Some ten years after President Obama’s Cairo speech, Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo was in the city at American University presenting his own
speech trying to contrast President Obama’s policies to the Trump
Administration’s more heavily interventionist intentions in the Middle
East.
Pompeo argued that every instance in which President Obama ended a US
intervention, or didn’t intervene at all, things turned out badly. He
argued that the US government is necessarily a “force for good in the world” and that would benefit everyone.
Pompeo bragged of the US having intervened against Saddam Hussein’s
invasion of Kuwait, insisting the Middle East could never have gotten
China or Russia to do that. He contrasted this to President Obama not
attacking Syria outright during the war.
And even as the US is in the process of withdrawing troops from Syria,
Pompeo made clear US intervention there would continue. He vowed to see
every last Iranian soldier expelled from Syria, saying the US would
withhold aid from Syria until Iran complied.
With respect to Iran, Pompeo bragged about the US withdrawing from the
P5+1 nuclear deal, and claimed unity from Korea to Poland on complying
with US sanctions against Iran. He further set the stage for more moves
against Iran.
In particular, Pompeo talked up a US intervention in Lebanon. He said
the US will never accept Hezbollah retaining a “major presence” in
Lebanon. Hezbollah, of course, is a Lebanon-based faction, including a
substantial political party within the Lebanese government. Pompeo
provided no indication how he thought he’d get a large Lebanese group
out of Lebanon.
Based on Trumps personnel selections, his toleration of his staff’s insubordination and undercutting him, and his flip flopping on Russia, N. Korea, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, etc, i think he is unqualified to be President. He does not seem to have core principals for which he would fight.
Expel Hizbollah out of their land and homes? The whole reason they exist is because of the 1982 invasion by Israel. They became bound and determined to keep their homes, land, and not become the next Palestinians. This Time article actually isn’t that bad. Particularly Ehud Barak’s quote. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1903301,00.html
Good question.
You forget that Israel wants South Lebanon, at least to the Litani River. They do mean to drive those people out, to the north most likely.
They are doing it in Golan, and they mean to take more.
That is of course why Hezbollah exists.
I forgot about the Litani River issue. Thanks for the reminder Mark.
Has Trump been paying attention to what his subordinates have been saying the last several days? Does he have a pair?
Trump pays attention to the media. And he knows how to fire people who disagree with him. But Pompeo and Bolton are speaking for Trump.
My questions were rhetorical and aimed directly at the Trump supporters. Pompeo’s speech, at least the parts pertaining to Iran, sounded like Trump’s UN speech or his rhetoric during his orb rubbing, sword dancing Saudi visit.
… and a bowl of popcorn…
Syria, Russia and Turkey should declare a no fly zone over eastern Syria and get their S 300 and 400’s working and clear the air from any trespassing aggressor.
I agree 100%, Tom, Israel, the US.UK and France don’t belong in Syria at all. They’re invaders whom the Syrian Gov’t of Bashar Al-Assad did NOT invite to help destroy ISIS and other Jihadists.
Syria, Russia and Turkey should declare a no-fly zone over eastern Syria and get their S-300 and 400’s working and clear the air from any trespassing aggressor (namely, the US/UK and Israel).
Both Pompous Pompeo and Bonkers Bolton should be fired for undermining Trump’s agenda of removing all US troops from Syria .. they’re a serious threat to US security. Trump knows this and must fire them immediately. We have NO business meddling in the ME .. We have an entire crumbling infrastructure right here at home that seriously needs attention, as well as the vital need to secure our southern border with Mexico.
Anyone who thinks that Pompeo and Bolton are undermining Trump’s foreign policy is delusional. Trump is obsessed with the news media. He knows exactly what Pompeo and Bolton are saying. And Trump certainly knows how to fire people who go against his wishes.
In other words, Pompeo and Bolton are speaking for Trump. Trump has always been a belligerent mother f__ker who gets his way by force and intimidation. This is Trump’s policy: all in for war with Iran, support Israel, expand the US role in the Middle East, and to hell with the Palestinians, the Yemenis and the Syrian refugees . See:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2019/01/cairo-pompeo-delivers-trump-vision-confrontation-iran-190110140303307.html
We can’t be fooled by Trump’s meaningless sound bites about withdrawal from Syria, peace with North Korea, détente with Russia or questioning NATO. Trump is a militaristic imperialist demagogue who believes that people are gullible enough to believe whatever he says. Unfortunately there are some writers on this website who have fallen for the scam.
Trump is not a Neocon. But the Neocons were only a clique of technocrats who the crony capitalists who run USA hired to manage US foreign policy for a few decades. Before there were neocons there were imperialists and there will be imperialists after the Neocons. The enemy is US imperialism, crony capitalism and Zionism, not a clique of expendable technocrats.
Yes, and the imperialists, crony capitalists, and Zionists run both political parties. There is no “Third Way” around their influence – it is direct, total revolution against them or just kiss their asses and go along.
I tend to agree in general. I think you may have left out a large crowd of opportunist wannabe’s that further enables this phenomena to continue.
History proves that if something pays or benefits well enough, there’s always a crowd of lazy moral degenerates lurking about who are more than willing to take the short cut into the cult of the elite at any cost.
During the Senate proceedings to criminalize the BDS movement Marco Rubio said that the reason U.S. troops ‘must’ stay in Syria is to protect israel and opposes troop withdrawals from Syria because it would hurt israel. Too many neocons running amok.
bring it on, America. you’ll have a fight on your hands.
Well… okay but Drump REALLY IS withdrawing troops from Syria, even if they were only in a supportive role… and he’s suggesting the same for Afghanistan… AND many Deep State figures bitterly oppose the move… are they all faking?
But as Freud said: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And maybe Drump is executing an inverted, quintuple turn, somersault double split axel and is just consolidating US forces to start new wars.
Then again, maybe he really is following his campaign rhetoric and instincts and is pulling the US out of disastrous regime Change Wars. We can hope can’t we?
W8 what?
Neocon technocrats are the latest advocates of U.S. imperialism, crony capitalism, and Zionism. How can they be seen as separate?
“Democratic Party Voters Are Becoming More Pro-War Than Republicans” Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept, Jan 11, 2019.
https://theintercept. com/2019/01/11/as-democratic-elites-reunite-with-neocons-the-partys-voters-are-becoming-far-more-militaristic-and-pro-war-than-republicans/
“Neocon technocrats are the latest advocates of U.S. imperialism, crony capitalism, and Zionism. How can they be seen as separate?”
Trump advocates U.S. imperialism, capitalism and Zionism and Trump is not a neocon. In fact, Netanyahu and the other leading Ziocons prefer Trump to his Neocon predecessors.
Yeah, but you said the technocrats were expendable, essentially that the key players of a generation don’t matter in their own time.
The Neocons are like Metternich. Advisors to the powers that control a declining empire. The Austrian Empire should have been abolished following the Napoleonic Wars but Metternich’s clever but ruthless policies revived and preserved the Hapsburg empire and delayed its demise for a century. But Metternich was expendable. When a wave of revolution swept Europe and almost toppled the empire in 1848 the Hapsburgs threw Metternich under the bus and sent him into temporary exile.
The US empire hit a crisis in 1968 and went into what many of us, including Justin, believed was a terminal decline after the victory of the North Vietnamese and the NLF. US imperialism appeared to be collapsing following the Tet Offensive in February 1968. The incumbent was driven from the presidency and waves of protestors were demanding revolution in the United States. Following the Tet Offensive the US was seen as a paper tiger, the United Nations turned against the US. Liberation movements in Africa overthrew Portuguese and Spanish colonialism and liberation movements in South Africa and South and Central America inspired by the Cuban Revolution began to contend for power. The US defeat in Vietnam signaled that the US could not effectively invade foreign countries or defeat liberation movements with conventional forces. The US used every weapon it had short of nuclear weapons in Vietnam (the US did use chemical warfare – Agent Orange and napalm, to no avail). The US defeat in Vietnam and the reduction of the US military threat led to the formation of OPEC and the Arab Oil embargo to protest US support for Israel. The world economy appeared on the brink of collapse under the Ford and Carter presidencies and the US public opinion turned against foreign interventions. The US defeat in Vietnam and the examples of successful resistance to US and European imperialism by the Indochinese people, the Chinese, the Cubans, the Angolans, the Mozambiqeans, the Guinea-Biseau people, Algeria, Libya and the spurred the growth of the Black Nationalist movement, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Movement, the American Indian Movement, the Chicano Liberation Movement and the New Left. These movements grew explosively after 1968. By 1972 the Democratic Party nominated a genuine peace candidate in George McGovern, US imperialism was in a fundamental crisis like the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War Israel was not a major stake holder in US imperialism. The China Lobby was at least as influenetial, probably more influential, than the Zionist Lobby. Israel was seen as a socialistic country organized by non-religious Jews. Most of Israel’s US supporters in the 1960’s were on the Left. In fact, AIPAC was an ineffective liberal policy group with very little clout in DC until its founding executive director, Si Kenan retired in 1974 a few years before Menachem Begin’s Likud Party defeated the Labor Party that governed Israel from its founding in 1948.
A number of officials including George Shultz, in the Nixon and Ford administrations argued that US interests in the Middle East were more aligned with the Arab oil producing countries than leftist Israel . Shultz and others argued for a “tilt” toward the Arabs. In 1975 Gerald Ford was furious with the Israeli government’s stalling on a peace treaty to return territory seized during the 1967 War. In March 1975, coincidentally a month before the fall of Saigon, Gerald Ford sent a telegram to Israeli PM Yitzak Rabin stating:
” I wish to express my profound disappointment over Israel’s attitude in the course of the negotiations … Failure of the negotiation will have a far reaching impact on the region and on our relations. I have given instructions for a reassessment of United States policy in the region, including our relations with Israel, with the aim of ensuring that overall American interests … are protected. You will be notified of our decision.”
Ford refused to consider any military aid for Israel until the Israelis agreed to the interim Sinai disengagement agreement in September 1975. Meanwhile, AIPAC effectively lobbied US Senators and got 76 senators to sign a letter to Ford requesting that he favorably consider a multi-billion dollar military aid package to Israel.
In the 1970’s Israel began developing ties with American Evangelical Christians. That effort increased and those ties strengthened after Menachem Begin was elected PM in 1977.
So basically the Neocons were useful to the Zionists and the crony capitalists who run the US state. The Neocon agenda proceeded from the belief that the US was in decline but was still the strongest nation on earth. It followed from that that the US should aggressively confront its rivals (USSR, Iran) because the sooner the confrontations, the better it would be for the US. Essentially the Neocon project is to revive US imperialism the way Metternich revived the declining Austrian empire in the 19th century. The Neocons have been useful to the Zionists and the crony capitialists. But like Metternich, they are hired hands and are not the ultimate controllers of the state which is organized to benefit the monopolists.
Well, OK, but many of the neocons were Zionists, or more accurately, Israelists (which more accurately reflects the critical secular and gentile components).
Neoconservatism seems more a pretext to win broader bipartisan support; originally they were mostly Democratic Liberal Hawks who wanted more war than the Democrats were already delivering. Irving Kristol seems to have foresaw a coming Conservative century and knew the Republicans and a bipartisan war machine was the future.
Without their bipartisan Abramic supremacism, the neoliberal imperial project could not have proceeded so unthinkingly. Neocons are a con expendable to a rational polity, sure. Expendable to the con of Empire, perhaps not quite yet.
The neocons have returned home to the Democratic party. Far from expendable, the Democratic leadership possibly thinks neocons can fix the icy relations with Israelists (evidenced by the icy relations between Obama and Nuttyyahoo) that may have cost them electoral support.
” A core ethos of the anti-Trump #Resistance has become militarism, jingoism, and neoconservatism. Trump is frequently attacked by Democrats using longstanding Cold War scripts wielded for decades against them by the far right…”
https://theintercept. com/2019/01/11/as-democratic-elites-reunite-with-neocons-the-partys-voters-are-becoming-far-more-militaristic-and-pro-war-than-republicans/
The bipartisan spell has been temporarily broken; the Conservative base has no use for neoliberalism.
On thinking over your reply, the word for neocons might better be ‘extraneous’, not ‘expendable’.
‘Expendable’ has an undesirable dehumanizing element antiwars shouldn’t adopt, but also implies there are more where that came from. Bolton and Pompeo are the best and most experienced of their particular breed and would be hard for the neocon movement to replace.
‘Extraneous’ far better describes neocons like Bolton and Pompeo; materially extraneous but politically critical to Israelism as the ideology of the American Empire, as opposed to the old order Western Enlightenment. The toxic seed of ‘promised land-ism’ was present in America’s founding roots, though.
Comparing Neocons to Metternich is inaccurate. Simply, von Metternich had direct interest in preserving the obsolete Austrian monarchial old order, essentially an Austrian paleo-conservative.
The Neocons have no such sentiment; the old order of the American Republic was truly expendable to them. Neocons sought not a revival but displacement and destruction of the Old Republic and Enlightenment ideals of traditional Conservatives still into Constitution, Republic, and Western civilization.
The liberal revolutions that ousted Metternich were real classical liberal movements as well. Neoliberalism was a pastiche of classical liberalism pretensions preserving fascist ideals, and neoconservatism a pastiche of even that.
Classical liberalism had been overcome by fascism in the early 20th century. Neoliberalism was the pretense of returning to classical liberalism post WWII, while preserving fascist ideals that had been attractive to some capitalists.
The neocons hijacked the normal wax and wane of U.S. imperial sentiment to promote their own political ladders. More sound American imperials such as the Arab realists, who were against destroying Iraq, were indeed ‘expendable’ and out of a job.
The Neocons didn’t so much revive U.S. imperial sentiment as burn it out in a hostile takeover in the same vein as neoliberal predatory capitalism, applied to politics.
The U.S. was looted, sold out from within, and rebranded as a product of Israelism, not Western Enlightenment. Americans of that old cloth, whether of Republic or Empire, were expendable to the neocons, not the other way around.
Pretty sure that Javanka is Trump’s brain.
Hard to imagine anyone trying to out brag Trump, but it would appear this jack wagon has found the task to be his new pursuit.
There’s nothing more dangerous than an idiot that’s both convinced and well compensated for in his service to the cult.
Nothing changes so much as it stays the same. All of us who supported Trump in hopes of a saner middle eastern policy have been shown to be fools and dupes. .
Pompeo had plenty of competition for being the worst SoS in recent US history, but he seems to be winning the award.
“He vowed to see every last Iranian soldier expelled from Syria, saying the US would withhold aid from Syria until Iran complied.” ie he won’t help rebuild Syria-what a surprise.
US top diplomat, a Neocon with no diplomatic skills.
Pompeo’s bluster opens up the great fear about Trump’s pullout from Syria: that
it’s just a consolidation of US resources so new wars can be launched
culminating in an assault on Iran.
Given Bibi’s grip on Jared and Trump this is always a real danger.
It’s worth remembering that Mike Pompeo graduated first in his class from the West Point Military Academy. I’ll leave it to the reader to assess the degree to which this putative “human being” is saturated with the Kool-Aid of death-worshipping militarism.
Also, it’s a feature of the human personality, of human behavior, to have and express the urge to dominate. At its most extreme and pathological form it results and people like John Wayne Gacy, who lured and “captured” and sodomized and then murdered 29 young men.
It’s incomprehensible to me how anyone could be so irresistibly psychotic, could have such a need, a need they satisfied in this manner, but the urge to dominate ***is there*** in humans, undeniable, at various degrees of expression. Every time I see Pompeo, (or Lindsey Graham or “mad dog” Mattis or Gina Haspel, acolytes of the cult of force and violence) I think of John Wayne Gacy. It’s written on their faces, though most people have lost the talent for reading faces.
Imagine how much ass kissing he had to do to be number one in his class. It can’t be all academics.
I never thought of it that way, despite having recognized that the hierarchical structure of the military inevitably builds “Yes-Men”. But it makes sense. The discovery and development of the “yes man” talent would indeed start at “the start”, in freshmen year at the Academy.
To get promoted in the military, you have to “stroke” (ie kiss up) your commanding officer for get the necessary recommendation. Thus “yes men” get promoted & independent thinkers weeded out.
Pompeo isn’t taking Trump’s Syria withdrawal very well; must be real enough.