South by Southwest: Update on the neocon world

The unitary presidency - the imperial presidency - of the current Republican administration (and the pervasive influence of so-called "neocons") is an ongoing topic in the blogosphere. Yesterday I posted about the Bush administration's use of national intelligence in policy making, in particular the role of Vice-President Dick Cheney and the neocons.

Neocons bear watching. In the post was a referral to a recent Frontline program called, "The Dark Side." I am following up on the subject in today's post, starting with a 10/28/2005 article written by Georgie Anne Geyer. It can be found in u express.com. The title, ironically, is "The Dark Heart of Dick Cheney." I quote,

Dick Cheney is, by all accounts, probably the oddest -- and the most dourly ambitious -- duck in the administration's pond of wing-flapping, sky-diving and prideful birds.
He rarely speaks, running things quietly and secretly from behind the White House's closed doors, where he maintains his own administrative staff (roughly 60 persons, almost as many as the president's). When he does speak, it is usually either a sarcastic observation or rejoinder.
As to his knowledge of Iraq, many remember how, on "Meet the Press" just before the Iraq war, he told Tim Russert, "I really do believe that we will be greeted as
liberators." . . .
There was always a brooding, Hobbesian Cheney just beneath the misleading openness he learned in his native Wyoming. But this week, the vice president took a turn into the deepest heart of human darkness. This week, unprecedented in history,
an elected vice president of the United States of America proposed that Congress legally authorize the torture of foreigners by Americans.

The neocon watch is extremely well-served by investigative journalism. The next big thing on the horizon is Iran. There is an important Iran story today from one of our most important investigative journalists. Seymour Hersh's 7/3/06 article in The New Yorker is entitled, "LAST STAND - The military’s problem with the President’s Iran policy." Hersh reports that,

On May 31st, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced what appeared to be a major change in U.S. foreign policy. The Bush Administration, she said, would be willing to join Russia, China, and its European allies in direct talks with Iran about its nuclear program. . . . Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President’s plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran’s nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States.
A crucial issue in the military’s dissent, the officers said, is the fact that American and European intelligence agencies have not found specific evidence of clandestine activities or hidden facilities; the war planners are not sure what to hit. “The target array in Iran is huge, but it’s amorphous,” a high-ranking general told me. “The question we face is, When does innocent infrastructure evolve into something nefarious?” The high-ranking general added that the military’s experience in Iraq, where intelligence on weapons of mass destruction was deeply flawed, has affected its approach to Iran. “We built this big monster with Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is son of Iraq,” he said. . .
Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the I.A.E.A., said in a speech this spring that his agency believed there was still time for diplomacy to achieve that goal. “We should have learned some lessons from Iraq,” ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, said. “We should have learned that we should be very careful about assessing our intelligence. . . . We should have learned that we should try to exhaust every possible diplomatic means to solve the problem before thinking of any other enforcement measures.”
He went on, “When you push a country into a corner, you are always giving the driver’s seat to the hard-liners. . . . If Iran were to move out of the nonproliferation regime altogether, if Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon program, we clearly will have a much, much more serious problem.”

Neocons - where are they now?
David Wurmser, et al - Christopher Delisio at Antiwar.com reports on a few of the lesser neocons (his links):

From start to finish, the Niger deception and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame depended on a relay team of hawkish officials providentially placed throughout various government agencies. These included the CIA, the Pentagon and its Office of Special Plans (now under official investigation by the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General), the State Department, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), performing a handoff of information from the point of origin (the CIA) to the ultimate "commissioners" of the inquiry, the masterminds in the White House and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Considering the frequently attested intra- and interfactional nature of all of these agencies, it is understandable why the highest officials in the land jostled to get their "people" strategically inserted throughout the departments, where they could garner inside information and hinder the objectives of their ostensibly direct employers whenever they conflicted with the goals of their real minders.
Considering the frequently attested intra- and interfactional nature of all of these agencies, it is understandable why the highest officials in the land jostled to get their "people" strategically inserted throughout the departments, where they could garner inside information and hinder the objectives of their ostensibly direct employers whenever they conflicted with the goals of their real minders.
The present study considers four such figures: David Wurmser and Frederick Fleitz, both formerly employed in the State Department office of the Madman with the Handlebar Mustache, John Bolton; Marc Grossman, a longtime State Department official recently turned lobbyist; and Eric Edelman, like Grossman a former ambassador to Turkey, longtime Cheneyite, and current recess appointee to Doug Feith's old position as No. 3 in the Pentagon.

Ahmed Chalabi - according to The Raw Story, Chalabi just will not go away. To quote,

Ahmed Chalabi, the man who helped provide cooked intelligence on Iraq to the Pentagon and the New York Times in the lead-up to war, is once again being engaged in US policy decisions, current and former intelligence officials say.
According to two former high level counterintelligence officials, one former senior counterterrorist official and another intelligence officer, Chalabi is acting as broker between the US Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Iranian officials in what are now stalled diplomatic efforts between the US and Iran.

Douglas Feith telegraph.co.uk reports that Feith resigned in January of 2005. To quote,

The Pentagon hawk responsible for much of the planning of the war against Iraq
has resigned. Douglas Feith is the second leading hardliner in America's campaign against international terrorism to step down this year.
His resignation follows the departure of John Bolton from the state department. But the administration's most prominent hardldefenseDonald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and the new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, remain in place.

Feith, cont'd - He will be joining the faculty of Georgetown University in the fall of 2006. The article reports that,

Feith also serves as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution
at Stanford University and he co-chairs the Belfer Center Task Force on
Strategies for Combating Terrorism at Harvard UniversityÂ’s Kennedy School of
Government. He is currently writing a memoir of his Pentagon work on the war on
terrorism.

What is the Veep up to now? A Wall Street Journal 2/6/06 article entitled "As 'Neocons' Leave, Bush Foreign Policy Takes Softer Line," by Jay Soloman and Neil King, Jr., speculates that Cheney's influence is waning. To quote,

The change coincides with the growing influence of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is putting her stamp on foreign policy in the second term much as neoconservatives did in the first term. The slow progress of the war in Iraq has made it harder for the U.S. to execute a hard-line foreign policy and has undercut the arguments of the war's chief advocates, such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose views often dovetailed with the neoconservatives, current and former government officials say.
Mr. Cheney also has been hampered by the loss of his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was indicted in October for allegedly lying to prosecutors about his role in disclosing a Central Intelligence Agency operative's identity. Mr. Libby was a neoconservative coordinator and intellectual conduit inside the White House.
"Cheney is handicapped by the Libby case," and "the contrast between policy and rhetoric is now huge," says Michael Rubin, an Iran specialist in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans during the first Bush term who now works at the American Enterprise Institute, regarded as a center of neoconservative views. He says he is concerned that Washington's support for European negotiations with Tehran will ultimately allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. "Diplomacy has a cost," he says. . . .
The foreign-policy shift is occurring, in part, because Ms. Rice is a more effective bureaucratic infighter than was her predecessor, Colin Powell. Her relationship with the president dates back to the early days of the 2000 presidential campaign. She has taken to the State Department an influence over foreign policy she built when working in the White House during the first term.
Mr. Bush has chosen to allow Ms. Rice to pursue a more multilateral foreign policy than he allowed Mr. Powell. During his first term and his re-election campaign, Mr. Bush openly snubbed European allies over Iraq, and said he didn't do "nuance." In an
interview with The Wall Street Journal1 last month, he said: "You can have more than one leader on an issue" in dealing with Iran, citing Britain, Germany and France. "This is a multilateral effort," he said. "My view of diplomacy is that it's in constant motion, and we're constantly strategizing and dealing with the latest nuance."

But, not so fast - Patrick Seale, writing in The Turkish Weekly, strongly disagrees in his 6/27/06 article, "Neocons Still Run the Show in Washington." Quoting from the article,

It was even thought that the appointment of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State in the second Bush administration would serve to moderate the aggressive nationalism and war-like instincts of Videfenseident Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and even those of President George Bush himself.
. . . These hopes, dreams and utopian predictions have all proved vain and without substance - for one important reason. Pro-Israeli foreign policy hawks remain strongly entrenched inside the Bush Administration where, in conjunction with an array of supportive right-wing think-tanks, they continue to shape U.S. policy, especially on the Middle East.
Men like Eliott Abrams, director of Middle East affairs at the National Security Council; David Wurmser, Vice-President Cheney's Middle East adviser, and John Hannah, Cheney's chief-of-staff, remain active and influential.
In addition, two other senior American officials - closely allied to the neocon camp -America'sy a central role in America'a self-proclaimed 'Global War on Terror,' and its bitter contest with Arab and Muslim opponents.
Stuart Levey, Under Secretary at the U.S. Treasury's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, and Robert Joseph, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security Affairs at the State Department (John Bolton's old job) are spearheading America's campaign against Iran, Syria, Hizballah and Hamas.
In the run up to the Iraq war, Robert Joseph was the U.S. government official responsible for inserting into President Bush's 2003 state of the union speech the fraudulent allegation that Iraq had bought uranium from Niger. This charge played a key role in convincing Congress and the public that war against Saddam Hussein was necessary.

Keeping our eyes on the neocon influence in the current administration is difficult. Vigilant efforts must be maintained, however. Here are some additional references that could be useful: