Democracy Languishes, but Neo-Con Strategy Lives (JIM LOBE)

[laststeamtrain]

Democracy Languishes, but Neo-Con Strategy Lives

Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 18 (IPS) - The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) may have effectively closed up shop two years ago and its key neo-conservative allies in the administration, such as Scooter Libby and Douglas Feith, may be long gone, but the group's five-year-old Middle East strategy remains very much alive.
This is not the "Wilsonian" strategy of transforming Iraq into a model of democracy and pluralism that will then spread domino-like across the entire benighted region of autocrats, monarchs and theocrats whose oppression and backwardness have, in the neo-con narrative, been the main cause of anti-U.S. Islamic extremism.

On the contrary, that "idealist" vision has largely disappeared from the administration's discourse, particularly over the past year as Iraq slipped steadily into sectarian civil war, despite having been enthusiastically embraced by George W. Bush and his neo-conservative supporters after their early justifications for war in Iraq -- Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ties to al Qaeda -- proved unfounded.

It is, rather, the hard-edged strategy first enunciated in PNAC's letter to Bush published just nine days after the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. That document called for the administration to focus its "war on terrorism" on what it considered the main regional threats to the security of Israel, "America's staunchest ally against international terrorism".

Indeed, the Sep 20, 2001, letter, signed by some three dozen prominent, mostly neo-conservative, hawks, suggested that Afghanistan and al Qaeda should be treated as mere hors d'oeuvres in a six-course meal in which Saddam Hussein's Iraq was to be only the main course.

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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36226

[pocoloco]

1. Shout it from the rooftops! Repeat it whenever possible.

The script has played out from then until now. Some Dems have even had major parts!

Next scene Iran!!