Wednesday, August 27, 2008

McCain's insane foreign policy advisers.

Glenn Greenwald has done a post today about the group of foreign policy advisers who are advising McCain and it really does make for some scary reading. These guys are nutcases.

As Greenwald states:

The foreign policy team exerting chief influence over John McCain is truly more extremist -- in a purer and more deranged form -- than the foreign policy team of the Bush administration. They're not only the most extremist faction in American political life, but also the most delusional. These aren't just the people who led the U.S. to war in Iraq -- though they are that -- but they're also the ones who actually believe that the Bush administration has been far too meek in its assertion of U.S. military force and too passive in its interference in the affairs of other countries. They want to accelerate -- massively intensify -- virtually every one of the polices that has brought the U.S. to such disgrace and near ruination over the past eight years. There is nothing "moderate" or "centrist" about any of them. John McCain is the Candidate of Bill Kristol and Joe Lieberman and John Bolton for good and clear reasons (including in Georgia): he's the best and most devoted instrument to advance their militaristic agenda.

Is there any real discussion of any of that? Hardly.
I am always extremely puzzled as to why, after eight disastrous years of Bush, that the US press don't make more of these guys and what their beliefs actually are. I mean we have James Woolsey, a guy who believes in the WWIV theory and who believes that the US has been at war with Islamists since 1979, when “they [Iranian revolutionaries] seized our hostages in 1979 in Tehran.”

Then there's Bill Kristol, a man who deserves to be laughed at every time he appears anywhere as the buffoon that he is, constantly making wrong predictions like these corkers:

The [Iraq] war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. […] History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.” [The Weekly Standard 3/17/03]

“There’s been a certain amount of pop sociology in America … that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.” [NPR, 4/1/03]

“We’re not in a civil war [in Iraq]. This is just not true….” [Fox News, 7/15/07]

So McCain is going to be advised by a man who has been wrong in almost everything he has said about the Iraq war and the American press have no interest in that?

Why is it in the United States that the most extremist right wing views are never called out as such? Why do we only ever hear of extreme left wingers and yet pretend that the group who came up with PNAC are somehow centrist?

I suspect it's because the extreme right have now taken control of the Republican party and that extremism is now what Republicanism actually stands for.

I mean imagine any other western nation, with the possible exception of Israel, where someone who came out with the following sentence would be an advisor to that country's elected leaders?
“If we can’t leave a democracy behind, we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies. The holier-than-thou response to this proposal is predictable: ‘We can’t kill our way out of this situation!’ Well, boo-hoo. Friendly persuasion and billions of dollars haven’t done the job. Give therapeutic violence a chance.” [New York Post, 10/26/06]
And yet Ralph Peters is one of McCain's foreign policy advisers, despite calling for "therapeutic violence" as a serious policy.

And we have John Bolton, who I consider the greatest nutcase currently not residing in an asylum, coming out with this:
“While treaties may well be politically or even morally binding, they are not legally obligatory.” [Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 1999]
He's advising McCain on foreign policy and he doesn't even regard treaties as "legally obligatory"?

It is worth clicking here to read the long list of, basically, unhinged right wing wackos who McCain has assembled to advise him to get a small taste of the kind of presidency McCain is actually offering.

It's further to the right than even the Bush administration and it's scandalous that the American press are allowing this man to be presented as a "maverick" rather than as the dangerous threat to world peace that his presidency would represent.

Click title for Greenwald's excellent article.

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