* Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, has unveiled his new foreign policy team, stacked with some of the most aggressive hawks imaginable, saying they are a group of his “trusted friends” who believe in a “strong America.”
At the center of his team is neoconservative ultra-hawk Frank Gaffney, a loudly anti-Muslim figure who believes in a wild array of conspiracies, including that a number of top political figures from both parties of being part of a secret Muslim cabal plotting the conquest of America.
Gaffney had previously been speculated to be a Trump adviser, as his dubious work has been cited by that candidate repeatedly in trying to back up his proposals to ban Muslim immigration. Gaffney’s overt hostility toward Muslims in general made him a virtual pariah during the 2012 campaign. Incredibly, a number of Republican hopefuls have courted him this time around, with Cruz declaring him “clear-eyed” and “a patriot.”
Also featuring prominently in the Cruz team is Michael Ledeen, the man at the center of the yellowcake uranium forgeries, among the pretexts for the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Ledeen has been involved in a litany of scandals, dating all the way back to Iran-Contra. He was also, notably, the man who got Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard his job at the US Navy.
Of course speaking of Iran-Contra, one must inevitably discuss Elliott Abrams, who famously pled guilty to two charges of withholding information related to the scandal from Congress, and is likewise a central player in the new Cruz team. In addition to the Contra scandal, Abrams was involved in myriad ugly Reagan-era operations, and was a close ally of both former presidents Bush, receiving a pardon for his Reagan-era crimes by George H.W. Bush, and being appointed as a special adviser to George W.
During his tenure with the later Bush, Abrams was accused by The Guardian of being at the center of a failed 2002 US-backed coup attempt against Venezuela, and was said to have personally given the go-ahead for the effort.
Abram’s most recent media comments, interestingly enough, were railing against Cruz, accusing him of being anti-semitic for even using the term “neocon.” Now that Cruz is establishing himself as the neocon candidate of choice, that allegation has been quickly brushed aside.
With this team and more, Cruz is surrounding himself with warmongers and criminals of the highest caliber. While the attempt appears to center on making him a more straightforward Republican insider, to serve as a counter to Trump, the jingoist and xenophobic policies these advisers portend also threatens to sabotage any hope he has of presenting himself as a safer alternative.
Neocons are protected by the system promoted by Cruz,and purveyed to Ametican as good products who are not liars not misleading,not closed minded not criminal ,not unprepared by the media .
We have to wait to see if David Brooks helps America recognize the dangers that are inherent in the nature of the neo con beasts from the known display of their vile uncouth tribal behaviors in a few past administrations. Instead for reason unknown ( only to the unwashed clueless ) he tries to warn Americans of what could happen from someone who hasn’t hurt American interests or destroyed American life if he gets elected.
* Trump can indeed break the stranglehold that Jewish Americans hold on US policy in the Middle East and towards Russia – if he is determined to do so.
It should be part of a new US foreign policy that pulls back the American Empire.
If Trump articulates a clear and reasonable policy, and directs the money the US gives to Israel to truly American causes, it will be supported by most people, and the pro-Israel lobby will not be able to play one side against the other.
What are Jewish Americans going to do, withhold money from the Democratic AND Republican parties? Then they lose their influence with both parties.
* I’ve had the same exposure to the neo-con’s of the late 70s and 80s. At that time Irving Kristol’s and Nathan Glazer’s Public Interest seemed to be the pearl of the neo-con public intellectual universe. Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary was stridently anti-Soviet, pro-Zionist, but engaged in heavy ridicule of Leftist social experiments, and even went after pop-culture Leftism in their long movie reviews by writers like Richard Grenier. Midge Decter, Mrs. Norman Podhoretz, was scathing about the alternative family and sexual experiments of the New Left types. Irving Kristol’s articles in the WSJ were full of commonsense on economics and skeptical of social experimentation. However, underneath it all was a fear of any kind of nationalism or cultural conservatism based on the inherited traditions of Anglo-America. In the end it was their cosmopolitanism and their fear of distinct nationality that won out after the fall of Communism. I think it was also a generational thing, the original neo cons came from that Marxist/Old Left tradition which was basically ascetic and was distrustful of revolutionary and anti-bourgeois sexual experimentation. The neo-Wilsonianism is a replacement for the universalist ideology that was lost when the Marxism of their youth sputtered out and with the fall of Communism the vacuum had to be filled with a replacement.
