slogans and clichés about Iran that Americans have heard from the carousel of bipartisan neocons dominating U.S. foreign policy for decades: Iran is a state sponsor of “terror”; it is pursuing nuclear weapons; it took American hostages forty-seven years ago (in 1979); it repressed and kills its dissidents, etc.

As if to underscore how fully he was embracing the very foreign policy dogma he vowed to reject, Trump invoked the Marvel-like “Axis of Evil” formulation that White House speechwriter David Frum wrote for George W. Bush at the start of the War on Terror. Iran’s government, President Trump proclaimed, is one determined to “practice evil.” This is how Bush — speaking of Iraq, Iran and North Korea — put it in his 2002 State of the Union address: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil.”

Trump left no doubt about the scope and ambition of his new war. This will not be a quick or targeted bombing run against a few nuclear sites, as Trump ordered last June as part of Israel’s 12-day war with Iran. There is nothing remotely constrained or targeted about any of this. Instead, this new war is what Trump called a “massive and ongoing” mission of destruction and regime-change, launched in the heart of the Middle East, against a country of 93 million people: almost four times the size of Iraq’s population when the U.S. launched that regime change war back in 2003.

That Trump claimed to have “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last June — just eight months ago — was not something he meaningfully acknowledged in his new war announcement, other than to vaguely assert that Iran somehow resumed their nuclear program. In fact, Trump seemed to delight in repeating the same triumphalist rhetoric that he used last year when he assured Americans that Iran’s nuclear program could no longer pose a threat as a result of Trump’s triumphant Operation Midnight Hammer.

In lieu of outlining any clear mission statement for this new war, let alone a cogent exit strategy, Trump offered a laundry list of flamboyantly violent vows. The U.S. will “totally obliterate” Iran’s ballistic missile program (which Iran could not use to reach the American homeland but which Trump admitted last June caused Israel “to get hit very hard” in retaliation). Trump also promised that the U.S. would “annihilate” Iran’s navy. And he told Iranians: “the hour of your freedom is at hand….bombs will be dropping everywhere.”

Trump also attempted to prepare the nation for caskets and body bags of American soldiers returning to the U.S. “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost; we may have casualties,” the President said. But, said the man who did everything to avoid military service including during the Vietnam War, mass death of American soldiers “often happens in war.”

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World War III Unfolding Before Our Eyes

The Neocons have won. Taking Venezuela followed the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis agenda to prevent Russia from installing nukes as a countermeasure for Ukraine. There are now even discussions about using military force to seize Greenland, but the most audacious direct slap in the face to Russia is the seizing of a tanker with a Russian flag, and Putin assumed would be enough to warn the US to keep its hands off it.

Russia had staked its reputation and geopolitical credibility on conferring official protection on the shadow-fleet oil tanker the Neocons pushing for WWIII have pursued with total disregard for the consequences. As the more than two-week pursuit of Bella 1 unfolded, Russia re-flagged the vessel with its own colors, renamed it the Marinera, and added it to an official Russian ship database. The Neocons do not give a shit. What they hell, they send other people’s children to die – never themselves. The re-flagging to a Russian ship was assumed it would say hands off or war. The Neocons want war. This is about the total destruction of Russia which they have been dreaming about since childhood. People like John Bolton joined the National Guard so he did not have to go to Vietnam.

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The New Neoconservatives

Nobody escaped 2020 without hearing of at least a couple of media personalities that became wildly popular amongst conservatives for abandoning the left. They themselves, though, framed things a little differently. “The left left me,” they proclaimed. There is something deeply revealing in this statement. These commentators didn’t move an inch to the right.

Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Bari Weiss, former op-ed editor at the New York Times and now editor-in-chief at CBS News and at her own publication The Free Press. Weiss earned respect from American conservatives in 2020 when she resigned from the Times, publicly accusing it of left-wing bias.

Weiss’s recent vault into editorial control of CBS News was backed by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder and world’s third-richest person Larry Ellison. Unsurprisingly, given her lack of qualifications, Weiss has stumbled in her impressive new role. 

Weiss’s town hall with Erika Kirk, the widow of assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk, garnered low ratings and drew criticism that it degenerated into “gotcha” moments featuring left-wing activists and Israel supporters in the audience. And the network’s credibility took a hit with progressives after Weiss’s decision to delay a 60 Minutes segment critical of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Despite her adherence to left-wing social policy and hawkish foreign policy, Weiss has found herself a leading gatekeeper of the right. What has she done with this power? The Free Press has made “combatting antisemitism” a major focus. It recently republished a speech by Ben Shapiro, a conservative pro-Israel commentator, that amounts to an effort to excommunicate Tucker Carlson, a critic of Israel, for alleged antisemitism. Other pro-Israel conservatives also grace the pages of the Free Press, including Eli Lake, Matthew Continetti, Niall Ferguson, Abigail Shrier, Douglas Murray, and Nikki Haley.

Bari Weiss and her so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” allies comprise our generation’s band of neoconservatives. Of course, not every hawk is a neoconservative, but the label aids understanding in the case of Weiss and her ilk.

The origins of neoconservatism can be traced back to the Trotskyite and social democratic left. The first generation of neoconservatives included Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Norman Podhoretz. Bell was a former editor of The New Leader, a prominent socialist and labor-affiliated magazine. He edited, alongside his friend Irving Kristol, The Public Interest, the neoconservatives’ publication of choice for many years. Kristol got his start as a member of the Trotskyite wing of the Young People’s Socialist League and then later moved towards hawkish liberalism. 

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The Rubio Doctrine: Neocons Are Back!

According to several recent news reports, the two major Trump foreign policy shifts last week are the handiwork of Marco Rubio, the President’s Secretary of State and (acting) National Security Advisor. As with all neocon plans, they will be big on promises and small on delivery.

First up, according to Bloomberg it was Rubio who finally convinced President Trump to take “ownership” of the US proxy war on Russia, and for the first time place sanctions on Russia. Up to this point President Trump chose to portray himself as a mediator between Ukraine and Russia. But with this move against Russia’s oil sector he can no longer credibly claim that this is “Joe Biden’s war.”

The Trump move followed a confusing few weeks since the Trump/Putin Alaska summit in August. After that meeting Trump dropped the neocon position that a ceasefire in the Russia/Ukraine war must occur before any peace negotiations. It was a sign that Trump was looking more realistically at the war. He also said he did not think Ukraine would win, which is pretty obvious.

A surprise call to Putin the day before Ukrainian president Zelensky was to arrive in town just over a week ago reinforced that position and Zelensky left Washington empty-handed. He was seeking Tomahawk missiles that could strike deep into Russian territory.

Then out of the blue President Trump last week announced through his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that the US would be sanctioning Russia’s two largest oil companies until Russia declares a ceasefire in the war before negotiations. That won’t happen, but what it does mean is that Rubio and the neocons have successfully gotten Trump to step on the escalation escalator. That is what they always do. It will be much harder to back down now.

At the same time the US Administration was jumping deeper into the Russia/Ukraine war, a long-time neocon dream was suddenly back in play. Although in Trump’s first term a “regime change” operation was attempted against Venezuela, it failed spectacularly. But the neocons have long dreamed of overthrowing the Venezuelan government – they almost got their way back in 2002 – and suddenly after several weeks of extrajudicial murder on the high seas in the name of fighting the drug war, President Trump announced that land strikes on Venezuela would begin soon.

He did mention that he might brief Congress on his plans for war on Venezuela, not that Congress can be bothered to care much one way or the other.

The neocon old guard that still dominates Washington foreign policy is taking a victory lap. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham was on the Sunday shows beaming over the conversion of “no regime-change wars” President Trump to “regime change wars” President Trump.

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The Neocons Have Finally Found a Way Into MAGA Hearts

“Neocon” may have become a dirty word, but after a few years, their agenda is back in play.

And no doubt many of their players, too.

After being banished to the wilderness for plunging the nation into a 20-year war, the neocons fell flat with the Trump base in Ukraine and lost the thread with MAGA in Israel. Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere are another matter. The neocons have evolved, and regime change is back on the menu.

How? Rather than pushing “democracy” and “freedom” like George W. Bush’s famous second inaugural speech at the height of the Iraq War, neoconservatives have adopted the prevailing MAGA/New Right language of “America First” to inject regime change back into fashion.

If you don’t think so, just listen to what Marco Rubio – once a reliable foot soldier for neoconservative foreign policy on Capitol Hill since his election to the Senate in 2011 – has to say about Nicolas Maduro today. He insists that Maduro is “not the President of Venezuela and his regime is not the legitimate government,” but a “corrupt, criminal and illegitimate (regime)” that undermines “America’s national security interests.”

Meanwhile, he calls Maduro an “enemy of humanity” who “has strangled democracy and grasped at power in Venezuela” and announced a $50 million bounty on his head. Since then, there has been a massive military buildup in the region and talk of bringing the lead narco terrorist to justice.

This hasn’t been lost on observers, even in conventional Right circles. “You thought I was joking when I said Trump was the greatest neoconservative president we’ve had in ages,” National Review’s Jim Geraghty exclaimed in a recent column.

Supporters of Trump say the president is still allergic to “regime change wars” and that the administration is only interested in short, sharp actions against drug cartels and Maduro. Yet Trump hasn’t fully denied that aspiration either. In fact, he teases a little about it every day. The President has even confirmed that he gave the CIA – who know a thing or two about assassinations and toppling governments – the authority to conduct covert operations in and around Venezuela.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.

So what is different about today? Trump’s populist base elected him because he espoused a nationalism that promised a foreign policy focused on American interests and our own backyard: cracking down on illegal immigration and drugs being top priorities. Going after cartels fits neatly into a “return of the Monroe Doctrine” and “pivot back to the Western Hemisphere.”

“Both inside and out of the administration there are many MAGA-aligned thinkers who want a more regionalized strategy in place of a globalist or imperial American foreign policy. They tend to be for less engagement with the Middle East and Europe and more attention to the Western Hemisphere,” noted Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy.

“Where that outlook intersects with neoconservatism is that the neocons have, of course, long wanted regime change and the promotion of liberal democracy in Latin America. Since there’s a fight on to define what the Monroe Doctrine means in the 21st century, the neocons have an advantage in that they already have a plan for Latin America and for Venezuela in particular.”

McCarthy points to neoconservative Elliott Abrams, who has probably set the record for Washington comebacks since his conviction in the Iran-Contra Affair. Abrams was in the thick of Reagan’s destabilizing attempts to overthrow communists in Latin America in the 80s. He has shown up in both Republican and Democratic administrations, always promoting regime change as a way to advance American interests in the region. He now runs the neoconservative Vandenberg Coalition and drove Trump’s failed policy to overturn Maduro during his first administration (Rubio was in on that too). Abrams is not on the inside today, but has been all over mainstream media for his quick takes on recent anti-narco military operations.

“There was less emphasis on the Monroe Doctrine in the first term, but now the neocons interested in Latin America are adapting their ideas for a Monroe Doctrine framework, and since there isn’t a fully articulated alternative on the non-neocon MAGA right, the neocons are in a position to influence the agenda,” charged McCarthy.

One may wonder who “they” are when the most visible neocons of the early 21st Century are now Never Trumpers who seemingly spend most of their time tweeting about “No Kings” and the total collapse of American democracy. Bill Kristol, David Frum, Elliot Cohen, Jen Rubin – they are part of a domestic commentariat who, even if they supported what Trump was doing in the Caribbean, wouldn’t say so publicly (except for maybe on Gaza).

The folks at the reliable neoconservative Hudson Institute, however, are railing against the realists (they call “isolationists”) in Trumpworld on Ukraine and Israel, and are now dipping their toe into the Americas. They hosted regime change advocates in a recent forum, where CSIS’s Eric Farnsworth trotted out the new language in support of regime change:

“I think in the biggest sense, to have Venezuela free and prosperous and return to democracy that is absolutely in the U.S. interest, to say nothing of, if I can say, the interests of Colombia and Brazil and Peru and Ecuador and Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean countries and the countries, frankly, in Europe where, like Spain, where Venezuela has intervened in elections and things like that.”

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Discredited Neocon Talking Points From The Iraq War Are Back, Lazily Re-Purposed For Iran

Remember all the infamous one-liners from the Global War on Terror? In the years after 9/11, when the neocon establishment in Washington was pushing ahead with its disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were everywhere. 

It’s a slam dunk case! We have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. We’ll be greeted as liberators. Islam is a religion of peace. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom.

Those last two are direct quotes from President George W. Bush, the man most responsible — whether through extreme naiveté or extreme duplicity — for propagating these ridiculous slogans and using them to justify decades-long wars that ended in ignominy for the United States. You’d think that after Iraq and Afghanistan this kind of rhetoric would be totally discredited. But you’d be wrong.

Over the past few days, almost since the moment Israel began bombing Iran, we’ve seen the reappearance of almost all the old GWOT rhetoric. Then as now, the purpose is to justify a U.S. military adventure abroad and gaslight the American people into supporting regime change in Iran.

For those of us who were in high school and college during and immediately after 9/11, who saw the propaganda play out in real time, it’s an amazing thing to witness what’s happening now.

In particular, the point about needing to stop Iran before it gets a nuclear weapon is almost word-for-word how Iraq hawks argued for a preventative war against Saddam Hussein in 2003. Iraq’s WMDs had to be destroyed, we were told, before they could be used in a terror attack against the U.S. that would dwarf 9/11. 

For those keeping track, we have been hearing about Iran’s impending nuclear weapon for at least 20 years. Tehran, we’re told, is always just months or weeks away from having deployable nukes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Iran was getting “extremely close” to a nuclear weapon — in 1996.

Similarly, the point about how we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here — a ubiquitous line in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 — is exactly what Netanyahu argued recently on ABC News. “You want these people to have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to your cities? Today, it’s Tel Aviv. Tomorrow, it’s New York. Look, I understand ‘America First.’ I don’t understand ‘America Dead.’” (It’s worth noting, too, that Netanyahu was a loud voice in the build-up to the Iraq War warning against Saddam’s non-existent nuclear program.)

Remember how we would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq? That was Vice President Dick Cheney’s line. Turns out the Iranians are also waiting to be liberated and will greet western militaries with open arms! After all, God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom, right? According to Mark Levin, who is old enough to know better, isolationists “stand in the way of Trump and Netanyahu transforming the Middle East” — as if transforming the Middle East is both a feasible and desirable thing for the United States to do.

It’s the same with all these neocon arguments. Remember Ahmed Chalabi? He was the western-friendly Iraqi dissident politician and founder of the Iraqi National Congress, which became a major source of evidence of Iraq’s WMD program and ties to Al Qaeda for the Bush administration. Chalabi himself was at one point floated as a possible post-Saddam leader of Iraq.

Yet nearly all the information Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress provided to U.S. intelligence agencies in the lead-up to the war turned out to be false, including information from an Iraqi defector codenamed named “Curveball,” whose first-hand descriptions of mobile biological weapons factories wound up in intelligence dossiers that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq. In the end, Chalabi’s fabrications were exposed (no WMDs were ever found in Iraq), and he was revealed as almost certainly an Iranian agent.

Now we have a new Chalabi: Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Shah of Iran, who this week released a pro-regime change video. “The Islamic Republic has come to an end and is falling,” he said. “What has begun is irreversible. The future is bright and together we will navigate this sharp turn in history. Now is the time to stand; it is time to take back Iran. May I be with you soon.”

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Pete Hegseth, a ‘Recovering Neocon?’

Politicians frequently “change their minds.” In principle, willingness to change one’s mind is a laudable trait, whether you’re a politician or any other type of person. To absorb new information, and then adjust one’s outlook in accordance with that information, is a prudent habit to cultivate for anyone who wants to engage constructively with the world. However, the propensity of political figures to “change their minds” usually requires an extra layer of critical examination, unless you’re inclined to just credulously accept their self-serving bulls**t.

When a political figure resolutely declares that they have an unflinching ethical or policy conviction, and then go on to abandon that conviction, at minimum this should obligate some explanation for the shift. If the explanation reflects a sincere and transparent reevaluation of certain facts or premises, that’s one thing to consider. If the explanation reflects naked expediency and opportunism, that’s another thing. If no real explanation is provided at all, that’s something else entirely. “Mind-changing,” thus, is not a virtue unto itself — nor is it necessarily a defect. The crucial factor is the accompanying explanation (or lack thereof), and how much soundness one ascribes to it.

For instance, if Bernie Sanders suddenly announced tomorrow that he was no longer in favor of imposing higher taxes on billionaires, that would certainly raise doubts as to the veracity and coherence of his life-long political project. If Thomas Massie declared he was suddenly in favor of the state controlling key economic sectors, that too would make one wonder about the fundamental reliability and consistency of his long-articulated worldview. So, while political figures are certainly free to “change their mind” about things, the rest of us are also free to make judgments about whether those “mind-changes” are credible.

How, then, to evaluate the claimed “mind-change” of Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense? In the recent past, Hegseth wasn’t just a casual supporter of the Iraq War — he was a full-blown professional pro-war activist and lobbyist, whose entire career was conjoined with his strident pro-war advocacy. Hegseth ran a group called “Veterans for Freedom,” whose explicit purpose was to pressure Congress to support the Iraq War and galvanize public opinion behind George W. Bush’s foreign policy, including by appearing in the media to make robust pro-war arguments — a role which Hegseth eventually marshaled into a gig on Fox News. As Hegseth fondly recounted in his 2020 book, American Crusade, one of the group’s primary tasks was to tour around the United States exhorting fellow citizens to join their pro-war cause. “We gave speeches aimed at building support for the war,” Hegseth recalled. “I believed in the mission we had in Iraq.”

But nowadays, Hegseth appears to be singing a different tune. In a podcast appearance last month, host Shawn Ryan asked: “Should we have been in Iraq?” To which Hesgeth replied: “I was a huge proponent of it at the time, but in retrospect, absolutely not,” adding, “I’ve been a recovering neocon for six years now.”

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Assad’s Downfall Proves Neocons Have Learned Nothing From Disastrous Middle East Meddling

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has fled his country, now under the protection of Vladimir Putin in Moscow. In only a few days, a regime that had withstood over a decade of brutal civil war crumbled into dust before the onslaught of a new rebel offensive.

Now, Syria teeters on the brink of tribal mayhem as disparate factions espousing differing strains of radical Islamism begin to squabble over the carcass and jostle for power. ISIS has even reemerged as part of the victorious rebel coalition, prompting U.S. airstrikes over the weekend.

But, on cue, the neocons crawled out of the woodwork to gloat, finding some solace in the bloodshed and mayhem after their recent electoral drubbing. In a little over 24 hours, they proved that they’ve learned nothing from over two decades of disastrous American meddling in the Middle East.

Unrepentant warmonger and Never Trumper Bill Kristol wasted no time waxing poetic on the carnage, posting on X, “The fall of Assad. On some days, one can believe that while the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice.” Perhaps the image of a toppled Assad statue reminded Kristol of when the same thing happened during the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq — back when people actually cared about what he had to say.

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