JFK and the Neocons Pt. 4

American Exceptionalism vs the Rise of BRICS

                

As many authors have noted, once President  John Kennedy was killed, Lyndon Johnson altered several of his policies.  Most spectacularly in Vietnam, but also in the Dominican Republic, Congo, the Middle East, Indonesia, and further, JFK’s attempts at détente with Cuba and Russia. Concerning the latter, Bobby Kennedy sent emissary William Walton to Moscow to convey the message that his brother’s pursuit of détente with Khrushchev would now be placed on hold.  Since LBJ was too close to big business for it to continue.  (David Talbot, Brothers, p. 32)

In some ways Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger continued what Johnson did. For example, those two men dropped more bomb tonnage over Indochina than LBJ. And they expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia. The latter produced catastrophic results since it eventually brought to power the Khmer Rouge, and the slaughter of as many as 2 million Cambodians. And as with Johnson in the Middle East, these two men also tilted toward Israel and away from Egypt, an issue we will deal with later.

But important to this series, and as mentioned previously, the first manifestation of the Neocon revolution was with the Rumsfeld/Cheney Halloween Massacre. Which included the clipping of Henry Kissinger’s wings and his replacement as National Security advisor by Brent Scowcroft.  This was reportedly done to fend off attacks from the right due to the expected candidacy of Governor Ronald Reagan for president. Afterwards,  Rumsfeld was angered because Kissinger was still trying to complete an arms proposal agreement with Moscow in December of 1975. (Slate, 12/02/2002, article by Timothy Noah)

But it was during the presidency of Ronald Reagan that the neocon revolution erupted. And this was due to the transfer of members of Senator Henry Jackson’s staff into the Reagan administration.  There were at least five instances of this occurring: with Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Frank Gaffney.  Reagan’s own conservative beliefs, plus the schooling of those five from Jackson, caused American foreign policy to take a rightward turn that would effectively bury whatever was left of Kennedy’s foreign policy. Perle and Gaffney were opposed to arms control. Perle later wrote a thinly disguised novel explaining why he was against the landmark Reykjavik arms elimination proposal of 1986. (Richard Perle Hard Line, 1992). Both Perle and Wolfowitz studied under one of Jackson’s gurus on atomic weapons, Albert Wohlstetter. (James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans, pp. 28-31) Wohlstetter argued that the Russians were actually ahead in building a nuclear arsenal. (Foreign Policy, summer and autumn 1974) The articles also carried a subtext criticizing Nixon and Kissinger’s attempts at  détente, implying it favored Moscow.  These essays clearly helped launch the Committee on the Present Danger and their intent to show that somehow the Russians were militarily superior to the USA.

With all this as ballast, when Reagan took office he started a colossal defense buildup. He revived the B-1  bomber, started the B-2 bomber—which was three times the cost of the B-1 or 929 million per plane.  This was when pilots still favored the F-111 Aardvark, a fighter bomber. (William Vassallo at history.net) Reagan also began to build the MX missile; these were three incredibly expensive projects. He also installed Pershing missiles in western Europe. In the spring of 1983, Reagan introduced a project that was wildly extravagant--even for him--in both concept and expense. He called it the Strategic Defense Initiative;  Ted Kennedy called it Star Wars. This was a space based “shield” that would somehow protect America from an incoming first strike from Russia.

Reagan paralleled this massive expenditure with a rhetoric that would make it seem credible.  In 1982, before the British Parliament, he said that Marxism-Leninism would soon be on the ash heap of history. (Lou Cannon: President Reagan, pp. 271-72) The following year, in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, he called the USSR the evil empire. His administration did not accept George Kennan’s concept of containment. He felt America should be on the attack, for example, aid to the mujahideen forces through Pakistan.  That policy began under Jimmy Carter but it was greatly expanded under Reagan and CIA Director Bill Casey. In the long run it ended up backfiring with the rise of the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden.

In Central America, as opposed to Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, Abrams oversaw wars in both El Salvador and Nicaragua. Those we were backing were largely rightwing thugs who helped popularize the term death squads.  In the former, that war included the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the infamous El Mozote massacre—which Abrams attempted to downplay and camouflage before congress. (Raymond Bonner, The Atlantic, 2/16/19) In the latter, it culminated in the Iran/Contra affair which, as exposed by reporters Robert Parry and Gary Webb, included the American backed Contra forces marketing cocaine through drug trafficker Ricky Ross in Los Angeles. And also selling arms to Iran to release American hostages.

But as poor as this record was—for example, the MX and B-1 discontinued production, and tens of thousands of civilians perished in Central America—the neocons were still convinced of their righteousness. Thus in 1997 began the Project for the New American Century. Its statement goal was to promote a Reagan type policy of military power and moral clarity in foreign policy. Here is what made the PNAC bracing.  Its founders were William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Kagan writes for the Washington Post and advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. His wife is Victoria Nuland who first served under President Clinton and then advised President Obama on Ukraine. As Robert Parry noted, perhaps no single person was more responsible for the war in Ukraine than Nuland. (See Consortium News, 2/26/22, “The Mess that Nuland Made”) This included the shunting aside of two peace agreements offered by Moscow. Reportedly, a third was sabotaged by British former PM Boris Johnson. (Responsible Statecraft, story by Connor Echols, 8/2/22).

It is simply impossible to ignore the fact that many of the PNAC members encouraged regime change in Iraq. They did this with President Clinton in 1998, well before the 9/11 attacks. Just before the 2000 election, they said the change would come about slowly unless there was “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.” Which occurred on September 11^th while there were  members like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, and seven others in the administration. Within 24 hours Rumsfeld wanted to make Iraq a target. (ABC News, March 7, 2003, “Were 1998 Memos a Blueprint for War?”)

No one should ignore this fact: Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton voted for the war resolution against Iraq. And Biden was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee at that time in 2002. As did Clinton, he bought the excuse of Weapons of Mass Destruction. (Vox, 10/15/19, article by Tara Golshan and Alex Ward.) It should be noted that Bernie Sanders opposed that resolution. In fact, advised by Kagan, it is hard to find a place where Hillary Clinton was not a hawk, and this extended into her stay as Secretary of State. Consider the following:  Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. (Foreign Policy, article by Micah Zenko, 7/27/16)

Let us never forget what happened in Libya. This was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s brainchild, augmented by UN Ambassador Susan Rice and NSC member Samantha Power. (Middle East Monitor, 10/ 15/20) Can anyone imagine John Kennedy using NATO to bomb an African country? Operation Unified Protector contained over 9.000 strike sorties.(Final Mission Stats, published by NATO, 11/2/11) In two excellent essays, University of Texas professor Alan Kuperman strongly criticized this as a gross overreaction to Muammar Gaddafi, one that ignored diplomacy as an option.(Foreign Policy, March April, 2015) Clinton made her aim clear by saying, “We came, we saw, he died.” (Consortium News, 2/16/16)

We all know what happened.  Libya descended into a failed state in which sales of arms and slaves were oft seen public spectacles. As Gaddafi had warned Tony Blair, Al Quaeda was part of this civil strife. (The Guardian 1/7/2016) The end result was the murder of American Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi on September 12, 2012.

It was also Hillary Clinton who pushed Madeleine Albright--then ambassador to the UN--on her husband as Secretary of State. Albright worked under National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski during the Carter administration.  After retirement she served on the board of the CFR and the New York Stock Exchange.

In 1998 Albright, after keeping the murderous sanctions on Iraq, argued for military action there. (CNN Report, February 18, 1998) The next day on The Today Show, she said “If we have to use force, it is because we are America, we are the indispensable nation.  We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future….” This is the kind of arrogance that got America into both the Vietnam and Iraq debacles.

But the Cold War strophe that really marked Albright as a neocon, and which she managed to convince Bill Clinton about, was the expansion of NATO eastward after the collapse of the USSR. (Jeff Sachs interview with Tucker Carlson 5/8/24) This was in 1990 after Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed to unify Germany after a promise of no expansion eastward of NATO. George Kennan, perhaps the most illustrious Russian diplomat/scholar, called this a mistake. So did Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry. It proceeded anyway, and Hungary, Poland and Albright’s own Czech Republic were in the first round of NATO expansion. Through later rounds of expansion, NATO now numbers thirty countries. The important thing to note is this: Russia is not a communist country anymore, and there is no Warsaw Pact.

One of the stupidest things Albright ever said occurred on Sixty Minutes with Lesley Stahl. She stated  that the sanctions on Iraq, which reportedly took the lives of 500,000 youths, were worth it. That was so dumb she had to take it back.  But here is another one: “Peace is not a gift, it must be earned and re-earned.  And if it is to last, it must be constantly  reinforced.”  There are approximately 400,000 casualties in Ukraine plus a 100 billion dollars down the sewer over this Cold War mythology, which Joe Biden endorsed all the way.

Let me close with something that Barack Obama initially denied he had done and depicted himself as resisting Hillary Clinton about. (CNN Report of 9/29/14 by Dan Merica) Not satisfied with what happened in Libya,  Clinton—as bad a Secretary of State as Albright—wanted to attack the Assad regime in Syria. What is so odd about this is that Assad was and is a secularist, not a Moslem fundamentalist; not nearly as extreme as, for example, the Saudi regime. But yet on Sixty Minutes, Obama said that arming the Syrian rebels in their fight against President Bashar al Assad ”would have been counterproductive.”

Here is the problem with that.  From the best information we have, Timber Sycamore, the huge CIA program to overthrow Assad, had already been proposed at the time and then approved in 2013. Partly because Israel wanted it to begin. Needless to say, this ended as another complete failure, in two senses.  First, many of the arms supplied by the CIA ended up in the hands of the Nusra Front which was Moslem Fundamentalist all the way. Secondly, Moscow did not want that kind of regime near its border. So it began a large and relentless air campaign against the rebels, supporting Assad.  The CIA operation was suspended in 2017. (New York Times, 8/2/17, article by Mark Mazzetti)

This is a key difference between the neocons and JFK.  Kennedy did all he could to forge a relationship with a powerful secularist leader in the Middle East, Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Because JFK thought that he could westernize and modernize the Middle East through Nasser.  As early as his famous 1957 Algeria speech he had warned about the dangers of Moslem fundamentalism. Which finally did explode in Iran in 1979.  Like Nasser, Assad does not wear a hijab, he wears a suit. Like Nasser, Hafez al Assad—Bashar’s father-- went to war against the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Do I even have to mention Israel? Kennedy was the last president who threatened to cut off all funding to Israel. He wanted to enforce the United Nations’ Joseph Johnson Resolution, which demanded that the refugees of the Nakba be repatriated. Does any American politician even think of that today? Consider also that Nasser and Kennedy exchanged many letters--it may be as many as ninety if one believes the Egyptian sources—and Nasser could not sleep when he heard Kennedy was dead.  He then broke relations with the Johnson administration on the eve of the 1967 war. In this writer’s opinion, if Kennedy had lived, the 1967 war would not have happened.

As the reader can see, the Democrats today have become an extension of the Neocon/Henry Jackson/Harry Truman faction of the party.  In almost all respects: In its attitude toward Russia, arms control, the use of NATO, the almost unspeakable horror in the Middle East, the senseless overthrows of Saddam Hussein and endless war in Ukraine. The Kennedy/ Roosevelt faction has become extinct,  something like a museum piece that only certain commentators, like Jeff Sachs, manage to keep alive.

But the worst thing about all this is the warning that Kennedy gave us; for example in his 1957 Algeria speech.  America, he said, should not be on the wrong side of history.  But as previously noted, as Bill Fulbright’s staffer Carl Marcy wrote, that is what has been happening, since Johnson and down until today. That is what these neocon policies have lead us to. For all the talk about American Exceptionalism, the rise of BRICS undermines that mythology. They have become a formidable geopolitical bloc, one which spans much of the globe and 45% of the world’s population. When China’s Belt and Road Initiative is complete, they will be even more formidable.

 The neocons were wrong.  This is not a unipolar world. John Kennedy warned us about that.