Upper row: Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby

Lower row: John Bolton, Eliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, Michael Ledeen, William Kristol, Frank Gaffney Jr.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed neocons can destroy the world

By Coleen Rowley

...No matter what you may think of their ideology or ethics, one cannot help being shocked and awed at the ability of this relatively small group to control the papers and politics of our country against all odds and against all reality. So they are hardly ready to Rest In Peace despite such predictions after the 2006 elections --see Salon article "Neoconservatism-RIP" for good analysis but lousy prediction. They have, in fact, proven so pre-eminently powerful that their next apparent task of rolling out this new campaign for pre-emptive massive bombing of Iran, seems nothing but a formality, a cakewalk if you will. Yes, while the rest of us mere mortals were caught up in the real reality of these first two terrible war quagmires, the neocons were already bent on making a third new war our reality.

They've given the ticket this time to first string and first-rate warmonger Michael Ledeen, with his "Iranian Time Bomb" book set to hit the airwaves and newsstands conveniently enough on the eve of 9/11. Folks may recall Ledeen as being the neocon with all that curiously coincidental but never quite proven connection to the forgery of documents about Saddam's seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger, the forged documents that Bush used to lie us into pre-emptively invading Iraq; that led to Plamegate and one other neocon (Scooter Libby's) conviction and pardon. The FBI of course couldn't solve the underlying mystery of the crude forgery. And how much do you want to bet that author Ledeen's talking head will not face one question on any news shows about his probable role in the yellowcake misadventure as he argues for new and improved war?

Sadly, you don't find hardly anyone asking the hard questions or exposing the neocons' "noble lies" except on blogs like DWT! (and Kick! which was DWT!'s original source for first and second tier neocons)--those not afraid of being politically incorrect (and, it goes without saying, from bloggers unafraid of being smeared as anti-Semite which is this "cabal's" preferred method of suppressing those who would expose them). The original blog piece, by the way, continued with the insight that "Neocons differ from old school conservatives in that they are so consumed with bombing the crap out of people all over the world that they have little inclination to bother with the social issues of guns, abortion, homos, religion and race. I suppose they could be considered the Vikings version of Rockefeller Republicans."

So do we all stand here, like helpless bystanders awaiting more world destruction from these Viking pillagers and plunderers? Or do we remember some wisdom learned the hard way, from the sign on the Holocaust Museum: "Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander." And, similarly phrased by Albert Einstein: "The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing." These quotes certainly don't mean that any one bystander is worse than any particular perpetrator. All they mean is that the perpetrators are few in number while the bystanders are many and could easily stop the perpetrators if they only tried.

On page 362 of the Epilogue of his insightful book Chain of Command, Seymour Hersh asked the question back in 2004 that I predict will become the major question all historians will have to answer: "How did they do it? How did eight or nine neoconservatives who believed that a war in Iraq was the answer to international terrorism get their way? How did they redirect the government and rearrange long-standing American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress, and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile?"

Historians may soon have to extend this question to include neocon-produced war on Iran. Their answer will probably not be that democracy was that fragile. Only that we had too many bystanders. Who preferred to shut their windows and close their ears so they wouldn't hear as our poor democracy was being strangled in the alley. Just like Kitty Genovese...[Open in new window]