Fukuyama: The Weekly Standard Conducted A "Deliberate Search For An Enemy

[ourbluenation]

Fukuyama: "Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard" conducted a "deliberate search for an enemy" after the end of the Cold War.

They "initially picked on China as their target," but then 9/11 was a "godsend."

http://bloggingheads.tv/?id=81&cid=271&in=04:59

[xchrom]

1. fukuyama has lost his mind.

[Momgonepostal]

2. Is that a real last name?

Excuse my ignorance...but dang...fuk-u-yama?

[C_U_L8R]

8. don't you say that about my mama

[WilliamPitt]

3. Why do you say?

His repudiation of all the neo-con nonsense would seem to indicate he has actually found his mind.

[Zynx]

4. Exactly what I was going to say.

[xchrom]

6. i say that becasue the neo-cons have always looked

to pick a ''fight'' with china.

through mouth pieces like bill gertz at the moonie times have used hyperbole to make china sound like the next great military threat to the u.s.

now that fukuyama has been forced to say that pnac was the miserable failure that it was always going to be -- fukuyama seems hell bent on justifying his existance by attacking those on whose side he was.

fukuyama himself is discredited -- and he seeks to spread the joy.

krystal and the others have always been wrong about the whole straussian dream of american empire -- but not because fukuyama says so.

[leftchick]

5. uh hello! This the first SANE thing he has said

in about twenty years.

[xchrom]

7. he's trying to reclaim something he can't.

i agree that the american builders are wrong -- but not because fukuyama has seen the light and is trying to discredit his former allies by dragging them through his mud.

[ourbluenation]

9. Was there really an enemy in the cold war?????

What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War? What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats?

What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life? What if our "enemy" represented a real but relatively small threat posed by rogue and criminal groups well outside the mainstream of Islam? What if that hype was done largely to enhance the power, electability, and stature of George W. Bush and Tony Blair?

And what if the world was to discover the most shocking dimensions of these twin deceits - that the same men promulgated them in the 1970s and today?

It happened.

The myth-shattering event took place in England the first three weeks of October, when the BBC aired a three-hour documentary written and produced by Adam Curtis, titled "The Power of Nightmares." If the emails and phone calls many of us in the US received from friends in the UK - and debate in the pages of publications like The Guardian are any indicator, this was a seismic event, one that may have even provoked a hasty meeting between Blair and Bush a few weeks later.

snip

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1207-26.htm

[ourbluenation]

10. Doesn't this have a familiar ring to it?

snip

But Nixon left amid scandal and Ford came in, and Ford's Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) believed it was intolerable that Americans might no longer be bound by fear. Without fear, how could Americans be manipulated?

Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of fear and, thus, reinstate the Cold War.

And these two men - 1974 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Ford Chief of Staff Dick Cheney - did this by claiming that the Soviets had secret weapons of mass destruction that the president didn't know about, that the CIA didn't know about, that nobody but them knew about. And, they said, because of those weapons, the US must redirect billions of dollars away from domestic programs and instead give the money to defense contractors for whom these two men would one day work.

"The Soviet Union has been busy," Defense Secretary Rumsfeld explained to America in 1976. "They’ve been busy in terms of their level of effort; they’ve been busy in terms of the actual weapons they ’ve been producing; they’ve been busy in terms of expanding production rates; they’ve been busy in terms of expanding their institutional capability to produce additional weapons at additional rates; they’ve been busy in terms of expanding their capability to increasingly improve the sophistication of those weapons. Year after year after year, they’ve been demonstrating that they have steadiness of purpose. They’re purposeful about what they’re doing."

The CIA strongly disagreed, calling Rumsfeld's position a "complete fiction" and pointing out that the Soviet Union was disintegrating from within, could barely afford to feed their own people, and would collapse within a decade or two if simply left alone.

But Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted Americans to believe there was something nefarious going on, something we should be very afraid of. To this end, they convinced President Ford to appoint a commission including their old friend Paul Wolfowitz to prove that the Soviets were up to no good.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1207-26.htm