John Brown (Tom Paine): Defending The Neocon War

[Jack Rabbit]

From TomPaine.com
Dated Tuesday July 26

Defending The Neocon War
By John Brown

“(W)e are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war, and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war ...”
—Norman Podhoretz, Commentary, September 2004

In recent weeks, commentators from both sides of the political fence have tried to make sense of the recent London bombings. The neocons and their fellow travelers are among these. But they have another, more immediate concern. They’re eager to decouple the tragedy in England from the U.S./British occupation of Iraq. That’s because they seek to prevent further erosion of popular support for the Iraq war, which could mean the end of their imperial ambitions in the Middle East.

There’s some historical irony here, if one considers what the neocons and their allies were saying in the fall of last year. At that time of the presidential elections, über-neocon Norman Podhoretz announced in a long Commentary article (September 2004) that a reason we were in Iraq—a campaign, he argued, of World War IV—was to prevent the terror of Islamic jihadism, including from Iraq, from reaching our shores. But today, the neocons—who long argued for a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein—claim there’s no connection between the coalition’s presence in Iraq and the terror outbreak in England. “Islamist malignancy long predates Iraq,”
declared Charles Krauthammer in The Wall Street Journal (July 18) “(I)t is ludicrous to try to reduce (the London bombings) to Iraq,” says Christopher Hitchens (Slate, July 7).

According to the neocons’ “It’s not Iraq, stupid” updated version of terrorism, what happened in England really represents is the reprehensible behavior of evil, delusional fanatics with Islamic slogans but no real political program. They will strike anywhere, any time, anyone and without reason. There is no place for wishy-washy academic illusions about the complexity of human nature in trying to analyze terrorists’ motivations, actions and psychological make-up. They’re mad killers, pure and simple. In the words of Cal Thomas, in The Baltimore Sun (July 19): “I don't want to understand why they hate us ... since the jihadists have declared war on us, I want to kill them before they kill me.”

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