How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington – and Launched a War
by Michael Lind
April 10, 2003
antiwar.com
here is a pargraph from the above article...
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The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defense intellectuals. (They are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right.) Inside the government, the chief defense intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. He is the defense mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defense secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, No. 3 at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protégé who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R. Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the U.S. to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned his unpaid chairmanship of a defense department advisory body after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defense secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
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The neoconservatives and the Bush administrations
sourcewatch.org
Many neoconservatives found important positions in the Department of Defense under George W. Bush. They had long argued for a preventive war against Iraq in particular, but also several other Middle Eastern countries (Iran, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia).
Immediately following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, they renewed their calls for attack on Iraq. The Bush administration chose to first invade Afghanistan, but the neoconservatives eventually prevailed. |
