Neocon Incompetence Through The Decades

John Patrick Diggins, in an op-ed piece in today's New York Times, supplies yet another reminder of how consistently wrong the neocons have been over the decades and across various foreign policy issues.

Mr. Diggins' recounts the dangerous policies espoused by the neocons during the Reagan administration, and offers reminders from George Schultz and Reagan himself of how the neocons could have screwed-up the ending of the cold war. One can go back even further, however, to the Ford administration to find the neocons already at work, preaching radical militarism as a solution to all of our problems.

Perle, Wolfowitz and other neocon artists were members of a "Team B" formed during the Ford administration to second-guess CIA assessments of the Soviet threat. "Team B" concluded that the CIA was vastly underestimating the size of the Soviet economy, the level of military spending and the Soviet capability to upgrade its missile systems. Information obtained following the end of the cold war conclusively established that the CIA in fact had overestimated Soviet capabilities in each instance. The CIA had been far off the mark, but Team B wasn't even in the right ballpark. Rather reminiscent of the neocon's assessment of the Iraqi threat, isn't it?

The neocons have only one policy: rampant U.S. militarism in service of a bullying foreign policy and an American empire. That was their policy in the Ford administration. That was their policy in the Reagan administration. That has been their policy in the Bush administration. The only difference now is that they finally have a president stupid enough to actually implement each of their maniacal proposals. Hence, the catastrophe in Iraq.