Brendan Karet

@badtakes.bsky.social

9601 Followers 391 Following

ex-@MMFA researcher (https://www.mediamatters.org/author/brendan-karet), current gamer

QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: Few in the media noticed at the time that key neoconservatives close to the Bush administration like Kristol and Robert Kagan (who are still more than welcome on cable today), had been articulating a goofball global domination plan called “benevolent hegemony” in public dating back to the mid- and late-1990s. The idea was, now that the Soviets were gone, the U.S. should be more aggressive, not less. We should bail on the “peace dividend” Bill Clinton touted in the early nineties. We should also, neoconservatives said, resist the nationalist version of the “peace dividend,” the urge to concentrate “energies at home” in policies like Pat Buchanan’s “America First” plan. Instead, we should secure a “preponderance of influence” over all countries, having a plan for “change of regime” for any country not under our control, from Cuba to Iran to China. How to justify this dressed-up version of “pre-emptive war”? We know from Bush speechwriter David Frum’s bootlicking account of having served that administration, The Right Man, that the “Axis of Evil” concept was something Frum found flipping through history books about World War II. There, he came up with the idea that America’s enemies were so crazy with hatred for us, they couldn’t be trusted to behave rationally even if threatened with annihilation. “If deterrence worked,” he noted, “there would never be a Pearl Harbor.” Tony Blair was fine with regime change, but felt he couldn’t sell the concept politically. In 2009 he admitted this and said he’d have “deployed” different arguments without WMD if he had it to do over. From the Chilcot inquiry we know his foreign policy advisor David Manning had dinner with Condoleezza Rice in March of 2002, and afterward wrote a damning memo to Blair. “I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change,” he wrote. “But you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different.”