Sunday, March 29, 2009

Neo-Con Ideologues Launch New Foreign Policy Group


By Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe
Published on Thursday, March 26, 2009 by Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON, Mar 25 (IPS) - A newly-formed and still obscure neo-conservative foreign policy organisation is giving some observers flashbacks to the 1990s, when its predecessor staked out the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy that came to fruition under the George W. Bush administration.

The blandly-named Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) - the brainchild of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, neo-conservative foreign policy guru Robert Kagan, and former Bush administration official Dan Senor - has thus far kept a low profile; its only activity to this point has been to sponsor a conference pushing for a U.S. "surge" in Afghanistan.

But some see FPI as a likely successor to Kristol’s and Kagan’s previous organisation, the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which they launched in 1997 and which became best known for leading the public campaign to oust former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein both before and after the Sep. 11 attacks.

PNAC’s charter members included many figures who later held top positions under Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, and his top deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

.... "This reminds me of the Project for the New American Century," said Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. "Like PNAC, it will become a watering hole for those who want to see an ever-larger U.S. military machine and who divide the world between those who side with right and might and those who are evil or who would appease evil."

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Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. ~ Barry Goldwater

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. ~ Carl Jung

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